What Is Spiritual Enlightenment?

 As the Zen poet Ryokan said:

"If someone asks what is the mark of enlightenment or illusion,
I cannot say -- wealth and honor are nothing but dust,
As the evening rain falls, I sit in my hermitage
And stretch out both feet in answer."

Enlightenment is often put up on a pedestal of perfection, and perhaps only a few out of billions have gone far enough to be substantially beyond severe physical suffering.  At such an extreme of non-attachment and non-identification, the pain simply arises and passes as it is, without resistance or stress.  But it's not necessarily all "good" at that point.  It becomes somewhat pathological, at least from the standpoint of society.  Ramana Maharshi was said to have let rats eat the flesh of his legs.  We might question whether this was truly the best use of the amazing insight of Ramana.

In the article "Drowning Mr. M" (SciAm Mind April 2005), we find a person suffering from athymhormia, a profound lack of attachment and motivation, due to lesions on the brain.  Taking a dip in the pool, he finds himself underwater and simply begins to let himself drown.  He doesn't care.  It doesn't bother him.  The sight of his daughter, though, breaks the apathy and he returns to the surface.  For these people, "it is as if they have become mere spectators to their own lives, no longer actively participating."

In many ways (credit to Shinzen Young) this condition mimics a high degree of enlightenment.  The interesting thing about athymhormia is that unlike other related experiences, there is no depression or cognitive impairment, the person is just very unattached.  They feel pain but it doesn't affect them.

And there are accounts of many such as Byron Katie, where it took her a long time to adjust to her extreme version of enlightenment.  For example, she couldn't understand why strangers on the street didn't know her, because from her perspective they were the same.

***

The standard definition for enlightenment would be something like the falling away of the ego.  But this is not necessarily easy to fathom unless one has actually experienced it.

In some ways enlightenment represents the falling away of false beliefs about the self, the loss of a certain kind of neuroticism.

From Karen Horney, (Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization):

The infinite powers the neurotic ascribes to himself are, after all, powers of the mind.  No wonder, then, that he is fascinated by it and proud of it.  The idealized image is a product of his imagination.  But this is not something created overnight.  Incessant work of intellect and imagination, most of it unconscious, goes into maintaining the private fictitious world through rationalizations, justifications, externalizations, reconciling irreconcilables - in short, through finding ways to make things appear different than what they are.  The more a person is alienated from himself, the more his mind becomes supreme reality.

Only when the patient has become interested in the question "Who am I?" will the analyst more actively try to bring to his awareness how little he does know or care about his real feelings, wishes, or beliefs.

The patient may simply feel sympathetic toward himself and experience himself for the first time as being neither particularly wonderful nor despicable but as the struggling and often harassed human being which he really is.

Moreover any move toward being himself gives him a sense of fulfillment which is different from anything he has known before.  And while such experience is at first short lived, it may in time recur more and more often and for periods of longer duration.

From the standpoint of individuals, it is important to notice that we weren't always ego-based creatures.  There was a bit of time, however brief, as say a fetus and a newborn, when we really didn't know we were anything.

Didn't know we were separate, or male or female, good or bad, rich or poor, or human, or anything.  Didn't have politics or religion, or categories period.  Didn't have gender, ethnicity, social class, occupation, hobbies, culture.  Didn't have parents, friends, or family, at least in the sense that we didn't know what those things were.  Didn't have status, self-esteem, reputation, body image, commitments, achievements, losses, gains.  Didn't have characteristics, values, beliefs, attitudes, ideas, habits.

Didn't have identity or uniqueness.  Didn't know we were separate. Didn't have past or future, time or space, or age or continuity. Everything was just happening, and there were no decisions that we could call conscious.

So what is that like?

What we're pointing at is pure, nonconceptual awareness, prior, in a sense, to the arising of anything.  All of those things listed above are attachment points for identity.  With those things dialed down, there is a lot of freedom to simply be who we are, instead of what we or other people think.

So pure consciousness or awareness or suchness, without ideas or conception, is a pointer.

