Spring Break
Mindfulness: East, West And In-Between
Bryan Murphy
Issue date: 4/11/08 Section: Commentary
The realization that the fat little fellow I had considered the legitimate representation of the religion of 376 million was not, in fact, the legitimate representation of the religion of 376 million people not only ruined a number of my stolen jokes - "I have the body of a god. Too bad that god is Buddha!" - but also caused me to realize how much of my knowledge I've taken as a given, uncorroborated and blindly swallowed. Information that we come across ourselves, we often feel the need to verify - such as the fact that peanuts are a legume, which I checked at least 10 times before accepting as truth. But social knowledge, passed down implicitly from our surroundings, is usually accepted unquestioningly.
The remedy to the sort of mindlessness that leads to one never bothering to research the foods we eat, the politics we endorse and the deities whose tummies we rub - it's a difficult sort of mindlessness to combay, not that people haven't tried.
Mindlessness and its remedy have been a hot topic with theorists since at least, well, the time of Siddhartha Gautama. Buddhism stresses the grave importance of "right attentiveness" as one of the steps on the "eightfold path" to enlightenment - "right attentiveness" stressing the ability to be aware and in control of the activities of one's body, feelings, mind, and thoughts. All of meditation, Buddhist or otherwise, is at least somewhat involved with cultivating mindfulness.
Modern psychological and psychiatric research and theory takes aim at the bane of mindlessness, as well. Psychologists such as Ellen J. Langer, author of "Mindfulness" and "The Power of Mindful Learning" have found that mindless learning can cause significant difficulties, inspiring functional fixedness - leading to decreased creativity and ingenuity - and a sense of learned helplessness, whereby the rote learner falls into a sense of fatalism and depression. As simple a "mindful" encouragement as giving the elderly living in nursing homes as jigsaw puzzle to complete, and not helping them to complete it, has been shown to improve the health and longevity of the elderly included in Langer's studies. Modern therapies have arisen to take advantage of the therapeutic benefits of "mindfulness", such acceptance and commitment therapy, which encourages those undertaking it to accept the impossibility of changing the past and commit themselves to move forward in a chosen direction, and dialectical behavioral therapy, a treatment method specially designed to treat borderline personality disorder.
The remedy to the sort of mindlessness that leads to one never bothering to research the foods we eat, the politics we endorse and the deities whose tummies we rub - it's a difficult sort of mindlessness to combay, not that people haven't tried.
Mindlessness and its remedy have been a hot topic with theorists since at least, well, the time of Siddhartha Gautama. Buddhism stresses the grave importance of "right attentiveness" as one of the steps on the "eightfold path" to enlightenment - "right attentiveness" stressing the ability to be aware and in control of the activities of one's body, feelings, mind, and thoughts. All of meditation, Buddhist or otherwise, is at least somewhat involved with cultivating mindfulness.
Modern psychological and psychiatric research and theory takes aim at the bane of mindlessness, as well. Psychologists such as Ellen J. Langer, author of "Mindfulness" and "The Power of Mindful Learning" have found that mindless learning can cause significant difficulties, inspiring functional fixedness - leading to decreased creativity and ingenuity - and a sense of learned helplessness, whereby the rote learner falls into a sense of fatalism and depression. As simple a "mindful" encouragement as giving the elderly living in nursing homes as jigsaw puzzle to complete, and not helping them to complete it, has been shown to improve the health and longevity of the elderly included in Langer's studies. Modern therapies have arisen to take advantage of the therapeutic benefits of "mindfulness", such acceptance and commitment therapy, which encourages those undertaking it to accept the impossibility of changing the past and commit themselves to move forward in a chosen direction, and dialectical behavioral therapy, a treatment method specially designed to treat borderline personality disorder.
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