If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Tranquillise Him

I marvel at the subtle and slippery nature of mindfulness in all of its guises, whether that be as a theoretical construct, a psychological process or a set of practices. Mindfulness resists all efforts to be pinned down. It presents itself as a vast canvas for our projections.

And project we do. The fields of health, education, business, politics, sport and entertainment are awash with mindful-this and mindful-that. Do such manifestations herald a kind of cultural transformation? What kind of future do they point towards? It has been 40-odd years since the ‘mindful revolution’ began and 20 years since it gained traction, yet any semblance of a ‘mindful society’ appears as far away as ever.

Cultural Appropriation

Ronald McBuddha

This is not to undervalue the many good-hearted and well-intentioned mindfulness practitioners in western societies or the growing army of trained facilitators who help stressed and struggling people through teaching meditation skills. But the evidence base for any systemic change is meagre. What we are witnessing is hardly a revolution, is it? The last 20 years demonstrate considerably more success at monetising mindfulness than mastering it.

What might the West have missed in the uptake? Answers to that pressing question can be found in both the forces that shaped mindfulness’s journey westward and the toxic influence of contemporary neoliberal ideology it contacted along the way. These would fill a book. Since this is a blog post, let me contribute just one image that captures something of the current predicament. Like all archetypal symbolism, this image shows up all over the place but rarely receives attention.

Unconscious Awareness

Meet the ‘crouching buddha’ (sometimes called the ‘resting buddha’). In the UK, where I live, statues like these can be found in gardens and on mantelpieces across the land. Even without any knowledge of Buddhist iconography, one might guess that this is a non-traditional form.

Crouching Buddha

Curiously, nobody seems to know when or where this form originated. I canvassed a selection of world-renowned scholars of Buddhist art, museum curators and antique dealers. None of them could say for sure. 

However, they did make highly uniform and educated guesses: the form is contrived; it is most likely between 20 – 40 years old; it was probably first manufactured in East Asia for the western consumer market. All asserted that its function is purely decorative, unlike traditional Buddha forms. As a symbol for western mindfulness, it’s a neat fit.

Ambivalent Attachment

‘Mindfulness’ may not be ‘Buddhist’ but Buddhism is fundamental to understanding mindfulness. Put on the spot, few western mindfulness ‘experts’ (trainers, researchers, advocates etc.) now dispute this. Yet many convey an ambivalent or confused relationship with Buddhism. When I have probed such people on this matter, their prevailing tendency is to retreat, one way or another, into the comfortable certainties of a secular-materialist worldview that has gone largely unexamined.

Each to their own. But the irrational part is these people are equally unwilling to disregard the Buddhist fundament. They may have a limited grasp of how contemporary subdivisions of traditional, secular and immanent Buddhism contextualise much of what they do, but they love the rootsy legitimacy that ‘ancient wisdom’ confers upon their work and so are happy to employ the B-word in fast and loose ways.

I wonder if these people privately worry that mindfulness de-ethicised and reduced to proficiency in present-moment attentiveness doesn’t make great sense. Perhaps they even intuit that the tangible, pragmatic benefits of meditation are necessarily linked to larger philosophical and spiritual enquiries that go beyond all isms. If so, such thoughts are rarely shared.  

‘Code-switching’

This ambivalence about the origin and complex nature of mindfulness often takes the form of ‘code-switching’ (read all about it in this important book). It works like this: the mindfulness advocate when engaging people in a secular setting (e.g. a school, boardroom or a funding organisation) deliberately downplays (‘switches off’) any reference to Buddhism. 

When that same advocate is around others open to Buddhism or where there is a perceived benefit to promote the spiritual aspect of mindfulness, they will ‘switch on’ the Buddhism to declare their mindfulness programme to be a vehicle for teaching the dharma.

I have been running mindfulness courses in secular settings for 14 years and can attest to how easy it is to ‘code-switch’, often without realising I’m doing it. It is deceptive and misleading. It leads to confusion for all concerned. It is not a good look for practices supposedly grounded in honesty and mutual respect. I feel relieved – a little embarrassed too – when my words are challenged and my insincerity is brought to my attention.

I wonder, too, if ‘code-switching’ might provide a clue for understanding some of the current dislocation of western mindfulness. For it is the kind of psychological sleight-of-hand that we tend to resort to when we don’t totally understand what we’re dealing with, or we haven’t thought things through, but we’re not willing to admit it. Rather than acknowledge our inconsistencies, we will obfuscate, prevaricate, complicate – do anything, in fact, to ensure that we remain in a state of comfortable ignorance. The crouching buddha nicely symbolises such a state of wilful clouding over.

Wakey Wakey

Sitting Buddha

Traditionally, Buddhist statues serve a purpose: to remind the observing human of wholesome qualities – joy, compassion, wisdom and serenity – they already possess and may further cultivate. Statues come in numerous styles and postures but they commonly display a certain vigour and grace. 