Alfred Lord Tennyson used a type of meditation to pierce the veil:

"... when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently till, all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being; and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life"

Anyone can have a moment of that, but generally people's assumptions and attachments are so strong they go right back to their assumed identity.  A person could get a powerful sense of this during a psychedelic experience, and in some way it might lightly affect them, but most people will go back to their old ways.

So something could be said about both a degree of liberation, which could be massive in a temporary experience of just one moment, and also the degree to which that liberation is permanent.  Someone who is enlightened would have a substantial degree of both.

From another angle, we might look to science, which points out that we don't ever have any direct contact with what we call the universe.  Our senses feed into a brain, which creates a map, and that map is all we ever experience.  As you perceive it, the universe IS your consciousness, always has been.  Everything you have ever experienced is you, is consciousness, and that is all we can know in an absolute way.  Some may find that hard to swallow, but it is an important pointer.

This is basically the insight of Plato's analogy of the cave.  All we can see are shadows on the wall of the cave, yet we cannot see what is actually casting the shadows.

And again from a scientific view, we can't really consider ourselves to be quite so separate as we might ordinarily conceive.  Not only do we live in a massively interconnected human world, each ultimately dependent on everyone else, and all of our beliefs formed by our interactions with others, but at a fundamental level we do not exist without oxygen or food or water, which means we do not exist without plants, or the earth, or the entire universe.  We are not separate from the totality.

We can generally understand that an amoeba has no self.  It is just a little organic machine, doing what it does, genetics plus environment.  As we go up to multi-cellular creatures, perhaps we can still see that something like an earthworm or a grasshopper has no self.  Just little organic machines, doing what they do.  For a lot of people this exercise gets more difficult as we get up to mammals.  But it's the same thing.  A mouse or a goat is just an organic machine that does what it does.  By the time we get to dogs and cats, many people will begin to disagree.  But it's the same thing.  You take those genetics, you put them in that environment, that's what you get, organic machines doing what they do.

So yeah, the kind of dry and unappealing spin is that we are soulless robots.  But waking up to that and beginning to see how your mental machinery was indoctrinated, and letting go of that unskillful programming, that's a beautiful thing.  Once again though, it's also just your particular genetics doing what they are doing in your particular environment.

The enlightened viewpoint might seem "wrong" in a way from the assumptions of consensus civilization.  ("Oh, but of course I have a self").  But in many ways it is the enlightened mind that is actually letting go of what isn't real, the phantoms of belief, opinion, and assumption.

And that intellectual path of seeing what we are conceptually is one thing, but circling back, the really important thing is to experience and see and be from the viewpoint of pure consciousness.

The enlightened mind is a mind relatively absent of assumptions or elaborations, one that is not taking the bait of craving or resistance.  Less compressed, more relaxed, less closed, more open, less reactive, more responsive, less self-obsessed, more compassionate, less compulsive, more free.

There is a kind of relaxation that takes place when all of this striving has been let go of.  The mind has been conditioned to "flex" and strive, in a way.  Continually practicing to be aware of that flexing and to let go of it, this is the path.  Eventually the mind begins to relax in this way.  The letting go of the grasping of self-identity is one aspect of this relaxation.  With enough practice, the mind breaks free of prior assumptions and begins to adopt relaxed awareness as its new default.  It begins to "identify" with the background of experience, with pure consciousness.  As this becomes permanent, this absence of assumptions, seeing what actually is, this is what we call enlightenment.

All visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. If man will strike, strike through the mask!
     -Ahab, from Moby Dick

Upping Your Game

It may be, of course, that you don't need to up your game.  But odds are that you do.

The meditation game is something along the lines of mastering a combination of attention and relaxation.  Simple enough, in theory.  But as the song* goes, "with a back beat narrow and hard to master."

The mainstream advice seems to be mostly about having an intention to be mindful, but not much is said on exactly how to accomplish this experience of mindfulness.  It's not that they don't provide any hints, but rather that they speak in general terms and tend to avoid reliance on any kind of direct technique to accomplish the task.  It's as if it were somehow rude to suggest that one indulge in something so crass as a technique, or probably even moreso a technique that is not (god forbid) specifically mentioned in the Pali Canon.  Other, of course, than following the breath, which has been grandfathered in as Buddha specifically used that technique as an example of how to be mindful.

