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!
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