Mindfulness Is Bad
I base today’s sermon on this flimsy article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/11629029/Mindfulness-is-stopping-the-world-from-thinking.html. Really just a squib to fill some space, but it points to larger issues. For an Oxford academic, this guy shows some determined wrongheadedness.
This academic—shilling a book, by the way—appears to know nothing about meditation and mindfulness. A good education seemingly grants one expertise on any subject. Here, our academic erects a straw dog, if indeed straw dogs are erected, then brings in the confirming opposition. This is a tiresome and egregious way to make a point.
He presents the thesis that we should attune ourselves to others. I agree. We should be mindful of, and compassionate towards, our fellow creatures. (What’s the downside of that, I add parenthetically). I do not agree, however, that spending time meditating interferes with this.
Dr. Expert insists upon a clearly unnecessary opposing duality, and let’s just add woeful to the description. What does he even mean by thinking? Are you only thinking when the internal dialogue chatters full speed? Maybe you “think” when you pare the process down.
Meditation serves to focus the mind so that you think of one thing, rather than a bunch. To stay on point rather than to scatter. It does not tear you from the social nexus. How could it? For most people, an hour is about the limit of their daily meditation, if not less.
The Oxford academic’s thesis makes little sense, really. If meditating is a solipsistic undertaking, what is sleep? Surely even Oxford academics agree that the eight or so hours a day that we sleep stands as a necessity. Eight hours completely free of the social aspect. People should stop sleeping?
And it’s not like meditation turns the brain off. Heroin or some other drug may do that, and we can add the universal distractions of TV, Internet and so forth, but meditation focuses on awareness. So really, what's he about?
Furthermore, studies are showing that meditation helps develop the part of the brain where empathy and compassion reside. Meditation does not makes us more insular, in fact just the opposite.
So why is Dr. Zeldin spooked by meditation. The word ignorance comes to mind. The first definition of mindfulness in the Oxford Dictionary: “The quality or state of being conscious or aware of something”. Mindfulness doesn’t sound bad at all.