Awakening the Mind
2009, revised 2016
First released in 2009, Awakening the Mind is the first piece of content that we developed at Juniper. Its goal was to succinctly summarize the path and create the basis for a collection of meditation practices. It provides an overview of Buddhist ideas and introduces four building blocks of practice: Meditation, Balancing Emotions, Cultivating Compassion, and Developing Insight. The full piece and four excerpts are included below.
Excerpt 1
The potential of practice
The premise of meditation is that the quality of experience is determined by the mind, and by training the mind we can change the quality of experience. Whether we are rich or poor, healthy or sick, young or old, our inner perspective, reactions, and patterns of behavior have an enormous effect on experience. Even more importantly, these inner attributes can be changed. The mind is not a rigid and hardwired organ over which we have no control but a dynamic and flexible system with great potential for growth. This capacity of the mind is now being confirmed by modern psychologists and neuroscientists, who are discovering the effect of thoughts and attitude on experience, and the malleability of the mind even well into adult life.
The methods described here are from a Buddhist meditation tradition dating back over two thousand years. From early India, where this tradition originated, to the great Indian university of Nalanda, to the monastic orders of Tibet, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Yet we present this tradition in a secular form and style, free of the cultural and religious artifacts that can impede our ability to engage it.
Excerpt 2
The challenges of modern life and the role of meditation
Modern life is characterized by a level of information and responsibility that can make us feel overloaded. Modern education alone, for example, requires the assimilation of an ever-increasing body of knowledge, at a younger age, to produce technically capable and productive members of society. Add to this the pressures of work, relationships, family responsibilities, and the barrage of media and communication made possible by new technologies, and the result is a veritable siege of information and responsibility. Individually, these may not be intrinsically harmful, but the collective noise level can be very high, making it difficult to remain inwardly calm and content. Matters can become even more challenging when we confront hardships such as illness, financial difficulties, or other reversals.
More significant still to our well-being are our inner habits and patterns of behavior. Strong cravings and emotional patterns color almost everything we do, sometimes keeping our minds disturbed for long periods. Consider the grip that anger, lust, envy, or fear can have on the mind, affecting our thoughts and experience for days, months, or even years. These inner states typically are present regardless of our outer endeavors and attainments, and they can be highly resistant to change. Wealth, fame, and other worldly successes often fail to provide the contentment we anticipated because they do little to change the inner patterns that govern how we think and act.
One of the challenges of contemporary life is knowing where to turn in order to grow beyond the inner habits that create agitation and hold us back. Because these forces exert a strong pull, we have to create enough momentum to reverse them. For example, although outer changes may help—more money, more fun, more friends, more free time, more respect, better relationships—they may do little to evolve our lives inwardly. Engaging the practices of meditation, in contrast, is directed at exactly this task.
Excerpt 3
The building blocks and results of practice
Our meditation practices can be divided into four building blocks, each of which addresses a different aspect of one's inner life. The four are Meditation, Balancing Emotions, Cultivating Compassion and Developing Insight.
Meditation encompasses a rich collection of practices for calming the mind and cultivating focus, stability, and awareness. Balancing emotions means gaining control over those emotional extremes and swings that cause us undue agitation and hardship. Cultivating compassion calls for deepening our sensitivity toward and concern for others and giving expression to this awareness with increasing discernment and skill. Finally, developing insight describes the process of deconstructing and going beyond limiting perspectives, inner stories and conventions.
The result of cultivating these qualities is apparent in the state of mind of those who are accomplished in them. These individuals come from all walks of life and have different styles and personalities. What they have in common is a state of mind that is content and calm; a discerning wisdom; a radiant, spontaneous energy; and a capacity to inspire and enhance the well-being of others. Their path to gaining these qualities is no different from the one described here. It may have a different wrapper, depending on the culture and time, but invariably it encompasses the same building blocks, in one form or another.
Excerpt 4
Introduction to insight
One of the seminal insights of early Buddhist masters is that the reality in our heads is not the same as reality itself, that this dissonance is the cause of much hardship, and that we can change it. We can expand our inner view and create a new vision of life. It is not unlike the way a telescope lens influences our information about the stars. When we upgrade the lens, we upgrade the information. Similarly, the mind is like a lens, constructing an image of reality. Thus, when we upgrade the mind, we upgrade our experience of reality. This is the function of developing insight. Early Buddhist thinkers called these ideas "The Middle Way." This describes the process of going beyond limiting inner constructs to discover deep levels of harmony, joy and fluidity.
At the heart of the insight practices is the idea that the mind's ordinary mode of perceiving reality is limited. The mind uses concepts and images to paint a picture of reality, which enables us to function, but this does not mean the mind is painting an accurate picture. For example, the world appears flat when we look at the horizon, and for thousands of years humans believed the world was flat. Now, of course, we understand that this is an illusion.
Though less apparent on its surface, this idea applies to many dimensions of perception, from how we see ordinary objects to our view of the self, our values, and many other phenomena. We see things as permanent and autonomous, as if they have their own essence or nature, when they are more accurately described as interdependent and in a constant state of change. We give concepts and perceptions more concreteness than they tend to possess. The same holds true for the stories, customs, and conventions that define our worldview. Through developing insight, we learn how the perceptions, customs and habits by which we live are merely conventions to which we have become habituated, often crystallized into rigid dogmas that do not have the substance or reality that we attribute to them.