Is mindfulness meditation a capitalist tool or a path to enlightenment? Yes

by Robert Wright | illustrations by Valero Doval

08.12.17

Its hard to put your finger on the point when the Western stereotype of Buddhist meditation flipped. It was sometime between the 1950s, when Zen Buddhism seeped into the beat generation, and the early 21st century, when mindfulness meditation seeped into Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

One minute founding beatnik Jack Kerouac was spouting arcane Buddhist truths that meditation is said to reveal. There is no me and no you, Kerouac wrote. And space is like a rock because it is empty. Fast forward half a century, and hedge fund manager David Ford, in an interview with Bloomberg News, was summarizing the benefits of meditation this way: I react to volatile markets much more calmly now. Buddhist practice, once seen as subversive and countercultural, now looked like a capitalist tool. It had gone from deepening your insight to sharpening your edge.

Of course, a stereotype is just a stereotype. Most of todays meditators arent following the guidance of the Bloomberg News headline that accompanied Fords quote: To Make a Killing on Wall Street, Start Meditating. Still, the past decades wave of interest in mindfulness meditation has had a utilitarian air. When companies like Goldman Sachs start offering free meditation training to employees, and salesforce.com puts a meditation room on each floor of a San Francisco office building, its a safe bet that heightened appreciation of Buddhist metaphysics isnt the goal. In fact, mindfulness meditation is often packaged in frankly therapeutic terms: mindfulness-based stress reduction.

This drift from the philosophical to the practical has inspired two kinds of blowback. First, because goals like stress reduction are so clear, attainable, and gratifying, many people now sing the praises of meditationwhich deeply annoys some people who dont. The author and business guru Adam Grant has complained of being stalked by meditation evangelists. Which bothers him all the more because the feats they harp on are so pedestrian. Every benefit of the practice can be gained through other activities, Grant says. For example, exercise takes the edge off stress.

The second kind of blowback comes not from Buddhism skeptics but from Buddhism aficionados, who lament that meditation hasin some circles, at leastbecome so mundane as to invite ridicule from the Adam Grants of the world. These Buddhism purists arent against reducing stress. After all, the Buddha preached liberation from suffering. But liberation was supposed to be a spiritual endeavor.

The idea was to penetrate the delusion that pervades ordinary consciousness, to see the world with a clarity that is radical in its implications, a clarity that doesnt just liberate you from suffering but transforms your view of, and relationship to, reality itself, including your fellow beings. Gaining a deep, experiential understanding of the truths Kerouac had pointed toobscure but fundamental Buddhist ideas like not-self and emptinesswas supposed to be central to the contemplative project. The ultimate goal, however hard to reach, and however few people ultimately reached it, was nothing less than awakening: enlightenment, liberation, nirvana.

All of which raises a question: Is mindfulness meditation, as its practiced by millions of Westerners, bullshit? Not bullshit in the sense of being worthless. Even Adam Grant admits that meditation has benefits and that, for some people, its the best way to get them. But has meditation practice strayed so far from its Buddhist roots that we might as well just call it a therapy or a hobby? Should people who trek to weekend meditation retreats at lovely rural locales quit bowing to the statue of the Buddha as they enter the meditation hall? Should all the strivers in Silicon Valley and New York who put in 20 or 30 minutes on the cushion each day switch to SSRIs or beta blockers and use the time saved for valuable networking? Is there any good reasonin ancient Buddhist philosophy or for that matter in modern scienceto consider mainstream mindfulness practice truly spiritual?

For years Ive been on what amounts to an exploration of these questions. I went on my first silent meditation retreat more than a decade agomainly out of spiritual curiosity, but happy to accept any therapeutic benefits, which, God knows, I could use. As this quest turned into a book project, the inquiry got more systematic. Now, with the project complete, Ive talked to lots of meditation teachers, Buddhist monks, and scholars of Buddhism. Ive read the ancient texts that describe mindfulness meditation and its underlying philosophy. And Ive gone on more silent retreatsa total of two months worth, ranging in length from one to two weeks.

