Doesn't it depend on how you define 'now'?

 
This sounds both right and wrong.

Right because mindfulness if we define it as meta-cognition is about seeing how eg. seeing happens. Wrong because the "what" is also content of meta-cognition or at least should be to make correct correlations between real world and how mind works.

But that I guess depends on what the goal for the practice of mindfulness is for someone. I can imagine it, and the way many people describe their practices and their fruits, that the inner workings of their mind are completely uninteresting to them and what matters for them is just solving issue of dukkha and not solving mystery how it happened and how the incoming changes work. So in that case splitting sense of self in to large but smaller pieces which are by the nature of observations removed from central position will yield positive results and as the time goes on and these replacement meta-cognitive object get to the same sorry state as sense of observer got the practitioner can go deeper and deeper and split themselves even more until they are split so much that nervous system can always manage to patch itself before our wrong tendencies screw it up just because there is always enough time of one part being disconnected thus being able to rest.

On the other hand observing correlations and the 'how' of minds inner operations and issues is also meta-cognition but it requires more context than just something happening. Not in a sense mentioned in OP - so good eyesight is not needed for it, but the 'what' in general sense is needed... as is having good inner perception so good perception in general.

To me the second type of meta-cognition is what can yield insight. First type does not provide any insight whatsoever. I mean if someone have "insight" that eg. there is no self, which is typical insight of someone doing this first type of 'meta-cognition' (which BTW should probably not even be called that) then that is wrong on so many levels it is even hard to begin to describe how wrong it is. Simply, it is complete and utter nonsense and should not be called insight and I would also not call practices that lead to such discoveries as mindfulness but some specialized type of attention. Kinda like if you had guard on the post and he reported "I see movement" and when asked what caused it he would reply "I do not know, I paid attention to movement, not the 'what' caused it"

That said I have nothing against this 1st type of specialized attention called 'mindfulness' other than it is being over hyped and called using wrong words. I can do it too and it yields cool results. There are many interesting ways mind can be trained with different benefits. Also pitfalls, especially when obsessing about one type waaaay too much and this is universal to any practices. Better overview or big picture emerges when more practices are done and more of them are mastered. I myself tried quite few of ways to do meta-cognition and also quite a few ways how to do normal cognition so I can better see how they work and what causes effects which people report or how explanations they give might not necessarily be making as much sense as they think they do. Of course it always is a matter of further and deeper analysis to find blunders in reasoning. I pretty much expect better meta-cognitive models to come and replace my old models and explain how silly the previous models were. In any way noble Stream Enterer should not cling to stuff and this includes meanings of terms like mindfulness and others.


Yes, the thinking often is that when we have clouded mind, cannot focus, feel bad and depressed, then this is somehow us not being in present moment. What is is our present moment, always.

The finding present moment is actually exactly the same thing as not wanting to face reality as it is. Which is pretty bad attitude because most unpleasant experiences stop being unpleasant once acknowledged... which technical mechanism of working is absolutely fascinating but even with normal way of reasoning about how it works it just works and makes at least some sense.

That said when we kinda know it is not really present moment it in fact is mostly because those experiences are just repeated echo of experiences. The mechanism I mentioned is resting those experiences which were not even real to begin with - though they can affect mind and body, in major ways even so ignoring them or trying to escape them is not very wise on more levels than just feeling bad. By not being real I mean experience as it is is always real but experiences describing experiences can be repeated so they kinda seem like something is experienced now (while it kinda also feel it is not what is in "present moment"...) while it is not what is experienced. That is why a lot of seemingly magical 'releases' from suffering happens. Like something hurts, we look at it and pooof, gone. At least some of these are caused by this mechanism. There is different mechanism, more universal which covers more of these but anyway, I probably went too deep in to this meta-cognition-analysis already