Once upon a time I knew a guy that was very into meditation and Buddhism.  He had practiced daily for years, read all the books, listened to all the dharma talks, been to all the retreats, and had even taught meditation for a while at an established center.  So we would figure this person should be pretty "good" at meditation, if we were to so judge.  I'm not sure exactly where he was on the path, but I do know that I turned him on to the "noting" style of meditation and afterwards he said that he had never been that aware in meditation before.

Okay, so maybe that last line went by kind of quickly.  Pause and consider the unbelievable magnitude of that last statement.  Let's go through it again: daily practice for a couple of decades or more, bookshelves full of dharma books, always listening to dharma talks, been to all kind of retreats, and, critically, taught lots of other people how to meditate, and yet HE HAD NEVER BEEN THAT AWARE IN MEDITATION.  Sure, maybe there is more to it than awareness, but generally, what does that say about the overall success of the mainstream meditation community?

And okay, I'll grant that maybe the noting style is not the be all end all for everyone, but circling back to the point, this is a concrete example of how a simple technique changed one person's game, even if just for a moment.

Noting style is a kind of paint-by-numbers version of mindfulness, forcing one to do exactly what mindful people do.  Name what you are aware of, at a rate of about one "note" per second or so.  Repeat 3600 times per hour.  When first exposed to it, people often comment about the unusual degree of awareness, much like the experienced practitioner I mentioned.

But, like many things, people habituate.  They slack off.  They succumb to the learned desire to think about this or that.  Time to up your game.  You can always work on intention, attempt to increase your earnestness, your engagement, your resolve.  And that is an important factor, but often it is not enough.

So what I'm recommending is, if you need to, come up with techniques or structures to overcome your lack of awareness.  You don't have to "do it on your own" without technique.  You don't have to just "wing it".  You can figure out a technology to get it done.

In noting practice, the first thing to recommend is noting out loud.  Most people will avoid this important step.  Noting out loud ups the ante.  Try it.  The hardest-core version I have recommended is to note out loud while writing down each brief note on paper.

There are any number of techniques, I have outlined a bunch of the usual suspects (and more) in Basic Meditation Styles.  But like the writing-down-noting-out-loud technique I came up with, you can invent what works for you.  There are apps that you can use to vibrate your phone every so often, like once a minute.  For years I used an old beeper device (Motivaider) that would do that, and held it loosely in my hand while I meditated.  By doing that, it was difficult to space out for more than a few seconds.  That's the idea.

Say you're lying down on the couch watching TV.  Great time to practice, few will attempt it, fewer will succeed.  Do what you have to do.  Maybe prop up your arm and slowly wave it in front of you, obscuring your view of the TV every second or so.  Use something like that to remind yourself to be here now, feel the body, open your awareness to the room.  You can invent a way to stay present.

All of this may be seem a bit silly or hardcore for armchair meditators who are maybe just looking for a bit of relaxing and de-stressing.  I very much advocate relaxing and de-stressing, but I find that awareness kinda has to take some precedence.  Once you are present, you will actually be able to relax.  You will actually be aware of what is tense, and you can see if you can let go of some of that.  That's what it takes to really relax.  And it does take some work to undo decades of conditioning, the prejudice of the mind towards concepts. 

My concern about this type of thing can be seen in a recent Tricycle article where the writer said:

You may read that meditation enables you to tame your mind and bring it to a state of stability and peace. Despite meditating as a Buddhist for more than 40 years, I have not achieved even a glimpse of this, nor have I ever seen anyone else achieve it. Admittedly, I am not much of a practitioner ...

The article, though nice in its own way, strikes me as essentially an argument for slacking off.  It saddens me that he's put in so much time, more than enough to get far more than a glimpse of stability and peace, but in some way the mainstream practices failed him.

