The following passages allow for different interpretations, and what I interpret to be descriptions of mindfulness someone else may interpret as descriptions of something else.¹ I mention this to prevent the reader from being distracted by the thought that I am twisting the meaning of the passages in order to serve my own ends. I am not trying to say that these passages must be interpreted as descriptions of mindfulness. Nor am I claiming that their authors had that purpose in mind. But I do believe that they can be taken in that way, and that is how I will take them.

I begin with a personal example. This is my father's encounter with, what I believe to be, the mindful state. A little background first. My family comes from Kasindol, a small town not very far from Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. A vibrant little river splits the town in half as it stretches in two contrary directions. In one direction, the river surges towards the rustle and bustle of Sarajevo, with its pubs and cafés. My father tells me how he would spend time at such places, drinking rakija—the Yugoslav version of vodka—smoking cigarettes and getting involved in the social and political events of his day. But it quickly becomes clear to anyone who takes the time to get to know him that that is not where his most cherished memories rest. He speaks with awe and wonder about that which he found when he followed the river in the other direction. In that direction, the Kasindol river leads into a thick, largely unexplored forest, where he fished trout, picked mushrooms, and received other gifts that nature sent his way. When his legs became heavy, he recalls with nostalgia shimmering behind his eyes, he would rest his backpack, forget his fishing rod and find a soft patch of grass on which to stretch out. Slowly and invariably, perhaps following a short nap, something would sneak up on him. And when it grabbed him this something would erase him from this world. This is no fancy description. My father speaks quite seriously when he says that in these moments it is as if he ceased to exist. And with his absence for the first-time reality would bloom into life: the clouds slowly and patiently striding across the clear blue sky, the gentle murmur of the river, the whispering conversation between the trees, all would become magical, wondrous. And as this state deepened, he recalls, that which usually appears as distinct and separate, including himself, would merge into a kind of harmonious unity. He once illustrated this by asking me to imagine a wheel with the different colours painted on it. And then to imagine the wheel as spinning really fast, and it keeps spinning until the different colours merge into a homogeneous and undifferentiated quality. The different colours stand for the distinct phenomena of which our everyday, ordinary world is made, the homogeneous quality represents the reality that revealed itself to my father in these moments. These experiences, he says, would refresh him completely, and memories of them served him as an unfaltering source of strength upon which he drew when faced with the endless, trivial difficulties and agitations that he encountered when he followed the river in the other direction. I had not the slightest doubt that what my father was describing was an experience of mindfulness, something I try so hard to harness in my meditation practice, and which I myself felt in situations similar to those depicted in his memories.

A description of experiences similar to my father's can be found in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the House of the Dead, a work inspired by the author's experience while a prisoner in Siberia.² The establishment of mindfulness is often, but certainly not always, preceded by some kind of anguish, a mood that arises as one begins to disconnect from ordinary life. This is certainly so in the case of Alexandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, the main character of the novel and whose anguish finds its source in the fact of his imprisonment. In prison, the conditions are arranged in such a way as to prevent the prisoner from pursuing the desires that defined their pre-prison existence, such as socialising, raising a family, the freedom to go wherever one wants, and so on. While one is longer able to pursue such desires, that does not mean that they are annihilated from the mind. Rather they now float painfully in front of the prisoner's awareness in the form of unrealisable and frustrated longings—“if not for these conditions, I could do all that.” It is this tension—between what the prisoner is capable of in the conditions that he finds himself in and the kind of life he could live in different circumstances—that make prison life so tormenting.

This tension, as Dostoevsky is about to tells us, is especially amplified in spring, the season that in ordinary circumstances opens up a whole range of simple pleasures, such as strolling through the fresh green grass underneath the clear blue sky. The prisoner senses these gifts of spring, and senses them very keenly. But they remain out of reach. “Even a man in fetters…” Dostoevsky writes

Goryanchikov shared his own impressions of such torments:

Because his mind is still holding onto the dreams and desires of his pre-prison life, and because the current conditions are such that he is unable to move towards their realisation, because of all that anguish and melancholy arise in Goryanchikov's mind with an incredible force, and he is brought down by a sense of hopelessness. This anguish hides from him the intrinsic beauty of the surrounding reality—the greening grass, the distant sky, etc.—which, at this point in the narrative, are only apprehended as unusable means towards non-pursuable ends, as a kind of painful reminder of his confined freedom. Goryanchikov experiences the surrounding reality only vaguely, as if through a fog or a veil. But this very hopelessness, in certain circumstances, forces him to find a whole new, more intimate connection with the surrounding reality, and leads him to the discovery of a different and much more fulfilling kind of freedom. The shift from the old attitude to the new takes place at a special spot by the river Irtysh:

The contrast is striking. In the light of his anguish, the surroundings are suffocating. With the dimming of that light and “the forgetting of self” they take on a very different significance. Freed from the sense of being mere means for his unrealisable ends, they reveal themselves as they are:

This is a state of mind where the self is forgotten, the surroundings bathed in a positive light, things freed to exhibit their own intrinsic nature and to move to their own rhythm and where attention becomes fixated in a quite usual manner—how many of us would stay so long with such a mundane thing as a flower fading by the side of the road? Keiji Nishitani (1982, p. 8) comments:

There is no evidence in these passages that Goryanchikov was intentionally trying to bring about some special state, as a meditation master might do. It cannot therefore be said that he was engaged in any kind of meditation practice, or that he had any such skill. The transformation occurs quite spontaneously and all he needed to do was to place himself in that special spot by the Irtysh.

The entire segment of Goryanchikov's consciousness that I have been considering can be represented with an image of a line divided into two sections. Their border is the spontaneous shift from one state of mind to the other. The section to the left of the border represents the old, anguished state of mind and the events that lead to the shift (e.g. the attentional changes, being placed in a particular situation). The segment on the right represents the state of mind that arises after the shift, which is characterised by the absence or forgetfulness of self and the discovery of something like a hidden dimension in the most ordinary things. The feeling of melancholy associated with the earlier state is replaced by a positive feeling tone, which paints everything with the sense of being “dear and gracious.” Attention, too, functions differently: before the shift, it was fixated upon his personal (non-pursuable) desires, now it effortlessly follows and fixes upon reality as it moves to its rhythm.

The place and setting, such as the river Irtysh was for Goryanchikov, can play an important role in helping summon such spontaneous shifts in perspective. Even a place as humbl...