Deal with Yourself: Or Why MNDFLness is Bad for You

Recently, mindfulness has become the latest self-help craze in the United States, especially as it connects with Buddhist meditation practices. Writers at the New York Times have done a very good job of documenting the phenomenon of mindfulness throughout the past two years. As Virginia Heffernan has noted in her 2015 article on the matter, the word “mindfulness” itself was derived out of a sort of mistranslation of the Pali word sati, a word that more closely translates to “memory of the present” than simply the one word we now refer to as its replacement. As Buddhist practice became more popular throughout the ’60s and ’70s, so did its connections to “being more present,” and the general conceit and concept and well-being, both of which I would say Buddhism provides.

As the Buddhist Dharma came to the West, it essentially ran into capitalism. And certain enterprises and ideas that seek to help us escape the demands of a capitalistic society sure do have a way of becoming ensnared by that same economic structure. As Heffernan notes in the article, which I suggest you peruse quickly, mindfulness and the “well-being” it would lead to became a major industry under the Buddhist teacher John Kabat-Zinn, but I am not writing this to point the finger at any particular individual – the fingers have already been pointed at so many within the Buddhist community and in Buddhist scholarship. However, that’s why I mentioned capitalism – because capitalism makes us all complicit! Hooray!

Further adding to the research and analysis provided by his colleague Heffernan a year before, David Gelles writes in a 2016 New York Times article, mindfulness itself has become its own self-sustaining corporate entity of sorts. We have seen this with the commodification of yoga in the West (please, try and tell me it was not commodified, I will fight you), especially with Lululemon and their yoga-focused products. Because when you’re a yogi, you go to a high-end clothes store to make sure you are prepared to forgo all material comforts in the heart of India to become one with the Brahman. Companies, “meditation teachers,” and DVDs all provide courses to get you on the right track in life. Yet, one development in particular has caught my attention and the attention of many other Buddhists: MDNFL. Other than ridding their name of all vowels to appeal to the Millennial demographic that strives to be semi-illiterate, MNDFL describes itself as a meditation studio that “exists to enable humans to feel good.”

Now, I could continue to tell you more and bring up other issues and questions I have. Like, how does MNDFL have guided mantra practice when the meaning of the words themselves do not carry the historical or symbolic significance they are meant to within a temple or the proper Buddhist sectarian setting? Do any of these “meditation teachers” have the authority to guide Buddhist meditation by being the successor of a Dharma lineage, that is, have they received the utmost authority from Zen masters and Buddhist abbots to teach others the rigorous techniques of meditation. Or, boy, how much money do you want me to throw at you to give me the privilege to sit my ass down on a cushion, something I could do at home for free if I was not always getting so distracted by watching the X-Files on Netflix?

None of those questions matter because the first actual sentence, which I assume is the thesis and motivational statement of the company itself, is inherently wrong. Meditation does not “exist to enable humans to feel good.” Buddha never said to any of his followers that he wanted to make sure they had a place to decompress from their jobs after working at an online retailer start-up all day. Saint Anthony the Great, that most bad-ass of the Desert Fathers, did not go into the Egyptian Desert because he wanted to get a tan. Meditation, contemplation, prayer – these are not practices you start to intensely engage in for the sake of making yourself feel better.

In the words of Brad Warner, Zen priest and punk rocker extraordinaire: “Real wisdom is the ability to understand the incredible extent to which you bullshit yourself every single moment of every day.”

Mindfulness, meditation, yoga, centering prayer, etc., etc. – they are good for people. They really can be, if you believe in them and devote your time and energy to one of those practices. The fact is, being more aware of your surroundings and who you are as a person and being present in the moment are aspects of our being we need to recognize every day. They help to not only center and ground us, but to make sure we can participate in our life and in our conscious experience of the subjective or objective to levels we may consider to be almost 100%. It is better to be an engaged and participating member of life than go through our day-to-day grind in a haze, unaware of the ways we may be harming ourselves and others. This is no way to go through life.

However, this does not mean we can take these religious/spiritual practices and fit them into our framework of commodified consumerism we in the West are so used to engaging with. Spirituality, faith, religiosity – believe it or not, the principles of most major wisdom traditions do not jive very easily with late capitalism. We cannot simply consume the teachings of these religions to create a better state of mind for ourselves in the hope we come out a happier person. Because, in reality, meditation and mindfulness are not practices that are intended to make you think happy thoughts and replace all the negative, nasty feelings we have about ourselves with happy ones.