I'm not one for Buddhist dogma, but I am reminded of a couple of quotes such as Buddha's last words, to "strive diligently".  Or when describing the removal of distracting thoughts, "with teeth clenched ... he should beat down, constrain, and crush mind with mind".  That's pretty intense.

This kind of effort must eventually be let go of like everything else, but for most people that will be a few years down the road.  For example, musically, you have to learn your scales and modes and arpeggios and chords and songs and solos and fingerings, and get to the point where all the movements are second nature, before you can really lay back and improvise at a high level.  It takes time and hard practice, and imagining that is going to happen without real effort is insanity.

If you want to "get it done", it can be done.  Figure out a technique that will get you, and keep you, aware, relaxed, and open, and do that for an hour a day.

*Doors: Texas Radio and The Big Beat

It's not about thinking with your eyes closed

"Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed"
- Sam Harris

I would add that sitting on a cushion at a retreat for 60 hours a week is not necessarily meditation, although it very well could be.

It depends on what is going on internally.

I've heard examples of modern meditation teachers recommending that their students actively think and analyze on the cushion.  Maybe some analysis can be helpful from time to time, but I find this advice a little bit frightening.  I think for a lot of people this may be pointing a bit in the wrong direction, that it may be training people to actually strengthen and practice their attachment and prejudice towards thought, something that is already extremely well practiced and something that instead maybe needs to be un-done, un-learned.

It is possible for a person to be relatively unattached to their thinking, to merely observe the thoughts that arise, and that indeed can be a part of meditation practice, but this is not the same as the recommended active steering and analyzing and grasping, but rather a mindful witnessing of what is.

I believe that in part this direction has resulted from a seemingly well intended political correctness about thought in meditation, at least among the consensus meditation community.  Once upon a time, a few decades ago, no-thought was used prominently as a pointer, and it remains an excellent pointer if understood correctly.  The danger is apparently that some people assumed there should be an aversion to thought and so would resist thought.  The largely modern western groups reacted to this by pretty much abolishing talk of no-thought, kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in my opinion.  But grasping and resistance were never part of the practice.  Being mindfully aware and relaxed and open, and leaning in the direction of the non-conceptual, abandoning whatever grasping and resistance that can be abandoned, surrendering to the moment, that is the practice.

The practice is a letting go of what can be let go of, not of shunning or resisting thought.

In my experience, there is grasping with every thought, at least on the cushion.  On the cushion, everything is taken care of, there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be.  Thoughts in that situation, although natural at some level, reflect a degree of dissatisfaction with the present moment.  But the experience of thoughts subsiding, relaxing down to the level of a few proto-thoughts, is a sign that you are on the right track.  Although perhaps an advanced practice, one simply watches these arisings and lets go of them as soon as they are witnessed.

Part of the political correctness stems from the misunderstanding of the no-thought pointer.  But there are a couple of other pieces to the puzzle.  For example, there is a general recommendation to "investigate" experience, and Buddha himself clearly does a bit of thinking and analyzing.  My take would be sure, you can do some "investigation" in the sense of feeling into your experience, but in terms of serious mental analysis or psychotherapy, I would recommend doing it off the cushion.

I would recommend staying away from discursive analysis and instead maybe interpret "investigation" as a term for "feeling" your experience, feeling your feelings.  What does your experience really feel like?  What does that fear or that tension in the body really feel like?  What happens when you stop resisting that?  We're living in a world of people that are out of touch with their bodies and feelings, like brains on popsicle sticks.  We need to practice the non-verbal.  We need to practice just being.

Similarly, the western Buddhist experience has been substantially blended with psychology over the past few decades.  This may not be a bad thing.  Psychology can help relieve suffering.  But again, when I hear someone at a dharma talk saying that they plan to spend their next retreat "meditating" on their relationship with their partner, my heart falls a bit.  Who knows, maybe what that person needs is indeed a lot of psychological think time.  But I'm not sure I would call it meditation.  I do recommend psychological work, I think everyone is on a spectrum of neurosis, but again I would recommend that work be done primarily off the cushion.