And here, as far as I can tell, is the deal: Its true, on the one hand, that many devotees of meditation are pursuing the practice in a basically therapeutic spirit. And that includes many who follow Buddhist meditation teachers and even go on extended retreats. Its also true that mindfulness meditation, as typically taught to these people, bears only a partial resemblance to mindfulness meditation as described in ancient texts.

Nonetheless, the average mindfulness meditator is closer to the ancient contemplative tradition, and to transformative insights, than you might think. Though things like stress reduction or grappling with melancholy or remorse or self-loathing may seem therapeutic, they are organically connected to the very roots of Buddhist philosophy. What starts out as a meditation practice with modest aims can easily, and very naturally, go deeper. There is a kind of slippery slope from stress reduction to profound spiritual exploration and radical philosophical reorientation, and many people, even in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, are further down that slope than they realize.

Consider the crazy-sounding idea of not-self. According to Buddhist philosophy, your intuition that there is a self at your corethe thinker of your thoughts, the doer of your deedsis an illusion. And not just any illusion. It is an illusion so deep and so debilitating, so central to the Buddhist diagnosis of the human predicament, that dispelling it can lead directly to full enlightenment and liberation from suffering. At least, thats the claim made in the seminal work on the subject, the Buddhas Discourse on the Not-Self. In that text, the Buddha explains not-self to a group of monks and, once they get the picture, they become arhatstruly enlightened beings.

Which is good news, and not just because theyre liberated from suffering but because theyll now be much easier to get along with. Just listen to how Walpola Rahula, a Buddhist monk who in 1959 published an influential book called What the Buddha Taught, put the matter. The false notion of the self, he said, produces harmful thoughts of me and mine, selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.

Kind of makes you wish more people would realize they dont have a self! But here lies a complication. The experience of full-on not-self is famously elusive, typically reported only by meditators who have done a whole, whole lot of meditatingcertainly more than Ive done. If saving the world depends on a big chunk of humanity having this experience, we may be in for a long wait.

But we have to start somewhere! And here there is good news. The not-self experience isnt strictly binary. You dont have to think of it as a threshold that you either manage to finally cross, to transformative effect, or forever fall short of, getting no edification whatsoever. As strange as it may sound, you can, with even a fairly modest daily meditation practice, experience a little bit of not-self. Then, as time goes by, maybe a little more. Andwho knowsmaybe someday youll have the full-on transformative version of the experience. But even if you dont, important and lasting progress can be made, and benefits for you and for humankind can accrue along the way.

So what would it be like to experience just a little bit of not-self? I got an answer to this question in 2003, on my first meditation retreat. Up to that point I was what I would call (though meditation teachers discourage you from talking this way) a complete and utter failure as a meditator. I had tried to meditate, but my dinky attention span and hypersensitive emotional equipment had kept me from mustering enough concentration to see any benefits. I decided that boot camp was in order.

I signed up for a seven-day retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in rural Massachusetts. There, every day, I would do sitting meditation for a total of five and a half hours and walking meditation for about that long. As for the rest of the day, when you add three (silent) meals, a one-hour yogi job in the morning (vacuuming hallways, in my case), and listening to one of the teachers give a dharma talk in the evening, youve pretty much exhausted the day. Which is good, because if there was time you needed to waste, the traditional means of wasting it wouldnt be available. There was no TV, no internet, no news from the outside world. And, of course, no talking.

This daily regimen may not sound taxing, but the first couple of days were excruciating. Have you ever tried sitting on a cushion with your legs crossed, focusing on your breath? Its no picnic, especially if youre as bad at focusing on your breath as I am. Early in the retreat, I could go a whole 45-minute meditation session without sustaining focus for 10 consecutive breaths.

But, slowly, I got betterfocusing for 10, 20, 25 breaths. Then, on the fifth morning of the retreat, came my first big breakthrough. After breakfast I had consumed a bit too much of the instant coffee I had brought, and as I tried to meditate I felt the classic symptom of overcaffeination: a very unpleasant tension in my jaw that made me feel like grinding my teeth. It was kind of like an amped-up version of stressthe kind of stress youd feel at the end of a really bad workday.

