Interest in meditation, mindfulness, and contemplation has grown exponentially in recent years. Rather than being seen as mystical practices from ancient Buddhism or esoteric philosophy, they are increasingly seen as technologies rooted in evidence from psychology and neuroscience. Mindfulness has become the basis for numerous therapeutic interventions, both as a treatment in healthcare and as a means of enhancing well-being and happiness. For millions around the world, mindfulness has become a life-style choice, enhancing and enriching everyday experience. Mindfulness is big business. But, what actually is mindfulness? Is it really good for you? Can anyone learn it? How can you recognize charlatans? Would you want to live in a mindful society, and would it smell like sandalwood? What does it feel like to be mindful? Are you mindful already, and how would you know? Evolving from the popular Honours Academy course at Leiden University, this innovative course combines conventional scholarly inquiry from multiple disciplines (ranging from psychology, through philosophy, to politics) with experiential learning (including specially designed ‘meditation labs,’ in which you’ll get chance to practice and analyze mindfulness on yourself). In the end, the course aims to provide a responsible, comprehensive, and inclusive education about (and in) mindfulness as a contemporary phenomenon. During the production of this course, we have been supported by Willem Kuyken, Director of the University of Oxford Mindfulness Centre, and Stephen Batchelor, co-founder of Bodhi College. And we gratefully acknowledge the contributions made by Mark Williams, co-developer of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and Rebecca Crane, Director of the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice at the University of Bangor.
Mindful utopias and distopias
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En provenance du cours de Universiteit Leiden
De-Mystifying Mindfulness
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Politics of/& Mindfulness
It is commonly assumed that Mindfulness is a solitary pursuit, and yet there is also often talk of a ‘Mindfulness Revolution,’ as though Mindfulness is also a social movement. In this module we’ll explore some of the ways in which the practice of Mindfulness might impact on ethical, social, and political issues today. We’ll ask questions about whether a Mindful society would really be a utopia, or whether it would be a nightmare. We’ll investigate the significance of Mindfulness in the military and in education, and finally we’ll attempt to engage with the meaning and significance of the commercialization of Mindfulness in capitalist societies.
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Chris Goto-JonesProf. dr.
Honours Academy
In the first session of this module, we saw how some influential theorists and
practionists have imagined the social transformations that might be occasioned
by a blossoming mindfulness movement.
In general, advocates of mindfulness tend to argue that the more mindfulness
society becomes, by which they mean, the more individuals
in the society who practice mindfulness, the better that society will be.
And when they say that a society is better,
they usually mean that it is full of more gentle, compassionate,
and wise individuals who treat each other and themselves more respectfully.
And so participate in business and governance, in more ethical ways.
As we'll see later in this module, there is also significant and
increasing support for the idea that a more mindful society will also be
a more efficient, productive and creative society.
Hence, the mindful utopia is not only a more ethical society but
also a more affluent and industrious one.
Indeed, for some, this is how and
why the mindfulness movement will be able to develop and grow.
Rather than because it might make people nicer, society will invest in it and
promote it because it's financially beneficial.
Whatever else its benefits for
society, mindfulness will ultimately flourish because it is good for business.
This is the guiding hand of liberal capitalism at work.
Commodities that work and bring economic benefits become profitable and flourish.
This means that private companies can and should commodify and
sell mindfulness as widely as possible.
However, this rosy view of the social impact of mindfulness
is certainly not shared by everyone.
In recent years,
there have been the beginnings of a backlash against mindfulness.
We've already seen how this backlash has manifested in critiques of some of
the therapeutic and positive psychological claims made about mindfulness.
It's also the case that it has occasioned some serious concerns about the social and
political significance of mindfulness.
Perhaps the most influential cautionary voice
has been that of the radical philosopher Slavoj Zizek who has criticized mindfulness
in the context of a more general critique of what he calls Western Buddhism
which he sees as a particular transformed form of Buddhism that places an undue
emphasis on meditation practices as its central concern.
Zizek makes a series of connected arguments and
we'll spend some time today considering two of the main ones.
First,however, it's important to have a sense of the framework
within which his critiques are formulated.
So, in the company of various others, Zizek identifies
the contemporary period as one of spiritual crisis and secularization.
Especially but not only in the west.
That is, there's a void left in the western culture by the failing popularity
of traditional religions and
by increasing antipathy towards religion as a source of violence and danger.
Into this void drops mindfulness which represents itself and
a kind of secular spiritual practice ostensibly satisfying our need for
religiosity but without offending us by actually being a religion.
The difficult and contested idea of mindfulness as a secularized form of
Buddhism speaks directly to this idea.
The first potential danger of this situation
for Zizek lies at the level of culture itself.
He argues that this process of drawing, mindfulness and
Buddhism into the spiritual void in the heart of western culture,
risks undermining the vitality and coherence of western culture itself.
Indeed, he goes as far as to suggest that western civilization risks being
overrun by what he calls New Age Asiatic thought,
which is invading Europe at the level of the ideological superstructure, he says.
While I certainly don't want to claim this about Zizek himself whose cases
carefully articulated and provocative, this kind of argument has been picked up
by other critics who formulated into a strong form of cultural conservatism, and
sometimes also to a form of xenophobia,
arguing that there's simply no legitimate place for Asian thought in Western societies.
The second danger identified by Zizek is rather more interesting for
us since it's not about the ostensible foreignness of mindfulness, which we might
contest in any case if we see mindfulness as a modern transnational construct.
