On Mindfulness
A discussion of contemplation and practice
Writing about mindfulness was one of my main goals for Orbis Tertius. But I have trepidation about it, because it’s not like I’m a shining example of mindfulness. I’ve never had formal training from a teacher, I’ve never been on a retreat, I don’t meditate consistently (in fact, I haven’t sat in weeks), and I constantly notice how dissociated, distracted, and distant I am as I go about my life…
…But that’s just it. Without a practice of any kind, you never notice. You just are dissociated, distracted, and distant.
I’m not a master, or even a teacher. I am a student. The things I have to say here are just the sort of things I tell people in real life when the subject comes up in conversation. I find it beneficial to think and talk about these things, and processing them through writing even more so. Maybe it will be helpful for you, too, the way a discussion with a friend could be.
Yes, of course, you’re familiar with mindfulness. You hear about it all the time. It’s basically just ostentatious stress relief. It’s making a big deal out of taking a breath and chilling out. There’s “meditation” involved (whatever that means), but it’s not clear exactly what that entails (something about paying attention to your breath or stopping thought) and what it achieves and how it achieves that—anyway it seems a little… cute. Meditation is like burning incense or owning one of those salt rock lamps. There’s nothing profound or surprising there. It’s part of a new-age aesthetic. It’s an effort to seem enlightened or less rigidly western or something like that.
Well, but there has been research that demonstrates the effectiveness of mindfulness techniques for reducing stress, among many other benefits. From the American Psychological Association:
Researchers reviewed more than 200 studies of mindfulness among healthy people and found mindfulness-based therapy was especially effective for reducing stress, anxiety and depression. Mindfulness can also help treat people with specific problems including depression, pain, smoking and addiction. Some of the most promising research has looked at people with depression. Several studies have found, for example, that MBCT can significantly reduce relapse in people who have had previous episodes of major depression.
“Mindfulness” has transcended cute new-age aesthetic into cultural vogue—you’ll find mindfulness training being introduced in classrooms, required before meetings, and listed as a benefit on job descriptions. This, of course, is part of an increasing cultural awareness of the importance of mental health; organizations see “mindfulness” as an easy (and free!) way to signal to students, employees, members, etc. that they care about mental health (instead of, you know, offering more PTO or grading assignments promptly or not sending emails after 5:00 P.M.).
That same APA article gives a definition for mindfulness: “training your attention to achieve a mental state of calm concentration and positive emotions.” This is the popular understanding of mindfulness. But it’s sort of like believing that the purpose of physics is to achieve the satisfaction of solving an equation.
True mindfulness isn’t about reducing stress or achieving calm, or really even about improving mental health, or improving experience generally. It may help with those things, but they can be considered convenient side effects.
Mindfulness comes from an ancient contemplative tradition of monks and scholars trying to figure out a path to genuine well-being, and a lens on the true character of human experience—the true nature of reality. There is a rich and complex history; which comes along with twisting and branching philosophies and terminologies, plenty of internal debate, and conflation with religious practices. For some reason, it’s baked into the tradition to keep instructions and insights secret; and when they are revealed, they are revealed in obscure, lofty, and spiritual language. It’s easy to get confused.
The beautiful thing about mindfulness is that it is empirical—all of the claims are testable and all of the phenomena directly observable—when it is considered as its own thing, secular and separate from the religious context in which it was developed. This means that you can believe in mindfulness regardless of what you believe about anything else. For example, meditation is often associated with the pursuit of nirvana and enlightenment, but mindfulness can be distinguished from these concepts. In fact, there is a critical divergence here, because on some level, true mindfulness is certainly not about the pursuit of any specific goal, or at least any specific experience.
It’s not about having really good meditation sessions, where you feel very calm; or, after a certain number of years of practice, you finally feel the self dissolve, or your awareness lose its duality, or anything like that.
Descriptions of what mindfulness is really about are often conceptually impenetrable. Some descriptions get at a lack of narrative thought, or a freeing detachment from thought. Others assert that the self is an illusion, and that mindfulness is about “cutting through” this illusion. Others refer to a mode of awareness prior to concepts, and others still a “non-dual” awareness. A phrase I’m fond of is “connecting with experience.” These descriptions come with an encouragement to practice, and to trust that these spiritual insights will come, and that they will mean something when they do—in other words, you are often asked to simply have faith. And all this is not helped by the persistence of the entanglement between mindfulness practice and religious concepts like sotāpanna. What I’d like to do is something besides than saying “have faith,” and openly explore the philosophy and practice of mindfulness, sincere and secular.
Mindfulness is fundamentally about making an effort to actually understand what subjective reality is actually like. It’s about the recognition that life is already happening, right now. It’s about actually living your life instead of just letting your life be lived. It’s about never really being bored, because it’s about recognizing that there is always something to be interested in. It’s about actually being there for joy, and for reverence, and for connection with other human beings, when the opportunities for these things, which are all too few, actually appear. And it’s about letting yourself be happy anyway, instead of being hostage to a story about what it would take to make you happy. It’s about giving up on the waiting—the waiting for the next thing, the end of the workday, or the the weekend, or the summer, or more money, or something else. It’s about equanimity—being deeply okay, at your very core, even when you are suffering or challenged. It’s about noticing when you have the impulse to pick up your phone. It’s about noticing when you have the impulse to say something hurtful to someone you love.
