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Observing Mindfulness
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.
...if the point is to be non-judgmental, non-reactive, and simply aware in the moment, focused on your breath, then interrupted thoughts or feelings may just be a casualty of the practice...
...to say that thoughts and feelings do not reflect reality or the truth is too broad. I’d rather say thoughts and feelings shouldn’t be considered the last word, or the whole story – they may have a basis in truth but dwelling on some truths can prevent us from seeing other truths.
...if the brain and its tracking systems didn’t do a reasonable job of approximating reality, I wouldn’t be able to write this sentence because Homo sapiens wouldn’t even exist. An animal has to be tuned into the world in order to survive that world.
...you can’t get people to stay on the path without frequent reminders of the suffering and darkness that would befall them should they lose their way.
Life is full of unavoidable suffering: we can’t hold onto happiness, everything changes, nothing lasts, everybody dies, pain in inevitable, we are endlessly seeking and desiring without lasting satisfaction; an inner emptiness haunts our every moment.
Here is the theme of endemic pain and suffering in our everyday lives, in which minor and transitory negative feelings become something deep and debilitating...
The threshold of conscious experience is about 200 milliseconds, or one fifth of a second . This is enough time to pronounce a syllable....If the “psychological present” is 3 seconds long, the longest thought that is articulated subvocally “as it unfolds” is 15 syllables.
The problem with sentences is that we rarely know what they mean without knowing what came before and what came after. Not to mention all the background information. Plus all the non-sentence-like stuff going on. Bigger worlds and smaller worlds. All are being spoken to. Or “thought” to.
In none of these articles were there specific references or links to academic papers. Rather, the authors use markers of scientific authority to present their claims as “facts”.
So a thought can be a process, the outcome of a process, capacity, inchoate intention, opinion, state of beholding, state of awareness, tentative belief, or an act of contemplation. Is there a common theme to these definitions?
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.
Parts of mindfulness practice may be useful, but does that mean you have to embrace the entire belief system associated with mindfulness practice – that is, an ideology with religious overtones?
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.
Sometimes labeling, reducing (making little and laughable), and purposely ignoring complexity can be useful. We don’t have to give our full attention and cognitive resources to everything. We have to choose: does this matter enough?
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.
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...