Hi Zom,Zom wrote:So - as far as I understood - everyone agrees that "awareness in/to the present moment " is a vital part of meditation ,)
So the only disputable point is how to call this awareness - "sati" or not "sati" (or - "included into sati")? Does that really matter?
I used to think that sati was "awareness in/to the present moment " but I read somewhere (by a very reputable monk-scholar) that really strictly speaking this is a misleading definition. We are instructed to be aware of/in the four frames of reference; body, feelings, mind, and mind-objects, and if we are focussed there we will, naturally, be in the present as well. If you mean that the mind should actually be here, right now, aware of itself and/or it's object, and not lost in some thought - then yes, I do know what you mean. But I think that we need to be careful in how we define it, because it subtly changes the meaning and thus how someone might practise it. Sati has to be present for us to cognize the object in a useful way. But it is the object itself that needs to be standing out clearly, and so in a way sati is just a tool, like our hands that reach out to catch a ball, we keep our eyes on the ball, not on our hands. Sometimes I feel that when sati is at it's brightest, it operates invisibly, in that only the object is manifest.
Anyway, this is such an interesting subject...there is so much to learn. Even just a clear and consistent definition of sati that everyone can agree on, it seems to be hard to find!
with metta