I totally f*cking AM !
A Lurid Deconstruction of Mindfulness & Self-Presencing
(For paid subscribers, this article is available as a Substack audio podcast read by the author.")
Q: Is it true that you disparage mindfulness?
That’s right! Screw mindfulness! Its mother is a common whore! My dad could easily beat up its dad! Why, I’d knock down Mister Mindfulness 9-out-of-10 times (with my good arm tied by behind my back) if only he weren’t too cowardly to meet me out behind the ol’ chicken shed!
Wow. That’s some unexpectedly jaunty aggression. Let the epic rap battle begin!
Or — maybe not rap. Maybe hip hop? Chap hop?
Do you know about Chap Hop?
Or his arch-nemesis:
Okay, putting aside that convivial, online, faux-culture in which hypermodern music genres are re-inscribed into the mediated phantasy of late Victorian imperialism, I have indeed made a few provocative public remarks to the effect that “mere witnessing” is perhaps the weakest form of metacognitive praxis.
So let’s unpack the idea of mindfulness…
Deconstructing Mindfulness
My comments, usually made as a guest on various podcasts, are meant to tweak our appreciation of mindfulness. The critique is not that it is ineffective but, rather, that the effects are
(a) not derived from the quality of watchfulness itself and
(b) actually derived from far more interesting dynamics that can also be found in various other practices, and
(c) that we should be a lot more curious about the relationship between a minimal quality of self-watching & a more maximal goal of intensified inner presence.
On that first point:
We often speak as though mindfulness practice were a kind of magical abstract eyeball. A disembodied “looking” with wondrous effects that not only liberate us from suffering but make us wiser, deeper and more competent beings because they apparently express the primal background condition of Reality. For, ultimately, we are told, there is only an infinite Seer who sees all things and we will be enlightened beyond our own thoughts & reactions if we allow that sheer power of seeing into our souls.
Maybe.
But what if the benefits do not come from the disidentified watching of the self-activity but, instead, from the intentional efforts made to force a more complex interaction between our different psychological systems?
While trying to maintain a more objective awareness of our perceptions and actions, we are ALSO trying to intentionally run multiple inner systems. We are complicating our self-experience by attempting to simultaneously be the subjective “one” who thinks and also the “other one” who notices. Do the benefits result from the detached noticing — or from the exercise of the simultaneous attempting?
In the first case we are invoking a metacognitive witness who is imagined to already exist. In the second, we are generating metacognitive capacity by forcing forth a new neuropsychological function that mediates between inner systems & oversees intrapsychic efforts.
It could be either. Or both. Obviously let’s keep our options on the table. But if it turns out to be the latter option, then mindfulness may not even necessarily be the best way to get that result.
Wait — what am I saying, dear reader?
I am still making the same mistake that most people make. I am acting as though “mindfulness” was already a single, obvious phenomenon that is commonly understood by everyone who uses that simple combination of English letters. Dubious in the extreme! Our deconstruction will probably have to probe more deeply...
Remember the Mindiness!
Mindiness is a fun obsolete English term (ca. 1200 CE) that evolved into mindfulnesse (1561) and finally mindfulness (1817) in its use as a translation for the Buddhist term “sati.” That’s Pali. The language of Buddha. It’s called “smrti” in Sanskrit.
I like the word mindiness.
It reminds me of handiness. Perhaps you could you be a mindyman in the same way that you could be a handyman. Perhaps you should! Imagine what sorts of peculiar domestic problems might require people to call for the local mindyman!
Speaking of reminders, more precise English translations render sati as memory or retention. Whereas mindfulness could be as general & sentimental as “thoughtfulness,” the Buddhists were trying to articulate something very specific. It involves the activation of a sensibility out of which you might launch several developmental tweaks to your stream of consciousness, but to make those tweaks, you must first remember their value.
Similarly, in the notorious Fourth Way teachings, the term self-remembering is deployed. (Although historically it was used much more frequently by Ouspensky than Gurdjieff. The former fellow made it sound like a scheme for transforming internal energies by splitting attention between experience & the “I”. Conversely, the other fellow made it sound a little more incidental and embodied. Less connected to the psychological impression of a witnessing self and more involved with the subtle proprioceptive sensing of the somatic body.)
Bodies have parts, limbs, organs. Members. To re-member yourself is to recollect your parts. Yet, of course, before you can re-member… you must first remember to re-member!
That means the value of the activity must re-arise in your consciousness. A previous insight must return or be retained. You recall that you wanted to do something important and intentional with your attention in relationship to the possibility of being more (of whatever you fundamentally are). That decision was already made. Yet it can only be implemented when our valuable plans and insights return from out of the fog of forgetfulness.
