Mindfulness or Mindlessness

Mindfulness is the act of existing and experiencing the now, appreciating your current state of being. It is a willful brain state of non-thought. It is accepting things as is, rejecting the need for explanation or reason.

It is religion.

When I was doing dialectic behavioral therapy I ran into a conflict in its teachings.

Premise one: accept the there are always other options, opinions, and points of view that are just as valid as your current mind state and they should be considered.

Premise two: Beware of words and concepts which lead down a singular path. Signal words include "should", "must", "have to" and "always".

If you apply premise two to premise one you realize a glaring paradox. I brought this to the nurse who was leading group and she said I should just stop thinking about it so much, that I should fake it till I make it. That phrase has been used for years to justify believing things on faith and faith is not a reliable path to truth.

I pointed that out to her and her response scared me. "Would you rather be right or healthy?"

So, in order to be healthy I'd have to throw away the concept of truth,  or at least the pursuit of it? This made no sense to me. Again, it reminded me of religion and if I had been able to ignore what was objectively true or false, I'd still be religious.  Needless to say, I am not and have become a far more skeptical person than I used to be.

While I had learned useful coping skills from DBT therapy, I could no longer pursue it knowing that it was based on an internal conflict. It had become clear to me that DBT’s worthwhile skills were surrounded by a mythos which I could not accept. I walked away from group therapy that day and as much as I miss the camaraderie and sense of belonging that it provides I am unable to go back to it knowing it is based on something false.

Tonight I am sitting and listening to The Joe Rogan podcast with his guest actor and comedian Dave Foley. They are discussing and exploring evolution and societal ideas about the roots of religion. Foley thinks that it intelligence was a trait selected for over generations but combined with the need to attribute meaning to things in the world around us. If two people are sitting at a table the only reason that it is defined as a table is because the two people agree that it is a table. Society has agreed that the meaning of a large flat piece of wood with four legs at a certain height is a table.

He further goes on to state that it is often the mentally deficient or injured who do not have an internal need or ability to find meaning in things, to see the deeper meaning beyond the surface level of understanding . His example was that cats do not find meaning the same way humans do and therefore the table is nothing more than something for him to jump on and clean itself upon, something that a human of normal mental capacity would never consider because of the meaning that we have put on that object.

His next point was to state that the reason we have religion was because at some point after we began endowing meanings on things, we began to realize that we were going to die and that there had to be meaning in that as well. After all, there was meaning and everything else in society so why wouldn't there be meaning in death and if there's meaning in death that there must be meaning in life. Therefore, human beings have a certain level of intelligence have a natural need to put meaning into existence. Some turn to religion. Artists create art in hopes that they will live on through their art. They put a meaning into their art which to the outsider may seem ridiculous but to the artist is a necessary spiritual connection which gives their life and work meaning.

One of the skills taught in therapy is the idea of mindfulness, experiencing the present as much as possible, pushing away intrusive thoughts, reasoning and  consideration of the both the future and the past. It is a training of the brain to accept things as they are without challenging how we perceive them or what meaning they have to ourselves or society. It is the momentary suspension of critical thought and attempting to understand the world around us.

Religion he's also the suspension of critical thought and the attempt to understand the world around us. You are supposed to believe on faith the that what you are told, reading a book, or experience emotionally is true without ever questioning. Most religions even teach get the idea of questioning, to embrace doubt, is a sin in itself.

I'm having a hard time seeing a difference between the suspension of critical thought in mindfulness and the same suspension in religion. How is it anything other than merely programming the mind to accept what it is told and no longer search for truth? And if that’s all that it is, even if it has its benefits, is it worth embracing if it must necessarily lead me down a path that at the very least cannot be justified and it’s also potentially demonstrably false.