satipatthana—the Buddha’s training in continuous, targeted
self-observation—was always my primary practice. The con-
ditions were perfect. I’d never enjoyed such an undisturbed,
open-ended opportunity until then, and never have since. I
investigated my body sensations, thoughts, emotions, moods,
dreams, and biological rhythms for weeks at a time. I did this
while sitting, walking, standing, and lying down, and during
all the activities in between.
Through weeks of body scanning I gradually became
transparent to myself. I illuminated every part of my body
from the inside. I “saw” and felt everything about the muscles,
bones, organs, and other physiology that it was humanly pos-
sible for me to feel. I directed that same sharp quality of vision
toward my mental activity, as the Buddha recommends in the
Sutta. I certainly didn’t need any external stimulus to stay
interested. Silence, stillness, and time were quite enough. The
inner movies never stopped. The drama was all there within
my skin, and the surprises kept coming.
Seven months of (essentially) looking in the mirror was
not boring for a moment. I was delighted, irritated, aston-
ished, and disgusted, but never bored. At that time (and
never since), my mind had a powerful instinct to go further
and further back into the past. I recovered an immense store
of memories that I thought I had lost forever. I’m sure some of
them were fictions, but since I was also exploring my mind’s
imaginative capacities, this hardly mattered. The many sub-
lime and ecstatic states that occurred over those months were
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superior to anything I’d known from my younger ventures
in taking LSD, which is saying a great deal. The insights into
myself and the world came in the hundreds.
I believe the retreat cured forever any tendency I might
have had toward depression, which is always a risk for a loner
and an introvert. I also had minutes and hours, but never more
than a day, of what seemed to be absolute insanity, except that
I always recovered more cheerful than before. I felt confident
with the process. I developed something akin to religious faith
in the self-preserving intelligence of the mind. I felt as if I was
in good hands, even if I didn’t know whose hands they were.
Over the seven months, I got to see my mind’s vast library,
repertoire of stories, and bags of tricks in unimaginable
detail. The luxury of this retreat was that I had ample time
to see and appraise literally everything that made up “me,”
down to the most fleeting emotions and assumptions. I came
to know who I was and what I felt, at least in that moment. I
discovered which ideas and emotions were natural to me and
which were cultural viruses. This gave me the grounding to
deal intelligently with my biggest issue, which was: “What am
I going to do with my life?”
I remained throughout a keen follower of the Buddha’s
method in the Satipatthana Sutta. There is a beautiful phrase
in the literature: ehipassiko, which means “Come and try it out
for yourself”—with the implication “and you will see that this
teaching is true.” That is, if you do the practice and develop
a strong, calm, insightful mind, you will see the world just as
the Buddha did.
I did what the Buddha recommended by following his
instructions in the Sutta. I developed that trustworthy state
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of mind, but when I looked at the world, I found that the Buddha had got it wrong. He said his truth was universal, but in
fact it turned out to be only his truth. It certainly wasn’t mine.
He saw life as nothing but suffering, misery, and ugliness. I
couldn’t for the life of me understand what he was complain-
ing about. Meditating just made the world more beautiful and
fascinating for me. I knew that was never going to change,
and it never has.
I ended the retreat only because the snow arrived. My hut
was not insulated and had no source of heat. After several
freezing days wearing all the clothing I owned, including my
sleeping bag, I realized that I had no choice but to leave. I felt
somewhat half-cooked, and I promised myself another seven
months sometime, but it hasn’t happened yet.
That retreat was the turning point in my life. Prior to that,
I had spent three years in Asia. I had also spent eight years
living a back-to-the-land lifestyle, complete with gardens,
orchards, beehives, and a hand-built house, in a place with
like-minded neighbors. After the retreat, the limitations of
that rustic idyll were nakedly obvious. Nor was I ever going
to take the logical next step and become a monk. Isolation
from society, playing Thoreau, and navel-gazing could take
me only so far, and I knew I’d gone far enough. Freud said,
“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanity,” and I
knew I was lacking in both. So I came to Australia and opened
up the Perth Meditation Centre. I’ve been teaching medita-
tion and writing books ever since.