So simple.
So familiar.
Anyone who has a life of inner practice, whether by applying some learned method or following some dimly innate instinct, has noticed this peculiar phenomenon of phasing. We move in & out of our developmental orientation. This is the beautiful distress of the seeker. She has moments of epiphany and insight that seem to transfigure reality and draw her dizzyingly close to her best self.
“The problem is solved!” she says, “If only I could remember this special inner position, then I would live life beyond my usual habits and reactions. And indeed I shall never forget this stark, essential and overwhelming truth!”
But she does forget.
Tasks and challenges absorb our attention. Rightly so. We should pay attention to people, activities, etc. Yet we lose something in the process. Invisibly our peak insight slips away. Later we are struck with the realization that we have forgotten the most important thing! And we cannot find our way back. Yet this remembering is already enough for us to begin again.
As long as I can remember, retain, recollect that I have a more-whole-way-of-being (which can be contrasted to my current partial efforts), then I feel like I am “on the Way.”
If only I could efficiently retain this inner orientation 24/7.
A laudable goal — yet the devious brown squirrels in my backyard, if they are to be believed, challenge my fantasy of total ongoing conscious effort. Don’t you also need to forget? they ask. Those demonic, frisky-tailed, tree rats assume that assimilation time, restorative ease & life chores are also important. That these other things may actually aid, rather than take away from, my self-unfolding. Perhaps even consciousness is a burden at times. Perhaps mindfulness should come and go naturally? Like breathing.
Still — squirrels are not experts. They know something about the patterns of organic life. Maybe even something that my human psychology is evading. At the same time, however, the result of their undoubtedly sage advice is likely just to be: a squirrel’s life.
That’s no good for me. I pretend to have much more lofty goals! And if it turns out that the constant, relentless state-of-remembrance is not necessarily healthy, nonetheless I do still want to increase the number & depth of such moments. For it genuinely seems that I live a second life consisting primarily of those special moments. A pathway made of mindfulness stones. One life as an organism, such as a squirrel or a bear, and another as the greater intelligence that remembers to bear witness.
Grrrrrrrr.
But who is this so-called Witness?
The Cosmic Voyeur
Within the philosophical world of Buddhism and its local network affiliates, there has long been debate about whether mindfulness is primarily about “mere witnessing” or whether it involves the arousal of a discriminating intelligence — a form of evaluation, insight & ethical judgement that is productively applied to each moment of human experience.
So what is the Witness? An agent? An evaluator? A posture? A strategy? Or merely an impersonal free-floating surveillance system?
This notion of an abstract conscious observer (surveillance system) has been quite popular in the West. Perhaps it derives from the ancient pharaonic fantasy of an all-seeing Imperial eye atop the imposing pyramid of the patriarchal State? Or it could be a neuropsychological side-effect derived from the experience of reading books. After all, “the reader” lurks invisibly behind and beyond the whole world of the text as an unseen seer.
Euro-American society and its local network affiliates, have tended to translate the spiritual practices of other cultures as though they were (obviously) suggesting that we should identify ourselves with a disembodied, impersonal and mental-optical faculty of “merely watching.” This is consciousness in its most vague and depersonalized sense. Such a fantasy may be typical of our culture and it lurks in the background of the way that many of us conceptualize mindfulness practices.
Many psychological and bio-medical studies show the straightforward therapeutic value of merely observing reactions and interpretations — rather than immediately acting them out. Great. And it can be very powerful and liberating to describe your subjective experiences in neutral, third-person terminology. He is typing. He completes this paragraph. He congratulates himself prematurely.
However these practical benefits have a socio-intellectual background. They are entangled with our worldviews. And all too frequently, they seem to reinforce the metaphysical “frame” of escaping from the passionate vicissitudes of embodied life.
Our uninspected paradigm might be that we are escaping and ascending up a ladder of impersonal self-observation until we finally merge with the Great Invisible Bodiless Eye who sees everything… but is touched by nothing.
Addicts need to be careful around their favorite substances. Maybe modern people need to be careful around optical metaphors?
Robert Kegan, former Chair of Adult Developmental Studies at Harvard, suggested that the primary mechanism of ongoing human evolution was the mere inspection of our own processes. “The subject of one stage,” he said, “becomes the object of the subject of the next stage.”
When you watch yourself, you become a new, bigger and better self. Or (according to Ken Wilber’s tripartite model of distal, proximal & anterior self), the cosmic Witness Itself intervenes in the act of your self-watching and helps grow you toward the perfect cosmic void of merely looking.
Wilber, of course, is notorious for his use of exaggerated optical metaphors.