For as popular as mindfulness has become, there is profoundly little writing about it. Much of the wisdom is only available in the form of teachers (and them only available via retreat), talks, and apps. I don’t know if this is because the philosophy is too abstract and intrinsic to be communicated via text, or if it has something to do with the tradition of keeping teachings secret. When it is in text, it’s often in the context of religious teachings, or at least bound up with religious concepts. In any case, getting some of this philosophy one way or another is an important part of the practice. It’s very difficult to make progress simply by sitting alone and receiving instruction, even if you do it every day. The practice is naturally and necessarily discursive.
So let’s start by differentiating mindfulness the idea from mindfulness practice. The idea is this goal of being more present, more intimately connected to experience; less distracted, less caught up in and identified with thought. The practice is how you go about accomplishing that. If you think that you can simply accept the idea and become more mindful without practice, you are unfortunately very mistaken. These pursuits are profoundly difficult. There’s work involved. It primarily takes the form of meditation.
Meditation is formal periods of practicing the capabilities that support mindfulness. This consists of things like being able to direct your attention intentionally, being able to focus on arbitrary things for more than a fraction of a second at a time, recognizing thoughts as things that appear all on their own, and being able to let thoughts come and go without being hopelessly distracted by them. Typically, this involves instruction from a teacher (who is either speaking to you from within the room or from a recording), guiding you through techniques for honing your attention, and recognizing the nature of experience.
The most common meditation technique is paying attention to your breath. (There’s nothing really special about the breath—it’s basically an arbitrary object of concentration. You could use anything, but the breath is convenient because it’s always available.) What you will find when you sit down to do this is that it is impossible. You can’t pay attention to your breath for more than a fraction of a second. You find that as soon as you close your eyes and begin to try, thoughts crash into your skull and yank you away from your breath. If you think that you’ve succeeded, that you actually did manage to sit down and fully pay attention to your breath for more than two seconds—well, try again. Really pay attention. Chances are you are just so caught up in thought that you don’t even notice how caught up you are. This experience is unsettling. It shows you how yanked around you really are, all the time.
A lot of mindfulness meditation consists of the same thing: paying attention to your breath, noticing when a thought arises, and then returning to the breath. This is a lot harder than it sounds. Normally, when a thought occurs, it completely carries you away, and you are helpless. But the practice helps you become better at letting thoughts drift on their own. This is one of the core capabilities of mindfulness. It lays the foundation for other insights, but it’s also easy to see how this capacity on its own is important for living life fully.
Of course, mindfulness practice extends way out beyond meditation, though, because remember the real goal isn’t merely to have good experiences in formal meditation sessions—so at the very least there has to be some amount of bleeding the meditation into the rest of your life. Mindfulness practice is, more broadly, about achieving that connection with experience as much as possible. The meditation sessions are just the reps that give you the capacity to do so. The Practice is much more broad than meditation: it’s having moments of meditation throughout the day, it’s becoming less attached to thought in general, it’s noticing the things that are available to be noticed whenever you can, whether those things are beautiful, like a sunrise; mundane, like traffic; or esoteric, like selflessness.
Permeating and surrounding mindfulness practice is the assertion that “the self is an illusion.” You may even hear some suggestion that the point of the practice is to dissolve your sense of self.
This was confusing and troubling for me for a long time. It’s an example of the sort of “secret wisdom” that gives structure to a lot of mindfulness training—a conceptually impenetrable hint at what is available to be observed once you’re sufficiently advanced. It turns out to be true, more or less, I think “the self” is an illusion, or something like that, and this is something you can discover in meditation. But asserting this on the outset without a normal-person explanation doesn’t help. You do exist, after all. What’s your “self,” and why am I claiming that it’s an illusion? And why does it matter?
What exactly is meant by the “illusion of self,” and the experience of cutting through this illusion, can be illustrated conceptually without the need for any experiential recognition. It goes like this: It is necessarily true that everything you experience is a feature of consciousness—there is nothing that you can experience outside of consciousness. So if you experience something that you identify as yourself—like the sense that you are there at the center of consciousness, or that you are behind your eyes, or that you are speaking to yourself inside your head, or anything else—that experience must actually be a part of a prior condition that allows for it. In other words, anything you experience that you could identify as yourself is only an experience, and not your “self.” It’s the identification with any individual experience that’s the illusion—you’re actually identical to experience itself. Simply existing as the prior condition that allows for these experiences, and ceasing to identify with any of them, is what is meant by cutting through the illusion of self, and it could be said that this is one of the goals of mindfulness practice, or at least it’s a potential consequence of the practice that is interesting and beneficial.
