Mindfulness, Monkey Mind, and Irrationality

Meditation can make you less irrational, but its hard to do right.

Recall those psychologists whose careers are built on convincing people that their minds are chaos incarnate, an unwinnable slot machine, an edgeless die. Those scientists whose entire life effort, according to Paul Bloom, is to establish that “we are continually swayed by irrelevant factors, by gut feelings and unconscious motivations.”

Now, imagine a pie chart representing the “irrelevant factors” Bloom mentions. I would bet that a sizable slice of said pie boils down to that voice in our head: the inner monologue to which some are oblivious, others are haunted, but all are subjected.

Thousands of years ago, this mind chatter was called “vritti” by ancient, cave dwelling yogis. Just yesterday, your new-agey friend, perhaps freshly enrolled in a bikram yoga class, called it “monkey mind.”* There are many names, and understandably so, for our inner voice makes up a sizable portion of our conscious lives. Much like that blurry semblance of our nose, so omnipresent as to be invisible (lest you awkwardly cross your eyes downwards), our inner monologue is definitional of humanness. So much so that, for most ,there is zero daylight between vritti and our conception of self. That voice is me.

*Why a phenomenon meant to describe the listlessness of the mind is named after the second smartest species on earth is worth a ponder. Why not call it squirrel mind?*

But, too often, our inner voice is an agent of anxiety: at worst a dejected, spiteful bully, at best, a neurotic secretary capable of convincing you of everything and anything. If you took a poll on self talk, people, especially gen z folks, thanks, in part, to the recent openness about mental health struggles, would invariably express contempt. Some, no doubt, with an air of ironic pride: “ya, i’m fighting a war up there… and i’m losing!”

I believe, like so many others, that meditation, or “mindfulness”, is not an escape route for this human condition, but a way forward, a method of approach. To the point, I believe meditation has the potential to decrease “irrationality”, as it was defined by those scientists hellbent on the doctrine of the uncontrollable mind.

But, I know what you’re thinking; I know what you’ve read or experienced first hand regarding mindfulness. You’re rolling your eyes, and I don’t blame you. In the past decade, mindfulness has been spoon-fed to the west a la torpid proverbs and suspiciously superb anti- anxiety fixes. “Look within”, “be here now”, “be present” , etc. You’ve perhaps downloaded Headspace or some other meditation app feeding off the multibillion dollar mindfulness industry (I would put money down that you didn’t stick with it, though).

However accessory to the shallowness of mindfulness, this ease of access is a feature not a bug for consumers and corporations alike. Mindfulness is everywhere. NBA teams mandate mindfulness trainings to both coaches and teammates. HR departments, especially in Silicon Valley, but now nationwide, offer trainings to their coworkers, hoping to cultivate a more enlightened office space.

My favorite moments, however, coalesce on national television. Take Dan Harris, former ABC and Good Morning America anchor who, on live television, suffered a panic attack, only to come back as a messiah of mindfulness, leading his team through morning meditations. Or, around 2011 when Andy Puddicombe, former monk and founder of the Headspace meditation app, was making his PR rounds. Trust me, nothing beat witnessing news anchors, up since 4am, wired on 400ml of caffeine, closing their eyes and hoping for the best as Puddicombe guided them through a routine in front of 3 million people. “Wow I can really feel it”, one reporter (who was not feeling it) exclaimed.

Live mindfulness exercises appearing on Good Morning America didn’t happen out of the blue, however. This is the latest domino to topple in a long, long line of dominoes with countless bends.

The first domino in the East to West translation of mindfulness is widely thought to be Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor emeritus of medicine at University of Massachusetts Medical School and founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Freshly out of his MIT degree in molecular biology, Zinn took a U-turn, opting to travel East and train with the big shots of meditation. Among them was Thich Nhat Hanh who was to become, with Zenn’s help, the crucial translator of meditation between East and West. MBSR was founded in 1979, later followed by Zinn’s 1996 venture: The Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society.

While Zinn has done more than anyone in popularizing mindfulness: writing scientific articles, giving Ted Talks, etc, one could argue he planted the first seed of phoniness that is palpable today. The problem is seeing mindfulness as a mere tool, something to be used when needed and quickly forgotten. The premise of Zinn’s MBSR offends Kant’s categorical imperative by treating mindfulness as a mere mean to achieve one’s end: Meditation being the mean, less stress being the end.

To Frankfurt school critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno, co-authors of the Dialect of Enlightenment, this treatment of Eastern meditation would be no surprise. Zinn’s phrasing of “mindfulness as medical tool” fits right into the concept of western “instrumental reason”, the Frankfurtian term for the social and political shift in priority from ends to means, from worrying about the larger purpose behind goals to caring only for the efficiency with which those goals are achieved.

Adorno defines instrumental reason as such:

Instrumental reason has two opposing elements: the abstract ego emptied of all substance except its attempt to transform everything in heaven and on earth into means for its preservation, and on the other hand an empty nature degraded to mere material, mere stuff to be dominated, without any other purpose than that of this very domination

By dangling guaranteed science-backed reductions in stress above desperate consumers, the all too familiar quick fix trap, recurrent in improbable weight loss programs and dubious investment classes, abounds. Of course, this is why so many people can’t seem to finish that nightmarish dieting or workout plan… because it really sucks, and they’re getting no satisfaction from the experience itself. The hope of weight loss is simply not enough to keep them going.