His (quite laudable) version of Integral Theory prominently features such visual fetishism as the Witness, the Eye of Spirit, Perspectives, Viewpoints, Lenses, etc. A widespread Western predisposition toward eye-centrism may lead us to misjudge the effective power of mindfulness. We may be biased toward the feeling that “simply looking with the mind” is the primary factor that produces the good effects.
Self-Consciousness vs Consciousness-of-Self
The other danger in mindfulness is the temptation to conflate it with attentional narcissism.
Sure, it is often anti-narcissistic to gain some watchful distance from our internal narratives BUT we must still be alert about the lurking potential of neurotic self-observation. Constantly watching your own livestreaming inner channel runs the risk of ignoring functional stressors and living relationships. Mindfulness practices may help the human ego to grow beyond its hasty identification with thoughts, emotions and perceptions but it could also reinforce the subtly contracted, egoic self-sense.
Does mindfulness protect the status of the “separate watcher” from the rest of reality? Could it exacerbate the sense of a mind/body split? Does it stray worryingly close to the habituation of constant, anxious self-checking? These are queries worth considering.
In English, we have ambivalent terms like self-consciousness. They indicate both an advanced state or stage of cognition & a neurotic discomfort generated by a compulsive loop of self-inspection.
Are we completely sure that our own mindfulness practice is only doing the good version? We humans mislead ourselves in many ways. We can also be misled by others and by systems.
Ron Purser’s famous book on McMindfulness argued persuasively that we are being sold a problematic version of mindfulness. The reason, he says, that corporations are rushing to endorse these practices for workers is because it serves their interests — not yours. It pacifies people. It accommodates them to the suffering inherent in their artificial and extractive circumstances. If people hate their jobs or societies (or families) then just encourage them to practice self-calming & watchful disidentification. That will undermine the desire to change or escape from the bad system.
Mindfulness has been clinically demonstrated to increase pain tolerance. That is good if you do not want to feel pain. It is also bad if it helps you stay embedded in unnecessary pain as part of a social activity that is incentivized to exploit people in dehumanizing ways.
In the book Zen at War, Brian Daizen Victoria described how Buddhist monks, in the service of the xenophobic Japanese Imperial war effort, were instructed on how to use mindfulness for state-authorized murder.
Maintain a flowing state of third-person detachment. You are not killing & raping the Chinese civilians. It is simply happening. You are not the person who feels bad about that — you are merely the observer of those feelings. Do not identify. Stay in the Witness position.
That’s worrying. So we should at least be a little suspicious when warmongering nations and predatory corporations are happy to “encourage” a culture of mindfulness.
Tweaks, Knacks & Novelties
Mindfulness advocates, of course, will simply opine that these are incorrect approaches. You need to gain the knack of doing it right. Okay. It is plausible that particular nuances of practice make the difference between productive and destructive outcomes. What could these nuances could be?
The most obvious suggestion is that we need to get the balances more precisely correct. You are not trying to dissociate. What you need is to occupy an attentional sweet spot — not too close, not too far. Sensitively engaged; not over-identified. A Goldilocks zone of adjacency.
Another option is that your mindfulness practice might be too homogenous. Perhaps you are being unnecessarily indifferent to variations in that of which you are being mindful. Are you noticing everything merely equally? Maybe that is a failure of discriminating awareness. Maybe some perceptions are more important and nutritious than others.
That’s interesting.
Suppose that we defined consciousness as familiarization. Our consciousness seems to show up in the space between all-them-stuffs you do not know (ignorance) and all-them-stuffs you know very well (compressed subconscious competencies). Consciousness is only needed when there is something relatively new. Something that has yet to be fully processed.
Thus mindfulness could be understood as attentiveness to novelty. A way of helping the familiarization process by intentionally inspecting the most surprising, interesting or least familiar facets of our perceptual field. This jives nicely with the cognitive theories of Karl Friston who has proposed that sentience is the attempt to reduce discrepancy. It also works well with the opinions of that peculiar 20th century century mystic call’d Osho.
He often connected meditation with novelty, suggesting that your awareness practices should not make you dull but more new, interesting, intelligent, lively and adaptive. In fact, he proposed that one of the best ways to learn the meditative state is to simply keep choosing new experiences and noticing what this does to your subjective awareness.
So maybe novelty is that of which mindfulness could be said to be “full”?
That’s one interesting tweak.
Another approach is to invoke plural psychology. Maybe you need more minds to be mindful together in order to be full of them?
Mindsfulness
I want to modify my experience in a way that I think will help me to unfold myself authentically within my relationships and various contexts, up to and including ecstatic self-transcendence. My plan is to enfold my wholeness into contact with each moment of activity & perception.
