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Observing Mindfulness
Triumphalism is a sense of superiority and expectation of ultimate triumph, often reflected in exultation about the achievements of one’s religion or ideology (as confirmation of progress towards an ultimate triumph). Granted, triumphalism is an “observer’s category” and is generally used pejoratively. Few people would call themselves triumphalist. Still, the idea of triumphalism captures something that is quite real.
Even though mindfulness advocates often cite scientific evidence for the positive effects of mindfulness, the religious and ideological nature of the mindfulness movement can be at odds with the values of science. Mindfulness enthusiasts may welcome findings that appear to validate their beliefs but I haven’t found much hand-wringing in the mindfulness community about null or negative findings. To paraphrase Kabat-Zinn: the scientific support is great but we don’t really need it to value mindfulness; we know the truth from the inside.
Recap: Borrowing from Robert Jay Lifton and Willard S. Mullins, I’m defining ideology as 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.
Unless I want to spend the next decade on this project, I won’t be going into a lot of detail about each study that addresses the benefits of mindfulness. Let’s just look at a couple meta-analyses. One, “Mindfulness-based therapy: A comprehensive meta-analysis “(2013), concludes that ...
The benefits of mindfulness have received a lot of press (e.g., see the Huffington Post ). Mindfulness boosters frequently cite scientific studies to support the case for mindfulness as a kind of cure-all for the ills of the modern age.
Per Teun A. Van Dijk in Politics, Ideology and Discourse, the “ideological square” is pervasive in ideological discourse: 1) Emphasize Their bad things; 2) De-emphasize Our bad things; 3) Emphasize Our good things; and 4) De-emphasize Their good things
Ok, so mindfulness discourse is full of warnings about the sheer awfulness of life without mindfulness, consistent with one quarter of the ideological square: Emphasize Their bad things.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
It would seem that awareness is related to what psychologists call “metacognition”. Metacognition is not one thing. The metacognitive system is composed of distinct anatomical and functional parts. So metacognition encompasses a lot of different things, including declarative knowledge about oneself, as well as anticipatory and emergent self-awareness – meaning anticipating and monitoring one’s environment, responses and behavior as the world unfolds.
If one acquires insight and loses attachment in conjunction with years of meditative practice, how much credit goes to the awareness and how much to the teachings that promote a specific worldview?
Linguistic conventions keep tripping me up when I write about thoughts and thinking. It sounds like there is a little homunculus in the head listening to thoughts, encouraging them to proceed, or directing them to more worthwhile topics.
Some thoughts and thought-streams lead to slightly lower mood – so what? A slightly lower mood isn’t the end of the world. If a line of thought leads to identification of problems, unresolved issues or as yet unrealized goals, fine.
“Being” with the flow of thoughts and feelings, and not trying to cut them off through redirection of attention, can generate good things and bad things. Sometimes it helps to “be” with thoughts and feelings, to let them carry one along for awhile, for them to work themselves out, or for us to become desensitized to them, or for us to learn or change through them.