I’ve been a student of meditative techniques and contemplative traditions for a while. I have a decades-long personal practice and academic degrees in both religious studies and psychology. And I have mixed feelings about the kind of attention mindfulness is currently receiving and the ways it’s often conceptualized today in the West. On one hand, the fact meditative practices and contemplative experiences are getting increased study I feel is deeply beneficial and long overdue. On another, with only slight exaggeration, I’m worried many of today’s biomedical and psychological researchers think they know what they’re doing.

To explain what I mean in saying that, I’d like to sketch a brief history of the modern West’s construction of mindfulness and note along the way an example of something it leaves out. Mindfulness and meditation techniques have been around for millennia, but socio-political factors have shaped our contemporary understandings of what those practices entail. The word “mindfulness” itself has a somewhat debated history. And after outlining some of the history that’s involved, I’d like to offer some personal reflections on the breadth, and the depth, of the experiential practices that actually underlie meditative and contemplative practices. In the end I wish to underscore how important it is that we stay humble and open-minded about what we think mindfulness is. There’s been an exponential increase in the studies of mindfulness and meditation in recent years. PubMed, an online search engine for biomedical research, doesn’t list any for 1968. For 1970 it lists six. And for 2018 it lists more than 1400. Starting in 1970, of the six studies PubMed lists for that year, four were on Transcendental Meditation. The relative bump in publications during the following ten years were also mostly TM studies. The TM organization is effectively a modernized and streamlined form of Vedanta Hinduism. In that style of meditation, the practitioner looks to attend, in a simple and intimate way, to a single, repeated one- or two-syllable mantra. A TM mantra is sort of like a thought that’s not to be thought about, and attending to its repeated and more or less effortless occurrence in the mind has the effect of quieting and displacing other, more discursive thoughts. That practice can shift our relationship with ordinary thinking and usher us toward a manner of awareness that is simpler and more fundamental than our habitually constructed thoughts. And, along with the intimacy with our experience that’s afforded to us when we attentively quiet our minds, for most people TM is very relaxing.

When promoting its technique through the 1960s and ‘70s, the TM organization emphasized the benefits of its practice with regards to “stress relief.” Stress was getting a fair amount of attention at the time through work like that of the endocrinologist, Hans Selye. My hunch is that by using the vocabulary of stress research, TM found a way to present karma theory in the language of a non-spiritual, Western, scientific discourse: karma, in its classical Indian understanding, is any action we carry out in a contrived or less than fully natural manner which then ends up having a deleterious or “stressful” effect on our lives.

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This article first appeared in issue 1 of The Side View Journal. Purchase your own copy here. 

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TM was popular. 1968, incidentally, was the year that the Beatles went to Rishikesh to practice TM with the Maharishi. In 1975, Harvard physician Herbert Benson published The Relaxation Response, a best-selling book based on his study of Transcendental Meditation. Benson was looking to further popularize and secularize meditation practice. Some additional meditation programs built on TM’s success and adapted themselves to modern Western society in analogous ways, often embracing a similar focus on relaxation and stress relief. One that became particularly influential was the program designed by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Kabat-Zinn was originally trained as a biologist. He became employed by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where in 1979 he was asked to develop a program to help patients with pain management. As a key part of the program he put together, Kabat-Zinn incorporated meditation techniques that he’d learned in retreats he had participated in with several American Buddhist organizations—especially the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.

Kabat-Zinn set up what he initially called the “Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program” (now known as the “Stress Reduction Clinic”), and he called the techniques which comprised the heart of his program, “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).” As the name suggests, a main focus of MBSR is the development of “mindfulness.” Here is how Kabat-Zinn describes mindfulness:

moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, as non-reactively, and as openheartedly as possible (Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness, 2005, p. 108).

Thousands of research studies have been conducted on meditation based on the understanding of mindfulness that is promoted in Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR. And researchers have created a number of questionnaires intended to measure mindfulness as it’s presented in MBSR. (Anne Murphy’s 2016 paper, “Mindfulness-Based Therapy in Modern Psychology,” lists ten such questionnaires.)

