The hollowness at the core of the "mindfulness" movement

Kevin Williamson's piece today at NRO looks at the "mindfulness" push going on in corporate America. I didn't realize it was such a thing; then again, the closest contact I have with the cubicle life is occasionally interviewing somebody living it for an article for a business publication.

But apparently it's a thing, big-time:

“Mindfulness,” a meditation practice that is in essence Buddhism without Buddha, is everywhere in corporate America and celebrity culture. (The two are no longer entirely distinguishable: Bill Gates is a celebrity, and Oprah is a vertically integrated global conglomerate.) Google offered a course under engineer-guru Chade Meng Tan (employee No. 107) that at one point had a six-month waiting period; Meng has since gone off on his own. Goldman Sachs has caught the mindfulness bug and uses a mindfulness app to keep its employees mindful. Intel is on board, and a study undertaken by the National Business Group on Health and Fidelity Investments found that one in five of the companies surveyed offered mindfulness training, with another 21 percent planning to do so — at a cost of up to ten grand per session.

When they aren’t pushing Häagen-Dazs out the door, General Mills employees and executives have access to a seven-week mindfulness program. After completing the program, 80 percent of executives reported that their decision-making skills had improved. One wonders about that datum: Were these executives going to tell their superiors that their decision-making skills had been degraded, or that they’d wasted their time? Bear in mind that Häagen-Dazs doesn’t actually mean anything in any language — the guy who founded the company just thought it sounded cool and that people would buy it. There may be a bit of that at work here, too.

All this mindfulness doesn't have much of an empirical leg to stand on, however:

Scientifically, mindfulness is way down there with yoga, acupuncture, and homeopathy in terms of empirically observable results. The evidence for its effectiveness is largely subjective, e.g., self-reported improvements in mood, attitude, stress, or sleep. A recent paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science — co-authored by 15 prominent psychological and cognitive-science researchers — gently derided the “pervasive mindfulness hype” associated with research on the subject and concluded that there was very little evidence for its effectiveness on any metric. There were predictable design problems with the research: inconsistent and conflicting definitions, lack of control groups to adjust for placebo effects, lack of replicable results. A review in American Psychologist found that fewer than one in ten mindfulness studies had included a control group. “A 2014 review of 47 meditation trials, collectively including over 3,500 participants, found essentially no evidence for benefits related to enhancing attention, curtailing substance abuse, aiding sleep or controlling weight,” Scientific American reports. 

One skeptic has bona fides in both worlds:

Ronald Purser [is] a professor of management in the business school at San Francisco State University and an ordained teacher in the Zen Taego Buddhist tradition, he has a foot in both the corporate and mindfulness worlds, and he is a trenchant, at times scathing, critic of corporate mindfulness, which he dismisses as a kind of prosperity gospel for coastal liberal elites — Joel Osteen in a saffron robe. “I’ve been to a number of corporate mindfulness conferences,” he says, “just as a fly on the wall to see what’s going on. Some of the consultants selling this stuff are Buddhist practitioners. But the Buddhism is backstage. At the Awakened Leadership Conference, a big mindfulness event, one of the consultants told me:

We know we’re teaching Buddhism — but they don’t. “They” meaning the corporate sponsors. In order to sell, they’ve really had to go stealth, selling mindfulness as a scientifically proven method. And the conference was all about how to sell the program, how to sell this stuff in corporate-speak, how to get them to perceive it as a performance-enhancement technique.

Cf. Aetna’s purported $3,000-per-person-per-year productivity kick. 

There's even a term - "McMindfulness" - that's being applied to this phenomenon.

Williamson's key point is to be found in his last paragraph, and it's one I think about a lot:

The embrace of mindfulness need not be understood quite so cynically as Purser and other critics do. It may in fact indicate that among reasonably enlightened, good-faith leaders in the business community, there is an understanding that something is wrong with life here in the rich, healthy, peaceful, free, capitalist world, that something is missing. But if there is a hole in the soul of the West, it probably isn’t shaped like a designer meditation cushion ($349.99 from Walmart), and it probably will not be healed by something so vague and diluted as “mindfulness.” 

The basic problem is the "all-is-one" / individual-sentient-beings-are-raindrops-that-eventually-return-to-the-ocean premise upon which "mindfulness" is predicated. At a cursory glance, it looks like a way to a heart full of compassion and a soul full of joy, but it's really a solipsism that inevitably devolves into nihilism.

We see this a lot in the looks industry - hair styling and cosmetics. In the past thirty years, the ethos behind the marketing of its products has been a striving to preserve / restore some pristine state of nature, and to celebrate some supposed nobility of those living in Third World environments and the fabrics, oils and such that they produce. Yet it's all in service of getting the consumer into the chair at the day spa for a decidedly all-about-me experience.

All-is-one "spirituality" ultimately collapses under its own weight, because there's ultimately nothing relational about it. If we're all subsumed into the Clear Light of the Void, there's no point in anything that exists on any lesser plane.

As you know, I've recently done two posts focused on a cursory overview of the countercultural impulse that has pervaded American life over the past half-century. I mostly focused on the political ramifications - the identity politics and the obsession with a macro view of the planet (something that figures heavily into the messaging of the above-mentioned looks industry, with its Earth Day fundraisers for clean water and such). But the "spiritual" aspect of all this is important to examine as well.

I spent a great deal of time in these trenches in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I gobbled lots of LSD. I spent the better part of a week at a commune in Tennessee, founded by a gaggle of Bay Area hippies that had come out to the hinterland by bus. I was in the last "advanced class" that "transformation" huckster Werner Erhardt personally conducted before having to flee the country, due to both tax troubles and his daughter making the kind of sexual-shenanigans claims against him that have been on the front burner of late in our society. I have been massaged, adjusted and otherwise bodily manipulated by all manner of "bodywork" experts.

So I have had the opportunity to draw some conclusions about the types of people drawn to these kinds of workshops, programs and practices. Bottom line: About three-fourths of the people immersed in this world are female. Pretty much all of them bounce from one approach to another, beating their heads against the wall, hoping that the next one will really deliver that one big insight that will bring them lasting contentment.

And, if one does a little digging, there's generally some rebellion among their motives. It's not always obvious on the surface. Many are quite adept at exuding the serene demeanor and sunny way of interacting that would indicate success at eradicating the basic darkness attendant to the human condition. But somewhere in pretty much each story, there's a chapter about wanting to get as far away as possible from what square old mom and dad were proffering.

So, per Williamson's conclusion, there's going to be a big void in the center of the mindfulness phenomenon.

What real spirituality does have in common with "spirituality" is the notion of emptying oneself, of letting ultimate reality, whatever that turns out to be, fill the vessel that is one's being.

There is something that will fill it so that it stays filled. That something is often presented in ways that are either sappy, boneheaded or hopelessly corny - or some combination thereof. That's why it took so long for me to accept it.

 And a lot of those disseminating the message get exposed as rank hypocrites.

But the message is indisputably true nonetheless. Hearing it starts with the basic decision to heed His call. From that simple act of volition the understanding - and the relationship - will deepen with each time one sets aside to be - how shall I put it? - mindful of it.