“If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that tree, he would have seen the apple falling and, reaching for Enlightenment, experienced each moment of its descent as a thing pure in itself. Only a restless Western Newton would say, “Now, what story can tell us best what connects those apple-moments from branch to ground? Sprites? Magnets? The mysterious force of the mass of the earth beneath it? What made the damn thing fall?” That’s a story we tell, not a moment we experience.” - Adam Gopnik, What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can’t: Examining the science and supernaturalism of Buddhism.
My initial enthusiasm for writing this blog was to figure out what I found so annoying about the mindfulness movement. Something is wrong here, my emotions said. No, no, no!
To help me figure out if it was just me or if those feelings were on to something, I decided to study the matter further and read a canonical work, Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (2013).
According to various brain imaging studies, mindfulness meditation can change the brain in ways consistent with observed or self-reported improvements in concentration, memory, and mood. The same has been found with prayer, cognitive behavioral therapy and psychodynamic therapy.
It’s only when we're stopped in our tracks that we realize we were looking down the road we were traveling.
The study authors speculated that these characteristics may foster “Openness to Experience” (OE), which has been positively correlated to paranormal beliefs in other research.
To be a fearmonger is to traffic in fear. Fearmongering is one way ideological and religious movements gain adherents and then keep them. The world is a scary place. We offer the way out.
The downside of living in such an interconnected universe is vulnerability. Between the psychological harm subtly inflicted years ago by our nonmindful parents, to lack of inner harmony and connection with others, to the myriad of “toxins” in our environment, the world is a dangerous place.
Two recent studies compared magical thinking in mindfulness meditators and non-meditators. Meditators scored significantly higher in magical thinking than non-meditators. The study authors suggested two possible reasons for this difference between groups: the mindfulness meditators came from a Buddhist tradition that incorporated magical ideas; and/or mindfulness is associated with greater open-mindedness.
The tendency among mindfulness practitioners to revere masters goes hand-in-hand with appeals to authority and status that are commonplace among boosters within the movement.
One way the mindfulness movement reflects a religious sensibility is in the reverence shown towards sacred texts: the sayings of individuals thought to have achieved enlightenment.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that adopting mindfulness as a way of being contributes to happiness and physical health. Then again, belonging to almost any faith community increases happiness and physical health. That fact alone doesn’t entice me to convert or join. Truth-value matters.
One can benefit from mindfulness practice without believing that suffering is the main fact of life, desire is undesirable because it is the source of suffering, or that modern life is teaming with toxic elements.
“Mindfulness entails concentrated awareness of one’s thoughts, actions or motivations. Mindfulness involves continually bringing one’s awareness back into the present moment.”
– What is Mindfulness?
What does it mean to have awareness in “the present moment”? What does it mean to be “present”? Why is it is desirable to be “present”?
“Mindfulness entails concentrated awareness of one’s thoughts, actions or motivations. Mindfulness involves continually bringing one’s awareness back into the present moment.”
– What is Mindfulness?
If “being present” involves a type of “parallel awareness” that co-exists with focal attention, what are the neurological correlates of “parallel awareness”? What evidence supports the existence of parallel awareness?
People sometimes speak of “awareness”as if it were a higher state of consciousness.
In this study, the authors asked study participants to rate their feelings, current activities and mind wandering.
Attention can be directed or involuntary. Insofar as different brain networks are involved in directed and involuntary attention, they reflect categorically distinct processes. This dual-process model of attention has been criticized, however. Rather than conceiving directed and involuntary attention as mutually exclusive categories, some argue it would be more accurate to consider their differences as matters of degree.
Let’s assume that the subjects in a recent experience sampling study were fairly typical: that is, resting-state experience – the default mode we’re in when not performing tasks – usually doesn’t involve words. The content of our resting states is mostly something else, like a sensory impressions, visual imagery, waves of emotion, or unsymbolized thinking (wordless and imageless, but there doing something – like wondering or questioning or realizing – but without words).
We’re in a resting state when we’re not performing a task, when the brain is “at ease, sir”, doing its thing in the default mode. Hurlburt and colleagues just published a paper comparing “resting state” in two conditions: in an MRI scanner and the natural environment of the subjects. They found that resting states have five characteristics: inner seeing (visual images), inner speaking, sensory awareness, feelings (i.e., emotions), and unsymbolized thinking (wordless, imageless, but still doing something – like wondering or questioning or realizing – but without words).
“The word thinking is arguably the most problematic word in the exploration of pristine experience.” (Hurlburt and Heavey, 2015, p. 151).