Such investigators generally agree that mindfulness practices are beneficial, but there are debates around such things as what the instruments developed to measure it are actually tapping into, what the primary facets or effective components of mindfulness really are, and whether mindfulness is more of a transiently elicited state, an enduring developed trait, or both.

Another on-going debate is over whether or not mindfulness is “Buddhist.” As ever-increasing use is made of MBSR and related techniques (collectively labeled “MBIs”–Mindfulness-Based Interventions), conversations have begun taking place between MBSR researchers, academic scholars of Buddhism, and Buddhist practitioners. A nice example is the 2011 issue of the journal, Contemporary Buddhism. The issue is devoted to the topic of mindfulness, and includes articles by individuals such as the research psychologist Ruth Baer, the religious studies Buddhism scholar Rupert Gethin, and the Theravadin Buddhist monk Bhikkhu Bodhi. It also includes a reflection piece by Kabat-Zinn.

Kabat-Zinn acknowledges that he downplayed the Buddhist roots of his mindfulness technique in the early going. He didn’t want patients’ potential qualms about adopting a “religious” practice to get in the way of its benefits (not to mention the possible objections of hospital administrators). But he has also frequently made statements which indicate that he understands mindfulness to be an essential heart of Buddhism. He notes, too, that his understanding of mindfulness, while most strongly shaped by the teachings of Vipassana (i.e., insight meditation, especially as originally practiced in Southeast Asia), has also been influenced by readings and some personal practice in Zen (namely, Phillip Kapleau and Thich Nhat Hanh) and Tibetan Buddhism (Chogyam Trungpa).

I don’t have space to provide a detailed account of the history of the sources and currents which have informed Kabat-Zinn style “mindfulness,” but here are pertinent highlights:

1. Kabat-Zinn looked to secularize a Buddhist practice…

2. based especially on his understanding of an Americanized version of vipassana taught by the Western teachers in the Insight Meditation Society—including Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg—whose own understandings of meditation were strongly shaped by…

3. the style of insight practice advocated in the 20th century in Burma by the layman U Ba Khin (d. 1971) and the monk Mahasi Sayadaw (d. 1982), whose approaches to teaching Buddhism were influenced by…

4. a 19th century Burmese Buddhist reform movement, exemplified preeminently by the monk Ledi Sayadaw (d. 1923), expressly interested in promoting a form of meditation practice accessible to everyone in the country, and not just monks.

Front row, left to right: IMS founders Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield; back row center: Mahasi Sayadaw. (Photo: IMS Photos)

Ledi Sayadaw’s efforts in the nineteenth century had come in response to British colonialism. The effects of Britain’s colonization of his country included the loss in direct support for Buddhism by Burma’s deposed king, who had been the beloved titular head of Burma’s Buddhist society, along with a de facto relativization of spiritual practice overall, through the introduction to that part of the world of additional numbers of Christian missionaries.

And when Ledi Sayadaw and other Burmese Buddhist reformists taught and promoted meditation, they consciously emphasized vipassana / insight techniques, and they de-emphasized samatha / calming-and-concentration techniques. They felt the latter practices were not absolutely necessary for a fruitful spiritual practice and that they included features too difficult for many persons in lay life to achieve, namely, the practice of jhāna.

The jhānas are states of concentrated absorption. And they’re fairly remarkable. In the basic approach of a vipassana practice, you look to appreciate, matter-of-factly and deeply, the contingent, generated status of thoughts and conscious experiencings, through noting, for instance, their inherent transiency. Thoughts come and go. Sensations come and go. And, ultimately, our own sense of ourselves as any enduring, substantive, “something” also comes and goes.

Getting out from under the illusive presumption that we are some sort of never-changing stuff, and instead allowing an embrace with the living truth that our very waking sense of “me” is itself a generated process and event, that’s the intent of vipassana practice. That is what Buddhist “insight” entails. And that’s what the previous hundred years of Burmese Buddhist teaching has primarily focused on.

