What is mindfulness? Simply put, it is the practice of bringing one’s awareness to the present moment.
In the Buddhist tradition where it originates, the word “mindfulness” is coined from the Pali word sati. Sati means “to remember”, “to recollect.”
In an effort to align itself with psychological science, this seemingly innocuous approach to “just being” has taken on new dimensions over the past several decades.
This process has inexorably led critics and religious scholars to decry its dissociation from its original Buddhist context.
One paper defiantly frames the rift not only as inevitable, but as a necessary condition for its flowering: “if the so-called mindfulness movement is to reach its full potential it needs to emancipate from its religious context.”
What exactly happened?
The medicalization of mindfulness
In the words of physicist Pavel Chvykov in his effort at reframing mindfulness in its historical context, mindfulness has become “a foundational psychological treatment.”
The psychotherapeutic medical establishment has integrated mindfulness into various treatment protocols in the form of Mindfulness-Based Interventions or MBIs for stress reduction (MBSR), cognitive function (MBCT) and cancer recovery (MBCR). These involve primarily Focused Attention (FA) and Open Monitoring (OM) techniques.
The adoption is widespread across all layers of society, with programs and exercises tailored for seniors, school children, even toddlers.
As a therapeutic tool, the benefits of mindfulness are extensive and well documented. Mindfulness has been shown to help with anorexia, ADHD, OCD, PTSD, academic and athletic performance, anxiety and depression, cognitive functions and forms of psychosis.
Underlying these claims, thousands of studies have been conducted on mindfulness by the scientific community.
The National Institute of Health lists an impressive 3400 research papers on mindfulness alone.
Cognitive neuroscience studies in particular highlight the remarkable potential that mindfulness exercises offer for intentional mental training to shape brain function, enhance cognitive performance, improve emotional regulation, reduce anxiety and boost stress resilience.
Cognitive neuroscientist Erika Nyhus sums it best: “You see mindfulness training everywhere and don’t know if there is anything to it, but I was shocked to see the results we got in the lab”. Adding:
“Mindfulness training shows potential pathways toward enhanced cognition but there are no short-cuts. It takes practice.”
The field of mindfulness research, although very promising, is not without its detractors who point to its limitations and lack of scientific rigor, the inherent biases of self-reporting, or the absence of evidence that MBIs result in lasting structural brain changes.
Other critics, Pavel included, rightfully point to the fundamental shortcomings inherent in mindfulness interventions in mainstream medicine and psychology that focus on symptoms rather than underlying causes.
Mindfulness as a means to an end – the trap of self-improvement
Beyond its “medicalization” in a broader sense, mindfulness has also filtered through into the multi-trillion-dollar wellness economy. The days of Transcendental Meditation may be behind us, – well, not quite – in its place, we are now able to regulate our hyperactivated nervous systems by picking the Meditation App that is just right for us to help “reframe our mindset and build healthier habits” through mindfulness practices.
Our culture’s obsessive drive is on self-improvement, achievement, competition, success, or rather, more to the point, on the outer manifestations of success.
Under the ever-present scrutiny of our social media followers or of our peers and superiors, performative behavior is often a more expedient form of self-expression than true authenticity.
But that is not all.
The ethical fallout of peak performance – Ninja warriors and mindful snipers
Mindfulness is now being marketed just like any other commodity. Lured by the promise of enhanced performance – a kind of Viagra for the competition consumed mind if you will – mindfulness programs have become part and parcel of self-serving corporate concerns: productivity-obsessed CEOs, government agencies, correctional facilities – even military and police departments – have joined the mindfulness rat race, with motives that are ethically entirely at odds with the Buddhist doctrine.
In an essay titled Sitting with the Demons – Mindfulness, Suffering, and Existential Transformation, Sebastjan Vörös calls for a critical reevaluation of mindfulness, underscoring to which extent corporate boardrooms have “turned to mindfulness meditation in order to ‘fine-tune their brains’ and ‘up their game’.
“These high achievers sometimes refer to themselves as the “new samurais’ or ‘ninja warriors’.”
As one study observes: “the mindfulness movement operates as an incentive to develop the entrepreneurial self that ‘marks a tendency to develop oneself as a product or brand in response to demands of the social and economic marketplace.’”
Moving from the boardroom to the battlefield, the mindful sniper is trained to “optimize impulse response neural pathways” and “tame the reptilian brain” in just a few weeks of practice.
In an article titled Mindfulness and Machine Guns, ex-Special Ops doctor Dan Pronk explores how we can “train our brains to behave with deliberate mindfulness and meditation practice, allowing us to have better control over our responses to stressful situations”, “strengthen our impulse override mechanism” and equip ourselves with a “mental armor” against emotional and cognitive breakdown.
The misuse and misrepresentation of mindfulness when directed towards war and killing one’s enemy gives particular weight and meaning to the concept of “wrong mindfulness” as opposed to right mindfulness or “right remembrance” – as Osho calls it, sammasati.