Not only that, but we cannot and should not tear away all that is essential to these mindfulness and meditation practices within the context of the wisdom traditions they belong to. As I write that sentence though, I know I am already too late, but the point still stands in my mind. Yoga itself uses mantras and positions that are divorced from the gods and worship ceremonies they are identified with in the context of Hindu spiritual practice, but that does not deter people from the practice. I have known a lot of people who have found out more about Hinduism and its teachings because of yoga, but there are still a majority of people who may practice without any knowledge of what the practices they are engaging with are really meant to do.

This goes doubly for Buddhism. Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism ascribes an exalted position to the lotus position of seated meditation. The lotus position was the same way the Buddha meditated when he sat under the Bodhi tree and found enlightenment. Not only that, but the position is ascribed with helping one achieve the state of nirvana, or “extinction,” meaning they may not come back after death after having found enlightenment. However, if you strip meditation of the context and concepts of rebirth, enlightenment, and nirvana, then in what context are you practicing meditation in? To feel good? What if that is not enough?

Meditation is a whirlwind of a mental and bodily exercise that makes us hallucinate, feel intense emotions, and reckon with the demons in our lives to an extent we are not used to dealing with. Saint Anthony the Great battles hordes of demons in the Egyptian waste before he came back a wiser man. Buddha confronted Mara, lord of temptation and personification of death for three days before he reached enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. Jesus pile-drived Satan all Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson-style in the desert after a forty day cage match.

If you want to feel good about yourself and be happy, that is your right as a human being. However, co-opting ancient spiritual practices and tearing away the contexts they are meant to inhabit to make them more palatable to a more modern and supposedly rational crowd does not mean you are stripping the practice of that which is inessential. In fact, you may be taking away the much needed environment and tools needed to make sure your journey into mindfulness will actually pay off in the long-run and make you a better person, not simply a person with a nice feeling in their stomach. Going into a “meditation studio,” you can escape the world and sit on a cushion for a fee every month to think happy thoughts. However, that studio and that nice little cushion may not save you from the thing you are actually running away from every time you might be entering MNDFL: Yourself.

To once again quote the Zen Buddhist teacher Brad Warner: “Zen tears away every false refuge in which you might hide from the truth and forces you to sit naked before what is real.”

Care less about feeling good, and start caring more about being good.

 

 

 

 

Growing into Faith: Taking Responsibility for Truth

If my last article was an exhortation for people to take their time to become more educated about the topic of religion, this next article is the natural outgrowth of learning and growing – to take responsibility and act maturely.

Those were the themes I had in mind as I chose the picture above as the banner for this article. A photo of young Buddhist monks being presented at the temple for their ordination, these young monks will most likely spend their days reading scripture, traveling from monastery to monastery to learn from different teachers, and eventually settle down into one particular community, taking responsibility for the life of their monastic community and overall well-being of their home.

This is how most of us enter our faith tradition, as young children, unaware of the tradition or the teachings we are about to embody for the rest of our lives. This is not necessarily a bad thing; people baptize and initiate their children into various faith/wisdom traditions each and every day with the best of intentions that following the particular teachings of that tradition will help make them a good person. However, initiation into a certain faith can also be the result of an unquestioning adherence to family tradition and societal norms. The latter is not necessarily bad either, it just comes off as lazy.

I can hear what some people may be saying as they read that last paragraph.

“Not everyone has the time to learn as much about religion as you think they should learn.”

“Maybe they like the tradition they entered into, there’s noting wrong with that.”

“Why am I reading this article when I could be doing a hundred other more productive things with my life?”

Well, dear reader, you hit the nail on the head with that last one. As for the first two statements, I do not disagree. I am neither asking people to devote their free time to constantly reading books about religion and culture, nor am I asking people to abandon the faith and traditions they grew up with. Yet, there is a precedent set within the great wisdom traditions themselves, a precedent of introspection and dialogue that should be met as often as possible. The majority of believers do not want to engage in any sort of dialogue with their faith or what they believe. But if you are going to church, temple, or meditation every day without asking the hard questions, well…

Then you may not have any faith at all.

This is a question of profundity as much as it is a question of authenticity. Spirituality lends itself to profound experiences and profound conundrums, but it is whether we face the questions the profundity of the universe puts on us that defines the authenticity of both our beliefs and our being. As I said in the previous article, we need to educate ourselves, and in educating ourselves to have an open mind. Only by having an open mind are we bound to have an experience that is the antithesis of quiescent faith – we start to have a relation with the world. As the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton writes in his posthumous work Love and Living:

“The purpose of education is to show us how to define ourselves authentically and spontaneously in relation to our world – not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of ourselves as individuals. The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it: that is, of the people who can be themselves in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is, therefore, more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom.”