Jhāna practice is a bit different, however. Where vipassana insight is effectively a deconstruction—in that it works to help us appreciate the constructed, “this comes from somewhere,” nature of all phenomenal experiences—jhāna practice is in significant ways constructive. The jhānas are generated modes of rather markedly altered consciousness. They include an element of quite vivid synesthesia, and they unfold in a set sequence. I practiced jhānas fairly intensively for several years, and, while space doesn’t allow for an extended description, here’s a nutshell account of the first four so-called “form jhānas”:

You begin by adopting a set meditation object, a fixed thing to focus on, like the breath as it occurs in a particular location, such as just outside the nostrils. You attend to that and to nothing else, in session after session of seated meditation, as well as during breaks and also during any walking meditations between sittings. And you do that for days. You may then eventually begin to get a kind of focal synesthesia to occur—your mind begins to “see” the breath. For most persons the image that arises appears as something bright or white, like a pearl, or a ball of cotton, or a light, just outside the nose.

That appearance, what I’m calling here a focal synesthesia, in the Buddhist texts is termed a patibhaga-nimitta, which means “a counterpart sign.” (Modern teachers often refer to it simply as “the nimitta,” i.e., “the sign,” although nimitta in Buddhism actually refers to any phenomenal appearance; in effect, everything we see or sense is a nimitta, like a Kantian “phenomenon,” while “the counterpart sign” refers specifically to that synesthetic representation the mind ultimately makes of your jhāna meditation object.) It’s kind of like a vivid echo, or like one piece of a dream representation; it may look like, say, a pearl, but you know what it is. You know it’s your breath.

When I give talks on meditation, I sense some persons kind of tune out when I start talking about the jhānas. It’s as though it’s something too removed from their personal experience, and too far from what they think meditation is about for themselves. But stay with me. The points I want to make in referring to the jhānas are meaningful for anyone, regardless of whether you ever actually experience jhāna.

Once there is a constant, unwavering nimitta, you then have in effect a kind of biofeedback arrangement. Where in biofeedback you can, for instance, increase your level of relaxation by making a tone that’s tied to your EEG patterns become stronger, in a similar way, when you have a constant nimitta you can make the concentration on your breath all the more unbroken and one-pointed by making the nimitta become brighter, more vivid, or larger.

And when you’ve got it like that and can maintain it, effectively just sitting there with your mental gaze fixed on a continuous nimitta, that constitutes the first jhāna. And when you’re in that state, there’s invariably a pronounced, rapturous joy. It feels wonderful.

After that first jhāna there are three additional so-called form jhānas. Very briefly:

* In the second jhāna, the sense of separation between you-as-observer and the nimitta-as-a-thing-observed comes to be, as it were, “too much” and too complicated. A further relaxation then occurs where the sense of separation dissipates, and there’s effectively only the nimitta. Then everything is, say, “whiteness.” And the feeling remains pervaded by a rapturous joyousness.

* In the third jhāna, that rapture comes to be felt as too much—perhaps too sweet, or just too agitated—and it falls away. What’s left is a distinctive experience of quiet and peaceful pleasantness.

* And in the fourth jhāna, even “pleasantness” comes to be as it were too much and too agitated. It slips away, as well, and what’s left is just a sense of a palpable and pervasive equanimity.

When you have the jhānas occurring distinctly, there’s no mistaking them. If an orgasm is like a momentary cymbal crash, the jhānas are like the sound of a bell, and that sound can go on for an hour. Jhāna absorptions are wonderful. They are restorative. And they offer an humblingly powerful perspective on what our minds are capable of. But, for most folks, they’re hard to get to happen. Most people I know who experience the jhānas have needed to go on several intensive retreats before they experienced them. In my own case, I’d been meditating rather seriously for several decades before my first jhāna retreat, and it still took four days of doing pretty much nothing but concentrating on my breath, all day every day, before I got a counterpart sign to form and I then entered the first jhāna. And it took me several more retreats over the next couple of years before I could also experience the jhānas at home, outside of a retreat setting.

So that’s a reason Ledi Sayadaw and the champions of the lay Burmese meditation movement did not emphasize jhānas. They wanted to promote practices that everyone could do and that everyone could experience benefits from right away.

