Think about watching a child play. See how absorbed they are in what they are doing? That’s a good example of what mindfulness is. It is being totally absorbed in the “now”. What is Mindfulness?

This seems to be where New Age and romantic ideas about childhood take over. Yes, to be in a state of fascination feels good – maybe because to be in that state assumes a sense of security and safety – it is unalloyed with the less pleasant emotions. We adults – our emotions tend to be more alloyed. Which is not to say we don’t experience positive emotions – indeed humans have a positivity bias– but as we get older, our emotions get, well, more complicated.

Odd, being “totally absorbed” seems contrary to both “being aware of attending” (parallel awareness) and observing.  Perhaps the idea is that there’s no task-unrelated thought (i.e., “mind wandering”) going on, no back-and-forth between the sensory/motor task world and the world that is its own world. Hence, no need for effortful redirection of attention as needed so not to screw up the current task-at-hand (like, say, driving). As many cognitive scientists have pointed out, people often find the experience of mental effort unpleasant.

Something else to think about: the brain is a “prediction machine”.  The brain doesn’t live in the “now” – anticipation is the name of the game, whether we’re turning a door knob, watching a butterfly, or drinking a glass of water. It’s only when we are stopped in our track that we realize we were looking down the road we were traveling.

Andy Clark (2016) Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind Oxford Scholarship Online ISBN-13: 9780190217013. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190217013.001.0001

Wisdom Through Mindfulness

“… the king went to the blind people and on arrival asked them, ‘Blind people, have you seen the elephant?’

“‘Yes, your majesty. We have seen the elephant.’

“‘Now tell me, blind people, what the elephant is like.’

“The blind people who had been shown the head of the elephant replied, ‘The elephant, your majesty, is just like a water jar.’

“Those who had been shown the ear of the elephant replied, ‘The elephant, your majesty, is just like a winnowing basket.’

…

“Those who had been shown the tuft at the end of the tail of the elephant replied, ‘The elephant, your majesty, is just like a broom.’

“Saying, ‘The elephant is like this, it’s not like that. The elephant’s not like that, it’s like this,’ they struck one another with their fists. That gratified the king.

“In the same way, monks, the wanderers of other sects are blind and eyeless.” [Blind and eyeless means not knowing the Four Noble Truths].

This is the pervasive metaphor of blind men feeling an elephant and each describing one small part of the beast. The story usually segues into the proposition that it is actually possible to see the whole elephant and such capacity belongs to God and/or the enlightened. But is it actually possible to see the whole truth and nothing but the truth? How do you know? Doesn’t everyone have a point of view? Why do you think some people can see the whole truth/elephant?

There’s an added lesson in this particular version of the elephant story: you gotta belong to our sect to see the whole truth and nothing but.

In a recent pair of studies on mindfulness and personality, subjects were given the “Magical Thinking” subscale of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. This subscale consists of questions about experiences with the supernatural, telepathy, clairvoyance, astrology, UFOs, and the like. In both studies, subjects who practiced mindfulness meditation were more likely than non-meditators to report magical thinking – that is, paranormal beliefs and experiences. 

In the second study, subjects were also given the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire. The five facets are:

Observing: noticing or attending to internal and external experiences.

Describing: labeling internal experiences with words.

Acting with awareness: attending to one’s activities of the moment (not on “automatic pilot”).

Nonjudging:   taking a nonevaluative stance toward thoughts and feelings.

Nonreactivity:  allowing thoughts and feelings to come and go, without getting caught up in them.

Meditators scored significantly higher on the Observing, Nonjudging and Non-reactivity facets than non-meditators. The study authors speculated that these characteristics may foster “Openness to Experience” (OE), which has been positively correlated to paranormal beliefs in other research. They note that a robust literature already links the practice of mindfulness meditation to OE.

It makes sense. Paying attention to experiences without judgment or reactivity can make one receptive to all sorts of nonsense. It’s like opening the door and letting in anyone who shows up, because to turn them away would be an act of judgment. And to spend time considering whether you like these people or want them in your home would be reactive. The idea is to let them come and go at their leisure.

Ok, so believing in the paranormal seems a pretty harmless side effect of being open. And being open is a good thing – right?

References

Antonova et al (2016) Schizotypy and mindfulness: magical thinking without suspiciousness characterizes mindfulness meditators. Schizophrenia Research: Cognition; 5, pp. 1-6. ISSN 2215-0013  http://www.schizrescognition.com/article/S2215-0013(16)30006-3/fulltext

Baer et al (2008). Construct validity of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire in meditating and nonmeditating samples. Assessment; 15, 329–342.  doi:10.1177/1073191107313003

Raine A (1991). The SPQ: a scale for the assessment of schizotypal personality based on DSM-III-R criteria. Schizophrenia Bulletin; 17:555–564.

