Category: mindfulness

I don’t know what to do with my disappointment. It took me years to accept that Buddhism was not just profound scripture but also an infernal institution. Today, mindfulness has been hijacked by The Corporation, distilled into twenty-first century opium. Where’s a modern-day subversive supposed to lay his head?

Why subversive? Think about it: the Buddha declared everything contingent, unsatisfactory, selfless — and chose homelessness over a life of power and influence. He abandoned his wife and son. He spent the rest of his life begging on the streets. Literally. Even after fulfilling his quest, he stayed away from civilization.

Today, who follows the Buddha into homelessness? Even venerable Asian monks live in nice monasteries. Meanwhile, mindfulness is settling very comfortably into the Googleplex and elsewhere where, as the BBC says, ‘it’s highly beneficial to both businesses and their employees.’

Funny, I thought the point of mindfulness was to see the futility of gain and fame. Evgeny Morozov’s right when he says that CEOs are on a mission to ‘finally reconcile spirituality and capitalism.’ Have your cake. Eat it too. Lovely.

I thought Morozov made his point rather well, but instead of being attacked by rabid capitalists, it was the Buddhists who got upset. He committed the sin of discussing mindfulness as if it were a new fad, not an ancient spiritual practice. God forbid.

Joshua Eaton writes about ‘Gentrifying the dharma: How the 1 percent is hijacking mindfulness.’ Professors Ron Purser and David Forbes protest that ‘Google Misses a Lesson in Wisdom 101.’ When the founders of Google and Facebook recently joined Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner to award prizes for life extension research, British philosopher John Gray asked, ‘Are Sergey Brin And Mark Zuckerberg God-Builders?’

Then there are the activists. Amanda Ream disrupted the Wisdom 2.0 conference while claiming that it presents, ‘evolution in consciousness of the wealthiest among us as the antidote to suffering rather than the redistribution of wealth and power.’ Sounds like communism to me, but that’s okay; the Dalai Lama’s a self-declared communist and he’s always being fêted at the White House, by democrats and republicans. They don’t take him too seriously.

What exactly is going on?

I’d say, same old. The nineteenth century captains of industry weren’t shy about co-opting the message of Jesus Christ. The Protestant Ethic turned out to be the twentieth century’s dominant ethic. We need our myths too, and what with the decline of religion and the ascent of scientism, the great myth of our time seems to be that we’ve finally broken free of myths.

We’re a passionate, crazed species. What other explanation is
there for continued optimism in the face of our deadly insight?

How anyone can fall for that one I have no idea. If we have no more mythic drives, why do we spend our lives chasing dreams of capitalism and communism, Buddhism and atheism? How come Hollywood’s still in business? We’re human beings. Myth is what we do. Ecclesiastes nailed it two and a half millennia ago, “…vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”

Mindfulness is not like that, we’re told. It’s ‘being in the present moment,’ no illusions, no judgment, no mental wandering, no disturbance. Full frontal focus.

The way to sell snake oil is to tell people exactly what they want to hear, and I’m disappointed because I practice mindfulness and I teach it, but Morozov’s right: it’s become a fad. Real-world mindfulness reveals that mental stillness, total concentration and stress-free living are fantasies of desperate longing. Mindfulness may involve acceptance of what we can’t change, but it also impels us to engage with what we can. It clarifies our minds, but reveals our demons.

I don’t so much believe that mindfulness should be subversive, revolutionary or seditious. It’s more something I feel. The Middle Way is no wishy-washy compromise; it’s a dangerous tight-rope walk over the abyss of what Giacomo Leopardi calls ‘the emptiness of all things.’ We’re all going to die — remember? All that keeps us on our feet is the irrepressible delight we’re biologically programmed to take in our illusions.

To take those illusions as real dooms us, but without them we’re doomed too. Philosophers have found no satisfactory answer to the question of life’s purpose. Observe human behavior though: our intent is clearly to love and be loved. Hell, that’s even why we go to war. We’re a passionate, crazed species. What other explanation is there for continued optimism in the face of our deadly insight?