I forget my plan.
Later I suddenly remember my plan! My valuable insight returns. I try to retain it. It is accompanied by a motivating intention. Good. But now how will I will enact my experiential wholeness?
Imagine the whole family went on a picnic. That means each member of the family was present. Or maybe Uncle Abed was in Dubai again but we were mostly all there. So who needs to be present at the inner picnic in order for my full presence to be activated? Who are the key members of my inner family?
Which “minds” would have to be co-present in order for me to be “full” of their shared minding quality?
The minimum standard for conventional mindfulness is that I evoke an additional mental witness. So that is probably one of the minds who needs to be at the picnic. Let’s call it a sensitized capacity for inspection, organization & naming. Usually I feel that I am doing this “looking” from the head. That’s where my eyeballs and my prefrontal cortex exist. A head mind.
I also have some kind of physical awareness. The inner life of my body, my cells, organs and musculature are always responding to the world. They have some capacity to intelligently detect things. They do not always tell these things to the head mind but they do a lot of the work that makes reality intelligible.
Sometimes I complain about computer imagery in films because the visuals don’t feel solid. They lack weight. The don’t interact correctly with their environment. A real perception requires subjective physical responsiveness to the solid factors of physical reality. A body mind.
Yet I am also more than just a head and body. I have vulnerable responses in my torso that seem to regulate my overall engagement with other people based on a capacity to appreciate qualities like significance, arousal, care and justice. A heart mind.
If I am playing badminton with the chaps and forget to watch my thoughts, I may have physical mindfulness but not mental mindfulness. Yet the opposite condition occurs when I am watching my thoughts carefully and then — stub my toe. Mental but not physical. And all the while I have lost contact with that part of myself that knows I should be calling my mother more often.
A plural mindsfulness will be needed. My degree of self-presence in my own life might be described as as circulation between several distinct and specialized primary minds. So the “Witness” may be less of a surveillance camera and more of a juggler.
Mindsfulness!
Problem solved.
Concluding, as Kierkegaard might say, Unscientific Postscript on The Maximal Self-Relation.
The salience of our perceptions, and the intensity of our feeling-of-wholeness, can be amplified, as we have just explored, by conscious circulation between different “minds.” Especially if they are relatively well-balanced. Or sometimes if they are allowed to powerfully disagree with each other. Okay, great. That’s an important thing to remember (sic).
It is not always necessary.
In each moment we find ourselves thrown into the space between authentic and inauthentic experience. We are somewhere between “peak becoming” and “unworthy reactive triviality.”
And in order to evaluate where we are on this gradient, we need to be in implicit contact with our possibility for full-spectrum presence. We use that contact —however weak or strong — to decide how close we are to the maximum valuableness of conscious experience.
You might not always feel mind-FULL but you nonetheless have the ability, whenever you remember, to check how much contact you are experiencing with your fullness. How near or far from it are you? And this evaluation itself, the mere awareness of the salient contrast, seems to invoke some degree of attunement to your wholeness.
(Attunement to wholeness? Is that most New Age phrase ever? I’d tell you not to forgive me for that one but I’m skeptical about the existence of oneness…)
One way to think about what is being remembered in any moment of mindfulness is this: The degree of contrast between your current embodied self-experience & your peak fullness of being.
You remember that you have, can be and wish to BE MORE — and that you are in relation to that. But what is that? What is a peak, maximal self-relation like?
Whatever it is, it is surely not the same flavor as being an incomplete and sentimental “little self” just trying to get a titch better by observing thoughts and reactions. It is probably much more full of “mind” than that. Maybe it is overfull of mind (or consciousness or self or being). I mean:
WOW!
I’m not just present and watching — I’m really, really, really present. I’m extraordinarily present. The salience-of-my-being is maxed. I have so much embodiment, feeling and mind that I can barely believe how much of a being I am!
My beingness blends into a beingness-of-all-becomings which, heck, might as well be infinite.
This is more than just I AM-ness.
I totally fucking AM!
That’s a picture of Boris from the old James Bond film Goldeneye. Please ignore him. He is not a great representative of peak self-presencing. It was just for fun. Instead try this:
Exercise: On a scale from 1 to 10 — evaluate how much of your peak-whole-self is currently being experienced? Give yourself a current number along a spectrum from “least contact with the best version of myself” to “maximal embodiment of my best self.” What is the number? And what does it feel like to be that specific distance from your own peak presence?
Awareness of being in this contrast is itself a kind of mindfulness that we can remember…
Bonus:
What might move you up one number on that scale right now?