Meditation Matters: Replies to the Anti-McMindfulness Bandwagon!
Many objections have been leveled against what Purser and Loy have coined ‘McMindfulness,’ the widely popularized use of mindfulness extracted from Buddhism. These include the claims that meditation (a) fails to attempt to try to change the world, (b) is
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Rick Repetti
To Be Mindful or Not to Be Mindful, that Is the Question As this volume makes clear, many individuals have leveled objections against mindfulness and/or ‘McMindfulness.’1 I will address some of them separately, below, but I will address some in terms of each other. First, however, I’ll briefly describe what I think mindfulness is and what McMindfulness is supposed to be. Second, I’ll share a sampling of some objections to mindfulness or McMindfulness, followed by some observations. Then, I’ll reply to some of these representative objections. Mindfulness is only contingently related to practices designed to cultivate mindfulness that happen to go by the same name, whether those practices are or are not considered orthodox within Buddhism. Buddhism, it should be noted, is considered unorthodox within the larger context of Indian philosophy, from which it emerged. 1
Apart from the many examples in this volume, see also Žižek (2012), Bodhi (2011), Purser and Loy (2013), Forbes (2012), Sharf (2012), Thompson (2014), Flanagan (2012), Moore (2014), Manthorpe (2015), and Edwards (2015).
R. Repetti (&) Department of History, Philosophy, and Political Science, Kingsborough Community College, Brooklyn, USA e-mail: [email protected]; Rick. [email protected]
By analogy, strength is only contingently related to various bodily disciplines designed to cultivate strength, such as resistance training and calisthenics. Mindfulness is easily understood by contrast with its opposite, mindlessness, the meaning of which is intuitively comprehensible to most, namely the state of mind or quality of consciousness characterized by not paying attention to what one is doing, thinking, perceiving, experiencing, etc. Mindfulness, then, is the opposite, namely the state of mind or quality of consciousness characterized by paying attention to what one is doing, thinking, perceiving, experiencing, etc. Mindfulness and mindlessness, therefore, are states of mind or qualities of consciousness. Mindlessness is any state of mind that is marked by an absence of metacognitive awareness of itself, as exemplified in cases where an individual’s attention is scattered and dominated by its objects, with little or no sense of its own characteristics. Examples include ineffective multitasking (though there may be relatively effective forms of multitasking or attentionshifting that are not mindless), scattered or dispersed attentional focus, and certain repetitive activities one engages in without attention, such as eating popcorn while watching an action movie. Mindfulness is a state of mind or quality of consciousness, independent of meditation practices that are specifically designed to cultivate
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 R.E. Purser et al. (eds.), Handbook of Mindfulness, Mindfulness in Behavioral Health, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44019-4_32
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such a state of mind or qualities of consciousness, which practices are also called ‘mindfulness,’ but which practices are distinct from the qualities or state
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