We’re on the verge of being too clever. Industrialization has gone digital. Efficiency’s measured in megahertz. Anomie is exponential. We live in times of epic change. All we can foresee is faster change. Are we about to outgrow the illusion that change equals progress, or will it soon be so taken for granted that we forget to question it? Decadence is just around the corner.

If this leaves you at a complete loss, go read Ecclesiastes. It’s only eight pages in my 1870 Spottiswood edition. Don’t be shy: they’re idiots who say you have to believe in a personal creator God to read the bible. This is a creation of the sublime human mind. It reaches through the ages. It grips you like a lover.

Buddhism has lost control of the term ‘mindfulness’

You’ll just have to do with mindfulness what you can. Buddhism has lost control of the term. It drifts through the idiom like a lost balloon, as misunderstood now as Karma™ and Samsara™. Some people will use it to calm down, perhaps even delay heart-attacks. Good for them. Soldiers will use it to steady their aim and be better snipers. It seems perverse, but how did snipers ever become good at what they do, whether or not there was a name for it?

Some of us will still use mindfulness to peer mercilessly into our own delusions. You might say that’s what it’s meant for, but that’s just your opinion. Funny, I used to feel like a deviant when I first came to Buddhism. I feel that way again, now as I distance myself from it.

Most people have no time for this nonsense. They want to get on with their lives. They’ll vigorously deny that living life to the full means questioning everything. Just as everything didn’t change with the arrival of Buddhism, everything’s not lost with its corruption. Life will go on, chaotic as ever, and just as we’ve done since we climbed down from the trees, we’ll continue to believe we’re on the verge of greatness.

Yes, go read Ecclesiastes.

“I was in a state of heightened slow motion, sensible to every movement of my body and to the roar of every in-breath and out-breath. I approached the bus stop, acutely alive to the universe of my own body and mind. The sounds of the jungle, wind in the high palms and the crunching of the dust beneath my feet overwhelmed my senses. In this moment of excruciating clarity, I stood outside the monastery gates awaiting the Colombo bus. From the bowels of the earth I felt a vibration that grew into a diesel roar and the screeching halt of the great vehicle in a cloud of dust. I placed one foot on the lower step, transferred my weight, slowly lifted the second and grasped the handrail. With a good-humored sigh, the driver let me climb aboard before pulling away as fast as the ancient motor would allow. I lurched from side to side, trying to follow the movement of my center of gravity, until a sudden swerve threw me conveniently into an empty seat. In the moment before I dropped my head in contemplation I noticed that everybody on the bus was talking, twitching, scratching and getting on and off at extraordinary speed. The passing countryside was a blur.” [The Novice, page 294]

What does it mean to be spiritual?

Thus began my withdrawal from a two-month retreat in Sri Lanka in 1979. It just goes to show that you don’t need drugs to lose touch with the world around you. The simple intention to transcend mundane realities will do the trick.

Unthinking people seek the spirit through disconnection; the thoughtful try to reunite them. Both are preoccupied by the myth of a divided self. Our species seems torn between the spiritual and the material as if they were separate realities, not two sides of one nature.

That doesn’t mean the distinction is meaningless. It’s not good to be too materialistic, and we all like to be in good spirits … but what does it mean to be spiritual?

Today’s cool interpretation is ‘being in the moment.’ This conveniently avoids awkward belief systems and monolithic institutions, enabling modern souls to live spiritually without cultural baggage. When incorporated into a life of ethics, insight and empathy, mindfulness reunites body and mind in ways we can experience immediately. It’s no wonder that in recent years mindfulness has turned from hippy weirdness into a business opportunity.

It suits people who don’t consider themselves spiritual, but it also attracts those who do. In an earlier post I spoke about, “…drifting mindfully around the house like a wraith.” Some people — and I was one — grow unnaturally attached to the heightened awareness of mindfulness. Perhaps that’s ‘spirituality.’

Because of its religious roots, or maybe in reaction to savvy marketing, mindfulness is indiscriminately seen as a a good thing, but it’s not that simple.

A recent brain plasticity study at Georgetown University found that too much attention inhibits implicit learning, which is how we learn without paying particular attention. It’s pretty important. If you had to focus consciously on everything you picked up in life, you wouldn’t get very far. The brain has its own way of acquiring and storing essential information with the least possible effort.

