This routine alertness derives its point, and its difficulty, by contrast with routine distraction. We normally are not aware of ourselves washing dishes, and don’t even want to be aware: we crave distraction, and we rely on habitual flows that do not require mental presence. A favourite example is driving: I can drive a considerable distance and get out of my car at the other end with no memory of anything along the way. Despite having accomplished something technically complex, dangerous and requiring an enormous coordination of skills, I seem to have been asleep.
Meditation replicates this yet asks you to stay awake and alert – mindful – throughout the drive, or in this case the fundamental act of breathing. It is therefore formally defined by a routine of concentration on a mundane focus, something that would otherwise – in the flow of routine experience – fall below the radar of consciousness. However, the core of mindfulness meditation is actually the experience of distraction and diversion from this flow. The teacher will constantly assure you that your mind will wander, that this is normal and that sometimes you will wander off for long periods of time, because you are worried about something, or extremely bored, or tired, or – in a lovely and often repeated phrase – because this is simply what minds do, they wander distractedly. Meditation is really about being able to see when you have drifted off, and then to calmly and gently bring your attention back to your breath, along with a brief, non-analytic acknowledgement of where it drifted off to. A ‘good’ meditation is not one in which you have maintained intense concentration on your breath for 45 minutes; it is not a virtuoso feat of mental discipline; to the contrary, it is a meditation in which your mind has constantly wandered off from the breath but you have just as persistently brought it back. It is in these moments that both consciousness and routine flow are entirely brought into view and you are entirely living in your present experience. Indeed both the wandering and the alertness are equally part of the experience that is to be experienced; the frame is part of the picture.
So what is the point of this for a Friend of the Western Buddhist Order? The routine of meditation offers a dialectic of awareness and distraction, boredom and interest that replicates everyday routines, and any everyday routine could – and ultimately should – be the occasion for cultivating the same kind of interested, alert awareness. Meditation offers a particular technique – or even laboratory – for dealing differently with the mundane flow of the everyday. For Western Buddhists, the aim of meditation as an ethical technique of the self is to achieve a ‘skilful mind’. This is not about being good or moral, but rather about being capable of not harming self or other. This skilfulness essentially resides in the ability to remain alert in the flow of events, to retain a critical distance so as not to be caught up by the flow of action and emotion. And this flow is largely conceptualized not in terms of structures, drives or constraints but rather in terms of habit: the routinization of mechanical responses to events. In recognizing the moment of distraction within meditation we become aware of how our mind habitually works, and, rather than following the normal course of response, we can look at what we are doing, pause and perhaps find more creative or beneficial ways of doing things. ‘Skilfulness’ describes the inculcation of this moment of pause and reflection, the construction of a conscious opening in the flow of events, which allows us to respond to them differently rather than be overwhelmed and unconscious.
The Ethics of Routine
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