Time on the cushion is precious time, it is an opportunity to practice being aware and letting go.  Indulging in stories is not that.  And as my guitar teacher put it, practice makes permanent.  You practice sloppy, your playing will be sloppy.  Guaranteed.  Practice being aware and letting go, abandon whatever you can.

Another Reason for Noting Practice

The article, "Things You Can Do to Cheer Up, According to Neuroscience", in the segment "He-Who-Actually-Must-Be-Named", explains that:

“To reduce arousal, you need to use just a few words to describe an emotion, and ideally use symbolic language, which means using indirect metaphors, metrics, and simplifications of your experience. This requires you to activate your prefrontal cortex, which reduces the arousal in the limbic system. Here's the bottom line: describe an emotion in just a word or two, and it helps reduce the emotion.”

This is the essence of noting practice, to continuously describe what is more or less predominate in awareness.

Basic Meditation Styles - An Overview

An attempt to gather together some of the best meditation and "liberation" techniques available.  Ideally, one would engage with each of these practices for several hours to a week, finding and/or creating what works best for you, and then work on mastery.

Concentration

We might also call this something like absorption or stability practice, but at any rate we're talking about some kind of continuous typically single-pointed focus on / absorption into / stability with - a specific meditation object, such as the breath.  Ideally, one might practice and partially master some form of concentration prior to practicing mindfulness, or perhaps do some concentration practice for the first few minutes of a mindfulness session.  This kind of practice seems to help a bit with keeping continuous, and people who have learned to practice in this way tend to make faster progress when they switch to mindfulness.

Styles of Concentration Practice:

• Following (Feeling) the Breath, at the tip of the nose or the diaphragm
• Following the Breath with Breath Counting
• Staring at an object (like a ball or a candle flame)
• Staring at the second hand of a clock

Mindfulness (+recommended)

Mindfulness is about awareness of awareness, about being "present".  In a certain way, we could say that we are always aware, in everyday life.  While daydreaming, for example, we are at least aware of the daydream.  But we are generally otherwise lost while daydreaming, we are not aware of our awareness.  To the extent that we are lost or embedded in our imagination, attached to the daydream, unaware of the sensate world, as we typically are when the mind is wandering, we are not really free.

On the other hand, if we do have awareness of awareness, if we know what we are aware of while we are aware of it and can for example stand back and name it, we have some metaphorical distance, we have some freedom.  This distance, this non-attachment, is an important component of mindfulness, and practicing with this aspect in mind is ultimately what leads to what we might call liberation.

So non-attachment, ultimately letting go of craving and resistance, and letting everything be as it is, is the ultimate goal.  But, at least at first, it cannot happen without awareness of awareness.  Getting this kind of mindfulness happening a very high percentage of the time, and very continuously is a prerequisite for the practice of letting go.

Some rare individuals may be able to to practice without technique, just sitting, simply intending very earnestly to remain mindful.  But realistically, most people will require some kind of technique, often something very structured, to maintain this kind of awareness.  Regardless of technique, one's intention and earnestness is a key component of success (one academic catch-phrase is "deliberate practice").

A good audio guide to non-structured mindfulness practice is this Basic Instructions talk by Andrea Fella.

Styles of Mindfulness Practice:

 

Note that here some practices categorized above as concentration are being presented as mindfulness.  There is some overlap, the difference here would be that these practices might be thought of as anchors within a larger context of being mindful of all experience.

Breath following

• The prototypical form of meditation.  Focus on feeling the breath.

Breath counting

• Following and feeling the breath, but using the structure of counting to help keep oneself on track.  A typical method would be to count the out-breaths up to 10, and then start over with 1.

Breath counting with mantra

• On the in-breath try a mantra such as "feeling" and on the out-breath do counting.

Breath counting with noting

• On the in-breath do noting and on the out-breath do counting.

Bilateral Breath Meditation

• Lightly press a left finger into your left thigh as you inhale, and then release that pressure and lightly press your right finger into your right thigh as you exhale.

Body scanning

• The attention is on the body, scanning and feeling one's way from the crown of the head down to the toes and then back from toe to head, sweeping the attention slowly and continuously.  Typically scanning takes several minutes to complete a full head-toe-head cycle.  This is lumped into mindfulness because it is traditionally thought of that way, but in reality this has a strong element of concentration.  This is a practice associated with Goenka.