For example, whether or not you formally study grammar, you pick up the rules of your language, more or less; you understand how to use the word ‘I.’ In similar ways we figure out how to ride a bike and use a mouse, when to use sarcasm and when to be sympathetic. Implicit learning has something in common with automaticity, where we learn consciously but at a certain point don’t think about it any more — like handwriting and operating a car. It frees up our attention to focus on what we’re writing or where we’re going.

In other words, we refine our knowledge by taking what we already know for granted. It’s how we get better at things, streamline our work skills and, hopefully, cultivate social graces.

Mindfulness does the opposite; nothing’s taken for granted; everything’s examined — at least in theory. Those who practice it for spiritual reasons tend to judge implicit learning and automaticity as mindless and bad. In fact, they’re mindless and good.

Mindfulness is not an absolute.
It works alongside mindlessness.

This is a real source of confusion for beginning meditators. I’m often asked how to be mindful all the time or, even worse, how to handle the guilt when you can’t. With misconceptions like this, the powerful tool of mindfulness becomes harmful.

So mindfulness takes discrimination. The Buddha, widely credited as its inventor, called it a medicine, and as we all know medicines require caution.

The question that’s too rarely asked is, What’s mindfulness for?

What you do with it is entirely up to you. You might use it to, ‘calm the mind.’ Then, with perseverance, your aim may be to ‘uproot suffering,’ or even to ‘overcome delusion.’ I find it helps separate my emotional motivators from self-serving rationalizations, and ultimately to see mental projections for what they are. For example, I rationalized that my Sri Lankan retreat made me a spiritual person, but what really motivated me was being free of everyday realities. Rather than acknowledging my self-centredness, I projected myself as heroic. It took a while, but I eventually saw through it.

Seeing our motives with immediacy brings a sort of clarity that mere theory and doctrine never will. For this, mindfulness is the tool of choice. However, spontaneity, creativity and flow emerge from the mindlessness of implicit learning and automaticity. Also, in order to be mindful of some things, we have to relinquish our attention to others, and just let them happen.

Mindfulness is not an absolute. It works alongside mindlessness. If you’re stuck on being in the moment just for the peace of it, you’re missing the point.

So take a deep breath and learn to let your mind go. It’s not just okay to be mindless; it’s important.

 

 

The word ‘fundament’ means base or foundation, so you’d expect religious fundamentalism to be rooted deep in history, but it’s not. It started in the Southern United States after the First World War, a reaction to modernity’s brazen questioning of Christian authority. The Bible, ambiguous, contradictory, sometimes just plain indecipherable, was abruptly declared to be ‘literally true.’

Since then, insecure Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists have followed suit and established their own varieties of fundamentalism, all to the general detriment of civilization. Around the globe, people threatened by life’s inexplicability cluster together to share fictitious certainties.

We don’t all react that way, and yet we do all feel that insecurity from time to time. Yesterday I was walking to the post office under unremarkable skies when the fact of existence seemed momentarily bizarre. ‘Why am I conscious,’ I thought. ‘Why does anything exist? Couldn’t the universe simply not be?’ It was visceral.

These are childish thoughts. I don’t mean to scorn them but to remember that they come from early days: before schooling, perhaps even before upbringing, training or culture of any sort. We humans are thinking machines, compelled to consider what we experience. The trouble with these particular thoughts is that they make us uneasy. They provoke a powerful sense of wonder, or fear, but don’t lead anywhere. They undermine every edifice of thought. Even when we dismiss them as foolish, they come back to haunt us; particularly when death lurks.

Such feelings are fundamental in the literal sense; they never really go away.

But neither do they linger. My mood shifted to irritable as I waited in line for my mail. We get on with our appetites and creativity, such as they are. Satisfaction demands attention and we forget those existential thoughts; then, expectation breeds disappointment and we’re back on the wheel of life. It’s dizzying at the rim; the hub is more manageable. At the precise mathematical centre it’s motionless, surely.

Imagine.

Do we really want that perfect serenity, or are we putting on a brave face when we pray for peace? Do we fear silence? Or, in the still of the night, tortured by whirling thoughts, is that what we really long for, that terrifying thing?

