The next few posts will be looking at mindfulness as an ideology. According to Teun A. Van Dijk in Politics, Ideology and Discourse – an entry in the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2005) – the following “ideological square” has been found to be pervasive in ideological discourse:

. Emphasize Our good things

. Emphasize Their bad things

. De-emphasize Our bad things

. De-emphasize Their good things

Let’s focus on the “bad things” in the square, starting with “emphasize their bad things”.

First a brief word count from Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living (FCL) to set the tone: suffering: 112; pain: 555;  stress: 588;  death: 63;  premature death: 6;  cancer: 109;  danger: 9;  dangerous: 14; risk : 45 ;  threat: 39;  threaten: 11;  toxic: 22.

Just as everyday awareness pales in comparison to mindful awareness, so everyday life pales in comparison to the mindful life. According to Kabat-Zinn, not living mindfully is to be in a world of “loss and grief and suffering” (FCL, Kindle p. 440). Mindfulness makes it possible for us to be “fully awake, not lost in waking sleep or enshrouded in the veils of [our] thinking mind” (ibid, p.2346) Living unmindfully, we are “half unconscious…reacting automatically, mindlessly” (ibid, p 9894).

In mindfulness discourse, contemporary life is not only spiritually impoverished, it is downright dangerous. Toxins are pervasive, threatening the delicate homeostatic balance of the interconnected world. Dangerous chemicals, including caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, sugar, additives, preservatives, fertilizers and pesticides, are “placing our exquisitely evolved homeostatic biochemical networks at some unknown degree of risk for cellular and tissue disruption and damage” (ibid, p.8759). It’s not just chemicals that are toxic. Thoughts, lifestyles and people can be toxic too.

The use of “toxic” is prevalent in the mindfulness cybercommunity. Here are a few examples I found in a quick Google search (6/6/14 – 2pm):

The Toxicity of Greed and the Mindfulness of Generosity

The Power of Mindful Empathy To Heal Toxic Shame

Advanced Mindfulness Techniques that Change the Brain: Rewire Depression, Anxiety and Toxic Lifestyle Habits

Could You Be Addicted to Toxic People and Environments? Remedy: Mindfulness Meditation!

It’s ironic that an ideology associated with a certain serenity of spirit is so alert to danger and threat. The list of psychological, physical, and societal ills associated with unmindful living seems endless. To Kabat-Zinn, television is especially pernicious, “much of it frenetic, violent, cruel, and anxiety-producing, and all of it artificial and two-dimensional” (FCL, Kindle p.9204). Add to the toxic mix all the “food stress, work stress and role stress, people stress, sleep stress, time stress, and our own fears and pain” (ibid, p.9405), the inevitable “reactivity” to such stress and it’s no wonder our very survival as individuals is in peril:

“A lifetime of unconscious and unexamined habitual reactivity to challenges and perceived threats is likely to increase our risk of eventual breakdown and illness significantly.” (FCL, Kindle p. 5436)

Without the self-knowledge and wisdom that comes with mindful living, the human race may actually be doomed. As Kabat-Zinn puts it:

“And when the human mind does not know itself, we get ignorance, cruelty, oppression, violence, genocide, holocausts, death, and destruction on a colossal scale. For this reason, mindfulness writ both large and small is not a luxury. Writ small, it is a liberative strategy for being healthier and happier as an individual. Writ large, it is a vital necessity if we are to survive and thrive as a species.” (ibid p.9078-9084

The mindfulness community’s emphasis on how bad life is without mindfulness stems in part from the Buddhist tradition, namely the Four Noble Truths, of which the first is the Truth of Suffering (e.g., anxiety and trying to hold on to what is forever changing). In line with Geertz’s conception of religion, Buddhism is about dealing with the problem of suffering.

But religions are not equally ideological. Strongly ideological religions elaborate on the problem of suffering, highlight and extend the realm of suffering, widening the chasm between the world of the blighted and the world of the blessed (in this world and beyond).

