The meaning and significance of Mindfulness from various different academic, disciplinary standpoints – ranging from Psychology, through Philosophy, to Politics – AND (just as importantly) you will have experienced the equivalent of a complete 8-week Mindfulness Training course, based on the famous MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction) programme.
About 30% of people hope that Mindfulness will help them to enhance their sense of ‘well-being,’ which includes aspects such as feeling happier, more fulfilled, and more self-aware, perhaps with better concentration and focus.
Mindfulness is a kind of ‘consciousness discipline’ that exists at the intersection of myriad forms of knowledge and inquiry, rooted in the creativity and openness of contemporary science.
In practice, it means something like this: The model of the sage teaches us that … instead of spending our time worrying about passing an exam, impressing someone at a job interview, or earning enough money for a new iPhone, we should instead spend our time sitting in meditation on the nature of our self and the present moment.
Instead of fretting about mistakes we made in the past, feeling unhappy about our weight or embarrassed about our clothes, or being angry about the injustice that an undeserving colleague got the promotion that we wanted at work, we should instead spend our time appreciating the beautiful patterns being made by the clouds in the sky, or the delicate feeling of rain on our skin, or the wonderful feeling of warmth that the sun leaves on our face. This kind of sagacity involves a self-conscious and deliberate reorientation of our relationship with life itself. Because it involves moving against the prevailing norms and values of commercial societies, it requires of us tremendous amounts of self-discipline, practice, and cultivation. The sage is committed and dedicated; devoted. Which also gives him/her an aura of purity and sacredness; we revere the sage precisely because he/she is better than us – we could be like them if we had the necessary discipline and awareness, but we don’t (or we choose not to), so we’re not.
In many cultures, the warrior as ‘spiritual hero’ represents an ideal of psychic integrity. Rather than being a thoughtless or arbitrary agent of violence, this warrior represents the human aspiration towards disciplined control over our attention, awareness, and emotional state. Indeed, the warrior emerges as the most extreme and accomplished version of this ideal, since his/her psychic integrity is tested (and actually cultivated) in extremis – in the face of danger, violence, and death. In the end, part of the warrior’s integrity resides in his/her abandonment of their sense of self – their actions must be in the service of a greater good, not the result of personal desires, instrumental reason, or ego-driven volition. Their disciplined selfcontrol and self-deprivation become a radical form of selflessness, which ultimately resembles a spiritual accomplishment
Well, in practice it means something like this: the model of the warrior teaches us that
instead of spending our time indulging our whims and desires for pleasure and luxury, which soften our resolve and undermine our integrity, we should instead spend our time and energy cultivating our discipline by deliberately depriving ourselves of those things that we want.
Like the monk, then, the ninja here is a model of devotion and commitment in a society that is characterised by indulgence, weakness of will, frivolity and fickleness. The ideal of the warrior calls upon us to reflect on our mortality and on our lives as a constant process of confronting and overcoming death: the warrior ideal asserts that we would be better people if we were able constantly to hold in our attention the possibility that this moment (right now) might be our very last moment of life. Hence, the discipline of the ninja manifests not only in tremendous physical skill and competence, not only in selflessness of conduct, but also in the ability to maintain a radically present-moment awareness. Put together, these features make the ninja calm and tranquil in the face of suffering, adversity, and danger, even in the face of death itself.
As it happens, some of the introductory literature of Mindfulness today makes explicit reference to a number of fears in order to reassure new practitioners that their preconceptions are groundless. One of the most famous of these is probably this passage from Jon Kabat-Zinn, who says: ‘When we speak of meditation, it is important for you to know that this is not some weird cryptic activity, as our popular culture might have it. It does not involve becoming some kind of zombie …’ (Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go 1994, 9)
The zombie is what humans look like after their self or their ago or their personality has died (and, coincidentally, also what they look like after they have literally died). The zombie is our nightmare of what the post-human condition might look like.
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