On Sunday morning, October 5, 2025, Stephen Batchelor guided a meditation and gave a dharma talk on zoom for the Community Meditation Center. Although I am familiar with much of what Stephen has written, this talk developed certain of his insights in a unique and especially insightful way. In what follows I want to offer a summary of what he said and to reflect on the implications of his insights for the continued development of mindfulness practice and of secular Buddhism.

Click here to listen to Stephen’s guidance for the meditation and his dharma talk.

Stephen’s Dharma Talk

Following CMC’s format, Stephen led a half hour guided meditation in which he emphasized mindfulness of the body – interspersing the silence with such questions as: How is your body made known to you right now? What is it like to have a body? What is it like to be a body? What in your experience lets you know that you have a body? What is the body? – for the last question Stephen suggested that we not try to give an answer but simply leave it hanging as an experiential inquiry.

After the guided meditation, Stephen began his dharma talk on the mindfulness of the body with a scholarly explication of that section of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10), noting that it is important to understand how mindfulness was presented traditionally and then discussing the importance of beginning with the mindfulness of the breath (knowing when our breath is short or long, deep or shallow, etc.) and recognizing that we are often unaware of our breath until something specific happens. Stephen also emphasized how being mindful of the breath provides a basis for knowing our fundamental existence from birth to death. This led to a discussion of the importance of knowing what and how it is to be embodied and the importance of that knowledge for grounding the other forms of mindfulness – of feelings, of states of mind and of the Dharma – which is why the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta places mindfulness of the body as the first form of mindfulness. Simply put, we could not feel, think, and have other mental activities if we were not first embodied and if the material world did not impact our bodies.

After discussing the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, Stephen transitioned to the Numerical discourses (the Anguttara Nikaya), specifically to the concluding sutta of Book of Ones on “the Deathless” (AN 1:20) in which he discussed the relationship of the deathless and mindfulness of the body. To understand this relationship requires a recognition that “the deathless” was generally understood by many traditional Indian religions not simply as the absence of death but as the highest level of spiritual and philosophical attainment. In Buddhism, it therefore referred to nirvana, the unconditioned. While this has traditionally been understood as a state of being transcendent to the natural world, Stephen gave it a secular Buddhist interpretation: nirvana as the unconditioned is what is cultivated, comprehended, and enjoyed when the reactivity of greed, ill will, and confusion have ceased. But the cessation of reactivity requires mindfulness, which begins with the mindfulness of the body. In other words, “the deathless” is brought down to earth by paying mindful attention to our present embodied experience, thus creating a space for reactivity to cease, a space from which we can skillfully respond. To put it simply, if you want to attain “the deathless,” to attain the space in which reactivity ceases, pay attention to the embodied experience that you are having now.

Stephen then presented a cartography of care, which contained, among other concepts, his reformulation of the four noble truths as four tasks of secular Buddhism – to embrace life, to let reactivity be, to see reactivity stop, and then to cultivate the path. This entails creating conditions for reactivity not to arise and for letting reactivity be, conditions in which certain virtues would arise and for sustaining and increasing those virtues. The “deathless” then is not only where you end but is also present where you begin – in the mindfulness of our embodied state, since mindfulness is already a non-reactive attention. Each time one is mindful is the end (the death) of our being conditioned by greed, hatred, and confusion. Thus, nirvana, “the deathless,” “the unconditioned,” is not a transcendent unconditioned state but is present whenever there is a ceasing of reactivity. To care about “the deathless” is to care about our embodiment no longer controlled by reactivity, and this virtue of caring for our embodied being, Stephen suggested, grounds all other virtues. And insofar as we recognize our being in a world with other physical beings, this opens up a space for caring for all sentient beings.

After Stephen’s dharma talk, there were several questions posed by members of CMC’s sangha. One of the questioners asked: “Does mindfulness escape conditionality?” Stephen’s answer nicely clarifies the idea of the unconditioned, at least as it can be understood within secular Buddhism. Mindfulness, he answered, does not escape conditionality but rather allows us to experience our conditionality. It makes us aware of how we are constantly creating conditions for reactivity. The point of mindfulness is not to be free of conditionality but to lead a life not conditioned by greed, hatred, and delusion and to be able to cultivate qualities of mind that are not determined by those conditions. Thus, “the unconditioned” is not apart from the conditioned.