“Sammasati is Pali for the Sanskrit words, samyak smriti. From language to language, small nuances go on changing. Samyak smriti is the root word. And samyak smriti means balanced remembrance. In Pali, it becomes sammasati. There it also means right remembrance. Remembrance can be wrong. There are two kinds of remembrance, right and wrong.
Right remembrance is concerned with your own being, when you remember yourself.
“When you are aware of yourself that is sammasati. When you remember other things that is not right remembrance. You may remember a thousand and one things, but if you don’t remember yourself, your remembrance is wrong.”1
As Osho calls out, in the hands of politicians, mindfulness can shockingly be turned on its head and become an instrument of war:
“America is now training its soldiers in meditation so that they can fight without any nervous breakdown, without going mad, without feeling any fear – so they can lie down in their ditches silently, calm and cool and collected. No meditator may have ever thought that meditation can also be used for fighting wars, but in the hands of politicians everything becomes ugly – even meditation. Now the army camps in America are teaching meditation so that their soldiers can be more calm and quiet while killing people.”2
Mindfulness as betrayal of religious values or cultural adaptation?
Others point to the cultural adaptation of mindfulness as a reflection of Western values, a self-reinforcing mechanism that supports the status quo by socializing its practitioners to a doctrine of self-optimization, calling it a tacit endorsement of a neoliberal ideology.
As one researcher observes: “The replacement of orange-robed gurus by white-collared academics who speak of the benefits of ‘being in the present moment’ is a powerful social phenomenon, which is probably rooted in our culture’s desire for quick fixes and its attraction to spiritual ideas divested of supernatural elements.”
Has mindfulness simply become an easy trick for us to make it through the day while keeping the stress of living at a manageable level? A cool technique to avoid feeling the pain of one’s own existence, to cope with the suffering of the human condition?
Or just another tool in our quest to recreate an updated, more sophisticated version of Nietzsche’s Übermensch?
Where do we go from here?
When science becomes a bridge
First, it will help to understand the real drivers and motives behind the ubiquitous adoption of mindfulness methods, howsoever misguided their applications may appear in relations to their original religious context and ask ourselves: what does it tell us about the world we live in? A world so twisted by misinformation, manipulated by algorithms, divided by partisan politics that keeps us under the constant threat our psychopathic political leaders will take humanity over the edge just to prove the point of their own delusional thirst for power.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, in the US alone, 23.4% of adults or over 60 million people are estimated to suffer from mental illness. For young adults aged 18 to 25, the prevalence is 36.2%.
As such, the sweeping endorsement of mindfulness need not be seen as a debasement of its religious concept but a validation of its powerful potential for transformation.
Mindfulness practice need not have its roots in religion for its effects and beneficial impact to be real.
Backed by a trove of scientific data, mindfulness is freeing itself from the chains of a dualistic mindset of right and wrong that permeates all religious dogma.
We now can clearly see that the debate is really not about secularization vs the Buddhist doctrine but a merging of the two into a deeper understanding of our ever-evolving culture.
The whole point of scientific inquiry is to bring new understandings that should only enrich, not be in opposition to, the wisdom of the ancients.
Osho:
“Science has the capacity to penetrate into the very secret of consciousness too. Then it will be a great blessing, a great benediction.
“As far as I am concerned and my vision for a new humanity is concerned, I see science as having two dimensions: one, the lower dimension, working on objects; and two, the higher dimension, working on consciousness.”3
And:
“If there is only one science about the objective reality, how can there be many religions about the inner reality, the subjective reality?”4
Mindfulness as emergent phenomena
Working on consciousness. As it is applied today, mindfulness does appear on the surface to have largely divergent objectives when it comes to advancing humanity on a trajectory towards a higher consciousness.
But could it be that mindfulness, having infiltrated almost every aspect of our existence, is – to keep our warrior metaphor – the stealth weapon that will assure not our collective destruction, but a renewal in consciousness?
Crucially, Osho sends a clear warning on the consequences of training soldiers in meditation:
But I want to warn America: you are playing with fire.
“You don’t understand exactly what meditation will do.
“Your soldiers will become so calm and quiet that they will throw away their weapons and they will simply refuse to kill. A meditator cannot kill; a meditator cannot be destructive. So they are going to be surprised one day that their soldiers are no longer interested in fighting. War, violence, murder, massacre of millions of people – this is not possible if a man knows something of meditation. Then he also knows not only himself, he knows the other whom he is killing. He is his brother. They all belong to the same oceanic existence.”2
While power brokers, influencers and vested interests are unconsciously playing with this fire as a quick fix, actually, the quick fix is consciously cooking them and cooking religion and its dogmas too. As a recent Pew Research Center Study on the decline of religious identity around the world shows, the “secular transition” from religious belief to an understanding of reality based on scientific facts is already well underway. The trend seems irreversible as science and technology probe us to constantly re-evaluate our understanding.