Reference:  Jon Kabat-Zinn Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Kindle Version, Revised Edition 2013; Bantam Books, New York).

The assertion that a religious experience is incommensurate with a “regular’ experience is common to believers of many persuasions. To be incommensurate is to be on a different level altogether. When two things are incommensurate, they don’t share a common measure and so cannot be compared. The rules that apply to one side are irrelevant to the other.

The conviction of incommensurability protects beliefs from critical scrutiny to the extent that these beliefs are thought to stem from religious experience. Rules of logic and evidence cannot disprove truths that are revealed through such experience. What appears to be false or inconsistent is only so to those who are unable to detect the deeper, revealed truths.

As Keith Yandell puts it in The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1994):

“…when doctrines appear to be refuted, the temptation to appeal to incommensurability, to ineffability, to self-authentication, to doctrines as mere pointers or ladder steps, apparently is irresistible.” p 321 Although the incommensurability of religious experience may lead believers to devalue the life and experience of nonbelievers, ideological factors are often involved in the degree to which a religious community rejects the life and values of those outside the community.

Ok, now I’m switching from considering mindfulness as a religious movement to considering mindfulness as an ideology. As defined in a previous entry, “ideology” is “a relatively comprehensive and coherent set of convictions (a “vision”) about how humans and the world works, which is powerful enough to influence one’s thinking, feelings, evaluations, and actions.”

According to Teun A. Van Dijk in Politics, Ideology and Discourse – an entry in the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2005) – the following “ideological square” has been found to be pervasive in ideological discourse:

• Emphasize Our good things
• Emphasize Their bad things
• De-emphasize Our bad things
• De-emphasize Their good things

So, how well does mindfulness ideology fit the specifications of an ideological square? To a tee.

Note: Throughout these posts, I will frequently illustrate points with quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Kindle Version, Revised Edition 2013; Bantam Books, New York.

By way of quick review: In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James defines religion as “…the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (p.38), with the ‘divine’ being “such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.” (p. 45). According to Clifford Geertz, religion creates “an aura of utter actuality. It is this sense of the ‘really real’ upon which the religious perspective rests” (Interpretation of Cultures, p. 112; my italics). Borrowing from Robert Jay Lifton and Willard S. Mullins, ideology is a relatively comprehensive and coherent set of convictions (a “vision”) about how humans and the world works, which is powerful enough to influence one’s thinking, feelings, evaluations, and actions.

Mindfulness is both an ideology and a religion. In this commentary, I will often refer to the mindfulness as one or the other, but I don’t intend to use awkward compound words like “religio-ideological”.

In mindfulness discourse, “non-judgmental awareness” is a way of experiencing the world that reveals its true nature. Using the terminology of James and Geertz, non-judgmental awareness is a kind of religious experience that reveals the really real. To be mindful is to be aware is to know the truth. From Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living (FCL):

“I define mindfulness operationally as the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Introduction to the Second Edition, Kindle page 394

“This feeling, this apprehending, is another way of knowing for us, beyond merely thought-based knowing. We have a word for it in English: awareness. Making use of this innate capacity for knowing, we can investigate, inquire, and apprehend what is so for us in profoundly liberating ways.” Introduction to the Second Edition, Kindle page 387

“Knowing what you are doing while you are doing it is the essence of mindfulness practice. The knowing is a non-conceptual knowing, or a bigger than conceptual knowing. It is awareness itself.” Chapter 1, Kindle page 1120

“…how difficult it is just to listen to the body or attend to our thoughts simply as events in the field of awareness. …As we have seen, the great delusion of separateness that we indulge in, coupled with our deeply conditioned habits of mind, the scars we carry, and our general level of unawareness, can result in particularly toxic and disregulating consequences for both our body and our mind.” Chapter 16, Kindle page 5102

In the discourse of mindfulness, it is through mindful awareness that we catch glimpses of the true interconnectedness of everything in the world (as opposed to the “great delusion of separateness”). This is the world of the really real – the realm of religion.