(There’s also another reason. In short: There are debates within South Asian Buddhism—as well as among academic scholars of Buddhism—about the place of the jhānas. Some feel that they’re centrally important, that they are a key innovation of the Buddha himself, and that the realization of final, liberative, vipassana insight only occurs with the jhānas as its foundation. Such persons are sometimes referred to as “wet insight” advocates. Others feel that the jhānas can actually be dispensed with, that they represent potential distractions from the core work of vipassana insight, and that they were originally a Hindu technique the Buddha effectively accepted into his practice community simply because they were already part of the contemplative landscape of his time. They’re known as promoters of a “dry insight” approach.)

And while Ledi Sayadaw and the leaders of the Burmese reform did not emphasize jhānas, they knew about them and they sometimes spoke of them. There is, though, little to no mention of the jhānas in today’s modernized Western “mindfulness” movement–most current psychology researchers are not acquainted with them. They’ve been left out.

Another thing most researchers are not aware of is that the word “mindfulness” is a bit of a mistranslation of the original word it’s intended to represent. “Mindfulness” in the original Buddhist Pāli is sati; in Sanskrit it’s smrti. A more straightforward meaning of sati is “remembering.” (Hinduism, incidentally, uses Smrti to refer to the category of spiritual texts that are “remembered.”)

And the South Asian Buddhists use sati today for a whole range of forms of attention. It’s important, for instance, to have sati when you’re driving, so that you don’t have an accident. And remembering moral principles and calling to mind Buddhist prescriptions for wholesome choices and life-decisions are also understood to be sati.

Within meditation practices, specifically, sati can mean remembering categories for recognizing the sorts of hindrances and wholesome factors of experience that can come up during meditation; sati helps you recognize such things. Buddhist sati, in other words, functions as a kind of informed attention.

Overall, I think a useful translation for sati is “remembering the present.” (A nice book on mindfulness practices in South Asia written by anthropologist Julia Cassaniti in 2017 has precisely that as its title.) There can be different applications and emphases, but by and large “remembering the present” carries both the suggestion that it is our here-and-now present experiencing that is of central significance, as well the Old School Buddhist understanding of meditation as ultimately an informed and active appreciation of the constructed nature of our thoughts and perceptions.

For that reason, although today’s Theravadin Buddhists and vipassana practitioners will endorse Kabat-Zinn and MBSR’s attention to “the present moment,” they will often feel that the emphases on “non-judgmentalism” and “non-reactivity” don’t immediately reflect their own practice style. Kabat-Zinn will suggest that those parts of his definition of mindfulness don’t actually come so much from Theravada, but more from his understandings of Zen or of types of Tibetan practice. His “mindfulness meditation,” in short, is a kind of amalgam. It’s an adaptation. And his promotion of it has been, explicitly, a packaging of meditation for our time and for our culture; to some audiences he’s emphasized its secular, non-religious character; and to others he’s highlighted its direct connections with the essence of Buddhism.

Buddhism, for its part, has itself always been adaptive. There are many forms and many expressions. And, as mentioned, even within today’s Theravada, there are different opinions over such things as the role and importance of jhāna.

And we actually shouldn’t expect it to be otherwise. The Buddha was born into a particular spiritual culture, one that already had many contemplative techniques and practices. He taught for 45 years, adapting his own presentation at times, depending on his audience. His teachings were passed down orally for several centuries, with different Buddhist communities emphasizing different practices, and remembering some of the teachings in different ways, and organizing them on the basis of differing analyses. And of course Buddhism has evolved, across centuries and across cultures, into the forms of Mahayana and Tantra, within China, Korea, Japan, Tibet and Mongolia; and now in Europe and the United States.

So it makes all the sense in the world that we deconstruct mindfulness, by which I mean that we understand it to have a history, a “side view.” It’s not a given or an absolute. It comes from somewhere. Mindfulness has been constructed. Mindfulness has been promoted. (And in recent years mindfulness has come to be criticized for ways it’s not just promoted, but marketed; see for instance Ron Purser and David Loy’s “Beyond McMindfulness.”)