How do we let go of meaning and yet pursue life with gusto?

 

“We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don’t interfere then it won’t happen. Now that’s the root of an enormous amount of trouble.”—Alan Watts

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We all need to belong. We also need to be self-reliant. When the two seem irreconcilable we try to think logically, but life’s not logical. You can figure out why you feel lonely but it won’t make you feel better.

What helps is looking at the gap between how you think you should be and how you actually are.

The feeling that you don’t fit in, that you aren’t the way you should be or that you haven’t reached your full potential are just ways of interfering in your own life. Sounds strange I know, but nobody’s got it all figured out, and that’s just the way it is.

Still, it’s hard to accept. We compare ourselves with others, judge ourselves by impossible standards of perfection or try to live up to ideal codes of conduct.

As if life’s not difficult enough.

When we accept that life doesn’t need fixing, new possibilities open up. It’s tricky to gaze into something inconceivable, but whether we’re being charmed by a moonlit summer night or challenged by the demons in our dark places, it puts us in touch with reality in ways that words and ideas just don’t. That’s why Blaise Pascal said that, “miseries come from being unable to sit alone in a quiet room.” It’s why people pray or meditate and why philosophers say that we sometimes need “to just be.”

All generations think they’re living in a unique time, but there’s nothing new about the sense that life is outpacing us and that we need to run faster. That’s life as a hamster wheel. It’s so hard to just stop that we need people of like mind to do it with. It’s easier to pray or meditate in groups, but it’s no guarantee you’re actually learning to let go. Often, the group becomes yet another source of busyness.

To make occasional silence a regular habit, we have to look into our evasions. There’s no sense as to why we keep trying to go with the ups and avoid the downs; we know it doesn’t work. The thing is to gaze into those habits without judgements and rationalizations, and uncover their roots. Those who refuse to confront insoluble mysteries because, “there’s no point,” are missing the point of self-knowledge.

Another form of evasion is holding on to beliefs like a life-raft. The purpose of life is to swim, not to cling. Preachers and gurus who deliver convenient answers are doing you no favours.

You can breathe with others even if they don’t see as you see. That doesn’t mean trying to like them, for true friendship is yet another mystery. Loneliness and isolation come from the thought that everyone else belongs and you don’t. Look into their eyes and you’ll see they’re just as afraid as you and me. Then you’ll belong.

And then you’ll find the courage to be.

 

A tale of corporate mindfulness and modern-day exploitation:

Martha had once been chief legal officer of Social Media Corp, a social networking leader. She’d worked side-by-side with the founders and been one of the ‘family.’ For five years she’d enabled the very behavior of which, today, she stood in court and accused them.

In an unequivocal voice she declared, “Just because they provide the pipeline through which user information is delivered does not entitle them to use that information, either directly or indirectly. Even though users check a disclaimer and acknowledge the company’s access to their personal data, they are still protected by the privacy laws of their country. The users of SM Corp can join for ‘free,’ but they nonetheless pay an unwitting — and illegal — cost.”

The defendants felt betrayed by their former colleague. They’d built a bright, progressive company that everyone wanted to work for. They were generous to employees and encouraged their creativity, letting them explore and sometimes fail. They provided a relaxed, high-tech workspace filled with wholesome, free food and beverages. They offered the best health coverage money could buy and a host of wellness options, including mindfulness training.

Which is where it all began.

Mindfulness put her in touch not only with her stress
and reactivity but also with her ethical footprint through life

Martha loved her job. At any rate, she was excited about ‘creating new realities,’ as the slogan went. She enjoyed welcoming visitors into her bright office and talking confidently about the future. She loved being at the forefront of her generation, of working with the brightest minds around.

Still, the job was tricky. Getting people to sign up for a free account was one thing; Turning their aggregated data into a revenue stream — a legal one, that is — straddled a fine line.

Martha’s job was to make sure SM Corp didn’t cross it. In the early days, she was sometimes  the only naysayer in a room of inspired engineers, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ She shocked them, but knew how to deliver the news. They respected her.

In return, she knew they weren’t greedy; they didn’t drive fancy cars or live ostentatiously. Out there on the leading edge things just got a little giddy, even electric. Sometimes she ended up just as frazzled as the front-line coders. That’s why she lobbied for the mindfulness class. She read in Time how all the big companies were using it to augment their employees’ health, creativity and productivity.

