What is attitude in mindfulness practice?

As a mindfulness enthusiast, I have been trying to improve my everyday observations. Following traditional and modern teachings. However, as the practice deepens only some of the subtle features come into play. One such concept is attitude. Here I will attempt to describe what I understand about attitude in mindfulness practice.

Understanding before attitude.

I am a strong believer in the fact that attitude matters in everything we do, if anything better than attitude is the understanding itself. Imagine a surgeon who cut open a human being, to operate a tumor. His intension is to save the patients life. However, that is different from a criminal who dance with a knife in front of the shop owner. If he cut, he is trying to kill. In life, even if you fail, the intension or attitude matters. Even if you have a bad outcome for your actions, that is fine as long as there is correct attitude. This is the common meaning to the life. Just imagine implications of this kind of attitude.

Two friends

Imagine two friends, trying to be rich. One is trying to get there fast, by brewing every ounce of energy from his employees. And the other one is doing the same, but he genuinely believes he is serving others by getting rich, so along the way, he does a slow progress, by letting his employees also grow under the circumstances. Who would you think will end up rich and stay rich?

You might say, the first or the second. But it is unlikely we can tell exactly at this point as, this is just two broad scenarios. There are so many specifics that matter. As an example, the first one happened to hire a good CEO, meantime the second one failed to do that. Obviously things will change then. But we can ask a different question. Having won or failed at the end of 20 years whom you think will be happy? And content?

If we consider happiness, a pleasure, obviously the one who got rich would be more happy. But if you consider being content, I can see the second person has more chance to reach peace even if he failed. If the first one failed his endeavor, he would be more dissatisfied as his path did not provide any wins, relative to his values. I can see we can argue that the first person would also have equal chance of being happy as he did not have those, other objective of serving the people in his mind. As long as he had been true to himself, [if he does know what is true and false not by societies norms, but as defined by nature.]

Can both of them be wrong? if there is another dimension, that a truth lies outside their journeys to happiness? This is what we try to examine with mindfulness.

Should we enjoy this moment, or watch the Joy?

Lets get back to attitude in mindfulness practice.

Let's get back with our mindfulness discussion. When we do practice mindfulness, we can see it is not just about watching our minds and body. The way I understand it is whenever I experience something my mind creates an automatic reaction to that object, whatever it is. I may be looking at a sunset, and the mind's reaction is something pleasurable. When I look at a plastic bottle on the beach, mind's reaction is some disgust. Similarly for each an every observation, mind creates an automatic reaction. This is kind of System 1 described in the book "Thinking fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. The attitude, that we should be having is neutrality, as non of these observations are inherently good or bad. It is absurd trying to teach the mind that each and every sensation, observation is neutral.

So, how can we have the correct attitude of neutrality, when the mind is automatically programmed to judge everything? It is by looking at the current attitude. If you just look at the whatever attitude and notice this long enough, you will see it disappear. And the correct attitude of neutrality will come eventually. It is not by force. But by understanding. As, if we try to force things, soon the effort will exhaust us and we would not be able to do mindfulness as long as we need to.

This is my initial understanding, and I wrote it down as soon as I realized it. I am sure you may have different opinion on this. Please comment.