Jul 27, 2019 05:51 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/mindfulness-is-lo...ssumptions
EXCERPT (Sahanika Ratnayake): . . . My own gripes with mindfulness are of a different, though related, order. In claiming to offer a multipurpose, multi-user remedy for all occasions, mindfulness oversimplifies the difficult business of understanding oneself. It fits oh-so-neatly into a culture of techno-fixes, easy answers and self-hacks, where we can all just tinker with the contents of our heads to solve problems, instead of probing why we’re so dissatisfied with our lives in the first place. As I found with my own experience, though, it’s not enough to simply watch one’s thoughts and feelings. To understand why mindfulness is uniquely unsuited for the project of real self-understanding, we need to probe the suppressed assumptions about the self that are embedded in its foundations.
[...] Contrary to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s loftier claims to universalism, mindfulness is in fact ‘metaphysically loaded’: it relies on its practitioners signing up to positions they might not readily accept. In particular, mindfulness is grounded in the Buddhist doctrine of anattā, or the ‘no-self’. Anattā is a metaphysical denial of the self, defending the idea that there is nothing like a soul, spirit or any ongoing individual basis for identity. This view denies that each of us is an underlying subject of our own experience. By contrast, Western metaphysics typically holds that – in addition to the existence of any thoughts, emotions and physical sensations – there is some entity to whom all these experiences are happening, and that it makes sense to refer to this entity as ‘I’ or ‘me’. However, according to Buddhist philosophy, there is no ‘self’ or ‘me’ to which such phenomena belong.
It’s striking how much shared terrain there is among the strategies that Buddhists use to reveal the ‘truth’ of anattā, and the exercises of mindfulness practitioners. One technique in Buddhism, for example, involves examining thoughts, feelings and physical sensations, and noting that they are impermanent [...] As such (the thinking goes), they cannot be the entity that persists throughout a lifetime ... Nor can the self be these phenomena collectively as they are all equally impermanent. But then, the Buddhists point out, there is also nothing besides these phenomena that could be the self. Consequently, there is no self...
Like their Buddhist predecessors, contemporary mindfulness practitioners stress these qualities of impermanence and impersonality. [...] I put my earlier sense of self-estrangement and disorientation down to mindfulness’s close relationship with anattā. With the no-self doctrine, we relinquish not only more familiar understandings of the self, but also the idea that mental phenomena such as thoughts and feelings are our own. In doing so, we make it harder to understand why we think and feel the way we do, and to tell a broader story about ourselves and our lives...
[...] Of course, it’s often pragmatically useful to step away from your own fraught ruminations and emotions. ... But after a certain point, mindfulness doesn’t allow you to take responsibility for and analyse such feelings. It’s not much help in sifting through competing explanations for why you might be thinking or feeling a certain way. Nor can it clarify what these thoughts and feelings might reveal about your character. Mindfulness, grounded in anattā, can offer only the platitude: ‘I am not my feelings.’ Its conceptual toolbox doesn’t allow for more confronting statements, such as ‘I am feeling insecure,’ ‘These are my anxious feelings,’ or even ‘I might be a neurotic person.’ Without some ownership of one’s feelings and thoughts, it is difficult to take responsibility for them. The relationship between individuals and their mental phenomena is a weighty one, encompassing questions of personal responsibility and history. These matters shouldn’t be shunted so easily to one side.
[...] As I write this, I’ve spent the past month being fairly miserable. If I were being mindful, I would note that there were emotions of sadness and helplessness as well as anxious thoughts. [...But...] without some idea of a self, separate from but embedded in a social context, I couldn’t gain much further insight.