For those who believe in this particular vision of an interconnected world, awareness is not just a way of experiencing things – it’s a “way of being”. In fact, mindfulness practitioners may find the idea of “experience” too small to capture the profound liberation and the deep “non-conceptual knowing” that awareness is considered to bring. According to this perspective, the standard sense of “experience” reflects a sort of alienated subjectivity (“the great delusion of separateness”), in which we live and suffer alone. In contrast, moments of mindful awareness are “true moments of wholeness” where we are being with the interconnected world (FCL Chapter 4, Kindle page 1964).

Nor, according to FCL, is “awareness” the same as “paying attention”. True awareness arises by paying attention in a particular way (non-judgmentally, in the moment, with acceptance, etc.). But it is much more than a type of attention. Awareness is transformative; awareness can lead to wisdom; awareness reveals and begets harmony, interconnectedness and being. Paying attention alone is or does none of these things.

As a form of religious experience, “awareness” isn’t just any old experience – it is a portal to the really real. To quote and paraphrase Geertz, as religious experience, mindful awareness reveals “a general order of existence” clothed with “an aura of factuality” (The Interpretation of Cultures, p.90).

Footnote: Without being too fancy about it, my definition of “experience” is from wiktionary.org: event(s) of which one is cognizant. These events may include all sorts of things: actions, thoughts, feelings, intuitions, perceptions (at various levels of integration and binding), sensations, proprioception, spatial relations, etc. Some within the mindfulness world might take exception to the assumption of awareness in this definition (“cognizant”) given the “half sleep of unawareness” in which the unmindful masses are thought to be habitually immersed (FCL, Chapter 27, Kindle page 8047).

Ideology and religion are somewhat contested and fuzzy terms and their meanings vary depending on whom you’re talking to. The definition of ideology I will be using borrows from Robert Jay Lifton and Willard S. Mullins: an ideology is a relatively comprehensive and coherent set of convictions (a “vision”) about how humans and the world works, which is powerful enough to influence one’s thinking, feelings, evaluations, and actions. In this sense, I consider mindfulness as an ideological movement.

As for “religion”, William James and Clifford Geertz will be my guides. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (Electronic Classics Series, 2002-2013), James defines religion as:

“…the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.” (p. 38)

And what is the ‘divine’? Per James:

“The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.” (p. 45)

Now to Geertz’s definition of religion.  In The Interpretation of Cultures (Fontana Press, 1993),  Geertz defines religion as:

“(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” (p. 90)

Geertz identifies suffering as a specific religious problem:

“As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others’ agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable.” p.104

Geertz further describes a “religious” perspective as:

“… [moving] beyond the realities of everyday life to wider ones which correct and complete them, and its defining concern is not action upon those wider realities but acceptance of them, faith in them. It differs from the scientific perspective in that it questions the realities of everyday life not out of an institutionalized skepticism which dissolves the world’s givenness into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses, but in terms of what it takes to be wider, nonhypothetical truths. Rather than detachment, its watchword is commitment; rather than analysis, encounter. …it deepens the concern with fact and seeks to create an aura of utter actuality. It is this sense of the “really real” upon which the religious perspective rests…” (p 112)

According to James and Geertz, the essence of religion has nothing to do with god(s) or doctrine. At its core, religion is about experience and a conviction about the really real. And it is in this sense that mindfulness is a religious movement.

These posts will also be part critique of the mindfulness movement. Per Wikipedia, a critique “is a method of disciplined, systematic analysis of a written or oral discourse…. and in the philosophical tradition it also means a methodical practice of doubt.” A critique is not just descriptive but implies evaluation of merit. The questions of merit I’m most interested in relate to the truth-value of assertions made in the name of mindfulness as well as possible effects of mindfulness discourse and practice.

