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The Problem of Mindfulness

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Re: The Problem of Mindfulness

#31

Post by altonzheng »

I've fallen into the trap of similar thinking as the author, and I agree, the main issue is believing that mindfulness is a panacea. The more we suffer the more we hope for simple solutions. I really wanted to believe that meditate more == be happier. For my neurotic and driven personality, this meant obsessively meditating, and I began deconstructing and disidentifying from every negative emotion using mindfulness. I got to some interested states from that and felt like I could "overcome" any negative emotion, but my general sense is my practice was imbalanced and I don't feel like I'm much better off... maybe a little disassociated from reality. Most serious meditation practitioners are aware of pitfalls like this though, it's known as "spiritual bypassing".

Meditation is just another tool, although a very powerful one. Use it wisely.

Re: The Problem of Mindfulness

#32

Post by gridlockd »

edejong wrote: post #30
gridlockd wrote: post #23

That's not awakening, that's going to sleep. Dare to be human, to have desires, to have a will. Don't just "accept" the world, shape it. You have an eternity to be nothing, be something now.

The ego: indestructible, why fight?

Death: inevitable, why live?

Re: The Problem of Mindfulness

#34

Post by bamboozled »

gridlockd wrote: post #23

That's not awakening, that's going to sleep. Dare to be human, to have desires, to have a will. Don't just "accept" the world, shape it. You have an eternity to be nothing, be something now.

One could say there are plenty of people on earth who practiced mindfulness, had feelings and shaped the world.

Re: The Problem of Mindfulness

#35

Post by mtalantikite »

It seems like the author may have fallen into the common trap of the nonexistence of self, which can lead to feelings of nihilism. When I first encountered meditation as a teenager I also wandered into this trap and subsequently stopped a daily meditation practice for maybe 10 years. Buddhist teaching is very explicitly not nihilistic though.

In the Prajnaparamita literature of Mahayana Buddhism the teaching is the emptiness of self and all phenomena, not the nonexistence of self and phenomena. There is a difference. Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra explains it very clearly, and he argues that a lot of the confusion comes from an unskillful translation of the sutra. I’d recommend it to anyone that might be struggling with feelings of nihilism in their practice and is working from the wrong understanding of there being no self.

Edit: I realized there are a couple publications of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Heart Sutra, but the one I’m specifically referencing is published under the title The Other Shore. I’d suggest getting a copy of the book in order to get the full commentary, but the sutra and some motivation for it looks to be on his website: https://plumvillage.org/news/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra...

Re: The Problem of Mindfulness

#36

Post by [deleted] »

stevebmark wrote: post #2

Mindfulness was a major step forward in the exploration of the self, at least for western culture. I see this criticism as the next step forward. I too have felt some ambiguous disconnect between mindfulness and experience that this essay does a good job capturing. The goal of mindfulness is to make you realize you don't exist, and to try to reach a state where you don't exist, and teach you that your thoughts aren't…

[deleted]

Re: The Problem of Mindfulness

#37

Post by laser »

“This error of understanding has dominated Indian culture for centuries and has turned the principle of life upside down. Life on the basis of detachment! This is a complete distortion of Indian philosophy. It has not only destroyed the path of realization but has led the seekers of Truth continuously astray ... Indian scriptures are now so full of the idea of renunciation that they are regarded with distrust by practical men in every part of the world. Many Western universities hesitate to teach Indian philosophy for this reason.”

- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 12 January 1965, Preface to Bhagavad-Gita

Re: The Problem of Mindfulness

#38

Post by Barrin92 »

the thing that rubs me the wrong way about mindfulness is how it sits neatly between secularism, spirituality and obsessive self-improvement, it's exactly the sort of thing "high performers" who are full of themselves are drawn to. No value commitments, little meaningful connection to the real world, it's the sort of replacement for religiousness you expect to find in a tech mecca, which is of course where it has been gaining popularity.

When I hear minfulness I think of Jack Dorsey meditating in a private retreat in myanmar while the rohingya are being chased down the next street by a mob organised on twitter. A few years ago it was reading Marc Aurel and the stoics and now it's apparently meditation.

The irony of course being that the entire practise seems to have been commodified already, now we can all medidate with the premium subscription meditation app that wants us to get away from our subscription services.

Re: The Problem of Mindfulness

#40

Post by narnianal »

Not really, nope. You should not focus on anything. You should experience the experience openly. If you eat a fruit and it reminds you of home, you should experience the food and the memory and yourself, without blocking any of that by focussing on something specifically.

Of course to get to that state of mind you first need to learn by naively focussing on it, that there is more to the experience than what you can see at first. But that is like the additional wheels you put on a child's bike. It's supposed to be on there forever. It's just to get you started.

The goal is to oepn yourself to parts of the experience you didn't have before. For instance have you realized how much your body is automatically communicating your inner feelings through body language? Just keep thinking about your shoulders over the day and see how often they are actually raised as an unconcious way of protecting yourself. It can even happen when you brush your teeth because of what you are thinking about in that moment.

So when you are able to combine all these observations, and are able to not overwrite your observations by thinking too much, and be able to do it all the time without needing to expend any kind of energy on it, then you have achieved Mindfulness.

Even the guys in the text books that are praised so much probably haven't achieved it btw. They themselves would not even claim so. But the people who wrote the books were on a lower level where they thought they needed to expend energy to achieve something, e.g. by telling a more enhanced version of the story they might advertise the book or its philosophy to you.

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