In response to another question that asked if there was also an imaginative aspect to mindfulness, Stephen responded that there is both an imaginative and conceptual aspect implied in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta’s discussion of mindfulness of the body. This is evident in thinking about the body as a decaying corpse (this is not happening at the moment) and also as we focus on each of our internal body parts (we do not directly see them). He also noted that the fourth foundation of mindfulness – mindfulness of the Dharma—is explicitly conceptual, as the focus is on a cluster of ideas that frame the practice, and he added Santideva’s claim that mindfulness includes mindfulness of our vows and commitments.

Several Reflections on Stephen’s Dharma Talk

Stephen’s dharma talk discussed a number of themes that are significant for the continued development of mindfulness in a secular Buddhist context. Here are some of the implications that I think are worth considering:

Mindfulness and Secular Buddhism: The implications of beginning mindfulness practice with the mindfulness of the body connects the traditional understanding of mindfulness with a secular Buddhist perspective. Since one of the points of secular Buddhism is to naturalize Buddhism, we begin with what is most obvious about our existence in the natural world – that we are embodied and that our embodiment is the foundation of all else of which we are mindful. We care for ourselves, in the first instance, as beings who are embodied, and our suffering and our attempts to overcome our suffering needs to begin with the recognition of this fundamental fact of existence. Furthermore, our caring for others is based on recognizing ourselves in a world with other embodied beings who share with us the existential suffering tied to the significance of our bodies, specifically that our deepest existential suffering is based on what inevitably happens to the body – illness, old age, and death. Finally, a naturalistic understanding of karma recognizes that our actions are always embodied actions and that the consequences of our actions always take place in the physical world and affect the neurobiological systems of ourselves and others.

Imaginative and Conceptual Aspects of Mindfulness: Stephen’s discussion of the imaginative and conceptual aspect of mindfulness present in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta in the Q&A section highlights an important difference between the traditional understanding of mindfulness and the way mindfulness meditation is often thought of and practiced today as non-judgmental, present moment awareness. To what extent should we extend our contemporary mindfulness practice to incorporate these conceptual and imaginative practices? In fact, some dharma teachers are already doing this, but perhaps we need to redefine mindfulness in a way that makes this explicit.

Nirvanic Moments: Stephen’s discussion of the connection between mindfulness of the body and “the deathless” develops a deeper understanding of what in his written work he refers to as “nirvanic moments” and the function of mindfulness in creating such moments. If mindfulness has as its goal to create a nonreactive space within which we can respond skillfully and such a nonreactive space is nirvana, then every time we are fully mindful, we have attained nirvana. Thus, from a secular Buddhist point of view, nirvana is always a potential part of our experience in the natural world. Of course, as mindfulness needs to be cultivated, nirvana is not so much a state of being but a process which increases as we cultivate mindfulness not only in our meditation but in our daily lives. Nirvana, then, may be understood not as a noun but as a verb – we, in developing greater capacities of mindfulness, create nirvana.

Conditionality and Nirvana: The idea of Nirvana as the Unconditioned in traditional Buddhism has brought about much confusion. If the Buddhist analysis begins with a recognition of how everything comes into being through conditionality, if everything is conditioned, how can there be a state of being that is unconditioned? Several attempts to solve this problem within traditional Buddhism seem close to sophistry. One idea is that everything is conditioned except Nirvana. But this can easily undermine other parts of traditional Buddhist analysis which understands all suffering and everything that exists as the result of conditionality. The answer to this is sometimes that we cannot say of Nirvana that it exists or does not exist or that it does not exist in the phenomenal world. However, if Nirvana is to be understood as a state (of being, of non-being?) transcendent to the phenomenal world, how do we know that it is not simply a fantasy, an illusion, or what Freud called a wish-fulfillment. In contrast, what Stephen does in his analysis is to place nirvana in the natural world as an embodied mindful process. When reactivity ceases, if only for a moment, there is nirvana. Is it unconditioned? Stephen’s answer is that this nonreactive space is one that is unconditioned by greed, ill will, and delusion. But this, as he makes clear in his answer to the question about escaping conditionality, does not mean that it is unconditioned. Conditionality is always present, since the mindfulness that creates such a space of nonreactivity is precisely a mindfulness that experiences and recognizes our conditionality, that allows our conditionality to be there until it ceases. I would add to this that our ability to be increasingly mindful is the result of our reconditioning ourselves through mindful practice. In other words, it is through our continually conditioning ourselves to be more fully aware of our conditionality, and especially aware of the way we are conditioned by greed, hatred, and delusion, that we can increasingly rest in the space of the unconditioned (by greed, hatred, and delusion).