We could take this as a more theologically fanciful way of saying “the unexamined life is not worth living,” but that is not what Merton is trying to say. Spirituality/Religion/Faith/Shopping at Target is a realm of being and understanding we can only start to truly be involved with when we engage in the dialogue/dialectic it presents to us. Being in dialogue with your spirituality is to hold up a mirror to yourself – to engage with yourself and your own questions is to engage with God.

Therefore, the wiggle room for “God told me to do this,” or “God said stealing that Porsche was okay because that man did not really need it” (he didn’t really need it anyway, no worries, you’re in the clear) becomes nonexistent. As in, there’s no room for that bullshit. The realm of religiosity or spirituality does not afford us the convenience of leaving everything up to a higher power or say he was the reason we did everything in the first place. The primary issue with this way of thinking is that it lends itself to determinism, which, fine, I guess it’s totally not my fault I ate that whole pizza by myself, it was supposed to happen anyway. Secondly, this is the highest mark of a lack of maturity or growth. The practices and precepts people of faith follow are not there so we can rely on Christ, Buddha, Jehovah, or Guru Nanak Dev. They are there to help you become a fully realized, and possible even an awakened, person.

We have a responsibility to ask the difficult questions. We cannot be afraid to evolve and change as people. This fear of understanding just how quickly and abruptly we may change is what usually makes people slink back from engaging with difficult questions in the first place. However, it is fear itself that metastasizes into the traits that faith routinely works against. Fear leads to ignorance, ignorance leads to hate, and hate ultimately leads to suffering. If you want to become a Sith Lord, that’s cool, then I just laid out the path to your ultimate success for you without having to watch the prequels (you are very welcome, no thanks needed). As I said in my last article, we need to have open minds, and that means we must be open to change and open to the unknown. Only when we confront the situations of our life with open hearts are we able to radically respond in new ways and radically renew our relationship with the world.

The best example I can muster is one that the Father of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) brings up in one of his more famous works, Fear and Trembling. In this work, Kierkegaard uses Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as his main character. Usually taken as a model of great faith and fortitude, Kierkegaard gives us an altogether different individual. The Abraham we encounter in Kierkegaard’s writing is one that is constantly plagued by doubt and consternation as to the reason why his new deity has asked him to travel so far from civilization, only to give him a son in his old age so that he may sacrifice him as an offering to the divine.

Abraham follows through with carrying out the task (until he is told he does not have to sacrifice his son, that it was all a test), but all the time he is fearful of what may happen if he does not listen to this god and constantly questions the wisdom and sanity of what he is about to do. In this individual, in this model of the “dark night of faith,” we see a figure who is plagued by doubt and change and an inability to comprehend what he is about to do. But he takes responsibility for his actions and carries them out, wracked with guilt before the change of fortune at the end.

Life, and life lived through faith traditions, is messy. We do not always have the answers we may want or seek, but we must ask the questions necessary for not only our survival, but our growth as a people. Constant questions can drive anyone crazy, and that is not the point of this article, but we must learn to be mature and reasonable people in the midst of opaque and existential phenomena in our interior lives. We cannot pretend the situations and frames of mind we find ourselves in from time to time are enjoyable, or that there will be an invisible force alongside us to always get us out of a jam. The best way to grow is to engage with whatever faith you may hold, because only by communicating with the principles and foundation of our being are we able to possibly find the Truth we may have always been searching for, even if we never knew what we were looking for in the first place. You may be surprised what you find when you learn to shoulder the weight of what our faiths may entail.

“Come, seek, for search is the foundation of fortune: every success depends upon focusing the heart.” – Rumi

Let’s Stop Being Jagoffs: Study a Little More Religion

Disclaimer: This essay is by no means meant to be negative, simply reflective of the reality that I have dealt with over the past five years.

With that said…

The one subject you cannot talk to the majority of people about is religion. Either they do not get it, they do not want to get it, or they don’t give a rat’s ass. I wish I encountered the first and third more often, but the second option is usually the one I encounter the most. There are many subjects people do not want to be educated on, for some reason or another. People don’t want to learn another language because it may be difficult for them, people may not want to learn to cook something new because they are fine with eating meat and potatoes their entire life. Pick a realm of life, and there are bound to be people that are set in their ways, or who would like to spend their time learning other things.

But you would think that people would be more than willing to take five minutes out of their day to learn more about a subject the majority of people believe their eternal salvation or damnation hinges on.

Now, here’s the part of this essay where I have to qualify exactly what I am talking about:

• No, I am not talking about people who hold onto their faith for very personal, or sentimental, reasons.
• I am not talking about grandmas. Grandmas get a free pass in all matters of spirituality. In fact, call your grandma right now. If I was the Pope, I would totally declare it a mortal sin (i.e., a “totally uncool thing to do” for you non-Christians) to not call your grandma.
• I am not talking about fundamentalists and/or evangelicals. In fact, some of them know more about religion than you people because they care a lot. Hence the way they are grouped.

