As previous posts have amply shown, I'm not a big fan of mindfulness as a quasi-religious ideology. I’m not going to propose a specific counter-ideology. Sure, I have beliefs about what makes life worthwhile, what matters, the is and the ought.
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.
Pace Jon Kabat-Zinn, who says mindfulness is a way of being that cannot be reduced to a set of techniques, I’m going to propose that mindfulness practice can indeed be considered as a bunch of techniques.
In their analysis of survey responses regarding proposed federal policies, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page compare the policy preferences of “average citizens” versus “economic elites.
In their paper Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014), Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analyze survey data on public support for proposed federal policies.
“Good research is cautious about drawing conclusions, careful to identify uncertainties and avoids exaggerated claims. It demands multiple types of evidence to reach a conclusion. It does not assume that association (things occur together) proves causation (one thing causes another). Bad research often contains jumps in logic, spurious arguments, and non-sequiturs (‘it does not follow’).” Todd Litman
A thought is not an inert object. A thought is a living thing: it is both propelled and goal-directed. Thoughts bring into being the unanticipated. Thoughts activate neural connections and open up worlds. Reducing thoughts to objects takes the life out of them – stops them in their tracks, unable to continue on their path...
“Mindfulness entails concentrated awareness of one’s thoughts, actions or motivations. Mindfulness involves continually bringing one’s awareness back into the present moment.”
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”?
Why are some objects more worthy of focal attention and other objects less worthy?
“Mindfulness entails concentrated awareness of one’s thoughts, actions or motivations. Mindfulness involves continually bringing one’s awareness back into the present moment.”
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?
Thoughts exist within a world of references and intentions. Content analysis of “wandering” thoughts has shown that such “stimulus-independent” thoughts are largely goal-directed and future oriented (Baird et al, 2011). Thoughts can be conversational and goal-directed at the same time.
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.
To truly observe a thought as it “unfolds” would disrupt its progression.
Observing thoughts is like registering words without trying to understand what is being said.
When does observing or awareness of a thought happen? Is it simultaneous with the comprehension of the thought? Or is more mental machinery, requiring a bit more time, needed to actually “process” the thought?
A common metaphor in mindfulness discourse is that observing thoughts and emotions is like being on a hillside watching the clouds go by: if you observe long enough, you’ll notice that they just fade away, like puffy little clouds do.
When we are advised to Recognize, Accept, Investigate emotions with Non-attachment (RAIN) I wonder what is being recognized, accepted and investigated through the observational lens of non-attachment. Emotions and their associated thoughts require attentional resources. Accepting, observing, and investigating require attentional resources.
Our brains engage in two distinct cognitive modes: the attention-demanding “task-positive mode” and the go-with-the-flow task-negative mode, also known as the default mode. Observing thoughts is a cognitive task; the thoughts themselves arise while the brain is in default mode. Here’s the thing: these two modes reciprocally inhibit each other; that is, our brain can’t be in both modes at the same time. They alternate.
While they are observed, thoughts do not unfold as they would unobserved. As we observe thoughts, they occupy the cognitive space called working memory. They are like echoes of what just happened in our heads, often represented as word fragments that may or may not be decent proxies for their pre-observed form.