The same can be said for mindfulness, but worse. In reality, when you follow the mellow instructions of Andy Puddicombe, talking into your ear via a guided meditation on Headspace, closing your eyes and watching your thoughts is unimaginably hard. But hard in a more suffocating, existential sense than, say weight lifting. If you pay attention, if only for a second, it seems you cant escape; you’re locked in a room with a stranger’s voice, previously assumed to be your conscience. What Puddicombe, like so many of the peddlers of mindfulness in the past decade, fails to include is its supposed to be hard. If profit is your goal, why admit that mastering meditation takes years of patience, dedication and self reflection?

For neuroscientist and Buddhist Sam Harris, the deceivingly simple practice of closing your eyes and watching your thoughts (namely, his inability to do so) tipped him into his anti-free will position. “Truly, put down the philosophy book and just try and focus on the breath, just watch your brain; how can you even pretend to have control.”

Try it. Really watch for that split second inception of a thought. There’s a dizzying prior cause fiasco awaiting. Even if you tell yourself to think a thought… where did that decision arise? Attempt a prediction. I guarantee you cant predict the next thought or burst of brain chatter.

The rift between the shallow, pithy aphorism’s like “be in the moment”, and the unimaginable difficulty to execute truly “being in the moment”, is distilled, often humorously, all over the internet.

Here, one reddit user articulates the rift

“But then there are the thoughts in the back of my mind. These are wild and uncontrollable. They flick back and forth between different things chaotically. I'm often not necessarily aware of the thoughts, it's almost like voices talking to me in the back of my head, but they feel like part of me. If you were to ask me what these thoughts were 5 Seconds after having then, I'd probably have forgotten what they were. It's all so fleeting. It feels like my brain processing things in real time, and I can hear what it's doing in a garbled version of language.”

Another hopeful recipient of enlightenment uses metaphor to convey their frustration

“When I sit and watch my breath, my mind is a pinball machine. It bounces all around and my sitting still only seems to make it worse. When im silent, just concentrating, there is nothing to distract me from my mind, and the current of thoughts just burst in.”

Short but sweet here.

“I think I am doing mindfulness wrong. It only makes me more aware of my anxiety. Thanks for nothing.”

The struggle these meditation hopefuls experience is normal; their frustration, however, is born of a false promise. It’s not that these consumers are being fed the wrong stuff. Puddicombe really does know his stuff. He really was a Thai Monk, bald head and all. The problem is he, and the “pocket mindfulness” industry more broadly, fuses meditation with a quick cure. No wonder so many people roll their eyes or type “Thanks for nothing” after closing their eyes for 5 hellish minutes.

And here we come to an important point. Buddhist meditation was designed not to make us happier, or less anxious, but to radically change our sense of self and perception of the world. Now, that is not to say that mindfulness meditation cant lessen mental suffering. It certainly can and has for millions. But, as Robert Wright explains in Why Buddhism is True, mindfulness was constructed around heavy metaphysical conundrums, namely the non-existence of the self. Also, there is the doctrine of emptiness, the idea that nothing has an inert essence, that basically everything is constructed by your mind. Feeling less depressed or less anxious, for Wright, is merely a happy accident, explained by meditation’s central ability: to rid the delusion that you are realizable self, undistinguished from the voice in your head.

That’s one way to approach the problem of shallow modern mindfulness: call it the “its way deeper than that” method. At risk of sounding elitist, this method seeks to abandon the symptom-curing angle of mindfulness by providing much needed nuance and a reframing of purpose. Notice that this method does not seek to abandon the sayings like “look inside” or “be in the moment”, but simply clarifies how difficult and also how worth it, “being in the moment” really is.

Another approach, call it the “Mcmindfulness method”, takes a more systematic, pessimistic approach. Ron Purser, in McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, defines “Mcmindfulness” as a cooperate tool used to further western dogmas of individuality and radical self-sufficiency.

Purser argues that: “by negating and downplaying actual social and political contexts and focusing on the individual, or more so, the individual’s brain, “McMindfulness” interventions ignore seeing our inseparability from all others.”

That is, corporations, like Puddicombe’s Headspace, have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon because it shifts the burden onto the individual employee; “stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently.” If we accept this framework, those silly moments, when a room full of suited businessmen take a five minute meditation break, or when an HR manager calms a panicked intern by instructing them to “look within”, look a tad sinister. Operating with a far-reaching historical grasp often used by postmodern thinkers like Foucault, “Mcmindfulness” invites us to conceptualize mindfulness as a gear in a well oiled western machine. Think Soma in Brave New World.

Does the mindfulness industry care about the wellbeing of their clients, or is it a pawn for a larger capitalist interest, pacifying employees by making them feel that their concerns are heard while existing conditions in the workplace remain unchanged?

I’m not sure. Its an appealing angle, no doubt. Purser’s method makes you seem like a mysterious, sharp émigré outside of modernity’s grasp, diagnosing societies illnesses to your hearts content. But, i’m not sure what Purser’s solution is, and consequently, the similarity to Foucault is solidified. Like Foucault’s theses, which sought to detach from the modern paradigm, so rife with corruption and power dynamics, Purser’s condemnations pierce so wide and so deep that nothing is safe.

Going forward, if the goal is to maximize the amount of people properly utilizing mindfulness practices, the “its deeper than you think” method is better, more pragmatic and less dramatic. The skeptics of meditation, who already see it as a pawn of shallow spiritualism, would be confronted with a dual threat of phoniness and capitalist manipulation if they took the “Mcmindfulness” path. Sure, this angle of analysis may be true, but its a tad aggressive considering Purser’s audience is one already skeptical of mindfulness.