This feeling kept intruding on my focus, and after trying for a while to fight the intrusion I finally surrendered to it and shifted my attention to the tension in my jaw. This sort of readjustment of attention, by the way, is a perfectly fine thing to do. In mindfulness meditation as its typically taught, the point of focusing on your breath isnt just to focus on your breath. Its to stabilize your mind, to free it of its normal preoccupations so you can observe things that are happening in a clear, unhurried, less reactive way.

And things that are happening emphatically includes things happening inside your mind. Feelings arise within yousadness, anxiety, annoyance, relief, joyand you try to experience them from a different vantage point, neither clinging to the good feelings nor running away from the bad ones but rather just experiencing them straightforwardly and observing them. This altered perspective can be the beginning of a fundamental and enduring change in your relationship to your feelings. You can, if all goes well, cease to be their slave.

After devoting some attention to the overcaffeinated feeling in my jaw, I suddenly had an angle on my interior life that Id never had before. I remember thinking something like, Yes, the grinding sensation is still therethe sensation I typically define as unpleasant. But that sensation is down there in my jaw, and thats not where I am. Im up here in my head. I was no longer identifying with the feeling; I was viewing it objectively, I guess you could say. In the space of a moment it had entirely lost its grip on me. It was a very strange thing to have an unpleasant feeling cease to be unpleasant without it really going away.

There is a paradox here. When I first expanded my attention to encompass the obnoxiously intrusive jaw-grinding sensation, this involved relaxing my resistance to the sensation. I was, in a sense, accepting and even embracing a feeling that I had been trying to keep at a distance. But the result of this closer proximity to the feeling was to acquire a kind of distance from ita certain degree of detachment. Or, if you want to put the point in more conventional Buddhist terminology, a degree of nonattachment. I had, in a sense, let go of part of my self.

You dont have to go to a meditation retreat to get this kind of experience. People who are more natural meditators than me can get it via daily practice as guided by a local teacher, or by an online teacher, or even by a good meditation app, like Headspace or 10% Happier. Or, if you dont want to invest even that much time, try this: Next time youre feeling sad, sit down, close your eyes, and study the sadness. Accept its presence and just observe it. For example, you may notice that, though youre not close to actually crying, the feeling of sadness does have a strong presence right around the parts of your eyes that would become active if you did start crying. This careful observation of sadness, combined with a kind of acceptance of it, can make it way less unpleasant. And, more to the point, less a part of your self.

Granted, sadness, like stress, is just a small part of youso small that touting this experience as a step toward the elusive, transformative experience of not-self may sound ludicrous. And yet, if you look at the canonical text on the subjectthat discourse on not-self delivered by the Buddhayoull find some validation of this touting. In that sermon the Buddha chips away at the notion of self bit by bit, chunk by chunk.

He does an inventory of the categories that constitute human experience: feelings, perceptions, mental formations (a big category that in Buddhist psychology includes thoughts and complex emotions), and so on. With each category he raises the same questions: Is this particular part of you, when examined closely, really under your control? And doesnt this part of you sometimes make you suffer (precisely, he suggests, because it isnt under your control)? The answers are of course no and yes, respectively: We cant magically control all the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that dominate our experience, which helps explain why they often cause us pain.

Well, then, does it make sense to think of these things as self? The Buddhas answer is unequivocal. Feelings, thoughts, and all the resteven your physical bodymust be regarded with proper wisdom, according to reality, thus: These are not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.

Note how pragmatic, even therapeutic, this argument sounds: If you want relief from suffering, quit identifying with the things that make you suffer, the things that are beyond your control. This kind of guidance is very much in the spirit of mindfulness-based stress reductionwhich, in fact, is what my little triumph over overcaffeination basically was.

And yet, according to the logic of Buddhism, if you follow this pragmatic, therapeuticeven, you might say, self-servinglogic far enough via meditative practice, you can get to the point where it feels as if there is no self at all. And a big reason for this apprehension is that everything in your field of experiencefeelings, thoughts, perceptions, everythingcan be seen, on close inspection, to not really be under the control of some inner you. Its just stuff happening. Stuff you dont have to identify with.