[...] I don’t mean to suggest that everyone who does mindfulness will feel estranged from their thoughts the way I did, nor that it will inevitably restrict their capacity to understand themselves. It can be a useful tool in helping us gain some distance from the tumult of our inner experience. The problem is the current tendency to present mindfulness as a wholesale remedy, a panacea for all manner of modern ills. (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Sahanika Ratnayake): . . . My own gripes with mindfulness are of a different, though related, order. In claiming to offer a multipurpose, multi-user remedy for all occasions, mindfulness oversimplifies the difficult business of understanding oneself. It fits oh-so-neatly into a culture of techno-fixes, easy answers and self-hacks, where we can all just tinker with the contents of our heads to solve problems, instead of probing why we’re so dissatisfied with our lives in the first place. As I found with my own experience, though, it’s not enough to simply watch one’s thoughts and feelings. To understand why mindfulness is uniquely unsuited for the project of real self-understanding, we need to probe the suppressed assumptions about the self that are embedded in its foundations.
[...] Contrary to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s loftier claims to universalism, mindfulness is in fact ‘metaphysically loaded’: it relies on its practitioners signing up to positions they might not readily accept. In particular, mindfulness is grounded in the Buddhist doctrine of anattā, or the ‘no-self’. Anattā is a metaphysical denial of the self, defending the idea that there is nothing like a soul, spirit or any ongoing individual basis for identity. This view denies that each of us is an underlying subject of our own experience. By contrast, Western metaphysics typically holds that – in addition to the existence of any thoughts, emotions and physical sensations – there is some entity to whom all these experiences are happening, and that it makes sense to refer to this entity as ‘I’ or ‘me’. However, according to Buddhist philosophy, there is no ‘self’ or ‘me’ to which such phenomena belong.
It’s striking how much shared terrain there is among the strategies that Buddhists use to reveal the ‘truth’ of anattā, and the exercises of mindfulness practitioners. One technique in Buddhism, for example, involves examining thoughts, feelings and physical sensations, and noting that they are impermanent [...] As such (the thinking goes), they cannot be the entity that persists throughout a lifetime ... Nor can the self be these phenomena collectively as they are all equally impermanent. But then, the Buddhists point out, there is also nothing besides these phenomena that could be the self. Consequently, there is no self...
Like their Buddhist predecessors, contemporary mindfulness practitioners stress these qualities of impermanence and impersonality. [...] I put my earlier sense of self-estrangement and disorientation down to mindfulness’s close relationship with anattā. With the no-self doctrine, we relinquish not only more familiar understandings of the self, but also the idea that mental phenomena such as thoughts and feelings are our own. In doing so, we make it harder to understand why we think and feel the way we do, and to tell a broader story about ourselves and our lives...
[...] Of course, it’s often pragmatically useful to step away from your own fraught ruminations and emotions. ... But after a certain point, mindfulness doesn’t allow you to take responsibility for and analyse such feelings. It’s not much help in sifting through competing explanations for why you might be thinking or feeling a certain way. Nor can it clarify what these thoughts and feelings might reveal about your character. Mindfulness, grounded in anattā, can offer only the platitude: ‘I am not my feelings.’ Its conceptual toolbox doesn’t allow for more confronting statements, such as ‘I am feeling insecure,’ ‘These are my anxious feelings,’ or even ‘I might be a neurotic person.’ Without some ownership of one’s feelings and thoughts, it is difficult to take responsibility for them. The relationship between individuals and their mental phenomena is a weighty one, encompassing questions of personal responsibility and history. These matters shouldn’t be shunted so easily to one side.
[...] As I write this, I’ve spent the past month being fairly miserable. If I were being mindful, I would note that there were emotions of sadness and helplessness as well as anxious thoughts. [...But...] without some idea of a self, separate from but embedded in a social context, I couldn’t gain much further insight.
[...] I don’t mean to suggest that everyone who does mindfulness will feel estranged from their thoughts the way I did, nor that it will inevitably restrict their capacity to understand themselves. It can be a useful tool in helping us gain some distance from the tumult of our inner experience. The problem is the current tendency to present mindfulness as a wholesale remedy, a panacea for all manner of modern ills. (MORE - details)
