Mindful of what?

My friend Ann Hall put me onto an article published by the CBC called “McMindfulness: how capitalism hijacked the Buddhist teaching of mindfulness” which recaps an interview (that you can listen to on the article page) with Ronald Purser, author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.

The interviewer leads with a quote from a review about Purser's book and it's loaded with meaning: "None of us dreamed that mindfulness would become so popular or even lucrative, much less that it would be used as a way to keep millions of us sleeping soundly through some of the worst cultural excesses in human history, all while fooling us into thinking we were awake and quiet."

At the very least, what "mindfulness" is supposed to do is wake us up, not put us to sleep. It is this that is at the crux of the issue. What “mindfulness” seems to be is a watered-down approach to vipassana meditation. I know that the pedagogy focuses on breathing and awareness of surroundings and body scans. At issue is that it reduces a means to enlightenment as a tool to create better workers, better soldiers.

Removing the ethical underpinnings and the result is cohort of stunted individuals who are employing these techniques for stress reduction and how to maintain focus on a goal. This is so very far from the liberation from suffering that undergirds the very raison d’etre of “seeing things as they really are” (a fairly literal translation of vipassana”.)

Purser illustrates the corporate utilization of “mindfulness” at Google to demonstrate this as stress-reduction and insurance against developer burn-out. The result is that "...you become mindful, to become more productive, to produce technologies of mass distraction, which is quite an irony in many ways."

I’m putting “mindfulness” in quotes like this because it’s really not a matter of being full of mind nor is it experiencing the fullness of mind. It’s simply being concentrated on the task at hand, be it following the breath to calm oneself in the midst of stress and panic or it’s a kind of one-pointed concentration on getting the job done regardless of what distractions abound. There is no sense of working through whether the work being done is beneficial for others (sila) or that employing such techniques as samatha or vipassana in these situations will aid the individuals learning them to become freer human beings. The priority is simply productivity and efficiency.

As, if not more, egregious is the military context. "...the bottom line is that the whole purpose of this training is to make better soldiers.  'Comprehensive fitness training' is what they call it. Creating mental armour for these soldiers. But the bottom line is it's really trying to 'optimize warrior performance' and that's the actual language they use if you read some of the Department of Defence documents. And that translates to better sharpshooters, better killers."

Purser points out that the DoD’s rationalization would be that better snipers would result in less civilian casualties, so that’s a win? I guess? But he knows that such equivocation belies and betrays the precept against killing in a Buddhist context.

Over twenty years ago, this issue first came to my attention when Alan Wallace noted that ethics cannot be divorced from mindfulness practice and be considered Buddhist. I concur, but we live in a secular world and the challenge to the corporatists and the militarists would be to attempt to recouple these meditation techniques with ethics and what it means to be more aware. I wouldn’t expect companies or armies to even entertain something like “enlightenment” as a goal, and I doubt seriously that ethics are going to be of any interest in those settings.

However, one thing that becomes apparent after you begin meditating after this fashion is a lessening or impulsive reaction. There’s a greater amount of space that opens up in which the all-pervasive nature of mind is encountered, however fleeting that may be. It shouldn’t necessarily result in conformity which would make teaching these approaches with ethics built back in somewhat dangerous for corporate and military hierarchies.

Samatha or shamatha in Sanskrit, is single-pointed meditation on an object. Most often, something like the breath is chosen and this leads to a concentrated awareness. The technique in itself, Wallace pointed out all those years ago, is ethically neutral. It is also not unique to Buddhism. Vipassana (vipashyana, Skt.) is unique to Buddhism and the early Pali Buddhist canon holds a number of suttas (sutras, Skt.) describing the approach. Vipassana is only attainable in tandem with abiding by the five precepts of no killing, no lying, no nonconsensual sexual conduct, no stealing, and no intoxicants. These are not for simplistic moral policing but in order to purify body and mind, distractions need to be pared down if clarity is to be generated.

A case in point for contrast to the corporatist model is the use of vipassana meditation in the tradition of U Ba Kin, made popular by his student S.N. Goenka, in prisons around the world. The ten day courses have proved vital in reducing violence in prison populations among incarcerated and guards, too. The emphasis is on sila (moral/ethical discipline), samadhi (meditation), and puñña (wisdom.) People come out of these courses changed, not at a superficial level but much deeper. They have begun the purification and disciplining of the mind and understanding the nature of what-is. Additionally, there is an opening up of the heart to the suffering of others and the desire to realize anatta/anatman, to understand that there is no static inherent entity commonly called the self. This breaks up the fixation on a limited sense of being and provides room to explore freedom and compassion as dynamic functions of existence. Hardly something that would be supported in a corporate or militaristic context.

These utilitarian uses of these techniques or approaches are understandable. We live in a pragmatic, capital- and capitalist-intensive world. It appears increasingly that relationships are as transactional as business deals and anything that drives business more efficiently is a tool to be employed. That what corporations and military structures want to use for developing better and more -well – efficient workers and personnel was originally developed to provide the ground for liberation from cyclic existence and to become more fully human, is inconsequential.

Therein lies the rub. To my thinking, what is being taught is nothing less than the path to liberation stripped of all that makes it liberating. Absent compassion for others and all life, and the wisdom to choose what is good and meaningful, and abandoning both to ensure a promotion or a raise or to kill/slaughter (okay, “defend”) better, all that is being offered is one more way to fall asleep, to continue and extend ignorance. We grow increasingly dull, despite sitting, sitting, sitting. Why? Because no one wants us to be awake, to question, to ask why and to call people higher up the food chain to account.

Perhaps the classes focus on chewing a raising and simply being in the present moment to its texture and flavor, all in the hope that this is transferable to being calm and awake later. But it’s entirely possible that at some point, a programmer may get a glimpse of what can be. Perhaps if that spread within the organization that would result in some corporate change in goal. A new world created within the shell of the old, as it were. Realistically, I suspect that such change will come only over a vast period of time, if it comes at all.