Mantra, a repeated word or phrase (+recommended)

• There are ancient mantras such as "om", but I recommend that mantras be customized to your specific situation.  For example, a beginner might benefit from a mantra such as "awareness".  My overall recommendation would be "feeling", in order to point back to sensate experience.  Mantras can be used in an almost koan-like sense, with the intention of pointing to, or creating curiosity about, something wordless like "stillness", "tranquility", or "love", or "gratitude". 

Noting (+recommended)

• A short version of noting I have described is notice what is roughly predominate in awareness and label it, about once per second, as either seeing, hearing, feeling, or thinking, or "don't know".  A more detailed version of this style ended up working well for me, your mileage may vary.
• Noting can also be performed out loud, as well as back and forth with a partner (ping-pong or dyadic noting)
• Also see tons of material on this site on How To Meditate in the noting style.

Inquiry or Direct Awareness (+recommended)

Inquiry is generally about trying to get a direct sense of "beingness" with questions such as:

• Who am I?
• What am I?
• What is this?

Similar to Zen koan practice, these are not to be literally answered, but rather the idea is to sit with the curiosity and awareness and the sense of "I am" or "being".  What is the nonverbal answer to these questions?

Loving Kindness (Metta)

The focus is on the positive, generating loving friendliness and compassion, typically performed with several phrases such as the following, starting with the "I" form and working out to all beings.

• May I/you/all beings be happy
• May I/you/all beings be healthy
• May I/you/all beings live in peace

Also, alternative forms such as imagining that people are happy to see you.

Some Alternative Forms/Techniques/Approaches that may be Helpful

• Sitting with the question, "how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?" (a useful version of inquiry practice, called Actualism, from the obtuse website Actual Freedom)
• Viewing the totality as it actually appears from your perspective, with no head. (The Headless Way)
• Viewing the totality with a sense of that totality (Sperry Andrews)
• Focusing, a technique similar to mindfulness and releasing techniques.
• MBSR, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, is a well studied secular version of meditation practice.  Their seven attitudinal factors are non-judging, patience, beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go.  Comprehensive free MBSR course.
• Mindful Prayer (including non-religious prayer to, say, your true nature)
• Forgiveness work
• Guided meditation recordings
• Mindfully listening to ambient music 

Sitting with feelings and asking oneself the following series of questions (Sedona Method - similar to any number of "release" methods):

• "could I let this go", or "could I allow this feeling to be here" or "could I welcome this feeling", then 
• "would I let this go", and finally, 
• "when?"

Advanced Practice:

Just Sitting

• Ideally nothing needs to be done here.  This would be an advanced style where the meditator has already trained the mind to be aware and relaxed.  See The Easy Way - Do Nothing.

Objectless Absorption

• Just sitting can become an absorption.  It is difficult to describe the object here, it would be something like the background of all experience.

Getting It Done

It should go without saying, but these kinds of things need to be actually practiced and mastered.  It's not a matter of reading a technique and understanding the concept, it's a matter of sitting down and continually practicing a given technique until it becomes second nature, until it becomes automatic, until the body/mind acquires a new default.

Deliberately learning a few diverse techniques will give you a better idea of the overall direction that is being pointed at, and will give you a better idea of what works for you and what you should focus on.  And that may change over time, as beginners often tend to need more concrete and structured techniques, while experts will probably lean towards less structure and more just being or absorption.

A Whole Post on Getting It Done

[Advanced] Six Words of Advice

In Tibetan, Six Words of Advice by Tilopa, translated by Ken McLeod.

• Don’t recall - Let go of what has passed
• Don’t imagine - Let go of what may come
• Don’t think - Let go of what is happening now
• Don’t examine - Don’t try to figure anything out
• Don’t control - Don’t try to make anything happen
• Rest - Relax, right now, and rest

This would be considered advanced in the sense that it is a "do nothing" approach, like the "just sitting" or "open awareness" style of Shikantaza in Zen, or here in the native style of Tibetan Mahamudra or Dzochen, "nonconceptual awareness".  Beginners often need to assiduously practice structured methods until the mind is stable and relaxed, but these are great pointers to what can be going on amidst the structure.