I was apprehensive when I left the retreat. My state of
mind felt superb, but could it only exist within the nursery
of a retreat? Was it like a plant reliant on a precise biological
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niche? Would it survive the plunge back into the barbaric world of money, work, sexual relationships, information overload, and the seas of faceless humanity?
My fears were justified. I was not surprised to find that
the reentry was even tougher than I could have imagined.
My life had been peaceful but intellectually poor for many
years. I could see that a rich quality of life comes with a price.
If I couldn’t usefully meditate after an argument with a girl-
friend or during another financial emergency, there wasn’t
much point in it. I didn’t want meditation to become just a
hobby, an escape, a way to relax, or a nostalgic memory of
earlier, carefree times.
OPEN MONITORING
Fortunately, my main practice was satipatthana. On retreat, I
trained myself to become mindful of—to “hold in mind” and
evaluate—every thought, sensation, emotion, mood, quality of
mind, memory, dream image, and intuition as they occurred.
This is the full development of the satipatthana method, and
it doesn’t require isolation or long sitting meditations. Satipat-
thana could adjust to post-retreat life in a way that the Tibetan practices couldn’t.
A meditation similar to satipatthana, and easier to under-
stand, is what psychologists call “Open Monitoring” (OM).
Done systematically, Open Monitoring is still based on a nor-
emphasis from a “closed” focus on the body toward an “open”
monitoring of peripheral thoughts, sensations, and moods.
When doing OM, we still focus on the body but we give our-
selves more license to notice what else is in consciousness at
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the same time. We don’t need to actively search for anything.
We just wait for the next thing to arise, for the next item to
float along the stream of consciousness. Many writers regard
OM as the best way of describing Modern Mindfulness as a
meditation practice.
There are a variety of Open Monitoring techniques in the
literature. For instance, the Indian anti-guru Krishnamurti
(1895–1986) promoted the concept of “choiceless awareness,”
which he described as an ego-free, nondiscriminating, effort-
less, “observing without an observer” state of mind. On my
seven-month retreat, I also did the advanced Tibetan practice
called Dzogchen (Sanskrit: Mahamudra). The approach of
Dzogchen involves a fifty-fifty split between the focusing and
monitoring functions, and I suspect that this is ideal.
Modern Mindfulness is sympathetic to both Dzogchen
and choiceless awareness and uses their terminology. All
three approaches are simpler than the Buddha’s approach
in the Sutta, but the family resemblance is obvious. They all
have the same open-ended, all-inclusive quality. A defining
characteristic of Open Monitoring is that you don’t preselect
what you will pay attention to. While remaining consciously
grounded in the body, you give your remaining attention to
whatever else arises in the moment. The quieter your body
and mind become, the more attention is available for this
activity.
Zen and Tibetan Buddhism commonly assume a funda-
mental duality of body and mind. They have a theory that
“mind” is intrinsically pure, luminous, and empty, and that
thoughts and perceptions defile this purity. This pure “bud-
dhamind,” also called sunyata or emptiness, is assumed to
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be eternal and transcendental, as opposed to everything else, which is subject to decay and death.
A meditator tries to approach this absolute state by cul-
tivating a pure, disengaged “observer” mind. The technique
implies a belief that there can be an observer consciousness
that is separate from what it sees—that mind can be separated
from the contents of the mind. Modern Mindfulness tends
to idealize this nonreactive, “just watching,” “empty” state of
mind. Unlike satipatthana, Modern Mindfulness also mini-
mizes the value of deliberate attention. Once you feel settled,
you are encouraged to let go into a free-floating, “open” state
of choiceless awareness. Many writers now seem to regard
this passive, nonjudgmental acceptance of present-moment
experience as what mindfulness “really” is.
But is it actually possible to attain a dispassionate, “just watch-
ing” state of mind? That was certainly not my experience on
retreat, and I doubt if any meditator attains anything that re-
sembles it for long. In science, the idea of unbiased observa-
tion is regarded as a cognitive fallacy. Scientists, with the help
of elaborate protocols, work extremely hard to minimize this
effect, but they never expect to eradicate it completely. This
subtle, continuous interaction of subject and object is also go-
ing on when we meditate.