Why beneficial? Well, first of all, I think that to see things as they really are is valuable in and of itself. But more pragmatically, this illusion is a significant source suffering. Or maybe more tangible: the ego is a significant source of suffering. If we think of the ego as our concept of ourselves (as opposed to the “self”—the experiences with which we mistakenly identify, like narrative thought), we can see how malignant a force it is. The ego wants to be fed. An attachment to ego is what motivates things like taking advantage of others, lying, and being selfish. It’s also what motivates things like poor self-confidence and self-loathing; you can’t direct loathing at yourself unless you have a powerful concept of yourself.
Cutting through the illusion of the self undercuts all of these very human, but very harmful tendencies. Notice how the word “self” is used so consistently to describe them (“selfish,” “self-loathing,” etc.)—if the self is an illusion, these things don’t even make any sense.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Rest assured, the experience of selflessness runs infinitely deeper than this, into things more abstract, more experiential, more philosophical and more spiritual, and requiring more and better words to describe.
Besides the experience and insight of selflessness, there are others on offer to the meditator, such as an awareness prior to concepts, and non-dual awareness. They’re all interrelated, but the latter two are even more abstract and difficult to describe, not to mention more difficult to characterize the benefits of. To that end, for now, I will only say that these qualities of awareness are, in a deep way, the way that awareness already and always is, and the cultivation of them is an effort to see things the way the really are; not an effort to change anything.
On some level, though, “dual” vs. “non-dual” can refer to a difference in practice, which can lead to confusion. In dual practice, you are doing things like the classic concentration technique: paying attention to the breath. The duality comes from the separation between “you” and “your breath.” You are your awareness, and your breath is something separate which you can sort of point yourself at. It’s dual because it’s conceptually rooted in the normal way of understanding experience, which is that “you” are experiencing the physical world, of which your body is a part. But you are your mind, which is sort of not. Mind and body. Dual.
In non-dual practice, you get instructions like “rest as the condition in which everything appears.” That may sound a little out there. That’s why you typically start with the dual techniques. But non-dual practice is all about this sort of thing, this recognition that consciousness is all there is. There is no duality, no separate mind and body—only awareness.
This is one of the primary insights of true mindfulness: as a matter of experience, any duality is a fabrication. There is no separation between you and your breath, you and what you see, or you and anything else that you experience. This occurs (in part) through a technique that takes you from dual to non-dual, in which you direct your attention (as you would towards your breath) towards attention itself. You just do a 180-degree turn with your attention. What happens when you perform this turn is, just for a moment, awareness completely loses this quality (you could say, this illusion) of being like a spotlight shining out from the back of your head that you can point at things. Everything opens up, and there is just what there is. It feels infinite and infinitely calm.
You can do it right now. Imagine an arrow pointing out of this text into the place from which you are reading it. Follow that arrow to “look” with your attention at that which is reading. What happens? (This is a relatively “advanced” technique—the sort of thing that is traditionally kept secret, at least at first.)
Probably nothing, especially if you haven’t spent a significant amount of time practicing the attention articulation that makes up a lot of meditation (and perhaps that’s why it’s usually kept secret—if you’re hearing this instruction as a beginner, you probably think it’s a bunch of nonsense). It can take a while before the instruction to turn attention upon itself really means anything. But once it means something, this insight is available to you experientially, at any time, without effort. You realize that this is the way that awareness always is.
In “When it Rains in Colorado,” I talked about how much I loved the rain, and how, here in the Rocky Mountain high desert, the rain typically only lasts about ten or twenty minutes. Well, as I’m writing this, we’re in the final hours of a precious occurrence: an entire day of constant, gentle rain. We woke up to grey light and little quiet taps on the window. And when we went outside just now, at twilight, the rain was still coming down in little taps, and there were rivers in the gutters, puddles in the rocks, ponds in the grass; the streetlights were making golden streaks on the roads, and the nearby mountains were shrouded in mist. This is something that only happens maybe every few years. It is something that I yearn for deeply.
But where was I, for the rain today? I was at work, I was running errands, I was walking my dog. There were things that got in the way of my ability to relax and enjoy the rain. But there were plenty of moments too in which I was completely free to do nothing but appreciate the rain. How well was I able to do that? To what extent was I able to allow the rain to fill my awareness, taking the place of everything else that I’m usually worried about?
Haven’t you experienced this? Haven’t you found yourself failing to finally arrive when it seems to matter most? Or maybe you only noticed it after the fact? When the precious thing was already gone, and you wondered where you were when it was there? And anyway, why should you be waiting for something that’s going to really capture you, to bring you into the moment? Aren’t you in the present right now? Couldn’t you finally arrive, right now?
This is what mindfulness is really about: how do you finally arrive?
I stumbled upon this post at just the right moment when I needed it most. I feel a sense of closeness to my experience and to the world again. This post brought me so much joy and I hope this travels back to you. Thank you for your work!