Vipassana or Insight Meditation - Mahasi Noting Style

The idea behind meditation is that the mind needs to be trained to be aware, in an awareness of awareness kind of way, and within that, needs to be trained to relax.

As far as the awareness side, many styles can accomplish this but I feel the Mahasi style is one of the better to learn as it mechanically requires one to do exactly what needs to be done.  It "forces" you to be continuously mindful.

The Mahasi or noting style comes from the Theravada Buddhist monk Mahasi Sayadaw.  It is more or less the predominate style of vipassana (insight meditation or mindfulness) practiced in the southeast Asian Theravada Buddhist world.  For people that take to this practice, it may be one of the faster paths to what we might call the tipping point or "escape velocity", what would be referred to as the first stage of enlightenment in the Burmese tradition.

This style is the source material for the type of meditation I teach in How To Meditate, so it's relevant, but mainly it can be helpful to see the practice from a slightly different angle.  Here are some of the original Mahasi style instructions from one of his lectures:

Instructions to Insight Meditation - Mahasi Sayadaw (text)

Instructions to Insight Meditation - Mahasi Sayadaw (mp3)

The linked text above can also be found in Practical Vipassana Exercises (pdf) by Mahasi Sayadaw, pages 30-44.  The mp3 is a 46 minute recording of a British man reading the text, and it ends up being something like a guided meditation, and a relatively painless way to receive the instructions

Kenneth Folk is a modern teacher who studied under Pandita, Mahasi's successor.  He outlines his version of noting practice here:

Kenneth Folk - Intro to Mahasi Noting (mp3)

This mp3 is a series of instructions edited from some Kenneth Folk instructional videos, totaling not quite 33 minutes in length.  The topics are:

• What is Meditation?
• Noting based on Six Senses
• Body Sensations (1st foundation of mindfulness)
• Pleasant & Unpleasant (2nd foundation)
• Mind States (3rd foundation)
• Thoughts (4th foundation)
• Freestyle Noting
• Pressure Release Valve
• Working Through Difficulty

I think at one time I would have been relatively dogmatic about this unique style of meditation, for the simple reason that it proved effective for myself and a number of friends on the path.  But clearly many methods work, and frankly, anything that is keeping you substantially aware and relaxed during formal practice will likely "get it done".  For those who are interested, here is a post from earlier in the series outlining some of the reasons that the Mahasi style may be particularly effective.

There are some minor differences between the original Mahasi instructions and those of Kenneth Folk.

Mahasi has a style of repeating each note twice, Kenneth does not.  In some ways the repeating could allow one to "sink into" the experience behind the note, a practice that Shinzen Young has at times advocated.  Beginners typically have more of a problem with mind wandering and need more to do to keep them on task, possibly suggesting more frequent noting.  More time between notes might plausibly be more appropriate for advanced meditators.

Mahasi also places a lot of emphasis on the breath, which is very traditional.  Kenneth does not.  The breath has always been the focus of many meditative practices and it is of use as it is always available, always moving, always here and now.  Mahasi makes the breath a "fall back" or anchor mechanism if nothing else is going on, which is reasonable, noting the ever present "rising" and "falling" of the diaphragm.  It's a legitimate option, but I do like the concept of not making the breath any more important than anything else going on in awareness.

Kenneth also advises people to experiment with out-loud noting.  This is a powerful technique which tends to automatically increase awareness as compared to mental noting.  If you are having trouble with mind wandering while mentally noting, try a highly recommended session of out loud noting.

Other Resources about Noting:

My material on How To Meditate

A brief article by Gil Fronsdal on Mental Noting

How to Practice Vipassana Insight Meditation by Sayadaw U Pandita (a student and successor of Mahasi Sayadaw)

A fairly long and detailed description of noting and mindfulness practice from the Vipassana Dhura Meditation Society