But it is instead about the concrete impact of mindfulness on
the individuals who practice it.
Rather than seeing mindfulness as a technology or skill that enhances
an individual's health, their well-being and their potential,
Zizek sees it as an ideological tool that tranquilizes people into docility.
Rather than being away to cultivate freedom and emancipation then,
Zizek suggest that mindfulness might be a way
to enact our capitulation to the oppression we experience in capitalism.
Mindfulness not only encourages us to accept how things are even when they
objectively damage us or cause us suffering.
But it also encourages us to pathologize or medicalize stress and ambition.
Making us label those people who are stressed or disruptive or dissenting or
simply discontent as sick and maladjusted.
In short, people who try to change the objective material conditions of
their lives out of the sense of their injustice about those conditions
risk being seen as maladaptive to their society.
In an extreme case for instance, a poorly paid exploited worker, who complains that
she should be given better working conditions, and more equitable pay
might simply be told that her problem is not her pay, or her working conditions.
Her problem is that she's just insufficiently mindful.
She might then be sent on a mindfulness course to help her become better adapted
to her situation and thus to become a more profitable worker.
And she might then return to her poorly paid exploitative job but
now feel much happier and better about it.
So just as Max Weber famously argued that the Protestant ethic was
instrumental to the development of capitalism in northern Europe,
Zizek suggests that were Max Weber alive today, he would definitely write a second,
supplementary volume to his Protestant Ethic entitled the Taoist Ethic and
the Spirit of Global Capitalism.
To many, Zizek's critic seems extreme but we must take it seriously.
Indeed it's worth taking a moment to check in with yourself,
to see how listening to that critic made you feel.
What was your intuitive response to it as somebody who practices mindfulness?
Perhaps you're immediately convinced by it, or perhaps you feel it's unfair.
And if that's the case, take another moment to consider whether you
feel that it's actually unfair, or do you feel that you want it to be unfair?
This is a good opportunity for you to cultivate some practice.
And keep in mind that your position on this really matters.
Not only but also because it will partially determine your views
on the ethical status of the commercialization of mindfulness today.
In fact, criticism similar to those in Zizek have been around in Asia for
a very long time.
The question of whether certain types of Buddhism and especially Daoism,
were really just ways keep the masses from realizing how much better off they could
be if they rebelled or if they stood up for their rights rather than cultivating
quiet acceptance of the status quo under a tree has been asked over and
over again for thousands of years.
One of the most elegant counter arguments is the appeal to the experiential
nature of the knowledge that underpins mindfulness practice.
That is the argument that we can only know what impact mindfulness will have on our
condition of emancipation or
enslavement once we have accomplished the experience of mindfulness itself.
Otherwise, we're making at least a species of the mistake that we explored in module
three of attempting to produce an objective third person model of what is
essentially and inalienably first person form of knowledge and understanding.
In other words, if someone tells you that your mindfulness practice makes you into
a slave of capitalism, your retort might legitimately be very simple.
What do you know about my mindfulness practice?
This simple retort contains a number of rather radical, perhaps even revolutionary
implications for the role of mindfulness in capitalist society.
It suggests that mindfulness attacks the foundational ideas about materialism and
objectivity, as well as the instrumental forms of reasoning that underpin
capitalism itself.
Rather than making practitioners into slaves of capitalism,
mindfulness might provide a fundamental and
radical attack on the purpose directed thinking that keeps capitalism afloat.
So, from the outside, from a third person's standpoint,
the mindfulness revolution might look silent and harmless to the system.
But from the inside, from a first person's standpoint,
it might usher in the possibility of a radical transformation of that system
into something entirely new.
One of the difficulties of this idea of a mindful Utopia lying on the other
side of capitalism, which rests upon the kinds of knowledges, processes, and
practices that we've associated with mindfulness, is that we will not and
cannot know what it will look like until it arrives and until we experience it.
Indeed, in a sense, it is entirely possible that your practice has already
allowed you to experience this.
And hence that you live in this utopia right now, and
that I don't live in it, precisely because I haven't experienced it yet.
And if you think this is the case, let me know,
please describe it for me, I'd be really happy to hear from you.
As it happens, these kinds of fears and uncertainties about the implications and
impacts of mindfulness on individuals, and
on society, are also discussed in the Buddhist literature.
Indeed at the level of the individual, we have seen some of this with
respect to the emergence of existential anxiety during meditation practices.
One of the fascinating, and probably elegant,
implications of this, is that critiques of mindfulness, like those of Zizek,
might be reinterpreted as evidence of the psychology of fear.
Our fear that we will become slaves or zombies is a device generated by our
subconscious to prevent us from continuing our practice and transforming ourselves.
In the language of Buddhism, this fear is a form of Mara,
the demon who attempted to prevent Buddha from attaining enlightenment under his
tree by tempting him and frightening him with images of desire and aversion.
But in the end as we know, mindfulness is specifically tasked with tackling
our enslavement to desires and aversions.
So, before we move on to consider the relationship between mindfulness and
violence in the next session,
I just like to leave you with these wise words by Joseph Goldstein.
Meditators sometimes report that fear of liberation holds them back in their
practice.
As they proceed into unchartered territory,
fear of the unknown becomes an obstacle to surrender.
But this is not really fear of enlightenment.
It is rather fear of ideas about enlightenment.
The mind might invent many different images of the experience of liberation.
Sometimes our ego creates images of its own death that frighten us.
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