Our teacher, Ajahn Tong, once explained to us that in order to walk the Noble Eightfold Path we actually don’t have to memorize each of the steps: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. All we really need to memorize is right mindfulness. That is because mindfulness is the key to the Eightfold Path. Just like in order to start a car, you don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works, when you want to walk the eight fold path, you only need to turn the key.
The idea behind mindfulness is actually very simple: mindfulness means that you know what you’re doing. There seems to be a temptation to make this into something more intense. Sometimes students ask how one could be mindful while talking or while thinking about one’s plans for the day. Don’t those activities get in the way of our mindfulness? Such questions are due to a prevailing misunderstanding of what mindfulness actually is.
Going back to the simple definition that mindfulness means that you know what you’re doing, we can see that there is no problem talking or thinking — we will just be aware of the fact that we’re talking or thinking. Certainly we can think of times when we misspoke because we weren’t being mindful of what we were saying or we spent an inordinate amount of time lost in thought because we weren’t mindful of the fact that we were thinking. By illustrating the effects of heedlessness, these examples demonstrate to us the subtle quality of mindfulness and the profound impact that it can have on our lives.
This ordinary mindfulness can be enough to have a positive impact on our lives but there is a deeper aspect to mindfulness that can only be experienced through practice over an extended period of time. This kind of mindfulness can have a much deeper and lasting impact on our day-to-day experience. If we learn to practice insight meditation, we discover the ability to convert our ordinary mindfulness into a penetrating mindfulness — penetrating mindfulness has the ability to root out the defilements of the mind: greed, anger and delusion.
If we manage to reduce these elements of the mind then not only will we become more mindful in our daily lives but we will also discover a true happiness that does not depend on any conditions.