8 Where you at Mindfulness?

So far we have traced a rough outline of the changes that opened historically Christian civilisations to the import of Buddhism, and the changes by which Buddhism was ‘packaged for export’ to the West. To locate ‘mindfulness’ more specifically in relation to this interchange of cultures I suggest viewing it in relation to three ‘poles’ or reference points which Jon Kabat-Zinn draws attention to in his article Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps:

“When I wrote Full Catastrophe Living... I wanted it to articulate the dharma that underlies the curriculum, but without ever using the word ‘Dharma’ or invoking Buddhist thought or authority, since for obvious reasons, we do not teach MBSR in that way. My intention ands hope was that the book might embody to whatever degree possible the dharma essence of the Buddha’s teachings put into action and made accessible to mainstream Americans facing stress, pain, and illness…from the beginning of MBSR, I bent over backward to structure it and find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, ‘New Age,’ ‘Eastern Mysticism’ or just plain ‘flakey’... This was something of an ongoing challenge, given that the entire curriculum is based on relative (for novices) intensive training and practice of meditation and yoga, and meditation and yoga pretty much defined one element of the ‘New Age’.” 

The first ‘pole’ is the medical or therapeutic pole. The second is Buddhism, more specifically Buddhist Modernism. The third is the ‘New Age’, by which Kabat-Zinn is referring to the spiritual counter-culture that gained prominence in the 1960’s with the Hippies and ‘the Summer of Love’ and had, by the 1990’s, so influenced mainstream culture that he believed that mainstream and fringe were no longer easily distinguished. Each of these poles should be thought of as dynamic and developing, like Earth’s magnetic North, rather than static and fixed like true North.

The Therapeutic Pole. This is the context in which mindfulness is being employed. Within the philosophical history outlined previously, the rejection of (Christian) religious sources for understanding the nature of humanity and the growing confidence of science as a way of exploring and explaining even the most mysterious of phenomena contributed to the emergence of psychology as a distinct field of study. At the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st Centuries, Western culture has become dominated by an understanding of humans as primarily psychological beings. In this understanding of personhood, identity is not defined by external influences (physical biology, social relationships etc). Personhood is a subjective, internal reality. Your body and the circumstances of your life are a canvas on which you express your inner being in as authentic a manner as possible. The priest’s confessional has given way to the shrink’s couch. This ethical implications of this have been explored by Charles Taylor in The Ethics of Authenticity. It’s impact on gender identity in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Truman. Medicine is interested in healing whole persons (rather than just bodies) so a redefinition of self-hood as psychological places emphasis on human needs for felt wellbeing, drawing attention to problems with subjective ‘mental health’ which need psychotherapeutic responses. Contemporary mindfulness is presented as a broadly applicable and effective psychotherapeutic tool.

The Buddhist Modernism Pole. This is the context from which mindfulness has been appropriated. Note that mindfulness has not come direct from traditional Buddhism, with its  institutions and supernatural cosmology. It arrived in the West via Buddhist modernism which had already been repackaged to align with a Western Liberal critique of religion. Buddhist

Modernism itself is presented as scientific and therapeutically oriented. Buddhist scholar David McMahan writes: 

“The interface of Buddhism and Western psychology has been one of the most prevalent frameworks of modern interpretation, especially in the West. Even the earliest revitalisers of Buddhism... emphasised the psychological elements of Buddhism. Those who have drawn parallels between Buddhism and Western psychology have highlighted the sophisticated discussions of the mind and its functions in many canonical Buddhist texts and have explicitly connected them with various Western psychological schools of thought. This began in earnest in the mid twentieth century, when Western authors began to draw parallels between Buddhism and the psychoanalytic schools of psychology. The treatment of Buddhism as a psychology granted it considerable legitimacy in the West.”

Buddhist modernism has already been through a process of ‘psychologising’ and ‘demythologising’ which McMahan defines as “the attempt to extract - or more accurately, to reconstruct - meanings viable within the context of modern world views from teachings embedded in ancient world views”. Buddhist meditation has been reinterpreted as a psychoanalytical means of bringing the sub-conscious into the conscious sphere. McMahan: “Under the influence of Jung and Fromm, the articulation of meditation in terms of analytic psychology has become a staple of popular Buddhist literature in the West”.

The New Age Pole. There is academic debate about what exactly the ‘New Age’ is. Heelas presents it as a New Religious Movement. Sutcliffe emphasises the specific end times vision which the term ‘New Age’ originally areferred to. It later came to be associated with a wide range of ‘alternative spiritualities’ characterised by an emphasis on ‘spirituality’ as an evolving, individual quest as opposed to ‘religion’ as a settled, corporate or institutional identity.  For Sutcliffe, viewing this as a homogenous ‘movement’ hides the inherent diversity. Kabat-Zinn uses the term broadly, recognising that Buddhism, New Age, and Eastern mysticism were linked within this general spiritual ‘counter-culture’ but also identifies yoga and meditation as a specific element of this culture. 

