In the first part of this essay, I wondered whether the practice of Mindfulness runs the danger of developing into a detached position (a term I shall explain shortly) but then spent the vast majority of the remaining paragraphs describing Mindfulness in very positive terms. I related my own beneficial experience of it. I stated twice: “Mindfulness works.” Finally, I ended with the rhetorical question,
“What’s not to like?”
It is time to answer that question now.
The first port of call in such a discussion should always be the text. And my concern is that a close reading of the text – in this case, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living – could lead to an interpretation that the goal of Mindfulness (healing, by learning to live in the very beneficial “here and now”) is something that is set against the pernicious world of our thoughts and emotions. It also runs the risk of ignoring or diminishing the essential role others have to play in our lives. I hedge my bets in my earlier sentence by using the phrase “could lead to”, because I find Kabat-Zinn to be very ambiguous in defining what he is railing against. He is very thorough in explaining what he understands by the “here and now”, and so the goal of Mindfulness is outlined in clear relief. On the other hand, what he is fighting against is rather less well defined. In some places he acknowledges the essential value of thoughts, emotions and other people; but in other passages he is highly critical. I believe this ambiguity borders on inconsistency, so it is hard to say where he really stands. But on balance, his thrust seems indeed to be anti-thought, anti-emotion.
It should be noted that those two sentiments in themselves do not directly lead to a detached position; however, they might be called stepping stones toward it. In the end, I believe we will see that although Kabat-Zinn doesn’t ultimately endorse detachment, to a certain extent he points in that direction, and his singular failure not to disavow the position and its dangers is a trap to the casual reader. Kabat-Zinns sins are therefore sins of omission.
But first, what might I mean by “a detached position”? The definition I am after approaches somewhat the technical term “solipsism”, but in a certain sense is less severe, while at the same time more encompassing. Solipsism can be defined as a belief that only the self exists, and/or a self-absorption, an unawareness of the needs and wants of other people. (I draw on the Wiktionary definition, which appears here: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/solipsism). That is a rather more active, aggressive definition than I want to present in this essay. In the detached position, one is aware that others exist, that they have a separate reality with distinct views and needs. What is lacking, however, is the fundamental notion that others are essential to my own existence and well-being.
Mindfulness grounds itself on two firm pillars: the “here and now”, and inwardness. To the extent that the movement is only an attempt to counter-balance a tendency to ignore these two important aspects of our lives, all well and good. But in so far as Mindfulness presents these two things as our only pivotal, essential points, I believe it is fundamentally mistaken, and misguiding.
Chapter 12 is called “Glimpses of Wholeness, Delusions of Separateness”, and represents a good example of Kabat-Zinn’s approach to thought. Thought is something that categorizes, that divides, that deconstructs. For him, thought is about analysis, never about integration or synthesis. Indeed, thought is not just about a failure to integrate; its inevitably analytic nature is pernicious, it prevents us from integrating at all. The chapter opens with the following passage:
“Have you ever looked at a dog and really seen it in its total “dogness”? A dog is quite miraculous when you really see it. What is it? Where did it come from? Where is it going? What is it doing here? Why is it shaped the way it is? What is its “view” of things, of the neighbourhood? What are its feelings?”
Full Catastrophe Living
Page 153
Taken on its own, this passage might lead one to assume that “looking” and “seeing” (as in “Have you ever looked at a dog and really seen it…”) are simple synonyms for thought, the equivalent of “Have you ever thought about a dog…”.
Not so.
Mid way through the paragraph which immediately follows, Kabat-Zinn makes clear that looking, seeing, cannot be taken as equivalent to thought, but rather are its polar opposites…
“Our thoughts act as a kind of veil preventing us from seeing things with fresh eyes. What comes into view is identified by the thinking, categorizing mind and quickly framed: a dog. This mind actually prevents us from seeing the dog in its fullness. It processes and categorizes the “dog” signal very quickly in our brain and then moves on to do the same to the next perception or thought.”
