Mindfulness is very much in vogue at this
moment as many of you probably know.
And it’s often taught as though it were
a glorified version of an executive stress
ball.
It’s a tool you want in your tool kit.
It prepares you emotionally to go into a new
experience with a positive attitude and you
know you’re not hauling around baggage from
the past.
And that’s true.
Actually having focus and having your mind
in the present moment is a little bit of a
superpower in situations that we’re all
in from day to day.
But that actually undervalues what mindfulness
really is and its true potential.
It’s more like the large hadron collider
in that it’s a real tool for making some
fundamental discoveries about the nature of
the mind.
And one of these discoveries is that the sense
of self that we all carry around from day
to day is an illusion.
And cutting through that illusion I think
is actually more important than stress reduction
or any of the other conventional benefits
that are accurately ascribed to mindfulness.
The enemy of mindfulness and really of any
meditation practice is being lost in thought,
is to be thinking without knowing that you’re
thinking.
Now the problem is not thoughts themselves.
We need to think.
We need to think to do almost anything that
makes us human – to reason, to plan, to
have social relationships, to do science.
Thinking is indispensable to us but most of
us spend every moment of our waking lives
thinking without knowing that we’re thinking.
And this automaticity is a kind of scrim thrown
over at the present moment through which we
view everything.
And it’s distorting of our lives.
It’s distorting of our emotions.
It engineers our unhappiness in every moment
because most of what we think is quite unpleasant.
We’re judging ourselves, we’re judging
others, we’re worrying about the future,
we’re regretting the past, we’re at war
with our experience in subtle or coarse ways.
And much of this self-talk is unpleasant and
diminishing our happiness in every moment.
And so meditation is a tool for cutting through
that.
It’s interrupting this continuous conversation
we’re having with ourselves.
So that is – that in and of itself is beneficial.
But there are features of our experience that
we don’t notice when we’re lost in thought.
So, for instance, every experience you’ve
ever had, every emotion, the anger you felt
yesterday or a year ago isn’t here anymore.
It arises and it passes away.
And if it comes back in the present moment
by virtue of your thinking about it again,
it will subside again when you’re no longer
thinking about it.
Now this is something that people tend not
to notice because we rather than merely feel
an emotion like anger, we spend our time thinking
of all the reasons why we have every right
to be angry.
And so the conversation keeps this emotion
in play for much, much longer than its natural
half-life.
And if you’re able, through mindfulness
to interrupt this conversation and simply
witness the feeling of anger as it arises
you’ll find that you can’t be angry for
more than a few moments at a time.
If you think you can be angry for a day or
even an hour without continually manufacturing
this emotion by thinking without knowing that
you’re thinking, you’re mistaken.
And this is something you can just witness
for yourself.
This is – again this is an objective truth
claim about the nature of subjective experience.
And it’s testable.
And mindfulness is the tool that you would
use to test it.
One problem is that most of the people who
teach mindfulness – and I know many of the
great vipassana teachers in the West and in
the East and I have immense respect for these
people.
I learned to meditate in a traditionally Buddhist
context.
But most people who teach mindfulness are
still in the religion business.
They’re still – they’re propagating
Western Buddhism or American Buddhism.
The connection to the tradition of Buddhism
in particular is explicit and I think there
are problems with that because when you, if
you are declaring yourself a Buddhist you
are part of the problem of religious sectarianism
that has needlessly shattered our world.
And I think we have to get out of the religion
business.
That whatever is true about mindfulness and
meditation and any introspective methodology
that will deliver truths about the nature
of consciousness is non-sectarian.
It’s no more Buddhist than physics is Christian.
You know the Christians invented physics or
discovered physics but anyone talking about
Christian physics clearly doesn’t understand
the significance of what we’ve understood
through that means.
It’s the same with meditation.
There’s going to come a time where we no
longer are tempted to talk about Buddhist
meditation as opposed to any other form.
We’re just talking about turning consciousness
upon itself and what can be discovered by
that process.
Now it just so happens that Buddhism almost
uniquely has given us a language and a methodology
to do this in a way that is really well designed
for export to secular culture because you
can get to the core truths of Buddhism, the
truth of selflessness, the ceaseless impermanence
of mental phenomenon, the intrinsic unsatisfactoriness
of experience because you can’t hold on
to anything.
No matter how pleasant an experience is it
arises and then passes away.
And no matter how much you protect yourself,
unpleasant experience is destined to come.
These features of our minds can be fully tested
and understood without believing anything
on insufficient evidence.
So it’s true to say that despite all of
the spooky metaphysics and unjustified claims
within Buddhism you can get to the core of
it without any faith claim and without being
intellectually dishonest.
But it is intellectually dishonest, I think,
to keep talking about these truths in an exclusively
Buddhist context because it’s misleading.
It subtly gives the message that in order
to have rich, meaningful, important spiritual
lives we must somehow continue to endorse
religious sectarianism.
We must still frame this inquiry with an ancient
allegiance to one accidental strand of human
culture as opposed to using all of the concepts
and tools and conversations that are available
to us in the twenty-first century.