This phenomenon we call progress feeds upon itself in our quest for a more unified vision of our world.
Osho again:
“I am for one world, one humanity, and ultimately one science which will take care of both – a meeting of religion and science – one science which will take care both of the inner and the outer.”5
And:
“In fact, according to me, there is only one science with two dimensions: one dimension working on the outside world, the other dimension working on the inside world. We can even get rid of the word religion.
“This is a fundamental rule of science, that a minimum of hypotheses should be used. So why use two words? Just one word is enough. And science is a beautiful word, it means “knowing.”
Knowing the other is one aspect, knowing one’s self is another aspect; but knowing covers both.”6
The old reductionist approach of simple system thinking that divides reality into conflicting opposites is simply short-sighted and critically fails to incorporate the complex systemic factors that shape a technology-driven humanity.
Instead, we should start looking at the phenomenon of mindfulness through the lens of an emergent system from which patterns and behaviors arise often unexpectedly through the interactions of its multitude of individual parts within social networks.
These interactions not only accelerate their dissemination but also create a self-organizing positive feedback loop that in turn has the potential of reaching a critical mass, a tipping point where a wider societal shift emerges, independently of its individual parts.
Every one of us plays a small, invisible role in this as yet imperceptible shift.
So, no matter how tempting it may be, applying an ethical or moral value system to the prevalent uses and abuses of mindfulness may be missing the point completely.
Osho:
“Right and wrong have been decided by all the religions as if they were fixed entities: do this, don’t do that, this is sin, that is virtue. That is not the right approach to reality, because what is right today may be wrong tomorrow, what was wrong yesterday may be right today.
“Life is a flux, it is constant movement, it is change. Except change, everything else changes.
So I cannot give you fixed ideas about what is right and what is wrong. I cannot do that harm to you.
“All the old religions have done that; maybe it was needed because humanity was in a very immature state. But now man has come of age.”7
If one dares to look, signs are starting to appear that the fire Osho is talking about may be spreading in the most unexpected ways and is starting to make a difference, creating a new awareness and opening the door to a more intelligent, a more mature, a more responsible, a more conscious way of being.
There is no doubt the fire is indeed spreading:
There are currently over ninety podcasts on meditation and mindfulness that support the individual’s inner journey, helping us perhaps go through the insanity of our morning commute, or just relax and get a good night’s sleep.
Take for example this recent survey following the “No Kings” marches across the US involving millions of peaceful demonstrators. It shows a sharp decline in support of political violence. Who in their right mind would ever support political violence you may ask, but in America, a shift from 40% in support to “only” 23% is real progress….
And remember our mindful soldier?
This ex-Navy Seal is shifting the focus of his mindfulness training to incorporate conscious breathing into his daily routine back home and help him raise his kids, all the while using the same mindfulness skills he learned in combat to deal with the aftereffects of a traumatic head injury. How can his story, being chosen to be featured in National Geographic, not be construed as a societal turning point?
We may not have yet reached critical mass, but the gathering momentum of personal life-altering stories and testimonies all seem to point to a not-too-distant future where the combined momentum of the invaluable benefits individuals experience through the myriads of mindfulness and meditation practices creates enough of a spark to light humanity with the flame of a new, emergent consciousness.
Osho:
“The darkness can be very old, ancient, millions of years old, but just a small candle is enough to dispel it. It cannot say, ‘I am very ancient, so how can you dare? You are just a small candle and you have come into existence this very moment, and I am so old, so ancient.’ But there is no time for darkness to say all that. The moment the candle is lit, the darkness starts disappearing.
The problem is how to light the candle; once it is there, there is no problem at all.
“If the candle is not there then darkness is very real, too real – although it exists not. It is only an absence.
“Once the fire is inside, even just a small part of you is on fire, that will do – it will spread.
It is not a fire that dies. Once it is there it is going to consume you totally; that is inevitable.”8
And maybe, just maybe, we might soon find ourselves in a more conscious world with less divisions, more awareness of our interconnectedness, and, having shaken the very foundation of sati to its core, declare that after all, it was well worth the trouble.
END
1 – Osho, The Great Zen master Ta Hui, Talk #6 – Innocence
2 – Osho, Om Mani Padme Hum – The Sound of Silence: The Diamond in the Lotus, Talk #1 – Expressing the Ultimate Experience
3 – Osho, The Golden Future, Talk #36 – Science Has to Become Religious
4 – Osho, The Wild Geese and the Water, Talk #2 – Religion is rebellion
5 – Osho, The Secret, Talk #8 – A New Phase of Humanity
6 – Osho, The Transmission of the Lamp, Talk #31 – I Am an Adamant Optimist
7 – Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 5, Talk #6 – Wonder and Awe
8 – Osho, I Am That, Talk #12 – A Mystery Has to Be Lived
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