Some assertions cannot be proven by argument or evidence; that is, they are unfalsifiable. Variations on “I just know” are unfalsifiable. These include: it’s a matter of experience, higher understanding, wisdom, essential truths, deeply felt emotion, being, higher consciousness or faith. There certainly is room for unfalsifiable convictions, but if a conviction is about something that can clearly be evaluated according to the rules of logic or evidence, then “I just know” or any of its variants is not enough. For example, “I know in my heart that, deep down, people are good” would be hard to confirm one way or another, but “I know in my heart that John never hit that woman” refers to something that potentially could be shown to be true or false.

Even though many mindfulness advocates welcome scientific support for mindfulness practice, such support may not considered essential because, ultimately, the “truth” of mindfulness is not subject to impersonal rules of logic or evidence. As Jon Kabat-Zinn put it:

“And if a science of mindfulness had never emerged, meditation would still be just as important to me. Such meditative practices stand on their own. They have their own compelling logic, their own empirical validity, their own wisdom which can be known only from the inside….” 280 Full Catastrophe Living (Kindle pagination – my bold)

Maybe, maybe not. If an assertion includes falsifiable elements, that assertion is fair game for logical and/or empirical critique.

Approaching the mindfulness movement as a form of discourse reflecting a broad array of influences (cultural, historical, ideological, religious) and employing various rhetorical strategies to boost its appeal is not to say that the insights or wisdom associated with mindfulness are without merit or foundation in reality. A lot of things constrain and influence how we see the world and how we see the world may still reflect, more or less accurately, what is the case. An example: to paraphrase Steven Pinker , our neurobiology, upbringing and linguistic conventions enable us to experience and label something as “red” and “redness” corresponds to something real, e.g. a wavelength of light from approximately 620–740 nm on the electromagnetic spectrum.

To claim otherwise is to engage in either/or thinking, or “rathering” – a wonderful term coined by Daniel Dennett. Cultural (or, for that matter, psychological) reductionism is a form of “rathering”: rather than seeing the world as it is, we see through our cultural (or psychological) lenses. Such reductionism is often applied to those with whom we disagree: Their way of thinking is a product of influences or self-interest; my way of thinking is the result of close observation of reality.

There’s no need to choose between analyzing discourse as such and also considering its truth-value. I intend to do both. I want to understand mindfulness as a form of discourse and I want to know how well the assumptions, beliefs and practices associated with the mindfulness movement comport with the current scientific understanding of how people and the world works.

Mindfulness enthusiasts may reject the comparison of mindfulness with New Age movements. Perhaps this has to do in part to the common association of New Age with being light-weight and faddish, whereas mindfulness is deep and steeped in ancient wisdom. But check out how “New Age Movement” is described in Wikipedia:

The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as “drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational psychology”.*

The movement …holds to “a holistic worldview”, emphasising that the Mind, Body, and Spirit are interrelated and that there is a form of monism and unity throughout the universe. It attempts to create “a worldview that includes both science and spirituality” and embraces a number of forms of mainstream science as well as other forms of science that are considered fringe.

This sounds a lot like the world of mindfulness to me. Disregarding the negative connotations associated with New Age (e.g.,  anything “Western”) and just looking at the meat of the description, in what way would Mindfulness movement not be considered a type of New Age movement?

*Quote from: Drury, Nevill (2004). The New Age: Searching for the Spiritual Self. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-28516-9.

In the last post, I provided a very general and rough definition of mindfulness as “a more or less cohesive set of propositions about what is and what matters, along with various practices associated with those propositions.”

I initially wrote “beliefs” instead of “propositions” but changed to the latter after remembering  that “belief” is one of those words that has the power to offend. Which leads me to  a not-that-short digression about the word “belief” and how it relates to “the truth”.

Dictionary.com defines “belief” as confidence in the truth or existence of something.  Some people object to labeling something they hold to be true as a “belief”, because “belief” connotes a leap of faith rather than a true statement. Seen this way, a belief is not the result of an encounter with reality but is merely “in the head”.

