THE MINDFUL REVOLUTION OR INVOLUTION?

​There is a tremendous presence in the popular press regarding mindfulness or scientific evidence of the beneficial effects of meditation, exemplified here by a cover story in Time magazine not long ago. Many articles in the Huffington post also advertise extraordinary benefits of meditation therefore it is important to point out that there is in society now a kind of meme running around that suggest that mediation is nearly a cure-all, however those of you with some experience, and many of you with experience in many different ways to achieve well-being will know that that’s not going to turn out the full story at all.

In fact, there is an article recently in Bloomberg magazine, which is a lifestyle magazine for the very rich, that suggests that if you want to make a killing in on Wall Street you should start to meditate. Visual improvement thresholds are being used by stock brokers that think if they can meditate enough, their vision will be sharp enough to capture the first moment a ticker-tape goes across their screen and they can essentially hack their brain to make more money, a kind of internal high frequency trading!

At the same time we live in a society that is so wired so perpetually interconnected, so often stimulated caffeinated and never quiet and alone, that a study published in the journal science in July 2004 in 11 experiments showed that many individuals, if they cannot have their smartphone, their computer, and need to be told to sit alone for 15 minutes in a room become so uncomfortable that given the option of shocking themselves to a level that includes pain they will rather shock themselves than sit quietly, can you imagine if this experiment is done nowadays in 2015?.

When you put these things together we definitely have a problem with hype regarding some claims of the effects of meditation and at the other end we have a problem because the simplicity of the quiescence is leaving our culture.

The attention restoration theory says that there are in fact environments that can restore your attention, your concentration, to reset your mind. However most of the times we spend attentional resources inhibiting all the distracting elements (e.g. avoiding traffic, ignoring advertising, car horns, etc) and this effort consumes attentional resources therefore makes urban environments less restorative than natural ones.

So when I think how often every day, minute by minute, the quality of my mind is affected by the modern local environments I wonder what the real mindful revolution is.