She took to it like a duck to water. It clarified her thinking and helped her center herself when she felt overwhelmed. She learned the power of silence, to watch what was going on without judgment and to shift the burden of communication from speaking to listening. Things began to change at home too, where she and her husband juggled intense professional lives with parenting their two children. She experienced moments of peace and clarity, and wanted more.

Martha wasn’t interested in religion, but she was intrigued to learn that this modern scientific practice was rooted in an ancient tradition. She signed up for an online Buddhism course and discovered that there was more — much more. Focused attention was just one element. Mindfulness helped her see into herself, but in all that raw data there were patterns to discern, and insights. From those emerged a desire to grow — but in what direction? This, Martha believed, was the essence of ethics.

Without even realizing it, she’d distanced herself one small step
at a time from what mattered to her more than anything else.

Ethics was why she’d become a lawyer in the first place — naively as it turned out; law wasn’t the same thing at all. But she’d invested in school, then in her career, and did what she had to do. There wasn’t much time to think. Without even realizing it, she’d distanced herself one small step at a time from what had once mattered to her more than anything else.

Her mindfulness practice put her back in touch with the thoughtful space in which those thoughts had originally germinated. She contemplated all the small steps, mulled over the compromises of the last five years and questioned her integrity.

Which was what, exactly? Was it just behaving in ways that were acceptable to others? She always felt that was a cop-out. Where was the dignity in that? With her new clarity she saw that integrity meant to become complete in her own eyes. Mindfulness had put her in touch not only with her stress and reactivity but also with her ethical footprint through life. What mattered most was what she was passing on to her children, not through words and ideas but as a role-model, through her behavior.

Martha turned to her parents. They were proud of her success, but had never been as impressed by her employers as Martha. They’d raised her to make the world a better place, and considered social networking a step backward. Martha never argued with them — they were from another time after all — but one day she read in a book review that Google was, “in the business of distraction.”¹

Distraction wasn’t simply an unfortunate side-
effect of social networking. It was the point.

That stopped her in her tracks. She’d been noticing how automatically she reacted to the twitches of her smart phone; how often she turned to technology for momentary distraction; how her attention was increasingly fragmented. She also noticed that, for her colleagues, ‘good’ meant good engineering, and technical progress was precisely equivalent to social progress. It was as if humanity was heading for tech heaven, and they were the priests. Cults were usually fringe groups, but this was mainstream, addictive and, she furrowed her brow — destructive.

She was shocked by her insight. There’d be a price to pay, and she laughed uneasily at the irony. Mindfulness helped her colleagues focus on fragmenting their users’ attention. The more often a user clicked, the more money the company made. Distraction wasn’t simply an unfortunate side effect of social networking. It was the point.

The other side of that irony was that the simple pursuit of inner peace had turned Martha’s life inside out. Here she was in exactly the job she’d worked so hard for, only to find it unconscionable.

Cautiously, she probed colleagues in search of allies. She expected resistance but it was worse than that. They were insulted by her accusations.

“Accusation?” she protested. “I didn’t mean to….”

But the look in their eyes was unmistakable. She’d positioned herself beyond the pale. For them, the company was on the leading edge of a new wave. They were transforming the world, empowering people, creating wealth. What was not to like? Mindfulness was personally helpful and great PR, but it was there to support their work, not to challenge it.

Martha began to feel weirdly introverted, afraid she might be too wrapped up in herself, but the shift in her perception was irreversible. She couldn’t account for why mindfulness had pushed her and her co-meditators to such opposite poles, but she hadn’t felt this sure of herself since college. There was no doubt: mindfulness was growing her integrity; the job was compromising it.

Her parents were supportive; a little nervous for her future but proud to see Martha make sacrifices for what she believed in. They talked into the night about how things used to be. Through their eyes, Martha saw more clearly the challenges of the future. There was no reversing the technology, but the notion that society would be steered merely by what was technically possible was disturbing. To her colleagues, a new ethics, society, politics and economics would emerge naturally in the digital age, not the other way round. Something was wrong with a picture in which users were the product and the corporation owed them nothing.