Statues symbolise not just the historical buddha but your inner one. ‘Buddha’ is an honorific title meaning ‘one who is awake’. It refers to the wise and compassionately aware aspect of you. How ironic that the crouching buddha form is ‘one who is not awake’ – a representation of a being who holds nothing in mind and is ignore-ant of the world.

An interesting thing you can do with Buddhist statues is to imitate them. For example, if you sit like the buddha in the adjacent image – grounded through the sitting bones, upright spine, shoulders relaxed – over time you will notice an energetic balance of mental calmness, stability and alertness. These qualities lay a solid foundation for the development of one’s practice. 

By contrast, try sitting like the crouching buddha. When I tried it, I felt confined and detached. It’s the sort of posture I could easily slide into if I were feeling listless or bored. It’s a posture that also engenders a certain self-consciousness and conceit, which are shadow qualities of mindfulness.

Crouching Buddha Hidden Meaning

On the upside, here’s a little scoop about the crouching buddha: he may be contrived but he has a precedent. According to Dr. Christian Luczanits, senior lecturer in Tibetan and Buddhist Art at SOAS, there is a unique representation of the historical Buddha leaning on his knee from the Gandharan period (3^rd century BCE – 1200 CE), which resurfaced in a modified form in 13^th century China. It signifies the moment after enlightenment when the Buddha is reflecting on whether or not to teach his experience.

Thinking Buddha

It is, therefore, a thinking posture, not dissimilar to more recent sculptures such as Rodin’s The Thinker. Note that the head remains alert. It seems that even at his most vexed and in need of a bit of self-propping-up, the Buddha was regarded as a person concerned with how best to engage with the world. 

Alas the same cannot be said for his crouchy descendent, who is not thoughtful, regards only himself and is, therefore, a fitting symbol for all forms of McMindfulness that have wheedled their way into our lives over the last two decades.

So, the next time you see an advert for mindful baking, or read about soldiers improving their kill rate through meditation practice, or hear some ‘expert’ explaining how they can plot your mindful awareness on their new graph, you may want to pause to consider the subtle and slippery nature of mindfulness in all of its guises. And breathe. These are the proverbial blind men surrounding the proverbial elephant, knowledge slipping through their fingers. Be careful around them because they have the power to blind you too.

In these testing times, navigating the world of mindfulness is a job in itself. Know that you are not alone. There are many of us, sheltering indoors, doing our best to wise up. In idle moments we prop ourselves up on our knees in front of Netflix and watch Headspace: Unwind Your Mind the way you can’t not look at a car crash, while out in the back garden our little buddha statues doze quietly, cold as stone. It’s no revolution but at least it’s a wake-up call.

Grand Narratives (III)

Where and how do you ‘situate’ mindfulness in your life? The previous two posts overview why this is a valuable question to consider. Wise reflection is an essential part of practice. Without it, we lose our bearings. Similarly, if we do not develop self-reflexivity, we become blind to how we are swayed by assumptions and narratives that may not be coherent, useful or true.

Mining your beliefs about mindfulness is always illuminating. It reveals what you identify with and, by extension, something about the nature of identity. It deepens your practice by opening up new channels for it. Nothing is off limits on the path of awareness. Mindfulness meets its potential in its engagement with the fundamentals of existence – meaning, identity, freedom, death – without any compulsive fascination but with the greatest sensitivity.

What’s the Story?

Below are fifteen avenues for self-enquiry. You could parachute any one of them into your depths and see how it lands. You could do this in any way you choose, such as through contemplation, dialogue or artistic expression. The method is not the point. The point is to give time to exploring yourself deeply.

• Why do I practise mindfulness? In what specific ways does my practice give me a sense that I am making the most out of life?
  
  
• Do I deliberately cultivate or aspire to attain particular mental states through meditation? Why?
  
  
• How is my practice informed by ideas about health and connection? What does health mean to me?
  What about connection?
  
  
• Do I believe that mindfulness practice is linked to wisdom, empathy or ethical engagement? Why? If I hold no such beliefs, what capacities do I believe my practice links to?
  
  
• Who or what garners my interest, respect or adoration in the mindfulness world? Who or what does the opposite, perhaps even repels me? What do my preferences have to tell me?
  
  
• If I achieved my goals in life, what would change about my practice? Would I approach it differently? Would I relate to others and the world differently? What role would mindfulness assume in how I conducted my life?
  
  
• How do I view the current human era? Do I perceive a crisis or end-time? Do I believe there is a great turning, a new era beckoning? Do I believe neither? What ideas does my mind harbour about human existence over time? 
  
  
• Do I hold particular beliefs about the nature of reality? Who or what do I have abiding trust or confidence in? What do the paradigms of science, materialism, religion and spirituality mean to me? How do these relate to practising mindfulness? How are my beliefs in turn affected by my practice? If all such ideas are insignificant to me, do I think that I have no metaphysical beliefs, that I am free of all baggage? If so, what is this belief?
  
  
• What do I consider mind to be? A non-physical, personal faculty? An impersonal process? A function of the brain in the skull? An emergent property of energy? Something else?
  
  
• What do I understand to be the relationship(s) between body and mind? 
  
  
• When I am mindfully aware of thoughts, who or what do I think is doing the thinking?
  
  
• How does my practice contribute to my self-image and/or inform my sense of being part of something bigger than me (e.g. a community of sentient beings, a transcendent value, a cosmological matrix)?
  
  
• How are self-worth, personal popularity, status or material ambition bound up in my motivations to practise? If I think none of these are factors, what other anxieties or insecurities might compel me to keep practising?
  
  
• If I knew I had one month to live, would mindfulness practice figure in my plans? If so, to what degree? What would be meaningful about spending time in this way? 
  
  
• Do I hold particular beliefs about what happens to consciousness upon physical death? How do these beliefs affect my practice?
  
  

Click here for Part 1.

Life By Autocue

As outlined in the previous post, it can be tricky to fully know what the mind is up to, moment to moment, as life unfolds in its typically novel, mundane, stimulating and ambiguous ways.

Investigating this process through mindfulness reveals intriguing truths about the behaviour of the mind. Many mental responses, such as reactivity to perceived threats, are hardwired. Learned habits and tendencies can seem equally fixed. Through practising awareness, we come to realise that we routinely operate in automatic ways.

Automaticity is not a bad thing. It confers advantages through allowing mental attention to dexterously flit to phenomena unrelated to the task-in-hand. Hence we can walk down a street and fiddle on our phones and make plans for next week because the act of walking down a street is not something we need to figure out or perfect anymore.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

The downside to automaticity is that we fail to show up for the occasion of our own lives and so rob ourselves of its innate vividness and many of its joys. You probably know the experience (retrospectively at least) of becoming so distracted that you lose all sense of what happens next, only to ‘come to’ sometime later.

The potential for profound disconnection from present moment experience is all the greater in this age of the internet and social media. With powerful technologies at our fingertips, we are encouraged and seduced into consuming information speedily and superficially. How our minds love to skim vast directories of language and inexhaustible banks of imagery in their quest for instant gratification.

Even when we are relatively undistracted and alive to our sensory experience, it is easy for our minds to unconsciously react to a flutter of boredom, a pang of desire or an unpleasant sensation and, before we know it, our fingers are swiping screens and our eyes or ears are glued to some arbitrary object in a virtual world. Before smartphones came along, the possibilities for such mental hijacking weren’t quite so endless.

Non-Superficiality

When we get distracted, we act without awareness of acting, that is, we do not see and comprehend what is happening as it is happening. Often it goes something like this: a subtle feeling arises, either pleasant or unpleasant (e.g. sensual desire, boredom, restlessness) => the mind reacts by seeking to either maintain or build up the feeling (if it’s pleasant) or to flee from or get rid of the feeling (if it’s unpleasant) => the reaction conditions a behaviour, such as the physical act of reaching for a phone or the mental act of going into thought and fantasy.

By contrast, when there is an awareness of the initial feeling, this chain reaction does not happen in the same way. The mind does not run off. It stays with the felt experience. Blind reactivity abates. Ensuing actions arise out of clear intentions. There is a sense of stability and agency.

This is mindfulness: the ability to stay with experience for a prolonged time, and to really investigate it in detail. It is the opposite of distractedness. In fact, one of the classical characterisations of mindfulness (from the Abhidhamma, an early collection of teachings in the Buddhist tradition) is ‘non-superficiality’. This is the understanding of how mindfulness does not skim over the surface or ascertain in a shallow way. It sinks into an object and facilitates a deeper knowing of it.

When you are mindful, experience deepens. This is a natural capacity you have, which is cultivated through practice. It is a lot more likely to happen when your phone is switched off.

Mindfulness of Habits (I)

Our patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving can be so habitual and automatic that we barely notice them. As long as they remain outside awareness, we reinforce them.

Every moment offers a potential for change, whether it be by one small degree or an intentional and wholesale refusal to run the same tired script for how to respond to problem x or situation y.

Notice how you can make a choice, right now, to pause reading and focus your attention on something else.

Notice how you can choose to move some part of your body or click elsewhere or engage in a different activity. Notice how you might choose to decline that invitation and carry on reading. Whatever you do, it’s your choice.

Being aware of how we respond in the moment is a gateway to greater possibilities. To become adept at knowing when we are in the grip of negative habitual patterns will likewise offer us easier release from them. The effort required is no more and no less than waking up from our compulsive reactivity to the spontaneous flow of thoughts and feelings.

Lost and Found

‘Waking up’ is something to be cultivated. Otherwise we dwell in customary states of blunt attention and dull awareness.

One time, on a train, I watched a woman standing motionless and staring at the carriage wall for several minutes. She was, as the telling phrase goes, lost in thought. Her eyes wide and unblinking, she was oblivious to everything around her, as locked-in to her experience as she was locked-out to everything around her.

Then, as if released from a magic spell, her eyes suddenly blinked, her body unfroze, and she was ‘back’, looking around, visibly startled at discovering where she was.

Her experience exemplifies many of the moments in all of our lives. Each of us has the capacity to be as absent to what’s happening as we have of being present to it.

Click here for Part 2.