An observer always interacts in profound and mysterious
ways with what he observes. He has his goals, hopes, expecta-
tions, and prior knowledge. These invariably shape what he
sees, as indeed they should. We also now know that the brain
splits every incoming perception into thousands of subcom-
ponents. These are then reconstructed along with all relevant
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past- and future-oriented data before being presented half a second later to consciousness. Even the simplest perception is
inextricably coded with an immense body of memory-based
understanding. There is no possible way of reversing all this
to return to a state of “bare attention.” All we can attain is a
state where we don’t elaborate on it further.
Even at the level of consciousness, and if we are honest
with ourselves, we will have to admit that when doing Open
Monitoring, the “watching mind” doesn’t “just watch.” It is
subtly selective and discriminating. It is not pure and imper-
sonal like a mirror (which is a common metaphor) reflecting
things “just as they are.” It always gravitates toward what is
most interesting or salient, as it should. It is not passive or dis-
engaged (like a mountain). We can’t dismiss or “just watch”
everything indiscriminately (like objects floating down-
stream). Life is too important to let it all drift past unexam-
ined. Nor can we revert to seeing things innocently the way
a child is assumed to do (in Zen this is called “beginner’s
mind”). We know too much. We can see things differently,
and in more detail, but we can’t go back to scratch.
The “watching mind” is not a kind of “bare attention” or
primordial consciousness cut free from cognition, memory,
and emotion. No matter how refined and detailed our per-
ception of something is, it will always have associations and
filters unique to us. We are also likely to have well-embedded
ideological filters and preferences. Modern Mindfulness and
Zen, for example, automatically give high value to arising
sensations and discriminate against arising thought. They
also regard the ideal state of mind as more important than
the phenomena passing through it.
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So why try to do Open Monitoring at all? It turns out
that what does happen is very useful indeed. Even when we
apparently “just watch,” we invariably reappraise and reorient
ourselves toward each object. We engage and “process” each
thing we notice, if only to a tiny degree, through lightning-
fast feedback systems. (“Is this really what it seems to be?
How important is it really?”) Even if we abandon it in a milli-
second, which is the fate of most stimuli, we still evaluate it
first. This evaluation is mostly automatic and effortless, but
it can’t be avoided. If we are alert, we are likely to be aware of it
happening dozens of times each minute.
Open Monitoring makes this natural process more con-
scious and therefore more accurate. It slows down the video<
br />
to catch the detail. OM means holding and reappraising any
interesting stimulus for a few seconds longer than usual. A
well-controlled mind can easily do this without losing its pri-
mary focus on the body. This enables us to grasp that arising
object and “know” it more precisely than before.
Nor does monitoring involve only thoughts. We “reframe”
many other kinds of stimuli to put them in their broader per-
spective. We recognize a subtle overreaction or bad mood,
and it starts to dissolve. We notice an ancient memory and
see it from a different angle. We realize that we are holding
on to a grudge, or are worrying about something unnecessar-
ily, and the problem starts to shift. Open Monitoring scales
whatever we notice up or down in value, and doing this more
consciously can vastly improve the outcomes.
Most of these fine reappraisals are done within a few sec-
onds or less. This isn’t long enough to lead us into open-ended
“elaborative” thought. If we are well-grounded in the body,
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a brief examination of something else is not long enough to break that anchor. These reappraisals are likely to be small,
but there may be hundreds of them. OM brings those homeo-
static adjustments closer to the surface. This is one reason
why we mysteriously feel so much better as we meditate.
Meditation almost always involves both focusing (on the
body, for example) and monitoring (the periphery, the “not-
body”), but we can choose how we distribute our metabolic
resources between these two functions. New meditators have
to give most emphasis to the focusing function, and at first
they may not even have a clue about monitoring. Open Mon-
itoring is usually regarded in the traditional literature as an
advanced practice to be done only after good body-mind
stillness is established.
Good focusing alone brings enormous benefits. These
include relaxation (optimal muscle tone and arousal), bal-
ance, comfort, pleasure, and mental control. Once a medi-
tator has attained good body-mind stillness ( passaddhi), he
can maintain this with a more routine level of focus. This
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