The concept of ‘spirituality’ is another outworking of the psychological view of personhood. Where religion claims authority to impose institutions, ritual, and symbolism on the basis of canonical standards, ‘spirituality’ implies a personal journey of exploration to find ritual and symbolism which express meaning, as meaning is perceived by the inner, subjective, individual identity. It need not be limited to any one practice. This means that there is an interface between meditation and yoga, and various forms of what would traditionally be labelled ‘the occult’. There are also multiple lines of intersection with the therapeutic pole. Some alternative spiritualities have a specifically therapeutic orientation (e.g. Mind-Body festivals, healing rituals, reiki, shamanism, Christian Science, chiropractics etc). There are always strong cultural connections between religion and medicine. The medical face of alternative spirituality is what is frequently referred to as ‘Holistic’ or ‘Alternative’ medicine. Hedges and Beckford say that “The holistic notion of self... is integral to New Age healing ideologies and practices”. In fact, since the late 1960’s, and the Y2K millennium celebrations, when popular end-times expectations failed to be realised, the New Age has been increasingly framed in terms of healing and well-being.

Locating Mindfulness

Where is contemporary mindfulness located in relation to these three poles? It is a practice taken from a form of Buddhism which has been demythologised, psychologised, and reconstructed within the Western liberal and scientific framework. This is the same framework in which the receiving context, the field of psychotherapy, came into existence. It employs practices considered to be elements of New Age spirituality, but the ‘New Age’ has never drawn a sharp defining line between the spiritual and the therapeutic. Indeed the founding fathers of psychoanalysis drew no sharp distinction between therapy and spirituality: Freud’s interest in the occult is widely known and Jung’s work was informed by interpretations of Buddhist concepts. The Buddhist scholar Richard Payne says that the early psychoanalysts found themselves in competition with mind-cure cults and quotes Richard Cabot who, in 1908, wrote to defend the movement:

“Psychotherapy is a most terrifying word, but we are forced to use it because there is no other which serve to distinguish us from the Christian Scientists, the New Thought people, the faith healers, and the thousand and one other schools which have in common the disregard for medical science and the accumulated knowledge of the past.”

McMahan says that “Some distinctively modern Buddhist movements occupy a sort of borderland between traditional Buddhist institutions and free-form spiritualities”. As an example of this he singles out the Vipassana meditation movement - the movement of which Jon Kabat-Zinn was a part. It was on a Vipassana retreat that he received his mindfulness ‘vision’ and ‘karmic assignment’.

Payne argues strongly that “…Buddhism has not simply been interpreted psychologically. Rather, psychotherapy, modern occultism, and Buddhist modernism arise within the same cultural milieu, and the ease with which Buddhism is interpreted as psychotherapeutic is a consequence of that background”. Each of these three dimensions are 

“...dynamically interconnected with the other, as well as to other nodes, including Romanticism, medical psychiatry, liberal Protestantism, conceptions of selfhood, and systems of social, political, and economic organisation. When we pull on any one of these three nodes, all of these others move as well”.

Indeed, if you follow Kabat-Zion’s narrative closely the change that enabled the initial acceptance of mindfulness as therapy was simply a change of language - teaching a therapeutic application of the dharma without using Buddhist terminology or appealing to Buddhist authority. The later interest in the Buddhist roots of mindfulness followed from a change to medical culture - there was no longer a risk of being rejected as flakey because the alternative culture had penetrated the mainstream so that there was no longer a binary distinction between the two. Payne says that Buddhist modernist meditation was “...promoted as a kind of mental technology. Rhetorically stripped of any devotional or ritual connotations, it was, and still is, presented as universal and transcending any particular religion”.

What has changed to make mindfulness practice “accessible to people of all faiths and none”? 

The rhetoric.

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This seems like a good place for me to take a break - I’ll pick up again in a few weeks time!

7 It’s Buddhism, Jim, but not as we know it.

So far we have considered some of the changes which opened up historically Christian, Western society to Eastern religions like Buddhism (here and here). Christian theism degraded into a cold and remote deism creating a hunger for something more tangibly spiritual, intimate, and warm. Pantheistic approaches have obvious appeal. If ‘God’ cannot be found ‘out there’ (because Enlightenment philosophy decided that all external, objective knowledge is dubious) then our only hope of finding him or her or whatever god is, is to look inside ourselves. Do we not often feel that there is some sort of transcendent quality to our deepest intuitions and emotions, our appreciation of art and music, the primal connection we have with nature, and so on? These were the main ideals of the Romantics, who idealised the beauty of the natural in reaction to the destructive mechanical darkness of rapid industrialisation. I confess that if I were not a Christian, I would rather be a fiery pantheist than a cold deist. I am in good company too. Writing in the late 1800’s, the famous Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper felt the same:

“It is not our desire to be classed with those who have no good word for pantheism  in any form. The difference between our age and the age which preceded it is too deeply marked for this. Then it was deism, cold and grave ; a rationalism which withered the spirit; a conventional affectation on every hand; a state of society such as exists in the waiting-room of the house of one dead, inanimate and weaned from every ideal. In its place we have now an age full of animation and thrift; a boiling and a fermentation of all the elements of society ; a spirit to dare everything, together with development of power which is astonishing. Were ours the choice, therefore, between frozen deism, which causes the blood at length to coagulate in the veins, and this melting pantheism, which from the midst of a tropical wealth communicates to the soul a thrill of its own delight, there would be no room for hesitation.”

