In this installment of his Satipatthana Sutta series, Joseph Goldstein examines the nature of mindfulness practice by exploring how practitioners cultivate both internal and external awareness. Rather than limiting mindfulness to self-observation alone, Goldstein emphasizes the Sutta's instruction to contemplate feelings and mental states both within oneself and in others, creating a balanced practice that prevents self-absorption while developing insight into the impermanent, reactive nature of all experience. Central to this teaching is learning to distinguish between bare knowing—direct, non-conceptual awareness—and the mind's habitual storytelling, alongside practices for maintaining non-reactivity when observing others' positive and negative emotional states.
What Is Comprehensive Mindfulness Practice?
Mindfulness is often understood as a solitary, inward-focused practice. Goldstein's reading of the Satipatthana Sutta introduces a different framework: mindfulness as a comprehensive discipline that encompasses both internal and external observation. This distinction is not merely semantic but foundational to how a practitioner understands and applies the teaching.
Goldstein emphasizes that the practice involves what the Sutta calls "contemplating feelings internally and externally." This means a meditator works with direct awareness of their own emotional and mental states while simultaneously maintaining mindful attention to the feelings and mind-states arising in others. This dual awareness prevents practitioners from becoming isolated in their own inner experience and instead creates a more complete and balanced training of attention.
The comprehensive nature of this practice extends beyond intellectual curiosity about others' minds. By observing both internal and external states, practitioners enlarge the context in which they practice, moving beyond a narrow focus on personal liberation toward a more inclusive understanding of how awareness works across different instances of experience. This creates a foundation for seeing patterns, impermanence, and the universal nature of emotional reactivity rather than viewing suffering as purely personal.
How Does External Mindfulness Prevent Self-Absorption?
One of Goldstein's central points is that external contemplation—mindfulness directed toward others' feelings and mental states—serves a practical function: it counteracts the tendency toward self-absorption. In modern practice, meditators often become preoccupied with their own inner states, creating what Goldstein implicitly critiques as an excessive internalization of practice.
Goldstein notes that contemplating externally keeps practitioners in balance and helps them remain attuned to how their actions affect others. This is not purely ethical instruction, though it has ethical implications. Rather, it is a training method that expands awareness and prevents a narrowing of consciousness around one's own experience. When a practitioner becomes mindful of others' positive and negative feelings in a non-reactive, non-judgmental way, they develop what Goldstein calls being "attuned" and "aware" of these states as they arise.
This external awareness also serves investigative purposes. By observing how feelings and mental states manifest in others, a meditator gains empirical, direct evidence of how the mind works universally. They see that others experience the same patterns of reactivity, impermanence, and conditionality that they observe in themselves. This observation moves practitioners beyond the illusion of separation and into a recognition of what Goldstein describes as "going beyond the division of self and other."
What Is the Role of Thoughts in Triggering Emotion?
Goldstein's teaching includes an important insight about the mechanics of emotional experience: thoughts function as the trigger for emotions to arise. This is not a metaphorical statement but a direct observation about how the mind works. When a thought arises—a judgment, a narrative, a conceptual elaboration—it activates an emotional response.
Understanding this mechanism is crucial for practitioners because it reveals where intervention is possible. Rather than attempting to control or suppress emotions directly, a meditator can develop awareness of the thought-patterns that precede emotional reactivity. By observing the arising of thoughts and the subsequent emotional response, practitioners gain insight into the causal sequence of their own reactivity and that of others.
This teaching connects to what Goldstein calls the mind's "storytelling" function. The mind does not simply perceive experience neutrally; it automatically generates narratives, interpretations, and conceptual overlays. Goldstein contrasts this habitual storytelling with the Buddha's instruction on "bare knowledge"—direct, non-conceptual awareness that does not add layers of meaning or evaluation. Learning to distinguish between these two modes of knowing is central to developing stable mindfulness.
What Is "Bare Knowledge" and Why Does It Matter?
A key theme in Goldstein's teaching is the distinction between bare knowing and the mind's automatic interpretive activity. Bare knowledge is awareness without conceptual elaboration, judgment, or narrative framework. It is the direct knowing of something as it appears without the addition of story, meaning, or emotional charge.
The Buddha's instruction emphasizes this bare knowledge as the foundation of liberating insight. When a meditator observes a feeling arise—whether in themselves or another person—bare knowledge means seeing the feeling as sensation, as a transient phenomenon, without immediately spinning narratives about what it means, what caused it, or what should be done about it.
Goldstein introduces a useful mantra for practitioners: "it's already here." This phrase points to the simple fact that awareness itself is always present and available. The instruction is not to create awareness or to force particular states; rather, it is to relax into the awareness that is already functioning and to recognize it in its bare, non-elaborated form. This is subtle but transformative: it shifts the meditator's effort from trying to achieve a special state to recognizing what is already the case.
How Do Practitioners Contemplate Others' Feelings and Mind-States?
External mindfulness is not voyeurism or intrusive observation. Rather, Goldstein teaches that practitioners develop mindful awareness of others' emotional and mental states through direct observation, inference, and reasoning. This is a refined form of attention that respects boundaries while remaining attuned.
When Goldstein mentions "insight from inference and inductive reasoning," he points to a valid epistemological approach within mindfulness practice. A meditator observes another person's facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, and behavior. From these observable signs, and using reasoning informed by their own experience, they infer what mental state or feeling is likely present in the other person. This is not guessing or projecting; it is using direct evidence and drawing reasonable conclusions.
Importantly, the instruction is to maintain mindfulness of these observations in a "non-reactive, non-judgmental way." This means the practitioner does not use their inference about another's mental state as a basis for judging, fixing, or interfering with that person. Instead, they simply note: "In this person, anger is present" or "In that person, joy is arising." This clear seeing, without the overlay of personal reaction, develops the meditator's capacity to be genuinely present with others' experience.
What Is the Importance of Observing Impermanence in Feelings?
One of the Three Marks of Existence in Buddhist teaching is impermanence (anicca). Goldstein's approach to external mindfulness includes specific attention to the impermanent nature of all feelings. By observing others' emotional states, a meditator becomes directly aware that feelings in others—just as in themselves—are constantly arising and passing away.
This observation is liberating because it undermines the illusion of solidity and permanence that the mind typically projects onto emotional experience. When a meditator sees that another person's anger, sadness, or joy is not fixed but transitional, they develop both compassion and wisdom. They recognize that difficult emotional states in others (and themselves) are not the final reality but temporary phenomena moving through the landscape of consciousness.
By "contemplating both internal and external mindfulness so that we can see phenomena objectively," Goldstein points toward a crucial shift in perspective. Objectivity here does not mean cold detachment but rather the capacity to see what is actually present rather than what the mind habitually superimposes. When a practitioner can observe impermanence in both their own and others' experience, they achieve a more balanced, realistic understanding of how consciousness actually functions.
How Does Balance in Practice Prevent Imbalance in Life?
Goldstein's emphasis on external mindfulness serves a practical life-wisdom function: it keeps practitioners' lives in balance by preventing excessive self-absorption. Modern contemplative culture can inadvertently foster a kind of navel-gazing where meditators become so focused on their inner states that they lose sensitivity to the wider context of their lives and relationships.
By training in external mindfulness, practitioners develop the capacity to stay aware of how their words, actions, and energy affect others around them. They are "mindful of the feelings and mind states externally" and thus remain "attuned, aware, in a mindful, non-reactive, non-judgmental way." This is not a burden or moral obligation but a natural outcome of expanded awareness. When attention includes others' experience, a meditator naturally becomes more responsive and less reactively driven.
This balance also serves the meditator's own development. A practice that includes both internal and external observation prevents the mind from becoming rigid or stuck. Goldstein teaches practitioners to stay "free in the flow of changing experience." This fluidity requires that attention can move between internal and external, between one person's experience and another's, without grasping or aversion. The ability to rest in bare knowing while remaining attuned to the full spectrum of experience—one's own and others'—characterizes a mature and balanced mindfulness practice.
Where to Go From Here
Practicing mindfulness as taught in the Satipatthana Sutta requires developing skill in both internal and external observation. Begin by deepening awareness of your own feelings and mental states—noticing how thoughts trigger emotions, observing the impermanent nature of these states, and learning to distinguish bare knowledge from the mind's habitual storytelling. Once this foundation is established, extend mindfulness outward: observe others' emotional states with genuine interest and attunement, using inference informed by their behavior and your own experience. Notice how others' feelings arise and pass, how their mental states appear without fixed substance. Practice maintaining non-reactivity and non-judgment in these observations. Over time, this dual practice develops a comprehensive mindfulness that prevents self-absorption, expands your awareness, and deepens insight into the universal nature of how consciousness operates. The mantra "it's already here" can serve as an anchor, reminding you that the awareness you seek is not distant but present in each moment of bare knowing.