Who am I talking about? I am talking about you, dear reader, the person who has enough time to read this essay, but not enough time to read Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Islam: Religion, History, Civilization or Karen Armstrong’s Buddha or Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (you…you should probably be writing these down…no, it’s okay, I’ll wait).

I have a very good example I want to cite: Bill Maher. Maher is a comedian that somehow convinced television producers he had the ability to comment on heavy and complex topics concerning the current state of the world. The latest incarnation of this partnership has been, and continues to be, Real Time with Bill Maher. Now, the reason why I cite Bill Maher (of all possible examples I could use) is because Bill Maher consistently says he stands for “liberal principles.” He says he stands for the best version of America that respects the ideals we were founded upon, or at least you can surmise as much from what Maher believes he stands for. However, time and time again Bill Maher will tell just about anyone that listens to him how much he dislikes Islam.

Like, guys, Bill Maher really does not like Islam, why are you not doing anything about it? As viewed in the video here, Maher will even tell Ben Affleck how much he does not like Islam (and, in return, Ben Affleck does not like Bill Maher, which is refreshing). The person Maher is flanked by in this video is Sam Harris, an atheist thinker who has some of his own problems. Why do I choose Bill Maher out of everyone to use as a prime example? Because he is a public figure that sets himself up as an example of discourse and understanding, but consistently fails to hold himself up to an educated standard. Though, none of this makes Bill Maher a special example. He is not alone. In fact, Bill Maher represents the populace of the United States as a whole, especially when we are still willing to fan the flames of ignorance and hate by rallying behind a candidate that talks about banning the practitioners of Islam and practically make Christianity the state religion (which is…you know…against the law, kind of).

Which brings me to my point: Guys, pick up a book.

I swear, books are fun. They’re like a cool movie for the inside parts of your head.

Learning about religion yourself is the only way you will start to know anything about religion that is worthwhile knowing. The spiritual leaders, the practitioners, and the priests, ministers, imams, rabbis, etc., will not help you. That’s not saying anything about them personally, but religious people are not in the business of making sure you learn everything about your beliefs or the beliefs of other religions. Their main role in life is to give people a nice fuzzy feeling in the middle of their chest one to two hours every week, and then make sure people take that nice fuzzy feeling and hope life does not knock it out of them before Friday comes along. If you want to know how Taoists conceive of the cosmos, or what exactly are the beliefs of the Australian aborigines, or how exactly Christianity turned from a Jewish reform movement into a full-blown syncretic tapestry of Judaic beliefs blended with Roman pagan organization, then you need to pick up a book yourself.

But the minute you pick up a book to learn about religion, the chance that everything you believed in that made you feel safe in the universe and gave you the idea that you have a purpose in some overarching plan in the universe is going to go away very quickly. Studying religion, philosophy, or theology is not the type of journey that will make you feel more secure. In fact, you study religion in order to doubt the status quo and ask the tough questions, to lay out all the options and potentiality before you and see what life may have in store for you. What I am trying to say in this paragraph is that, if you study religion, chances are you are not going to come out the same person as when you started, and you are going to have to learn to be okay with that.

The reason I am saying all of this is because, as someone who has spent almost the last decade of my life learning as much information about religion as possible, it is impossible to communicate what you believe. Or think. Or feel. Because religion is a topic and way of life with many paths and many interpretations that span millennia, and all some people know is the message they hear from their pastor or the books/videos they are told will help “educate” them in a way that will make them a stronger believer. And, in essence, religion is not so much about believing as it is about being. Being is not something that is easily communicated through the veil of culture, class, ideology, tradition, and community. So you may have a harder time communicating to people how you think and feel because you are studying a subject that is “weird” and kind of “uncool.” Which are the reasons we do not have enough people in this world that understand exactly just what religion/spirituality is, and what it aims to do.

If you want to study religion like I did (which was through college), please, have an open mind and study a little bit of everything. If you want to study religion in your own way, still, have an open mind. We don’t need more Bill Mahers in the world. What we need more of is cool bearded philosophers and monks.

More beards is better for everyone.

Hope this rant was helpful. Let me know if you have any questions.

 

SOON

After a summer focused on attempting to find a job, finishing my graduate program, working two summer jobs that were physically demanding albeit invigorating, and absorbing as much material as I possibly can through meditation, reading, and watching video essays, I finally have the time and focus to devote to this blog again. Expect updates very soon, anyone who follows this blog. Material will be up in the next few days.

Thank you for your patience.

— Matt