Mindfulness, conciousness and directing attention Often as part of mindfulness meditation (at least the Westernized form with which I am familiar) we can practice awareness of breath, parts of the breath, arising thoughts etc.

However, if the aim of mindfulness is to be in pure consciousness, how can we at the same time be directing attention to something? Wouldn't this constitute a 'doing' which arises from thought rather than from consciousness?

EDIT: I have accepted an answer that seems to be the most useful for me right now, but I can see that this a complex subject and I will certainly not ignore the content of the other answers.
From a traditional Buddhist perspective, the purpose of mindfulness is threefold:


At a superficial level, the level of mere beginner or layperson, we pay attention to what we do and how we do it, evaluating it against the basic Buddhist guidelines, in order to overcome our basic unwholesome habits.
On a deeper level, the level of dedicated practitioner, mindfulness is viewing everything through the prism of Dharma, which means our basic frame of reference we use to interpret all of our experience is superseded with the Buddhist system.
On the deepest level, mindfulness is practiced as a way to cultivate tathata or suchness. This is when we learn to observe phenomena with no judgment or taking sides. In the absence of taking sides our experience becomes pure reflection of whatever is happening, with no conflict of interest generated when experience mismatches the expectations of the side we took.


As you can see, nowhere on this ladder do we try to "be in pure consciousness" without directing or doing. What we try to do is change our frame of reference and indeed our identification to free ourselves from all traces of existential conflict.

This means that "doing" and "thinking" is not your enemy, it's not your goal to stop them or to go without them - not at all. Your goal is "cessation of craving &amp; attachment", meaning to not take sides or boundaries in any way that would lead to experience of suffering.

Your entire mental machine - including thoughts, emotions, and impulses - should keep functioning, it's only your attitude that must undergo purification and "liberation" (from mind-made boundaries).

Among other things this means that at some point you even stop judging your own thoughts and taking sides wrt them. But of course, there is a fine line here between allowing your mind go unbounded vs letting the pathological urges and neuroses drag you around. The standard Buddhist approach is, first you liberate yourself from crude types of conflict, then gradually move onto more and more subtle kinds.

In general my advice is, as you go around your day, your mindfulness should be in how you don't get involved in maintaining drama - not in trying to avoid controlling anything at all. Your level of involvement in drama is something you must control, all the way until this very control remains the only extant drama, at which point you drop it too - but not before that.