But, for me, an especially salient aspect of mindfulness—constructed as it is by history and by current needs and interests—is that it is in itself a form of deconstruction. That is to say, a pivotally significant feature of mindfulness is that it is a practice that helps us to see how we see things. It is in the end a looking at how we look at things.

I’ll save for another time a discussion of how mindfulness practice can also go a long way in helping us appreciate how our constructed categories of “secular” and “religious” are just that, constructed categories. They’re stories. A reason Kabat-Zinn could present mindfulness as one or the other, depending on his audience, is because those ideas, those categories for interpreting life’s meaning and purpose, are concepts that come as it were “later than” mindfulness. Mindfulness is a form of honesty. It’s a touching of the earth. Mindfulness is the sort of experiential practice that ultimately comes before our ideas of what is “secular” and what is “religious.”

And it almost goes without saying, and yet very much needs to be said, “mindfulness” is by no means exclusively Buddhist. I referred earlier to TM and Vedanta Hinduism. And there are, and always have been, Western forms of meditation and contemplative practice, too. Notwithstanding the significant ties between Buddhist teachings and, for instance, MBSR, it’s a mistake for present discussions of mindfulness to place the focus so exclusively on Buddhism. Christian Centering Prayer and Orthodox Hesychasm, Jewish Kabbalistic and Hasidic techniques, Sufi dhikr and meditative movement, those can all rightly be understood as mindfulness practices, as well.

Mindfulness is an exercise in intimacy and open-mindedness. To really embrace mindfulness is to allow ourselves to be embraced, namely, by life in this moment. There is nothing more basic, there’s nothing more simple, and in the end there is nothing more wonderful.

But, as the discussion here also suggests, remembering ourselves to such basic and meaningful simplicity can end up being fairly complicated in some ways. We make mental models of ourselves and of our lives, and we make mental models of things like “religion” and “science” and “mindfulness.” And, quite tragically, we can easily become over-confident of our models. We can come to be over-sure that we know what we’re doing.

I’ll close by relating a story that helps me remember that I don’t know everything. Following an intensive 10-day jhāna retreat some years ago, for a period of about five weeks, I was meditating during dreamless sleep. I was experiencing the jhānas in my sleep. I’d previously had the experience of meditating in my dreams, too, and when that would happen I typically became lucid within the dream. But this was different. This wasn’t occurring during dreams, where of course there’s some degree of consciousness. This was while I was asleep and not dreaming. But still I knew it was taking place. And there were two ways I knew it. For one, while the jhānas, as I mentioned, unfold in a set sequence, I would sometimes wake up at night in the middle of that sequence. The jhānas had effectively started “without” me. Some part of me knew how to do them, and it also knew how to do sleep simultaneously.

The other way I knew the jhānas were occurring in my sleep I don’t have words for. I just knew. Some part of me that’s before words knew I was asleep and knew I was meditating. Something knew I was generating those states. Something knew that those experiential events came from somewhere.

And when I woke up, I knew that that too—my sense of myself as a waking, thinking person—is also something that’s generated. My sense of the waking “me” is not in fact where things begin. That, too, is an event. That, too, is a process. That, too, comes from somewhere.

And I don’t know how that happens. Just like I don’t know how I do sleep, and I don’t know how I do meditation during sleep, neither do I know how I do my waking sense of myself.

Mindfulness practice is deeply beneficial. And a key benefit such practice affords us is to help us to appreciate the matter-of-fact miracle that our thoughts themselves come from somewhere. Thinking and conceptualization are constructions. They are our provisional stories of what is what. So are our very ideas of ourselves.

In the end, a particularly beneficial effect of mindfulness practice is the way it can help us to remember that we don’t know everything.

 

The 10th century Chinese Zen student Fayan was on his pilgrimage. During a rainstorm he put up at the temple of a Zen priest named Dizang. The next morning, as he was getting ready to leave and continue his pilgrimage, Dizang asked him, “What’s the purpose of pilgrimage?”
Fayan paused and answered, “I don’t know.”
Dizang said, “Not knowing is closest to it.”
Fayan had an awakening.

(cf. The Book of Equanimity, koan case 20)