The word ‘mindfulness’ appears throughout this work — in virtually every chapter, doing significant load-bearing work — as if its meaning were self-evident. As is so common, it is undefined. Leaving it at that – circumventing the effort required to nail its meaning and, instead, relying on the shared notion of what it may be is tempting, but inexcusable (and possibly worse, incompatible with what this work is all about). The mindful choice — i.e., the correct choice — is, of course, to make the required effort, define mindfulness, and initiate its exploration. Ergo, this chapter.
Before I give it my best shot, let me emphasize (in a way of a disclaimer) that what follows is subjective — my definition of mindfulness, what it means to me, and how I make sense of it (I don’t think it is contrarian to any major take on the concept, but still — FYI).
The word mindfulness has multiple meanings. It is used to describe a perspective, a practice, a mental state, and an aspiration. It is a central concept in all Buddhist traditions, but even in Buddhism, its application varies significantly across different schools. To me, more than anything, it is a state of mind — a neuropsychological phenomenon with clear (even if not fully recognized) underlying neurophysiological underpinnings (Tang et al., 2015).
Or, to put it slightly less pretentiously, the word mindfulness describes a specific state of mind that emerges when several brain functions are activated simultaneously at, or near, their operational peak. For example, these functions include the capacity to calibrate and sustain attention; the capacity to filter and prioritize incoming data; and the capacity to act — rather than react. There is nothing spiritual, magical, or foo-foo’ish about it. Purely practical.
As such, mindfulness has a single purpose: to support the optimization of the brain’s single most important function — choice generation.
With this in mind, I define mindfulness as the state of mind most conducive to making optimal choices.
The fact that the brain can be in this state, and that this state can be cultivated through deliberate practice, are among the most important and underappreciated facts in the human experience. It is important because the quality of the choices one makes is important (at least in the context of one’s life). It is underappreciated because, like most (if not all) things worth having, it requires effort to achieve and sustain.
[Sidebar: Typically, when I try to come up with a definition of something, I start by trying to define its opposite (zooming in on the definition by exclusion). A number of candidates can be considered as the opposite of mindfulness; the first one that comes to mind is ‘mindlessness,’ fairly obvious, I think. Other terms to consider include ‘absent-mindedly,’ ‘out of (one’s) mind,’ and ‘spitefulness.’ These terms describe a state of mind from which one is unlikely to make the best possible choice one is capable of. In the first three, the quality of one’s decision-making is temporarily impaired by lack of attention, poor concentration, and distractibility. Spitefulness is different; it captures how ignorance impedes mindfulness. When one acts spitefully, one is usually ignorant of the fact that they are filled with spite; but more importantly, they are ignorant of the Law of Intent in the sense that a spiteful intent is invariably less than fair and therefore is unlikely to support one’s aspiration (as discussed in the Laws chapter).]
Buddhist teachings are often presented as metaphors and allegories. Two attempts to capture the essence of mindfulness through stories have stayed with me over the years; I find them quite illuminating and worth sharing (regretfully, I don’t remember the exact sources and have been unable to pin them down).
The first story involves a royal palace. Every morning, a crowd gathers outside the gates of the palace. Most of the people in the crowd have legitimate, often important, business inside the palace. But there is always the possibility that individuals who have no business inside the palace — thrillseekers, pretenders, troublemakers — will attempt to enter and disrupt the work being done within. Hence, a guard is positioned right outside the gate. The guard examines everyone who approaches. His examination is attentive, thorough, and without prejudice. He gives everyone a fair look. He is not suspicious by disposition; were he to be asked, he would say he was curious about the motivations of the different visitors trying to get in.
When the guard determines that someone doesn’t belong inside, he turns them away — firmly, but without cruelty. Firm as he is, he is not stubborn — if the circumstances change, he has no problem taking another look. Above all, he is a professional: his emotions don’t affect his job performance, he is not gamey, not punitive, not prone to enjoying the exercise of his authority. He is fully aware that making a mistake and letting the wrong person in could have dire consequences, but he is not troubled by this realization, largely because he trusts the other layers of security in place and the resilience of the system he protects. He is simply steadily committed to performing his job to the best of his ability.
Decoding the allegory, the palace represents one’s consciousness. A lot goes on in there, but the single most important product generated in the palace is the choice, the decisions it produces.
The choice (as discussed in detail in the Choice Making chapter) is the point of interface between a consciousness and the world it inhabits. It’s the only instrument the mind possesses for influencing reality. Everything that happens inside the palace — every process of perception, analysis, and deliberation — ultimately serves that function.
