So last time we continued looking through the myth of Siddhartha’s awakening. We talked about him leaving the palace—the having mode—his attempt to rediscover / recover the being mode, and the difficulty he faced in pursuing self-denial as passionately as he pursued self-indulgence and why this ultimately failed because it’s still working within the same operation of trying to have a self. Then we looked at Siddhartha’s commitment to the middle path: an attempt to overcome that through the cultivation of mindfulness.
Then we began our exploration of mindfulness. We first looked at what it meant: sati, and remember it’s this deep remembering / this recovering of the being mode that leads to a fundamental transformation and alleviates the existential anxiety and distress that Siddhartha was experiencing, and potentially is on offer for us.
Then we started to take a look at the practice of mindfulness and its attempt to address at least an individual or personal experience of a meaning crisis, and we were doing that because we were trying to investigate more broadly the mindfulness revolution and how that is a response to the meaning crisis within the West.
We began by noting that the scientific study of mindfulness is misleading in some ways because it begins with a feature list, and as we’ve noted multiple times feature lists leave out the edios—the structural functional organization—in order to do that we brought out four central characteristics in the feature list: being present, not judging, insightfulness, and reduced reactivity or increased equanimity. Then we noted that what we need to do is to make distinctions between the types of features: between those that are states that we can engage in, actions we can perform, and traits we can cultivate. Once we did we opened up the possibility of asking causal questions: for example, how can the practice of being present produce the trait of insightfulness? Then we could also ask constitutive questions: for example, what’s the part-whole relationship between being present and not judging?
That being said, we then also noted that we have to replace the language of training with the language of explaining. They operate according to different principles and for different goals. We began that by starting to ask “what does it mean to be present?” and then we talked about concentration and we talked about different senses of that and the kind of soft vigilance that’s actually conducive of insight discussed by Allen Langer and others. This kind of involvement is very much about conforming to, or being deeply interested in / connected to the structural functional organization of something.
We noted that that took us into a discussion of paying attention and all the while remembering this idea that we got from Siddhartha Gautama: the story about tuning, getting the right tuning optimization. We started to talk about attention and I made the argument that attention is not very well served by the spotlight metaphor. While the metaphor does give us the idea of attention altering salience the metaphor misses a lot of what attention is doing. We began to investigate what’s missing by making use of Christopher Mall’s idea that attention is not a direct action you perform but it’s something you do by modifying something else by optimizing something else. That’s why you can successfully pay attention by doing many disparate and different kinds of things. You can pay attention by optimizing your seeing into looking, by optimizing your hearing into listening, by optimizing your seeing and listening into a coordinated tracking of what somebody is saying like you’re doing right now. So what we needed was an understanding of attention that could capture the way it’s an optimization strategy which lines up with this tuning idea and how such optimization might be linked to a response to existential modal confusion and the alleviation of the suffering found therein.
Episode 8: The Buddha and “Mindfulness”