Smith, C. L., Johnson, J. L., & Hathaway, W. (2009). Personality Contributions to Belief in Paranormal Phenomena. Individual Differences Research, 7(2), 85-96.

Van den Hurk et al  (2011). On the Relationship Between the Practice of Mindfulness Meditation and Personality—an Exploratory Analysis of the Mediating Role of Mindfulness Skills. Mindfulness, 2(3), 194–200. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-011-0060-7

“…organisms with complex nervous systems appear to have evolved a gating mechanism that allows them to cease responding to stimuli with no apparent motivational or emotional value. Novel stimuli automatically attract attention.” Peterson, Smith, & Carson, S. (2002), p. 1137

How does something lose its novelty or value so that it ceases to capture our attention? One way is through repeated exposure without consequence. Another is through classification as something old and inconsequential.

Labeling thoughts and feelings makes them feel old hat. Labeling can be an efficient shortcut to habituation – the attenuation of response with repeated exposure.  Labeling makes it easier to let go because its breaks the hold of novelty (or the seeming novel).

Something feels novel when we experience it as unique and detailed. Novelty is an experience of particulars: particular people, particular actions, particular events. Labeling subsumes specificity under an overarching category.

Labeling can be the result of experience – repeated exposure to what was once novel. “Oh, I’m being a ‘martyr’ again.” Or labeling can replace experience – preempt experience before it plays itself out, before the drama sets in.

The urge to label hovers before the stream of consciousness, ready to take the wind out of its sails. Of course, the weather’s always changing and the wind often comes out of nowhere.

Reference:

Peterson, J. B., Smith, K. W., & Carson, S. (2002). Openness and Extraversion are associated with reduced latent inhibition: Replication and commentary. Personality and Individual Differences, 33, 1137–1147.

Monger:

Old English mangere “merchant, trader, broker,” from mangian “to traffic, trade,” from Proto-Germanic *mangojan (cf. Old Saxon mangon, Old Norse mangri), from Latin mango (genitive mangonis) “dealer, trader, slave-dealer,” from a noun derivative of Greek manganon “contrivance, means of enchantment,” from PIE [Proto-Indo-European] root *mang- “to embellish, dress, trim.” Used in comb. form in English since at least 12c.; since 16c. chiefly with overtones of petty and disreputable. Dictionary.com

To be a fearmonger is to traffic in fear. Fearmongering is one way ideological and religious movements gain adherents and then keep them.  The world is a scary place. We offer the way out.

When I read Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living, I was struck by its alarmist tone. Kabat-Zinn seemed intent on reminding us over and over just how bad and dangerous the world is. To get the picture, check out some of the Kindle word counts from the book:

• Toxic: 22
• Suffering: 112
• Pain: 555
• Premature death: 6
• Cancer: 109
• Danger/dangerous: 23
• Risk: 45
• Threat/threaten: 50
• Stress: 588

The basic theme of FCL is that unless we embrace mindfulness, our lives and the world will go to hell. To quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, in the book’s accolade section:

“As countless people have discovered over the past twenty-five years, mindfulness is the most reliable source of peace and joy. Anyone can do it. And it’s become increasingly clear that not only our health and well-being as individuals, but our continuation as a civilization and a planet depend on it….” (Bold emphasis added).

Throughout the book, Kabat-Zinn warns of the “toxic” and potentially lethal effects of living unmindfully. Over and over he stresses how our state of mind may kill us*:

“ … even if your mind is telling you constantly that it is stupid or a waste of time, practice anyway, and as wholeheartedly as possible, as if your life depended on it. Because it does – in more ways than you think.” 340

 “The evidence to date suggests that longer telomeres** are associated with the difference between a rating of how present you are … and a rating of how much mind wandering you experienced in the past week.” 414

“…our thoughts and emotions, especially highly stressful thoughts that involve worrying about the future or ruminating obsessively about the past, seem to influence the rate at which we age…. they also showed that how we perceive that stress makes all the difference in how quickly our telomeres degrade and shorten. And it can make many years’ worth of difference.” 407-414

“A highly pessimistic pattern of explaining the causes of bad or stressful events when they occur seems to have particularly toxic consequences.” 4469

 “…more people get sick or die prematurely if they have strong patterns of thinking or behaving in such ways.” 4820

 “…there is “mounting evidence” of the connection between one’s personality and cancer”. 4585

“In this model, disattention leads to disconnection, disconnection to dysregulation, dysregulation to disorder, and disorder to disease.”  5055

It’s not that there’s no connection between psychological factors and physical health – it’s that Kabat-Zinn repeatedly exaggerates the link, overstating the danger and over-interpreting the research. A classic case of fearmongering.

* Bold emphasis all mine. Kindle pagination is used.

** The idea being shorter telomeres = shorter life. Then: not being present shortens your telomeres. Draw your own conclusions.

Reference:

Kabat-Zinn, Jon (2013) Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Kindle Version, Revised Edition; Bantam Books, New York

Magical thinking includes believing in things like telepathy, ESP, fortune telling, and astrology. A couple recent studies revealed that mindfulness meditators scored higher on a “magical thinking” inventory than non-meditators. For more details on this research, see the previous post.

I propose that mindfulness practice creates a mindset that lets in magical thinking. Mindfulness ideology is anti-intellectual and discourages critical thought, except in the service of promoting mindfulness. Mindfulness is about maintaining distance from thoughts, not thinking them. As Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it:

“learning to observe what your mind is up to from moment to moment, how to watch your thoughts and how to let go of them without getting caught up and driven by them… Kabat-Zinn (2013), p. 954*

And when you observe a thought:

 “…let it be here and let it go, without being drawn into it, without investing it with a power it doesn’t have, without losing yourself in the process? This is the way to cultivate mindfulness.” pp. 2294-2301

Problem is, critical thinking requires a willingness to be “caught up” in thought streams, to follow them without knowing whether the journey will be fruitful or not. When we sense something but can’t articulate it, we may need to mentally flail without immediate issue or clarity to eventually arrive at an insight or solution. We need to be responsive to thoughts, let them lead, even if that means reaching dead ends more often than not. Such is the price of progress. The mindfulness directive to observe and gently redirect attention from thoughts to the present nips their progression in the bud. Sure, it may also reduce stress but stress reduction is not the be-all/end-all.

Of course we don’t always want to surrender to the machinations of the mind. Being in the moment is a good thing. As is critical thinking, which is a process that can take us away from the moment. So be it.

Mindfulness is also about being “non-judgmental” and “non-reactive”, the better to deplete the emotion that fuels thoughts, the easier to let go. Besides undermining critical thinking, a non-judgmental attitude doesn’t make for effective BS detection. There is such a thing as being too open.

And while mindfulness advocates welcome the new “science of mindfulness”, their appreciation of science seems to have more to do with its use-value than its truth-value, i.e.,  using science to promote the cause of mindfulness, not appreciating science as a way to get closer to the truth of things.  Hence we hear a lot about studies supporting the benefits of mindfulness, little about the inadequacies of these studies or about research that showed no significant benefit or no additional benefit when compared to well-matched control groups.

Besides, to the committed practitioner, scientific support is nice but inessential, because mindfulness practice provides its own “compelling logic [and] empirical validity” (p. 280).

Not even physics, that most rigorous of the physical sciences, has come to terms with new discoveries showing that, at the deepest and most fundamental level, the natural world is neither describable nor understandable. Our basic notions that things are what they are, that they are where they are, and that one set of conditions always causes the same thing to happen, had to be completely revised…”  p. 4323

And part of the way things are is connected and interconnected:

“One scientific view, known as the Gaia hypothesis, is that the earth as a whole behaves as one single self-regulating living organism…This hypothesis affirms a view based on strong scientific evidence and reasoning that was, in essence, also held by all traditional cultures and peoples, a world in which life, including human life, is interconnected and interdependent – and that interconnectedness and interdependence extends to the very earth itself.” p. 3448

The downside of living in such an interconnected universe is vulnerability. Between the psychological harm** subtly inflicted years ago by our nonmindful parents, to lack of inner harmony and connection with others, to the myriad of “toxins” in our environment, the world is a dangerous place. Our only hope is to change our mode of being, ala mindfulness.

Putting it all together, then, there are various threads within the mindfulness worldview that increase susceptibility to magical thinking:

• Disparaging thoughts and redirecting attention away from thoughts undermines critical thinking by interrupting mental processes
• Cultivating a non-judgmental attitude creates a non-discriminating openness to pseudoscientific and unfalsifiable absurdities, like the Gaia hypothesis.
• Asserting the most fundamental level of reality is not accessible to scientific notions of causality or understanding opens the door to uncritical acceptance of the unfalsifiable.
• Stressing the innerconnectivity and interdependence of all things can easily lead to the idea that things at a distance influence each other.

—

* All subsequent quotes are also from Kabat-Zinn 2013, using Kindle page numbers.

** Per Kabat-Zinn, this harm may have lethal consequences later in life:  “…a lack of closeness to one’s parents during childhood was associated with a risk of cancer… We might speculate that this has something to do with the extreme importance of early experience s of connectedness to later health as an adult.” 4937

Reference:

Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013) Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Kindle Version, Revised Edition; Bantam Books, New York

Magical wonders are all around us. How many types of magical powers are recorded in the Buddhist scriptures? According to the most common classification, there are six main categories. These are celestial vision, celestial hearing, the power of knowing others’ minds, the power of performing miracles, the power of knowing past lives, and the power of eradicating all defilement.  The Buddhist Perspective on Magic and the Supernatural

The “Magical Thinking” subscale of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire consists of these questions:

1.    Have you had experiences with the supernatural?

2.    Do you believe in telepathy (mind-reading)?

3.    Are you sometimes sure that other people can tell what you’re thinking?

4.    Do you believe in clairvoyance (psychic forces, fortune telling)?

5.    Can other people feel your feelings when they’re not there?

6.    Have you had experiences with astrology, seeing the future, UFOs, ESP, or a sixth sense?

7.    Have you ever felt that you are communicating with another person telepathically (by mind-reading)?

Two recent studies compared magical thinking in mindfulness meditators and non-meditators. Meditators scored significantly higher in magical thinking than non-meditators. The study authors suggested two possible reasons for this difference between groups: the mindfulness meditators came from a Buddhist tradition that incorporated magical ideas; and/or mindfulness is associated with greater open-mindedness.

However, the SPQ’s magical thinking questions don’t ask if you’re open to the possibility of telepathy, ESP, astrology, etc. rather, they ask questions about belief and experience. To be open is to consider. To believe or to interpret an experience in a particular way is to commit.

My take: mindfulness and magical thinking are in a committed relationship. Magical thinking – the fallacious attribution of causal relationships – is how humans think without the discipline of the critical mind. Mindfulness practice not only discourages critical thought processes but includes other threads of belief that increase magical thinking.

How so? See next post. 

References

Antonova et al: Schizotypy and mindfulness: magical thinking without suspiciousness characterizes mindfulness meditators. Schizophrenia Research: Cognition 2016; 5, pp. 1-6. ISSN 2215-0013

Raine A: The SPQ: a scale for the assessment of schizotypal personality based on DSM-III-R criteria. Schizophrenia Bulletin 1991; 17:555–564

Mindfulness entails concentrated awareness of one’s thoughts, actions or motivations. Mindfulness involves continually bringing one’s awareness back into the present moment.…

As you continue to focus on your breath, you will repeatedly find your attention drifting, as thoughts, feelings or sensations come into your awareness. That’s totally OK and to be expected.

The goal is not to prevent yourself from having thoughts, feelings or sensations during mindfulness practice.

The goal is to notice the distractions that arise and then to gently turn your attention back to your breath.

–  What is Mindfulness? 

When one goal is served by pursuing another goal, that means the effect of successfully achieving the latter goal is achieving the former goal as well.

When you know that one thing leads to the other, but deny that you care about “the other”, is that delusion or hypocrisy?

Yeah, yeah, I know: if the point is to be non-judgmental, non-reactive, and simply aware in the moment, focused on your breath, then interrupted thoughts or feelings may just be a casualty of the practice, and not, per the above quotation, an actual goal. Problem is, mindfulness is not just about meditation practice, it’s a whole body of teaching. And that body of teaching devalues the playing out of thoughts and feelings. It’s nonjudgmental in principle but not in practice.

Many true statements can be said about just about anything. Thoughts and feelings, unless totally delusional, often have at least a toehold on something true.  Although sometimes the thoughts and feelings are assuming a version of reality that is just plain wrong,  often the error is in emphasis or significance.  However, to say that thoughts and feelings do not reflect reality or the truth is just too broad.  I’d rather say thoughts and feelings shouldn’t be considered as the last word, or the whole story – that they may have a basis in truth but that dwelling on some truths can prevent us from seeing other truths.

Those practicing mindfulness come to realize that “thoughts are just thoughts”. One is then free to let their thoughts go because they no longer reflect reality or truth. –  What is Mindfulness? (accessed 7/6/14)

So “thoughts are just thoughts” means thoughts don’t reflect reality or truth? That they’re just in the head? I beg to differ.

Brains were designed to track the world. Brains track the world to predict probabilities of future events. Tracking and predicting guide action decisions. Thoughts are part of the brain’s tracking system. That doesn’t mean there’s a perfect fit between thought and reality. But if the brain and its tracking systems didn’t do a reasonable job of approximating reality, I wouldn’t be able to write this sentence because Homo sapiens wouldn’t even exist. An animal has to be tuned into the world in order to survive that world.

Thoughts vary in their fidelity to what is the case. Tracking is selective and prediction is guesswork. Our tracking systems may overlook something important or give too much attention to something inconsequential.  Brains aren’t omniscient. To error is human. Which is not the same as saying to be human is to error. Or to think is to be mistaken.