Once her mind was made up, Martha’s resignation wasn’t the bitter pill she feared. She felt empowered, primed to follow her passion. As she reoriented herself in the following weeks, she came across this challenge from a neo-Buddhist blog site, and pasted it on her wall:

“Does your mindfulness practice penetrate deep into your subconscious to uproot narcissism, greed and confusion; or, does it leave you feeling serene and unquestioning? Is it a tool for unflinching self-discovery; or, is it a way to become the nice person you always wanted to be? Does it reveal life’s ultimate groundlessness; or, does it console you with imaginary certainties?”

Martha joined an activist group that lobbied for digital privacy. Meanwhile, the corporation continued its mindfulness classes. On the whole, they made employees happy and boosted the bottom line. As far as they were concerned, Martha was just weird — an aberration.

Martha turned to the jury and showed, as only an insider could show, just how the corporation used its users, offering them a free service that actually cost them their privacy; providing information without cultivating intelligence, creating a hive mind rather than a community of the self-reliant, making people less contemplative, more easily overwhelmed and increasingly distracted.

“Distraction,” she raised her voice, “is their ultimate goal.”

The judge removed his glasses and locked eyes with Martha. She had his undivided attention.

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¹ The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr

If we’re to believe all the hype about mindfulness (one-month’s worth on the left), it’s a magic bullet. Claims for this latest fad grow daily more dazzling. Trouble is, there’s nothing ‘latest’ about it. It’s not the least bit new, and I’m not talking about the fact that it’s been taught for thousands of years in Asia.

What I mean, and what’s almost ridiculously underappreciated, is that it’s been practiced forever, everywhere.

One of my most memorable summer jobs was as a bricklayer’s mate, though I didn’t enjoy it at the time. I had to provide bricks and fresh mortar to two unrefined brickies who were paid piece-work and tolerated no down-time. Nevertheless, on the rare occasion I was ahead of the game I admired their workmanship and noticed the deliberate flow of their every movement. Cigarettes sometimes hung motionless from the corners of their mouths, growing ash like forgotten weeds. In that stillness I saw their minds at work as they built walls that would stand for centuries. It was exacting and absorbing. They took pride in the precision of their task. It was no surprise when I learned years later that Winston Churchill — British Empire warrior, Prime Minister and literary giant — composed his troubled mind at the bottom of his garden by laying bricks.

If you’ve ever been immersed in a piece of music or the sounds of nature, stopped in your tracks by a gorgeous sunset or, like my brickies, engaged in a task that absorbs your whole attention, you know the joys of mindfulness. In the 1970s, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi initiated a whole new field of psychological research when he appropriated the term flow to describe this experience. Before that there was no particular name for it. Perhaps it seems so new to the general public today because it wasn’t objectified that much; it needed no particular name.

What we mean by ‘mindfulness’ today however is more complicated. Look at these popular conceptions: it improves just about anything you do; it’s ‘spiritual’ for those who want it to be and ‘secular’ for those who don’t; if you’re just getting into it, it’s way cool; and, the one thing almost everyone agrees on, it’s good — which is where I disagree.

It’s great that so many people finally want to slow down and stop, but it’s important to understand that mindfulness is ethically neutral; it’s neither good nor bad. It cultivates mental strength, brings clarity and feels pleasant, but just as effectively as it can enhance the healing touch of a doctor, it can also heighten the murderous intent of a cool-headed terrorist. Mindfulness is impartial. That’s why it’s so readily embraced by business leaders and military commanders. They don’t necessarily care about people finding their true purpose in life, or overcoming self-cherishing thoughts.

Because mindfulness always feels good, we think it always is good. Ours is not the first civilization to confuse pleasure with virtue, and like every other we’ll pay a price if we don’t stop and pay attention. Paradoxically, stopping to pay attention is what mindfulness is all about, but no one until now suggested it was good in itself. It was always meant to be combined with ethics and intelligence, without which it will never be an agent of positive personal and social change.

As a civilization, we’re right now taking that for granted. Thinking of mindfulness as inherently good, and as the best new thing since sliced bread, is wishful thinking. It’s a luxury we can’t afford.