The crowd outside the palace represents the thoughts that seek entry into consciousness at any given moment. Most thoughts have legitimate business there — they are relevant, useful, sometimes urgent. But some thoughts have no business in consciousness. They are driven by intoxicated emotions, craving, and by ignorance in its various forms, from simple misunderstandings to delusions, unfounded convictions, and fanaticism. When such thoughts gain access to consciousness, they never help the operation, the production of high-quality choices; frequently, they damage it, resulting in the production of poor choices, the cost of which may range from insignificant to unaffordable.
The guard is the mindful state of mind. Mindfulness, in its role as the mind’s gatekeeper, enables one to examine one’s own thoughts before embracing them as worthy facts, and certainly before acting on them. Mindfulness makes it possible to identify the thoughts that don’t belong and deny them entry — without drama, self-recrimination, or permanently closing the gate.
I have said elsewhere in this work that you simply can’t believe everything you think. This is what I meant.
The Features of Mindfulness
The guard, examined closely, illustrates several features of the mindful state.
Calm Wakefulness: The guard couldn’t do his job half-asleep. Being awake is obviously required. What is less obvious is that wakefulness, in general, is not a binary phenomenon — it is a continuum. The default setting on the wakefulness spectrum for most of us is far below our functional ceiling; this is typically unrecognized.
To illustrate the point, think about highway driving. If you have experienced long highway drives, you have almost certainly been driving at a speed evolution still finds shocking, while managing the complex, technical demands of operating a vehicle, navigating traffic, and monitoring your mirrors; accomplishing all the required tasks would rightly leave you no reason to doubt that you are fully awake (moreover, you may simultaneously be engaged in a conversation with your passenger or listening to whatever is playing through your speakers).
Then an animal darts across the road, just a few feet ahead of your front bumper.
When that happens, you discover, in an instant, that you were nowhere near your full wakefulness capacity. The surprising animal appearance triggers a fight-or-flight response — a neurophysiological alarm that catapults your wakefulness toward its ceiling. For an instant, everything sharpens and time seems to slow down. In that instant, you pay attention to and appreciate minute details you would never notice in your previous level of wakefulness.
That moment — unpleasant, adrenaline-soaked, and entirely unsustainable — nonetheless provides a useful benchmark. It reveals the gap between the default and the full-on levels of wakefulness.
The mindful state is associated with a higher level of wakefulness than the default setting. Mindfulness practitioners aspire to sustain a level of wakefulness meaningfully above the highway-on-autopilot baseline — without any of the panic that triggers a fight-or-flight reaction. From a neuropsychiatric perspective, it can be described as a state of heightened attention without hyperarousal, an acute presence without alarm. It is this ability to modulate attention — sustain it where it is needed and spare it where it is not — that is at the foundations of the guard doing his job well.
This is where calm (and the practice of cultivating it) comes into play. Clearly, mindfulness is incompatible with the calm of sedation; it is all about the calm of a mind that is turned on fully, fully alert but not alarmed. It is rooted in a peaceful relationship with the future — not in a childish belief that “everything will turn out just fine,” but in the confidence that, however the future turns out, it will be accepted, and the journey will continue to unfold, adhering to exactly the same rules.
Passion: The guard is connected to his work. He is not detached — detachment would render him apathetic, and an apathetic guard is no guard at all. But neither is he attached. His non-attachment is manifested by his acceptance of the fact that he is not infallible. Of course, he is committed to doing his utmost best to avoid making a mistake, but he knows that ‘control’ is unattainable, and given enough time on the job, he knows he will err. Instead of futilely investing in controlling incoming traffic, he is focused on optimizing his influence over it. He can do that because he resists catastrophizing — his job is important and failing at it is likely to be consequential, but there is more to the palace’s security than just him, and, moreover, the palace has survived infiltrations in the past. In other words, he is not motivated to do a pristine job by fear of making a mistake. He is motivated by his caring, i.e., his passion, about doing his job well, about the people inside the palace, and about honoring the commitment he made when he took the post. His caring is not self-centered — he is not there to look good or to benefit personally from the exercise of his authority. His passion serves something beyond himself.
Such non-self-centered caring is a key feature of the mindful state. It provides the fuel that operating at a high level requires, without tipping into a perception-distorting state that focusing on one’s own needs tends to elicit.
Compassion: The guard does not reject the person he turns away — he denies them entry. The distinction matters. Rejection is personal; denial of entry is professional. Rejection is incompatible with compassion (given that its centerpiece is acceptance of a person exactly as they are), especially as a final verdict, without hope for a future change for the better. The person turned away at the gate is not condemned — they are simply not admitted, today; under the current circumstances, they have no business inside the palace, and allowing them entry would be wrong. If conditions change, the guard will look again.
This is the mindful relationship with the unwanted: neither suppressed nor indulged, neither banished nor celebrated. Seen, assessed, and handled with confident strength — not with force.