Full Catastrophe Living
Page 153
I think there is a certain sleight-of-hand going on here. Although Kabat-Zinn is attempting to contrast his insightful method of “seeing” with the shortcomings of thought, in fact in doing so, he is making an appeal to thought itself to think deeper. He is trying to get you to think about something. As we shall see, it is not clear he is aware of this, but it is not hard to see that it is true.
For example, one can easily change the word “see” in the second sentence of our first quote to “think” without in any way doing damage to the central message of the whole paragraph: “A dog is quite miraculous when you really think about it.”
What is really happening here is that Kabat-Zinn is setting up a straw man to knock down. His definition of thought is very constrained, he holds its functions so pernicious, his examples of its side effects so negative, that he is quickly able to dismiss thought completely. His critical focus is entirely on the analytical aspects of thought, and never about its integrational powers. It is a bit like dismissing, say, cars as entirely destructive simply because sometimes they are involved in accidents, or abandoning medicine entirely because sometimes it fails to cure people, or in very rare cases actually contributes to their demise. Not much can be seen to be good in this world if you only consider the drawbacks and disasters, and never attempt to balance these with the benefits and successes.
Likewise, it is not just that he only sees the negative aspects of thought; his analysis seems to be based strictly on an examination of analytical thought, ignoring completely its synthetic powers. This is similar to attempting a critique of chemistry by imagining that all chemists ever do is break things down into their component parts, and ignoring entirely the fact that they often synthesize new and useful substances.
Again, I would like to give Kabat-Zinn the benefit of the doubt here by pointing out that he is only one of a long list of (can I tar him with this brush?) thinkers who are fiercely critical of thought itself. This point is worth an extended aside.
Consider the following poem by Walt Whitman:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
It strikes me that this is another example of knocking down straw men. It is easy to imagine that taking a scientific approach (“proofs”, “figures”, “columns”) kills the glory and wonder of the heavens. And certainly it is possible to imagine that astronomers of this type exist. But many astronomers go in to the discipline precisely because they have a sense of wonder at our origins and our place in the universe. And it is not clear that they ever lose that. For many, learning more about the why’s and the how’s only serves to augment that sense; not at all to diminish it.
For much of my life I have had an interest in astronomy, and as a result have had – and still have – a subscription to the magazine Sky and Telescope. There are plenty of technical articles, the pages are full of numbers and charts, math, the mechanics of the equipment, the telescopes, eyepieces, cameras, spectrographs, and so on, and these articles employ a dry, analytical language to convey meaning. But a sense of wonder, a reverence for the beauty of the night sky, awe at the incredible power and the distances and the time scales – brief: an intense love and sense of wonder for the subject, permeates every page. One monthly columnist – Sue French – inevitably starts off her piece with a poem of Classical or Romantic origins. Perhaps the “Learn’d Astronomer” of Whitman’s poem did exist out there somewhere, at some time. But one look at the true community of astronomers, and it is far easier to imagine that Whitman made this straw man up, rather than ever actually met him. Lay Whitman’s poem and a copy of Sky and Telescope side by side, and it is clear it is the scientists, and not the poet, who are happy to embrace the other side’s point of view; indeed, they don’t even find it to be “the other side”. If there is an arid, analytical, dispassionate attitude being displayed, it has to be Whitman’s, and not that of the true Learn’d Astronomers.
Finally, as an aside to the above aside, anyone who is interested in an extended treatment of the misguided notion that science and thought suck the life out of all things wondrous and truly awesome need look no further than Richard Dawkins’ excellent book “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder”. In Dawkins’ treatment, Keats is the poet, “Lamia” the poem, and a sense that understanding how a rainbow is formed is the supposed crime scientists – Newton in particular – have committed. Dawkins’ defence is spirited, passionate, awe-inspiring, infections and – shall I say it? – “Learn’d”.
But enough of asides; I now want to add depth to my thesis that Kabat-Zinn (consciously or not) denigrates thought and emotion, and unduly diminishes the role that others play in our lives. If I based my proof on a handful of cherry-picked negative quotes, as per the above, I’d be knocking down straw men myself. We need to go deeper.
And for that, you’ll need to wait for Part III of this essay.