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:
- Exists entirely in an ‘immanent frame’ - that is, there are no transcendent beings, meanings, causes, standards, purposes, or destinies.
- Is thoroughly Humanistic - its values are defined solely in terms of universal human peace and well-being.
- 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.
- 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.
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