Prefacing a statement with “I believe” is usually an acknowledgement of some uncertainty. “I believe you are wrong” is softer than “You are wrong”. It’s curious that “belief” is defined in terms of confidence but “to believe” reveals an element of doubt.

If we feel sure about something that is important to us, we probably don’t like to hear our conviction described as a belief. It feels invalidating and belittling. I know for myself, if someone characterizes something I just said as a “belief”, my first impulse is likely to be defensive: “No, that’s not just a belief – it’s true!”

When we hear the word “belief” the focus seems to be on the believer and not on the reality they are upholding. To call a conviction a belief is to highlight that it is subjective and not necessarily an objective statement about reality. I still remember one of the schizophrenics in The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach (1964), who had a standard response to anyone  attempting to puncture his delusions: “That’s your belief, sir”. The implication being that belief qua belief is not reality.

People who follow the teachings of The Buddha are not immune to a certain prickliness when their understanding of reality is described as “beliefs”.   This from Master Chin Kung (http://www.amtb.org.tw/e-bud/buddhism_education.html):

“The Buddha wants us to know, not merely believe. The Buddha’s teachings flow from his own experience of the way to understand the true face of life and the universe, and show us a path of our own to taste the truth for ourselves…. The Buddha uses a perfectly scientific way of showing us reality in its true form.”

Such sensitivity may also be the case for some who embrace the mindfulness movement. I acknowledge this sensitivity but will occasionally  use the word “belief” and its variations throughout this commentary.  However, it’s not my opinion that characterizing something as a belief necessarily invalidates it as a true statement. And I do believe in the possibility of true statements!

Throughout these posts, I will be exploring themes and narratives commonly found in mindfulness discourse.   My focus will be what is written or said in the name of mindfulness, regardless of whether what is written or said reflects a “correct” understanding. My approach will be somewhat like that of an anthropologist studying the system of meaning shared by members of a community – the culture of that community.

Cultural analysis can be applied to any collectivity that shares common practices, beliefs, values and points of reference, such as the mindfulness community. This doesn’t mean that every member of the group feels and thinks the same way – only that one can find patterns within the mosaic of their discursive acts.

Cultural analysis may also involve looking at outside influences that contribute to a belief system or ideology. For instance, the mindfulness movement stems in part from ancient Eastern traditions, but it has also borrowed and expanded upon themes present in contemporary Western societies (e.g. cognitivism, self-esteem, positive psychology, New Age movements).

This project will also include “interrogations” of texts written to promote mindfulness practice. Here I’m appropriating the sense of “interrogate” used in literary criticism, that of reading closely and critically, and especially looking for:

•  The way language is chosen, used, or positioned as an indication of what an author considers crucial and what he expects you to glean from his argument.
• Possible ideological positions, hidden agendas or biases.
• Recurring images
• Repeated words, phrases, types of examples, or illustrations
• Consistent ways of characterizing people, events, or issues

Regarding mindfulness as a discursive and cultural object is not to say mindfulness is without positive qualities: mindfulness practice has much to recommend it.

So, what is mindfulness? To me, it is part skill-building regimen, part worldview, part self-help movement, part religion, and part ideology. (These “parts” will be elaborated later, often in considerable detail.)   Some practitioners may object to my descriptors and say that, more than anything, mindfulness is a “way of being”, one that involves a non-judgmental state of “present-centered awareness” (Bishop et al, 2004:232).  But here I’m assuming an etic position as an outside observer, not as a committed adherent.   I am less concerned about what mindfulness “really” is than in how it is talked about and in the allusions, assumptions and implications of the words spoken in its name.  Hence I’m hesitant to provide a strict definition.

Still, to the extent that mindfulness is a discussable thing, albeit a thing with shifting and fuzzy boundaries, it would be useful to have a rough idea of what type of thing mindfulness is.  So here goes:

Mindfulness is a more or less cohesive set of propositions about what is and what  matters, along with various practices associated with those propositions.

Note: New commentaries will be posted at least weekly.