So, at the end of the era known as the ‘Romantic period’,  there was an increased openness to Buddhism. However, just as the chef at your local Chinese takeaway changes his traditional recipes to suit the taste of Western customers, so traditional Buddhism needed a bit of modification. Buddhism had to be adapted to the local taste.

Adapt to Survive

The origins of Buddhism are traced to Siddhartha Gautama who lived in India around 500BC when many of the beliefs we associate with Hindu religion - like a polytheistic cosmology and reincarnation - were already prevalent. Born into a life of royalty and luxury, Siddhartha became troubled by questions of ultimate significance. Leaving the privileges of home he embraced the life of an ascetic spiritual seeker,  using meditation to explore the nature of experience. Without jettisoning every part of the Hinduistic worldview, he came to envisage a different answer to the ultimate questions about life and death.

Everything we experience, Siddhartha said, is subject to change. Suffering, or dukkha, is the result of ignorantly clinging to objects and desires which are inherently impermanent. The key to ending suffering is to stop grasping at these passing phenomena. Suffering is sustained by ignorance about the true nature of things. The experience of waking up to reality so as to let go of passing phenomena is called ‘Enlightenment’. Through his illuminating meditative experience Siddhartha Gautama became the ‘Buddha’– ‘the Enlightened One’. Through his handed-on teachings, or dharma, he became the father-figure of one of the world’s major religions: Buddhism.

Except that Buddhism is not really one religion. It is an umbrella term for a multiplicity of religious approaches which trace part of their origins to Siddhartha Gautama‘s approach to the big questions of life and suffering. Global Buddhism is typically divided into three sub-divisions, which emerged as a process of doctrinal divergence and cultural engagement. Theravāda Buddhism is commonly found in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar (Burma). Mahayana Buddhism, is typically associated with China, Nepal, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. These two traditions share many beliefs, but the Mahayana form teaches that there are set-apart ‘Bodhisattvas’ who can help lay-followers towards nirvana, where Theravada puts emphasis on monasticism and individual ‘salvation’. The Buddhism of Tibet is known as Vajrayana, and tends to have strong tantric or ritual elements. As Buddhism spread it proved extremely adaptable to the cultures it encountered and was often embraced by a process of mutual transformation. In Tibet, Buddhism absorbed elements of ‘Bon’ shamanism. In contrast Japanese Buddhism came to reflect indigenous religious concerns about funeral and burial rites. 

Buddhism remains a minority religion in the West but it has many layers. Asian immigrant communities bring with them the conservative monastic temple-based organisations of their home cultures in Japan, Tibet, Korea, or Vietnam. Second- and third- generation immigrants may have never had any direct contact with Buddhism in Asia, adding further complexity. There are also Western converts to Buddhism but they do not typically associate closely with the traditional Buddhism of immigrant communities. T.A. Tweed also refers to ‘Night-Stand Buddhists’ - those who might have a popular book of Buddhist inspirational quotes on the bed-side table but no intention of pursuing any higher form of devotion.

Buddhist Modernism

It is the Buddhism of non-traditional Western converts which is relevant to the development of Western mindfulness. As well as the major categories - Mahayana, Theravada, and Vajrayana - with their distinct national and local sub-flavours, a further distinction must be drawn between traditional and modernist forms of Buddhism. Increased contact with westerners during the Colonial era catalysed reform movements in Burma, Thailand and Sri Lanka. In order to counter the success of effective Christian missionary endeavour, some Buddhist thinkers deliberately appropriated the anti-Christian critiques of Western Modernism. They sought, Robert Sharf says, to portray Buddhism as a “rational, empirical, and therapeutically oriented tradition compatible with modern science”.  The elements of traditional Buddhism which did not fit with anti-supernatural Western thinking, (e.g. reincarnation, strict monastic vows, cosmology) were intentionally down-played or re-interpreted. For example, the spirit world of emaciated hungry ghosts whose necks are so narrow they cannot swallow anything might be interpreted in psychological terms as referring to addictions or cravings. Though this was not originally done with the intention of exporting Buddhism, it produced something quite palatable for a materialistic audience which demands low-cost instant gratification.  

Some Buddhist scholars have described this modernising process as a kind of Buddhist Protestant Reformation.  The comparison has rhetorical impact but is not very accurate. The Protestant Reformation is associated with the Renaissance era and was characterised by a return to Scriptural authority and careful textual exegesis. It made frequent appeal to earlier historical sources, acknowledged the supernatural realm. It did not aim to erase the distinction between ordained clergy and laity but merely corrected and recalibrated it. A form of Buddhism which is anti-supernatural and downgrades historical authorities and institutions – scriptural texts, historical commentaries, ordained monks, temples – has closer parallels with the Romantic ideals and immediate (as opposed to eternal) concerns of the disastrous, heretical theological liberalism of 19th Century Europe. So it is not so much a Buddhist Reformation as a Buddhist Enlightenment (which seems altogether more appropriate).

Buddhist Modernism is Buddhism, as it is typically perceived by Western society, portrayed by Western media, and embraced by Western academics. In the 1960’s, when American students began looking for alternative approaches to spirituality as part of a widespread counter-cultural movement they found what they were looking for in the spiritual-but-still-scientific approach of Buddhist Modernism. Some of these early converts may have travelled to Asia or had direct contact with monks who came to preach their message on University campuses. They then went on to become successful scientists, doctors, lawyers, and so on, and their professional status granted them a disproportionately loud voice in society. Because of the extensive influence they exercised through the media, there are now a large number of Westerners who could be called Buddhist ‘sympathisers’. They may use meditation for stress relief or as part of a generic spirituality, without identifying or committing themselves to Buddhism as a religion.

This rough outline is sufficient to locate the mindfulness movement in relation to Buddhism both geographically and historically. The movement’s core representatives are typically first-generation American converts to Modernist Buddhism who have a wide-reaching influence.  Their understanding of Buddhism differs from the vast number of Buddhists worldwide but appeals to sympathetic audiences in Western countries who are suspicious of traditional religious authorities and institutions. In seeking to present mindfulness as a user-friendly technique, it is common for Modernist Buddhists to claim that they have taken their favourite meditation techniques practice and “stripped” it “of all dogmatic and religious content” so as to make it “accessible to people of all faiths and none”. But the whole appeal of Buddhist Modernism is that it is already supposed to be religiously and dogmatically neutral. So what exactly has changed?

6 How the West was Won

So what happened? How did Western culture shift from a broadly Christian, theistic framework to the purely immanent, humanistic, pluralistic, and psychologically oriented worldview expressed in Lennon’s song Imagine? The popular way of viewing this is to treat it as a simple subtraction sum, as though this momentous shift could have occurred just by taking God out of the mix - Western society ‘grew up’ and stopped believing in God the way children grow up and stop believing in the tooth fairy. In actual fact, it is this subtraction story which is the fairytale. It took several centuries of philosophical development to construct the purely immanent, godless view of the world which is so popular in contemporary culture.

This history has been traced extensively by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his seminal work A Secular Age, in which he seek to expound what it means to be ‘secular’. More recently, Carl Truman has traced drawn on this same history to explore the origins of the sexual revolution and subsequent political debate around gender identity, in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. The development of ‘New Age’ spirituality and the Western interest in Eastern religious sources, in which we are interested here, runs in parallel. The ‘sexual revolution’ coincided with a ‘spiritual revolution’. 

Here are some key points:

(1) Theism gave way to deism.

The 16th Century Reformation broke the grip of the Roman Catholic Church. The Reformed world was not split into the natural and the supernatural, the sacred and the secular. The whole world was viewed as God’s world. This gave new impetus to the sciences and arts by freeing them from the previously imposed religious restrictions . Theology was still the ‘queen of the sciences’ but nature was an expression of the mind of God and its non-religious truths could be uncovered by scientific research and portrayed in art, for their own sake. 

However, this paved the way for a gradual exclusion of God from science. In a Reformed Christian view, God has not only created the mechanisms we see working consistently in the world, He remains intimately involved in guiding and sustaining these ‘forces of nature’. These phenomena are so observably regular that it became possible for doubters to ask whether God needed to be closely involved at all. Could he not just set them in motion and then retreat, leaving them running like clockwork? This is deism not theism. The more the world is understood in merely mechanical terms, the more distant God can become. Only once this view of a mechanical world had been constructed could people let go of a world sustained and controlled by God. A present God, became a relevant distant God, who became an increasingly irrelevant distant God, until people started wondering whether he was there at all, and whether it mattered.

(2) Philosophy turned inward.

Philosophy, too, began to develop in ways that departed from Christian orthodoxy. A key figure in this was Rene Descartes. A school of extremely sceptical thinkers were questioning whether it was possible to know anything with certainty. Descartes believed that mathematics was a form of knowledge about which you could be absolutely confident. Following mathematical patterns of deduction, he reasoned, would produce certainty in other areas too.

Being a bit of philosophical lumberjack, Descartes took out his intellectual chainsaw and began cutting down the trees of knowledge, felling anything that had any element of doubt, cutting off every branch that grew without respecting principles of mathematical deduction. He went about purging uncertainty with the enthusiasm of a sadistic Communist dictator and, when the epistemological blood-letting finally stopped, he was left with this famous piece of unassailable knowledge: “I think, therefore I am”. (It is not actually quite so unassailable as he thought but that doesn’t matter to us here). From this humble but confident foundation, he began to reconstruct a philosophical home from all the timber he had felled.

Descartes’ reconstruction still had a place for ‘God’ but a massive change had occurred. Christians believe in a God who has revealed himself - a transcendent being who breaks into immanent human to speak and act, most notably in Scripture and the Incarnation. Descartes’ God was not revealed, he was deduced intellectually. This is a seismic shift. True knowledge is not to be found by looking outside of ourselves but by relying on an internal capacity to know. God and Scripture are no longer trustworthy; innate human intuitions and reasoning are the only reliable foundations of knowledge.

Of course not everyone agreed with Descartes. Why give preference to intellectual capacities over those linked to the senses or moral conscience? Each position has been critiqued and counter-critiqued but Descartes’ new take on the foundations of knowledge was conceded. Since then, Western thinking has been basically ‘anthropocentric’ - oriented or centred around human capacities and experience - rather than metaphysical or theocentric. If the idea of ‘God’ is not revealed but rather constructed by human intellect, then meaning, morality, and religion, also have to be constructed - without reference to transcendent concepts.

(3) Much of the Christian church committed harakiri.

Rather than standing firm on its revelatory foundations many Christian thinkers surrender to the dominant influence of this deist and anthropocentric reorientation. Instead of allowing Scripture to shape their thinking and correct their moral outlook, theologians started to see their task as that of critiquing the Bible by the standards of human rationalism. The deist god was too far away to intervene in supernatural ways. Mechanistic science had no place for miracles. The Bible was not inspired inspiration but a record of human religious endeavour full of errors and myths which the modern mind simply could not accept. Humans were no longer subject to the Bible; the Bible was now subject to human beings. The effect of this theological suicide on churches was devastating. Christianity without an almighty God who breaks in to human experience to make himself known, is not Christianity at all. Christianity without God is dead, cold, legalistic, moralistic, spiritually dissatisfying, and powerless to have any positive impact on the human condition. 

This corresponded with the first access which readers in America and Europe had to Eastern esoteric and religious books. With the rise of Western imperialism in the East and academic interest in ‘orientalism’, previously unknown Buddhist and other texts were translated into English. These new translations would not have had an extensive readership but they were of interest to spiritually hungry people, many of Puritan descent, who had grown disillusioned with their patents cold and powerless, so-distant-might-as-well-be-absent deist god. Sceptical of the Bible’s credibility, its exclusive authority claims no longer restrained interest in other religions, which might offer real, but previously taboo, spiritual insights. The pantheistic outlook of these exotic religions offered the heat, vitality, and immediacy of spiritual experience so absent from the deformed, mutant Christian-deism of the day.

Hence the 19th Century gave rise to numerous pseudo-Christian ‘cults’ which claimed recent - immanent? - new revelations and resorted to the immediate experience of occult practices. It also laid the foundation for what would become the 20th Century’s ‘New Age’ movement. The association between Buddhism and the New Age which Jon Kabat-Zinn was so cautious to conceal at the beginning of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was not merely a perception. The import of Buddhism, the development of the New Age, and the now-common concept of ‘spirituality’ (as a distinct category to religion), were  inseparable and intertwined from their inception. The have never had a distinct existence in the West but emerged together from the vacuum left by the progressive erosion of Christian religion. In the words of Leigh Eric Schmidt, whose study Restless Souls - the Making of American Spirituality has informed the narrative presented here, “The American invention of “spirituality” was, in fair measure, a search for a religious world larger than the British Protestant inheritance”.

5. Just Imagine

How did mindfulness enter the mainstream of Western medicine? To answer this question we have to recognise cultural forces which were at work long before Jon Kabat-Zinn published his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) method. Kabat-Zinn has already hinted at the two important historical ‘streams’ it is necessary for us to consider - changes that have occurred in Western culture, and changes that have occurred to Buddhism. We’ll start with Western culture.

Picture in your mind, John Lennon getting in a time-machine and travelling back to the year 1500AD, somewhere in Europe. He tells people he is a musician so they hand him a lute and ask if he takes requests. Unfamiliar with the popular Latin mass currently at the top of the medieval charts, he starts to sing one of his own compositions....

Imagine there's no heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today.

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion, too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace.

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world.

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one.

How would the crowd react at this medieval gig? They would not be waving cigarette lighters. They would probably start waving flaming torches as they take poor John and burn him at the stake. Why? Because imagining these things might be “easy if you try” for people living in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. But it would not have been easy for people living in the 16th Century. Lennon’s ‘easy imaginations’ would have been completely implausible. Trying to imagine them would have been socially and religiously dangerous.

In the medieval mind there was, unquestionably, a heaven and a hell. Death - in child birth, from plagues and illness, or countless other things - was never more than a heart beat away. It didn’t happen in clinical hospitals but in the home where everyone could here the screams and see and smell the puss and the blood and the vomit. It was an everyday experience to be confronted by questions of ‘eternity’ and what might happen after this life has ended.

The answers to these questions were provided by the Roman Catholic church. The architecture of cathedrals was designed to portray God’s majesty and draw people’s attention up towards the heavens. Art depicted events from biblical history and portrayed spiritual beings like angels and demons. Schools and Universities, where they existed, were wider functions of the religious organisation of society. In cases of serious disease, beyond the reach of the fairly primitive medicine, the only hope was for a miraculous healing and this too fell to the remit of the church. The confession booth served many of the purposes now fulfilled by psychologists and psychiatrists. Problems were interpreted as ‘sin’ through a moral lens, which would now be viewed as psychological and through a medical lens. Where our modern psychological struggles are by definition internal and individualistic, sin had consequences for the whole of society. To depart from the church’s teaching, practice, or standards of behaviour could bring God’s judgment on everybody.

So you could not just “live for today”. There was no modern contraception, so every opportunity to pursue the pleasure of sexual intimacy might produce a pregnancy, and with it the risk of loosing wife and baby in childbirth. You had to plant your seed in spring in order to get a  harvest in the autumn or your family simply would not eat - all the time keeping one eye on God (and any other spirits who might live nearby) in case they brought a flood, a plague, or a famine. There was a social pressure towards conformity because if your neighbours transgressed the famine would come to the whole community regardless of your own good behaviour.

Countries and religions had a much more ‘objective’ status. God ordained the kings and the lords of the land, just as he ordained the popes and priests in the church. It is almost certain that you had never heard of a Hindu or a Buddhist but you might have heard about the political Crusades against the Muslim nations, which were justified on religious grounds because they did not submit to the Christian order. The world beyond Europe was largely unknown - in fact for most people, the world beyond their village or local town was largely unknown. High-yield industrial farming didn’t exist, the idea of a food supply sufficient to fill every hungry tummy would have been unimaginable, and if a famine hit Ethiopia you would never hear about it anyway. The concept of a universal brotherhood of man sharing everything would be utterly incomprehensible. Where resources are clearly limited, fighting over those resources is often unavoidable.

If John Lennon sang his song to a medieval audience the dominant intellectual and cultural framework simply would not expand to incorporate his vision. He would be seen as a ‘dreamer’ and he really would be the only one. But his imaginations would not be received as a positive ideal for the future of humanity. Such a drastic departure from the social order could only be envisaged by a devilishly deluded madman - a heretic - and the hierarchy had ways of dealing with such people.

The world which John Lennon imagined:

1. Exists entirely in an ‘immanent frame’ - that is, there are no transcendent beings, meanings, causes, standards, purposes, or destinies.

2. Is thoroughly Humanistic - its values are defined solely in terms of universal human peace and well-being.

3. Is Pluralistic - religion is something which can be done away with, a cause of human disunity which is not worth contesting. If one religion possessed the revealed way to truly access one God, it would surely be worth fighting for. For Lennon, no religion has this objective truth status. Religions are subjective constructions which divide people by their superficial distinctions - people who are in actual fact part of one undivided humanity.

4. Is Psychologically oriented - reality is not determined by externally existing spiritual realities, forces of nature, or social frameworks. New realities which are conceived of subjectively, and psychologically, in imaginations and dreams, can actually construct a different world: if we were all to imagine things this way, then one day “the whole world will live as one”.

Today many Western people do envisage the world which Lennon dreamed of (although the world doesn’t seem to be any more united or peaceful as a result). I hope to show that it is in this vision of the world which Western mindfulness has found its home. We will need to return to this story in the next blog.

4. Do or Do Not. There Is No Why (Until Later).

The previous blog explored some of the immediate historical context of modern mindfulness. It looked at Jon Kabat-Zinn’s stated intention of bringing Buddhist ideology into mainstream medicine without using Buddhist terminology. 

“...Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) was developed as one of a possibly infinite number of skillful means for bringing the dharma into mainstream settings. It has never been about MBSR for its own sake. It has always been about the M. And the M is a very big M...”

At the start, he went out of his way to hide this, knowing that any  religious or spiritual associations would hinder his project, but in recent years he has spoken openly of his previously hidden rationale. His article Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and The Trouble with Maps (Contemporary Buddhism, May 2011) helps to explain this shift in policy.

As we have seen, Kabat-Zinn “...bent over backward...” to avoid MBSR being seen as “...Buddhist, ‘New Age,’ ‘Eastern Mysticism’ or just plain ‘flakey’.” He began to rethink this policy in the early 1990’s when Thich Nhat Hanh offered an endorsement for the book Full Catastrophe Living. Although the statement “...showed that he had grasped the essence of the book and the line it was trying to walk,” Kabat-Zinn says “I did think twice about it”:

“It precipitated something of a crisis in me for a time, because not only was Thich Nhat Hanh definitely a Buddhist authority, his brief endorsement used the very foreign word dharma not once, but four times. Yet what he said spoke deeply and directly to the original vision and intention of MBSR. I wondered: ‘Is this the right time for this? Would it be skillful to stretch the envelope at this point? Or would it in the end cause more harm than good?’”

In the end, Thich Nhat Hanh’s endorsement was used as the foreword to the book. Why the change? Kabat-Zinn realised that there had been a shift in the attitudes of Western culture and medicine.

“Perhaps by 1990 there was no longer such a strong distinction between the so-called New Age and the mainstream world. So many different so-called counter-cultural strands had penetrated the dominant culture by then it was hard to make any binary distinctions about what was mainstream and what was fringe.”

Media presentation of yoga and meditation had helped to normalise Eastern practices in the Western mind. Having cleared the first few hurdles with regards acceptance by health professionals, there was sufficient momentum and interest in MBSR to begin explaining its origins without undermining the whole project.

“Perhaps it was important to be more explicit about why it might be valuable to bring a universal dharma perspective and means of cultivating it into the mainstream world”.

If you have ever spent time living or working in a Buddhist culture you will notice something distinctly ‘Eastern’ about Kabat-Zion’s strategy here. In Western cultures, influenced over millennia by the philosophical questions and methods of Ancient Greece, and the propositional-doctrinal emphasis of Christianity, we typically like to start with ‘understanding’ and then move on to ‘doing’. Before we begin anything we want to know the ‘whys and wherefores’. We start with the idea.

In simplistic terms, Eastern religious thought can often be seen to proceed in the opposite direction. You ‘do’ what your tribe or your family have always done because it works. It is not necessary to understand why - explanations can come later, if necessary. For example, if you travel in Tibetan areas of Central Asia, you will see various religious symbols painted on to houses. Inquire what these symbols mean and, quite often, the inhabitants will answer “I don’t know, ask a monk”. They start with the activity. Intellectual understanding is secondary and even optional.

Kabat-Zinn’s strategy involves getting people to start doing mindfulness. You have to do it first. Only after you have experienced the benefits of the activity, and become open to its possibilities, will the ideas that underpin mindfulness be explained. Within the Buddhist framework which he employs this is not considered unethically deceitful; it is a ‘skillful means’ necessary to advancing the perceived greater end, namely, bringing the dharma to bear on lived experience in a transformative way.

“It is my hope that people attracted to this field will come to appreciate the profound transformative potential of the dharma in its universal and skillful applications through their own meditation training and practice. Mindfulness can only be understood from the  inside out. It is not one more cognitive-behavioural technique to be deployed in a behavioural change paradigm, but a way of being and a way of seeing that has

profound implications for understanding the nature of our minds and bodies and for living life as if it really mattered... Without this living foundation, none of what really matters is available to us in ways that are maximally healing, transformative compassionate and wise. Of course, ultimately there is no inside and outside, only one seamless whole, awake and aware.”

This quote raises a number of fascinating questions about the relationship of mindfulness to cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), the widespread sense of meaninglessness in which people are looking for ways to ‘live life as though it matters’, and the pantheism or monism articulated in the last sentence. But I am still trying to outline the historical context in which mindfulness has become widely accepted. This is not just important in understanding what modern mindfulness is. It will also help to illuminate the broader spiritual atmosphere of the contemporary western world and the intersection of spirituality and medicine - with much wider general application.

The take home point from this blog is that in Kabat-Zinn’s account, the acceptance of MBSR did not just involve changes to Eastern mindfulness, it also involved changes in Western culture and medicine.  He strategically obscured the underlying worldview until mindfulness practice had gained acceptance by a medical community which had also changed in becoming more open to alternative health care approaches. Can we explain these changes?

3. Mindfulness: It’s a Magical World...

The previous blog quoted Candy Gunther Brown’s claim that the recruitment of mindfulness into the medical mainstream followed a similar model to the attempted recruitment of Transcendental Meditation (TM): “translation into Western language and settings, popular recognition, adoption within scientific research in powerful institutions, and the use of sophisticated marketing public relations techniques”. ‘Mindfulness’ was the word chosen to represent a form of meditation in early English translations of Pali and Sanskrit Buddhist texts. It gained credibility through the advocacy of Western Buddhist converts with academic credentials in science and psychology. The medical breakthrough is credited to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme. Further popularising occurred through the support of high-profile peace activists, celebrities, and media.

In contrast to mindfulness, the medical promotion of TM failed. TM was not presented as a simple stress-reduction technique but retained its explicit connections to Hindu religion and supernaturalism. In tracing the East-West translation process, it is necessary to recognise that in Buddhist religious contexts mindfulness also has a definite ‘supernatural’  orientation. The key points on this I take from Jeff Wilson, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies, University of Waterloo, in his book Mindful America - The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014).

In traditional Buddhism, meditation is not a normal part of life for lay-people. It is a pursuit for monastics, those who have reached an advanced stage through multiple reincarnations, and for whom Enlightenment may be within reach. Meditation is carried out under instruction in religious community and balanced with philosophical study and real world ethics. ‘Mindfulness’ is but one form of meditation among many and it is associated with

“…the highest concentrative trance meditative states; supernatural

powers of hearing and sight; recollection of thousands of past lives…

mind reading, the ability to multiply one’s body; invisibility; the ability to 

pass through walls, dive into the earth and walk on water; 

supernatural flight…etc”. (Wilson, 106).

Strange or supernatural experiences were not unknown to the earliest advocates of medical mindfulness. In a PhD thesis exploring the psychological impacts of intensive mindfulness meditation and mindfulness retreats, which was submitted in 1977, Jack Kornfield reported that mindfulness can result in disturbing emotional experiences including “nightmares, anger, pain, mood swings, fear, paranoia, hatred, uncontrollable body movements, hallucinations, and psychological tension”. Wilson comments 

“Another class of effects erased from current scientific discussions

 of mindfulness is psychic phenomena. Significant numbers of mindfulness

practitioners on retreat reported manifestations of telepathy,

precognition, or out-of-body experiences”. (Wilson, 82-83).

Kornfield’s research also reported positive effects including reductions of stress and anxiety and suggested the application of mindfulness for pain reduction, before Kabat-Zinn presented MBSR to the world. Wilson notes that whilst this dissertation is “...thoroughly psychological...” it is “...also thoroughly Buddhist... Though Buddhism is framed as psychology, it is also overtly and indelibly religious in his presentation” (Wilson, 82-83).

Elsewhere, Kornfield has acknowledged that in South East Asia, monks who are meditation masters are “revered for their qualities of mind, their purity and saintliness, and in many cases the powers they are believed to possess”. However, Wilson says that Kornfield follows Asian tradition by deliberately avoiding discussion of “powers” developed through meditation. He:

“…acknowledges that powers are common among Asian meditators,

and that this accounts for a significant portion of their popularity, but

refuses to discuss them with his English-reading American audience”.

It is unnecessary for Asian mindfulness teachers to talk about these ‘magical’ phenomena because “they live in cultures that already expect meditation teachers to manifest such powers”. This is widely recognised by mindfulness teachers with experience of practice in Asia. Teachers and students trained exclusively in the West are, says Wilson, “often completely unaware that mindfulness is embedded in magical contexts in Asia” (Wilson 107).  

Western mindfulness teachers acknowledge that mindfulness has religious, Buddhist origins, without ever going into detail regarding what those origins entailed. They rely heavily on the claim that Jon Kabat-Zinn secularised mindfulness by removing it from this religious Buddhist context, thus making it ‘accessible to people of all faiths and none’. So what exactly did Kabat-Zinn do? Trained as a microbiologist, Kabat-Zinn’s first encounter with Buddhism was at MIT in 1966. He began meditating every day and received further training when he accepted the role of Director at the Cambridge Zen Centre, becoming a student of Korean Zen Master, Seung Sahn. Kabat-Zinn struggled with a sense of disjunction between his day-job as a biology lecturer and his meditation teaching and practice.

In his own words:

“In 1976, I went to work at the almost brand-new University of Massachusetts

Medical School. All the while, my koan about what I was really supposed to be

 doing with my life in terms of right livelihood was unfolding in the background.”

(A ‘koan’ is a kind of paradoxical riddle used in some forms of Buddhism to move one’s thinking away from ignorance and towards enlightenment).

“On a two-week vipassana retreat at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS)

in Barre, Massachusetts, in the Spring of 1979, while sitting in my room 

one afternoon about Day 10 of the retreat, I had a ‘vision’ that lasted maybe

 10 seconds. I don’t really know what to call it, so I call it a vision. It was 

rich in detail and more like an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable

 connections and their implications. It did not come as a reverie or a thought

 stream, but rather something quite different, which to this day I cannot fully

 explain and don’t feel the need to.

I saw in a flash not only a model that could be put in place, but also the longterm

 implications of what might happen if the basic idea was sound and could be

 implemented in one test environment—namely that it would spark new fields

 of scientific and clinical investigation, and would spread to hospitals and medical

 centres and clinics across the country and around the world, and provide right

 livelihood for thousands of practitioners. Because it was so weird, I hardly ever

 mentioned this experience to others. But after that retreat, I did have a better

 sense of what my karmic assignment might be. It was so compelling that I

 decided to take it on wholeheartedly as best I could. Pretty much everything 

I saw in that 10 seconds has come to pass…” 

He explains how he proceeded in this karmic assignment.

“…From the beginning of MBSR, I bent over backward to”

avoid “the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, ‘New Age,’ 

‘Eastern Mysticism’ or just plain ‘flakey’.” 

This was difficult because:

“…the entire curriculum is based on relatively… intensive training

and practice of meditation and yoga, and meditation and yoga

pretty much defined one element of the ‘New Age’.”  

He remained fully committed to teaching the Buddhist ‘dharma’ which aims:

“...to elucidate the nature of suffering and its root causes, as well 

as provide a practical liberation from suffering”. 

However, in the public sphere: 

“this is to be undertaken, of course, 

without ever mentioning the word ‘dharma’”. 

(J. Kabat-Zinn, "Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps," Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1 2011): 282, 287-288).