Mindfulness – An era
There is an obligation and a considered debt I owe to mindfulness. Personally it’s afforded me many treasures and immense teaching experiences that I've shared with many hundred’s of people over the years. And given that it’s easier to teach mindfulness than it is to practice, I've become increasingly conflicted by the way mindfulness is applied in its varied mainstream guises and adaptations. Mindfulness has it's ancestry deeply rooted in Buddhism. The growing elephant in the room is that disengaging mindfulness from its Buddhist origins, namely it’s moral root and framework, is a theft no one saw coming when it crossed over from the East to the West more than 60 years ago.
Stripped of its many useful concepts and practices, mindfulness today serves as a beacon helping commercialisation prosper in the global socioeconomic terrain. Mindfulness campaigns heavily and in its promise, much like a political party vying to reach the top. It's a well oiled multi-faceted machine paying little attention to consequence, critique, ethics, philosophy and any sense of meaning.
The mindfulness I once knew from many years before, now resembles a disfigured, unrecognizable child who's lost their way home. Blinkered and ill-equipped for the big events in an increasingly changing and complex world, the sixty-plus year child seems to lack maturation, wisdom and any potential leanings that might be soulful and helpful. Absent is any capacity for depth and an unwillingness to be reflective or accountable. Could this be in any way similar to a Caucasian family adopting a child from Africa and never enquiring about the adopted child's origin, history, cultural roots, practices and language?
The acculturation of mindfulness involves big bucks and that speaks volumes.
To refrain from evil and harm, to do good and do good for others (as much as possible) are Buddhism's three main precepts. The Dalai Lama has said - "I think in short that it's best , if you're able to help others. If you're not able to do so, however, then at least do not harm others. This is the main practice."
Mindfulness as applied in the business world has never really managed to awaken the fat sleeping giant that is the amnesia of our times.
Consider a perspective of mythic proportions in the shadow of the mercurial trickster Hermes. In the following quote Jungian Analyst, Jean Shinoda Bolen describes him.
“Hermes the trickster is cunning, clever and with the ability to change shape and form. Inventive he takes what he wants by trickery or theft. He may turn out to be a con man, an unscrupulous salesman whose clever sales pitch traps people into unneeded purchases. A charming sociopath, who feels no qualms about lying or taking whatever he wants.”
Balancing a treachous slope of stress in a time of profits before people, and the inequity of power and it's distribution is unobjectionable in an age where mindfulness-on-demand assumes an air of innocence and good intention. We are encouraged to live in the present moment without judgement. Any inital attempts at sincere empathy quickly morphs into the evasive and slippery trickster known as Hermes characterised by increased apathy, indifference, unethical regulation and unsavoury disadvantages.
Don't we usually ascribe this type of behaviour to someone who is a sociopath or a bullying narcissist?
And you have noticed that it’s always YOUR problem. YOU.
It’s never a reflection of your hazardous work environment or the external factors that generate principled anxiety, stress and fear. What if the cause of the problem is structural, organisational or social? Surely people can be forgiven if their mindfulness practice no longer holds sway in workplaces who's controlling influence is to excel under enormous pressure.
What do people truly deserve?
What happened to the idea of right livelihood? Right action against lying, stealing, and greed? Is corporate empathy and equanimity even possible? How about transparency and inclusiveness? How might this feed a necessary and growing emotional intelligence? How can we develop a moral compass for which accountability to those who deserve better are recognised and cared for.
You are what you eat. You are what you pay attention to.
Steadily some of the biggest corporations in the world who have taken to mindfulness continue to go about their daily business with a selective yet discernible model of attention. The smoking mirrors of modern day mindfulness that focuses the minds of workers on behaviours such as tax reduction or out right tax avoidance (making such practices more efficient and companies even more profitable) shows how mindfulness has been corrupted. It illustrates how the profit obsessed corporate world has co-opted mindfulness to deflate the human soul. It is an arrangement that gives little acknowledgement, reward or return to its people. Its strategy is to increase efficiency and efficacy, but where is the purposeful attention to a deeper and necessary enquiry towards corporate soul searching?
What is clear, is that the hunger for corporate mindfulness does know its boundaries. It stops short of entering boardrooms and permeating management and shareholder meetings. In corporate buildings do-not-enter signs abound. Visitation rights, passes, and permits are strictly forbidden behind the doors of corporate ethics and morality as well as social and global responsibility. Is this a balanced show of mindfulness or a disproportionate way of paying attention?
The Economist, a UK business magazine went as far to say that - "Western capitalism seems to be doing more to change eastern religion than eastern religion is doing to change Western capitalism."
Commodifying mindfulness and Eastern philosophy as a calculable and efficient means for the purpose of performance, profit and competition does little to enliven our souls towards a culture that consumes itself to no end.
“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Who knew that the ever up-scaled military is using mindfulness training to help soldiers remain awake for long enough to kill? I would always feel anguish, while conveying evidence gleaned from the military, while I taught attention training in the corporate world. Secretly it was an attempt to reveal who had ethics and moral courage. The military incorporates mindfulness training into the most fundamental soldier skill, firing an M-16 rifle to harm. Attention is given to synchronised breathing on the onset of triggering the finger’s movement. It shows that modern day mindfulness is a winner for building resilience and maintaining survival, but at what cost?
Workplace respondents, both executive and middle management, were often surprised by this research but as a result more determined “I’ll have some more of that. If it can help soldiers, it can help us.” I have been teaching for a long time and I have never witnessed even a mild protest from anyone expressing abhorrence or asking why mindfulness is used as a tool to harm and kill human beings. To this day, it has always gone unnoticed. Are workplaces becoming more and more like war zones? Where is the depth of Buddhist critical thinking?
The absence of the core concerns to not harm and to not be violent are a characteristic of the secularisation and commercialisation of mindfulness.
What does mindfulness ask of us today?
What does paying attention on purpose ask of us?
We seem to owe nothing to mindfulness because it has become a lifestyle option, an entitlement that goes with everything else we expect. There's no obligation.
There’s a story of a young monk who comes barging unannounced into his master’s room shouting about another monk in the monastery, “I can’t stand him, I'll kill him, I hate him!" The master casually watches the young monk spew his venom and after some time the master interjects, “Okay, go ahead and kill. But, ensure you kill him mindfully.” With that, the young monk suddenly woke up.
The New Rule
It's the old rule that drunks have to argue
and get into fights.
The lover is just as bad. He falls into a hole.
But down in that hole he finds something shining,
worth more than any amount of money or power.
Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of the sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.
Nothing else to do.
Here's the new rule. Break the wineglass,
and fall toward the glass blower's breath.
(Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks)