Category: Cognitive Bias

At some point in the recent past I happened across an article titled “The Problem Of Mindfulness” that made my brain throw an error before taking over and getting me to click on the link. I am glad it did, because I got a lot out of reading the article as it reminded me about how far I have come in terms of getting clear on what the present moment is and what the experience of being in it is like. While I did have a challenge with the title, because it begs the question and therefore usurps a number of my brain cycles, I got a lot out of the mental journey caused by reading and reflecting on what the author wrote.

While I have a number of disagreements with what they say, I think it is a good article. It is well written, it comes from the heart and from the author’s experiences, and there is very little in it (possibly nothing) that is distracting in terms of style, language, grammar, or sentence structure. This final point is very critical because it allows the article to stand on its own and to be a thing independent of the medium. The ideas that the author puts forward are evaluated as objectively as they can be and it seems like a lot of care was taken to remove most of the details that might cause a subjective interpretation or trigger a cognitive bias. For example, I had no idea the gender of the author until after I read the article and revisited the page to do some follow-up review. Their gender is probably important to them, but it is not relevant to those who consume the article.

This is something that I think I need to highlight more. Ideas are good, bad, neutral, provocative, progressive, regressive, transformational, ignorant, biased, inclusive, future-altering, creative, etc. and, in an ideal world, they are consumed and interrogated based on their merits. A good idea that you do not like remains a good idea, so ones opinion of the idea should never factor into the critical evaluation of it. The best example here, and one that may remain relevant in perpetuity, is Donald Trump. In this case I am not actually making reference to the person. I am making reference to the idea that is “Donald Trump.”

He does not conform to the stereotypical role of US president or traditional western world leader. His presentation is something closer to a mid-twentieth century union leader than a diplomat of a superpower. There is a straight shooter quality to him that on first glance seems authentic and trustworthy, but does not stand-up to any level of scrutiny. It is authentic in so far as it is true that he is thinking the thing that he is saying in and around the time that he says it, but there is no evidence or proof that the thoughts existed before the moment or have much of a life afterwards. There doesn’t seem to be any stacking of ideas that is building to a grand theory or understanding of things. It is just a stream of ideas, one after the other, and mostly non-sequiturs.

Which is why it is inappropriate to dismiss everything he says out of hand or to accept everything he says instantly. There are a few very good ideas in the totality of everything he communicates, just as there are some absolutely awful things. Uncovering these things will only occur when you take the time to divorce the message from the man and allow the idea to stand alone. The problem here is that this takes a lot of effort and it is not something that comes naturally or is even remotely palatable to do. It’s easier to say “he’s a genius, MAGA!” or “he’s a dope who is ruining the country” and then take this view into the evaluation of the next thing he communicates.

Like most things, the middle way is ideal, but it lacks all of the power and energy that tribal reactions affords us. This is what I try to do in-spite of the fact that it is draining and a lonely pursuit. Fewer people operate this way now than at any time in our history and I have a feeling that this approach will be effectively eliminated within a couple of decades. But until then, I’m going to try to detach an idea from its creator and consume it as though it came from someone who has a strong track record of putting forward reasonable perspectives that are not dogmatically charged or partisan.

So given all of this, here are my thoughts on the article title “The Problem Of Mindfulness” and the ideas that it puts forward.

The way the title reads is that “mindfulness” is a lot like a dryer that hides a single sock, if you are in a great mood, diarrhea, if you are feeling nothing much at all, or something between homelessness and   cancer depending on just how down you are feeling.

Of course, when the page opens and the reader is greeted with the article, the title is there, superimposed over a picture of someone’s face, both of which are being joined by a subtitle that would, if not for the first one, cause the brain to throw an error.

“Mindfulness promotes itself as value-neutral but it is loaded with (troubling) assumptions about the self and the cosmos,” which indicates that its creator is making much more troubling assumption than the noun or verb “mindfulness” has, is, or will. Let’s also throw “can” into that mix as well.

Before moving forward, I need to declare my conflict of interest here. I am a fan of mindfulness meditation and a big believer in the positive effects of disenchantment and its close relative disillusionment. Phrased more crassly, the sooner someone takes their head out of their ass and begins to see reality in more objective terms, the sooner they can start to do more impressive things in the world and with their life. For example, a lot of people have challenges realizing or learning that there is a boundary between themselves and other people, meaning that everyone else has an experience of reality that is theirs alone and rarely (never) is their perspective from your point of view. This makes sense logically. So much sense that you may even think “what a stupid and unnecessary statement to make,” which is exactly the point I am making. From YOUR perspective it is unnecessary, so therefore it is unnecessary. That doesn’t change the reality that until we learn to act otherwise, our first impulse is always going to be to see things from our own point of view followed by a castigation of anyone who is not aligned with it.

It doesn’t need to be this way, you can train your brain to table harsh judgment of dissention for later in favor of considering how the world would have to be in order for someone to believe something OTHER than what you believe. Here’s the rub, the world is actually much closer to that way than the way you believe it is.

And it is this way for EVERYONE. We evolved to get it wrong and we do, until we realize that we are wrong and take the steps to correct our path.

For me, mindfulness meditation represents the main step we can take in order to correct our path. So it follows that “mindfulness” as a noun and verb is making reference to some aspect of what we experience when we practice mindfulness meditation. It allows us to notice what is actually going on from moment to moment and in doing so, creates a juxtaposition between reality and what we think is going on. This may or may not make sense to you on any level, but once you spend any amount of time sitting still, with your eyes and mouth closed, noticing the sensations of your breath on the area of skin above your upper lip and in and around your nostrils, things will become more clear. You are probably still not going to understand what I’m talking about, but you’ll begin to grow more certain that I am actually talking about something that is real, and not spewing a new age or metaphysical creation designed to improve my position on some enlightenment hierarchy. And the more you practice, the more in-focus these two things will become – reality and the experience of reality that each one of us manufacture from moment to moment.

With that out of the way, let us move forward and deal with the two main goals of what I’m writing here. They are to address the authors concern and to then address my concern with how they went about addressing their concern.

The author has a long back ground with, at least in terms of observational exposure to, meditation. And they admit that they were bored when they went to the temple. They practiced a few techniques during university and later served as a control group member in a large scale University of Cambridge study about the effects of mindfulness. Read the original article, both to validate my summary and to gain more insight into how the author is approaching the subject. And I’ll add that it is a good piece of writing.

They found the practice of mindfulness, like many people do, to be rather destabilizing. For one thing, it reveals a lot about the world that we have never paid attention to, either because we learned to ignore it or because we never took the time to notice it. Those in the first group find mindfulness a lot easier to integrate and it tends not to rock their world nearly as much. They can be curious and fascinated with all that is reveals while never feeling like they are losing their grip. The second group, those who never noticed the things in the first place, tend not to fare so well in the short term. Initially their mind will be blown by all that they become aware of and the automatic nature of perception and how the brain manufactures ones experience of being alive. But this will usually give way to feelings of loss, confusion, and detachment. Feeling this way sucks. It won’t make any difference if the core lessons of impermanence are taking hold, the feelings are real and experiencing them has a negative valence until they go away. Over time though, things will stabilize as the brain updates the software and begins to gain confidence in its predictive accuracy. At some point in the future, everything will be assimilated and you will move forward with a new mental process called “mindfulness” that can be called upon as needed, and which will run in the background making sure that your perceptions are closer to reality than they were before.

About this fact, consider what happens when someone in a long term committed monogamous relationship cheats on their spouse / partner. Initially nothing happens to their partner, the world is the way it was the day before. It will continue to be this way until they find out about their partners infidelity. Then all hell breaks loose. Personally, I don’t think people should cheat when they are in committed relationships. It’s a shittie thing to do and is an act of immense disrespect to yourself. BUT, if it happens and you make the decision to tell your significant other about it, do it as soon as possible. Do not wait any longer than is necessary because the longer the gap, the greater the damage you will be causing to the other person.

Cheating on a partner is bad, but continuing along as though nothing happened for years only to come clean about it later is pathologically selfish and has the tendency of shattering the other person’s world view. The reason is very simple, and it is exactly the same thing that happens with the second group mentioned above – those who did not choose to ignore how the world actually is because they never realized how the world actually is – it causes them to question the past and to doubt their own judgment and their experiences. If someone comes clean five years later, they are forcing their partner to reprocess the last five years of their life before they can move forward. Sure, they are not going to be completely stuck at ground zero, but a very large portion of their mental energy will be redirected away from the day to day tasks of living and onto assimilating the new information and updating their long term memory as it applies to their relationship, their partner, and their shared experiences.

Over time, they will probably get through it. The brain is remarkably resilient and can process many different types of traumas. But the energy expenditure required to adjust to the information that your partner cheated is proportionate to the length of time between the act and when it came to light.

Something very similar happens when someone takes up mindfulness and starts to realize that how they have been experiencing the world is not aligned with reality. It will be resisted and denied until it can no longer be disregarded. Then will come the difficult tasks of reframing and reorganizing everything you know about the world to accommodate the fact that there is, for example, no self. A lot of stuff will need to get torn down and rebuilt, and this will take time and mental effort, and probably a good diet and sufficient rest / recovery. But it can happen so long as the person stays the course and relinquishes their attachment to their old world view. Anyone who jumps ship will find their swim back to their old reality to be less challenging than continuing forward, but they will be returning to a different place than from where they left and will likely be embittered about the subject as a whole.

My own experience with onboarding meditation was similar to what the author experienced. But I was older when I started and was certain that my world view was inaccurate which was leading to a drop in predictive accuracy. My journey had me leaving behind something pretty crappy and while I was not certain about the “goodness” of what I was choosing to move towards, life had taught me that different is good when the normal has become difficult, challenging, or painful. It needs to be said that I had already learned to doubt the validity of what I knew, so as destabilizing as I found the transition, it was no more so than the year leading up to the start of the journey.

The author does a good job at shining a light on the lack of thoroughness in the on-boarding that many people have with mindfulness practices. There is no doubt that had she engaged the practice more when she was young and being dragged to the temple, she would have been guided with a lot more vigor and care than what many people experience presently in western societies. But that is the nature of things. More care is taken with younger people as well as in places where what is being taught is viewed as important or is a big part of the traditional culture. North America is new to mindfulness, and when coming from a tradition of capitalism with a side serving of violence, it is not surprising that the care is being taken to collect the money as opposed to guiding the people.

This is not the fault of mindfulness, as either a noun or a verb, and is should not surprise anyone that the “money over everything” view is muddying the waters. The thing is this, mindfulness is like any skill, it takes time to generate, it is going to be messy in the middle, and it cannot be done for us. It is the quintessential selfish undertaking that one could argue is impaired by other people and enhanced by temporary isolation. It is like committing law to long term memory or learning how to solve advanced calculus equations, a teacher or instructor can help along the process, but the individual needs to do the practice to stimulate the brain growth to support the new memories or the new way of thinking. To this end, it is a less than optimal capitalist venture since capitalism places experience or perceived value at the top of the service offering. You cannot do mindfulness for your customers, they have to do it themselves, so the only way to make money doing it is to offer something that is scalable. Which in this case means something that is incomplete, is useless crap, or is actually counter-productive and harmful.

The medium is the message here. Those who seek enlightenment and the cultivation of the skill of mindfulness through a smart phone get smart phone levels of enlightenment and mindfulness. Smart phones are tools to trigger the release of dopamine through the activation of outrage, exposure to novelty, and social validation / approval. Mindfulness is a tool to make you aware of what is happening from moment to moment. While these things are not the exact opposite of each other, they are reasonable close to being completely dissimilar. Meditation, the primary way to cultivate the skill of mindfulness, is as close to doing nothing as someone can do without being asleep. The mind is very active, you are alert, but you are focusing so intensely simply because you do not want to become distracted, outraged, etc. Cultivating mindfulness is an act that inhibits the release of reward chemicals, so it offers no hook that business people can use to capture you as a customer.

The author talks a lot about the concept of “no self” in a way that makes it difficult to reconcile the truth of it with the experience of being or having a self. I am not aligned with them here. Two things that seem to be in contradiction can coexist simply because neither one of them actually does. It is kind of like Schrödinger’s cat or the wave–particle duality in that sometimes something is one thing while other times it is something else (meditation and mindfulness have NOTHING to do with quantum mechanics and my use of QM terms is only to describe the fact that sometimes we will need to look at things differently in order to understand them more completely).

You are a physical being, a meat sack if you will. You are made-up of matter, and that matter obeys laws of physics and chemistry, and other subjects. Materialism applies to people just as it applies to rocks or dogs. The difference is, as far as we know, rocks and dogs do not have a well-formed narrative identity of themselves. To make reference to a rock having “no self” seems redundant. It seems similarly so, although not necessarily completely so, to say the same of a dog. But what is the different between these two things, and then, from these two things and us? It seems to me that human beings have reflective consciousness that gives them the ability to think about the world and about things that are not there or are not presently happening. Rocks do not have this ability and while a dog may be conscious and does have the ability to learn, we get no sense that there is any depth to their understanding of what they are or their uniqueness in terms of being a distinct piece of life.

What this means is that as something is happening, it is just a meaningless thing that is occurring – it is a collection of molecules moving in a particular direction. So in order for it to mean something, the observer will need to take a moment to reflect upon what is occurring, allowing their brain to interpret the collection of molecules and their corresponding vectors as being something. But this process is not an act of mindfulness in the purest sense of the term. It is a result of reflection and by virtue of the fact that any meaning is generated, the person is no longer living in the moment and is instead living in a latency period between stimulus and response.

So when we are simply experiencing reality as it unfolds from moment to moment, there is no self. When we are perceiving and understanding what is unfolding from moment to moment, there is a self. It is slightly confusing but not at all if there is a willingness to understand what it is all about.

It just seems really out of place in modern life because without reflection, modern life could not have come to be. But no self makes a lot of sense and is more easily observed and appreciated when someone is sitting in a forest meditating away from everything that has been manufacture. Simplicity allows for the sustained existence of no self because it affords the opportunity to do nothing other than take in whatever is occurring from moment to moment, so basically what is steaming into the brain from the senses. Other people and manufactured material objects make this task nearly impossible because they create the need for rules. This causes complexity and moves the person away from the role of observer and into role of reflector in order to generate an understanding of what is going on.

Neuroscience has revealed a lot about the nature thinking, and one part that applies to no self / self duality is captured by the two self’s phenomena. Specifically, your brain operates with information in two ways. The first way, the no-self way, is about experience. This is what happens from moment to moment and it is what is lumped into the experience of “now.” The second way is about the remembering self, which is what your consciousness recalls about an experience. While it would be partially correct to refer to this as long term memory, given that long term memories do contribute to what we remember, it is not the entire story. The truth is that most of us do not actually remember most things very well and what comes to mind when we are thinking about the past is a combination of long term memories and things we make-up on the fly to fill-in the details or manufacture a more rich or complete narrative. The point here is not to suggest that neuroscience has uncovered evidence to support the truth about what the Buddhist teachers have been saying for centuries but to lend weight to the notion that sensation / experience is a different thing than perception / reflection / remembering. So given this, it makes sense that we should hold different views about two different things.

There is a Buddhist / Zen saying that goes something like “before enlightenment work, after enlightenment work” that addresses the next concern the author has about “mindfulness.”

They raise a very good point, but do not track in on the source of the issue with any vigor or accuracy, when they state: “In claiming to offer a multipurpose, multi-user remedy for all occasions, mindfulness oversimplifies the difficult business of understanding oneself.”

The first part of the sentence is more or less accurate, as it would be if it was said about anything that is put forward as a panacea or cure to everything that ails a person, culture, or society. The second part of the sentence is less accurate. In fairness, they were writing an article and not a text book, so there was probably a word count limit in place for them. However, that does not negate the responsibility an author has for guarding their words and to speak as clearly, accurately, and concisely as possible. Their article is not a work of fiction so it is reasonable to assume that what is written down is factual and represents the truth as the author knew it at the time. Putting aside their right to have and voice an opinion, that sentence journeys well into the realm of a statement of disinformation or a statement that is demonstrably false.

The first thing is that mindfulness is a skill, so a noun or verb, and makes no claim about its abilities to do anything – in exactly the same way as reading is a skill and completely incapable of promoting its virtues. Mindfulness needs boosters because mindfulness is not alive. The problem then is not with anything that mindfulness itself is doing but with the claims that are being made about it. In the event that this seems so obvious and therefore unnecessary to mention, it is worth pointing out that racism is both a problem and a part of our internal operating system. Many skills or behaviours that human beings are capable of, that seem to lack any value in modern life, are there because they served a valuable survival purpose at one point in time. Racism is not good, but the ability to identify those who are not like us and to treat those we are similar to had a place in our evolutionary past. It is an antiquated thing, particularly given that every unique race has suffered MORE at the hands of those who look like them than those who look different, but so too is the appendix and a considerable amount of our DNA given that it doesn’t seem to code for anything at all. Well the appendix used to do something and those unnecessary genes used to code for something that promoted survival.

So the problem with mindfulness is that people who promote it are making extraordinary claims about what it can do and how it will impact the lives of anyone who uses it as an approach to life. The problem the author is making reference to is the overstating or direct lying about the utility of mindfulness made by the people who promote it. This is something that I agree with, but it was not stated as directly as that in the article.

The second part of the sentence “mindfulness oversimplifies the difficult business of understanding oneself” doesn’t hold up nearly as well, even when translated or updated to reflect what is actually going on. I believe that the author is intending to say “the skill of mindfulness is presented as a simple way to understand yourself.” This is true and it is not a problem. The fact is that human beings are biological machines whose brain manufactures meaning out of electrical impulses that are triggered by collisions between the body and molecules that are not a part of the body. The tree we see is a collection of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. that is in tree form. What we see is the light that bounces off of some of these molecules and hits our retina. When we touch it, the molecules of our skin are repelled by the molecules that make-up the tree, so this ends up stimulating receptors on the skin that trigger electrical impulses to flow into the brain that cause the sensation of touch. If we were to eat the tree, tree molecules would stimulate taste receptors, if we were to smell it, tree molecules would stimulate olfactory receptors, and when we hear the tree, receptors in our inner ear are simply responding to air that is coming off of the tree and going into our ears.

I am not intending to be irreverent when I say that it is “simply” anything, but our experience of a tree is so much less than any narrative story we manufacture to capture the entirety of our knowledge about trees. It is our brain that do all of the heavy lifting that allow us to perceive things and to understand the world in reflective terms.

The fact of the matter is that most of what we know about things is just a story we are telling ourselves and sharing with other people. It is accurate in so far as it works in allowing us to navigate our way through life with a lot of ease, but nearly all of it is just manufactured rules about collections of molecules that human beings mostly agree on just so they do not have to think about it anymore than they have to.

Considering and then assimilating this fact is alarming, at least initially, but our brain will reconcile things very quickly and it will allow us to go back to living life as though we didn’t gain the insight. From an experiential point of view, the facts and the truth are of much less consequence than the position and movement of the molecules that we bump into. So no matter what we learn, life will return to normal quickly because it must be lived by each one of us.

The skill of mindfulness is a way that anyone can gain clarity into the nature of the world and, more importantly, the nature of our social interactions and social conventions. It will allow someone to  uncover what they are in terms of molecules and what they are in terms of a narrative understanding, while giving them great power to figure out what is important, what is real, and what is worth pursuing. It isn’t going to fix anything EXCEPT the delusions someone may have created about what is going on from moment to moment. It is not a cure for clinical depression, it will not help someone grow taller or regrow their hair, and it will not open up the doors to effortless success. But it can allow someone to experience what is actually going on in the world, to gain a better understanding of the difference between sadness and depression, it can help someone accept the reality of their height or hair situation, and it can give someone the clarity to figure out what actions they need to take in order to find greatness and to then make the decision on whether or not they actually want it.

Mindfulness, when practiced consistently, gives someone the ability to separate the sensations from the perceptions and to then make the decision to act in a way that makes the most sense to them in terms of these sensations and perceptions. But that is all it is going to do. The reason some people feel calmer when they practice it is because it dissolves the narrative, for a short period of time, which will allow for whatever triggered emotions to run their course before returning the person back to their baseline. There are two ways to describe it, the first is the feeling you have right as you wake-up in the morning without an alarm clock and when you have nowhere to go – your mind is at ease and filled with next to nothing. It doesn’t last very long, but while it does, it is still and peaceful and nothing is pulling it one way or the other. The second is the feeling you have right after a very intense workout as your heart rate and breathing return to normal. Physically you feel fantastic and mentally you are overcome with a sense of wellness and indifference to the world. Your mind has been parked into unflappable so you feel, for a spell, like you are on vacation and weeks away from having to deal with the real world again.

Now consider what you have just read and apply it to the author’s statement: “to look for richer explanations about why you think and feel the way you do, you need to see yourself as a distinct individual, operating within a certain context. You need to have some account of the self, as this demarcates what is a response to your context, and what flows from yourself.”

Who we are is not a static thing, and a lot of what we may choose to believe we are is subject to the present emotional state at the time of perception. Before my long intense bike ride, I may be an angry co-worker who doesn’t take the time to consider the ideas of other people before pushing my own solution forward. At the end of the bike ride I’m more than capable of working through their solution to actually see the merits of what they are suggesting and realize that not only is it better than my idea, but it is the only way forward. I would suggest that this insight occurs because the “self” has disappeared affording me an objective perspective that is based on the consideration of a more complete view of the available information. There is no ego so there is no desire to be the problem solver, only a desire to have the problem solved as effectively and as permanently as possible.

The tendency for people to see the world only from their own perspective and to view this perspective as being more important or valuable is a characteristic of something called disordered attachment. With the exception of a few people, everyone has a bias towards their own point of view simply because there is nothing so real in the universe as it. Every moment of our waking life is experienced from inside ourselves and a good case can be made that most of our dreams are also from our own unique point of view. “We” exist somewhere right behind the eyes, nose and mouth, between the ears, and slightly above our tongue and throat. All of our physical sensations have a “I” quality insofar as they tend to originate on our skin, or at the boundary between “us” and the rest of the world. It is reasonable that we would create and carry such an inflated perspective given that there are only two things in the world and that “we” are one of them; the other one is the rest of the world / universe.

But this isn’t the entire picture because EVERYONE has the same sort of perspective and experience of being alive. When you are in a room with nine other people, there are ten unique perspectives, each one as the sole center of all experience. This means that no specific reality is more real than any of the rest. As many people as there are on the planet, there are that many versions of the real world running. So we are real, but we are not really real.

Disordered attachment is a type of psychological attachment or dependence to something, someone or some activity. It is consider disordered because it is out of proportion to reality or to the nature of things. The solution I was forcing through, for example, is only held by me as the better solution when I am attached to it and am therefore willing to dismiss the merits of my co-workers solution. However, at the end of my intense bike ride or at some point after around 5 minutes of meditation, my attachment has evaporated because my emotional state has returned to baseline and I am more able to see the world in objective terms. This can only be a good thing given that a good idea is a good idea regardless of where it comes from. By eliminating the disordered attachment, objective reality can come more clearly into focus and the world can get better for all those who are relying on the best possible results.

There are a slew of cognitive biases that have at their core this type of disordered thinking / rationalization. The ego centric bias, the Ikea bias, the fundamental attribution error, and conflicts of interest are just a few of them that apply directly to the work situation I outlined. The ego centric bias has someone rely too much on their own perspective and experience, the Ikea bias has someone inflate the value of something that they created well above the fair market value of similar items, the fundamental attribution error has someone view their own decisions or actions as being related to situational factors while viewing the decisions and actions of others as being the result of character traits, and a conflict of interest is the tendency for people to unconsciously act in ways that promote an outcome that will benefit them all the while believing and feeling like they are acting objectively. There are many more, but this list should be sufficient to provide evidence that things are not as simple as they seem or even as we perceive them to be.

However, intense exercise, a good night’s sleep, or a mindfulness meditation session can go a long way in mitigating the impact of being the center of ALL of your experiences simply because they put some distance between the stimulus and the response. This time delay will allow any emotional response to fade and it will reduce the perception of the magnitude of any gain or loss.

This piece of it is rather peculiar. The “self” is something to which things happen and this allows for the “self” to react to those things in a way that seems like it is automatic and beyond any conscious control. However, this is not the case for most things. With the exception of being physically hit by something or getting physically ill, most of the stuff that occurs doesn’t actually happen to anyone, or at least it does not actually happen to us. We see or hear it, but our bodies are in no way implicated by what happened. This means that the perception we have of events plays a much bigger role in how we go about living our life than anything that actually happens to us or our bodies. This leads to the situation that when something occurs in the world but that only impacts us in terms of our perception or narrative interpretation of it, we have a chemical response that causes us to “feel” something BUT that reaction is not to anything that is real. If we think about two co-workers putting forward different solutions to a specific problem, not much is happening in a physical sense – some brain activity creates a thought that is the solution, and other brain activity causes muscles to contract in very specific ways that allow air to flow out of the lungs, passing over the vocal chords to make a very specific sound that is the air vibration equivalent to the thought. Both parties are having a very similar experience although each one of them has a very different interpretation of the ideas that are being aired. Each one will believe their idea is better because they will have felt just how right it was when they thought it. What they hear, the other person’s idea, will not have the same quality. They won’t feel it in the same way – both in terms of intensity and rightness – and it will be as though it exists as something that is different from them. Both parties will feel and belief that their solution is the best and each will likely go to bat for it.

But this is only happening because each one is acting as though they are something independent from the other and that the other is part of everything else. While this may be narratively or perceptually correct, it is not correct in terms of what is actually going on in the world. A detached third party would simply listen to both ideas and give their opinion on which one is the best because they are neither of the two self’s who have been tasked with solving the problem. They get to be objective because both solutions are coming from outside of them. Their ego does not factor into it as they get to say “the best idea is this one” and get back to doing whatever it is they do. They will probably feel that one of the answers is better, but they will not be inclined to feel that their OWN idea is better simply because it came from inside of them.

It is worth suggesting that this level of insight – to notice that cognitive biases have a sensation and that I am as prone as everyone else to be subjected to them – really only came to life for me when I spent a lot of time meditating, noticing my thoughts and feelings arise and pass away, and getting very clear that the next thing that I think about or the next sensation that I have is most often a complete mystery to me. The most I can do is to try and shape them by paying attention to very specific things, but generally speaking, there is a very random nature to almost all of it. Which brings us to the final concern the author raises.

“After a certain point, mindfulness doesn’t allow you to take responsibility for and analyse your feelings.”

I believe that the opposite is true, that we can only take responsibility for and gain insight into our feelings through the practice of mindfulness. Right where the author claims mindfulness impairs our ability to own and understand our feelings is the point I believe that mindfulness facilitates these things. I also believe that we are talking about the same phenome and may actually believe more or less the same thing.

It seems that their conclusion here is based off of some of the other concerns they mention; which means that all that comes after may not be rooted in reality or fact. For example, if someone does not allow for the duality of self and no-self, they are powerless to draw any other conclusion that “mindfulness doesn’t allow you to take responsibility for and analyse your feelings” because if there is no self, there can be no ownership of the feelings that are being experienced and nothing there to analyse them. But it there is only a self, the observation that thoughts and feelings just seem to flow out of our spontaneous brain activity becomes a lot tougher to notice or it must exist in a world to which it is incompatible. Both concepts are needed because there are times when we are a self and times when we are no self. The author has laid out their concerns with this part of it which has had the effect of limiting the moves they are able to make without appearing to contradict themselves or outline a paradox / problem.

I suppose I am more willing to allow for the coexistence of mutually exclusive ideas because I am very confident that the experience we have of being alive from moment to moment is not well enough understood to limit any aspect or to allow us to say that “there is no self” or “there is only a self.” There are times when it seems to be a self and other times when there appears to be no self, so I’m going to hedge my bets by assuming that they are both accurate while conceding that there is probably a more complete theory or understanding that covers them both perfectly. Apart from this being a safe move, given just how complex consciousness is, it has the added benefit of allowing me to pick and choose the best or most effective stuff from whichever side I happen to be considering. My goal here is to point out and highlight what works and why it may be of value, as opposed to pointing out what doesn’t work or the underlying historical problems with a technology such as mindfulness.

Cultivating the skill of mindfulness will go a very long way in helping someone understand what feelings are and what they are not. It will also give a person the ability to critically assess what is going on in terms of their emotional reactions / responses. On the very surface level, knowing that you are experiencing the sensations of anger moments before you have the emotional experience of anger can be very helpful in determining the appropriate course of action. Anger may be the right response, but it may be an overreaction, and one with a big downside. On a deeper level, having a more full experience and understanding of an emotional response will allow the emotion to be all that it is and ONLY what it is. You can be sad because your sports team lost, but you do not end-up devastated or left feeling aimless.

Most importantly is the fact that by gaining the ability to see and feel emotions more accurately, you will begin to gain the insight into what the whole thing is all about and how your brain will react to the things that it believes are happening and the things that actually do. I would be inclined to suggest that you cannot possibly have a cursory understanding of your feelings or your motivations / action unless you are able to notice them as sensations, experiences, and linguistic narrative expressions. Having access to one or two of these things is not complete enough to be useful as each one supplies a portion of the information. But when all three are available and processed, we are able to create a more complete understanding of any situation and move forward having made any decision from a place of being fully informed.

In summary then, the skill of mindfulness is an essential piece of the equation that allows someone to figure out what is actually going on and what actions need to be taken to ensure continued survival. Without it, we are moving forward on autopilot, oblivious to the lack of depth in our understanding and completely unaware of the impact our manufactured fiction is having on the decisions we make. It allows you to figure out what is going on, what you did, and why you did it along with illustrating the subjective and self-serving nature of most of your perception.

Again, while I did not agree with much of what the author said, we simply have a different opinions. I see and understand the world differently than them and that is fine. They do point out some of the legitimate problems with the subject of mindfulness and how it is being introduced to the western masses. While most of these challenges are the consequence of the people who are involved and have nothing at all to do with the mental skill of mindfulness, generating awareness of these problems is a very good thing to do because it can go a long way in helping people avoid the pitfalls.

I liked the article in-spite of the fact that I did not not agree with much of it. Obviously, I believe that I can provide some of the missing insight and to help clear-up the authors concerns, but I have no problem if the author never changes their opinion. That is because their article was worth reading and forced me to dig in a little on some of the ideas or beliefs that I have about mindfulness in order to figure out what it was that I was not aligned with. At the end of the day that may have been the author’s goal – I know that it is one of mine when I write – and since the piece was well written, it allowed me to think about the subject very quickly and without having to decipher a hidden message.