Non-Judgment: The guard is curious, not suspicious. He does not approach the crowd with hostility or preconceived verdicts. Driven by curiosity, he looks, pays close attention, and studies. He doesn’t judge the people in the crowd — whether they appear rich or poor, attractive or repulsive, good or bad is irrelevant. He is interested in separating right from wrong: some rightfully belong in the palace, while for some, entering the palace would be wrong.
Judging is the brain’s default data-processing mode — everything that enters awareness gets tagged, almost instantaneously, as wanted or unwanted, safe or threatening, good or bad (as discussed in the Calm chapters). Judging automatically and quickly is indispensable in the survival arena. In the pursuit of happiness, it is often an obstacle. Non-judgment is not indifference (much like non-attachment is not detachment); it is the deliberate suspension of the automatic verdict long enough to actually appreciate what is really there.
Putting it together, the high level of wakefulness (with steady calm) enables full attention, which, in turn, permits a high level of awareness. This heightened awareness characteristically includes awareness of the laws of nature (beginning with the laws of impermanence, sameness, and intent), specifically, as they are relevant to the present moment.
Compassion and non-judgment ensure an unwavering acceptance (which, as discussed in the Acceptance chapter, is not the same as surrender or giving up). This translates into a relationship with one’s present reality that is never combative, supporting the rejection of force in favor of reliance on one’s strength.
The non-self-centered caring comes down to an investment in maintaining a crisp distinction between right and wrong. This is not a moralistic or dogma-directed right and wrong; essentially, it’s the distinction between real and not real; functionally, it is a distinction between influence that actually supports one’s cause and influence that undermines it.
For example, thoughts generated in a state of anger typically present as lucid and accurate; the angry person feels righteous, often self-evidently so. But, given that while one is angry, one is in an intoxicated state, that cannot be the case. The conclusions the brain reaches while it is intoxicated are distortions masquerading as facts. Actions based on distorted conclusions are not wrong in a moralistic sense; they are wrong in the same sense that acting on a hallucination is wrong. It simply doesn’t work.
Mindfulness, then, is not a state cultivated for its own sake — not merely an attractive way to inhabit one’s mind. It is the state most conducive to generating the best possible choices. This is what makes it central to the pursuit of happiness: not because it feels good (though it usually does), but because it works.
It is important to keep in mind that no guard (and, in general, no masterful professional) is born good at his job.
Mindfulness is not a trait distributed at birth in unequal measure to the fortunate few. It is a skill — a neuropsychiatric capacity cultivated through learning and deliberate practice. The guard’s discernment, his non-reactive steadiness, his professional compassion — none of it arrived fully formed. The guard may have been born with a talent for the job, a predisposition, but that is a long way from mastery. His mastery was built, in parallel with his inner discipline, through his commitment to continuously learning and practicing.
I emphasize this point because in my clinical experience, the single most common obstacle my patients who might benefit from mindfulness practice encounter is the conviction that they are simply not the kind of person who could do it — too anxious, too reactive, too undisciplined, too distracted. In each case, they were overly focused on their status as beginners. Obviously, that cannot be circumvented. Whatever the endeavor, one must start at one’s level and go from there. In all likelihood, on his first day at the gate, the guard was far from the level of mastery he ultimately achieved (and even his impressive level of mastery could potentially pale in comparison to his future mastery, with continued practice).
The Practice section of this work is devoted to the cultivation of the mental capacities that add up to mindfulness, i.e., the mental features that comprise a state of mind most conducive to making good choices. The theoretical framework presented here is of limited value without the practice. But the practice, without the theoretical framework, is just a collection of techniques in search of a rationale.
The second story is short: Mindfulness is like the rocks behind a waterfall.
The falling water is chaotic, deafening, and relentless. The rocks do not resist it, do not negotiate with it, do not attempt to stop it. They serve as an unwavering witness to the surrounding non-stop commotion.
This image captures the equanimity dimension of mindfulness: the capacity to observe without reacting; to let the full force of experience — pleasant or painful — pass through one’s awareness without being swept away, or somehow redefined, by it. In a sense, the rocks are infinitely patient and infinitely tolerant in their essential capacity of remaining present without reacting.
The guard tells us what mindfulness does. The rocks tell us what it is to inhabit it.
Together, they capture the full state: discernment and ground. Agency and equanimity. The capacity to act rightly, and the capacity to remain steady in the face of everything that makes acting rightly difficult.
That, as I understand it, is mindfulness.
REFERENCES
Tang, Y.-Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), 213–225. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3916
The following references appear in full in other chapters and are carried here as cross-references:
Bhikkhu Bodhi (Trans.). (2000). [as cited in Laws, Happiness, and other chapters]
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). [as cited in Happiness and Anxiety Management chapters]