This may sound crazy. Surely there are some things under our conscious control? Well, maybe, but modern psychology has challenged that assumption. One famous series of experiments seems to show that by the time someone is consciously aware of deciding to do somethingpushing a button, saythe brain activity that initiates the pushing is already well under way. Other experiments suggest that people are often not aware of what their actual motivations for doing things arebut that, even so, they generate explanations for their behavior and actually believe the explanations.

This doesnt mean science has proved that were on autopilot, and that the conscious mind is just a passenger under the illusion that its flying the plane. There are questions of interpretation surrounding some of these experiments, and lots more experiments to be done. Still, theres no doubt that modern psychology has cast serious doubt on the intuition that your conscious self is your CEO.

Which gives modern psychology something in common with ancient Buddhist texts. And something in common with modern meditation teachers. Ive heard more than one of these teachers assert that thoughts think themselves. Thoughts may feel like things we generate, but when viewed mindfully, with non-attachment, they are seen to be things that just float into our awareness. They arent generated by the conscious self but, rather, come from somewhere beyond it.

This imageof thoughts being received by your conscious mind rather than created by itmakes particular sense in light of a conception of the brain that has gained many adherents in recent decades: the modular model. The basic idea is that the brain consists of lots of different systems that have different specialties and may have competing agendas.

So, for example, one system may be focused on getting you to eat while another is focused on getting you to impress someone youre talking to with your knowledge of politics. The conscious mind might be unaware of the competition between these systems and unaware of the thoughts theyre championingexcept for the thought that wins. As the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has put it, Whichever notion you happen to be conscious of at a particular moment is the one that comes bubbling up, the one that becomes dominant. Its a dog-eat-dog world going on in your brain, with different systems competing to make it to the surface to win the prize of conscious recognition.

In this scenario, the conscious mind tends to identify with the winning thought, the one that bubbles up, even to the point of taking ownership of itthinking of itself as the thoughts generator. But highly adept meditators actually see the bubbling up part, and for them the identification, the sense of ownership, never kicks in.

Personally, I find it harder to get this kind of perspective on thoughts than on feelings. Whereas I might succeed in viewing anxiety or sadness as not-self during my daily practice, I dont generally view my thoughts that way until well into a weeklong meditation retreatif then. But the point is just that this perspective on thoughts is part of the logical progression of mindfulness meditation and a way station on the path to the experience of full-fledged not-self. Its an experience commonly reported by those few meditators who, having logged thousands and thousands of hours on the meditation cushion, say theyve gotten to the point of not-self and even stayed thereday in, day out, on the cushion or off.

So what does it feel like to be one of these people? Unfortunately, if you ask them that question, they tend to say things that are a bit opaque. One such meditator, describing life without a sense of self, said to me, If youre nothing, if you disappear, you can then be everything. But you cant be everything unless you are nothing.

I guess well have to take his word for that. Still, even someone like mesomeone who meditates 30 or 40 minutes a day and occasionally goes on meditation retreatscan have glimpses of what he means. Ive gotten to the point, deep in meditation, when a tingling I felt in my foot seemed no more a part of me than the singing of a bird I heard outside. And both, by the way, were wonderful, as was everything else; I felt utter peace and serenity. I also felt very favorably disposed toward that bird and to living things in general.

I had to go on a meditation retreat to have that particular brush with not-self. Still, theres a sense in which the experience wasnt that far removed from my daily practice. One reason it was hard to see a clear line between the tingling in my foot and the singing of the bird is that I wasnt identifying very closely with the tingling in the first place. The disaggregation of my self made its contents seem more like the contents of the world beyond me; the diffuseness of my self made its bounds less distinct. And this sense of the diffuseness of self begins with workaday mindfulness meditation: looking at any part of your experiencestress, physical pain, tingling in footfrom a more objective standpoint than usual. So objective that experiencing it is kind of like experiencing a birds song.

Indeed, I think the reason I felt so favorably disposed toward other beings when the bounds of my self dissolved wasnt just the dissolution per se. A big factor was that all the self-centered preoccupations that keep us from appreciating other beingsand sometimes make us envy, resent, even hate other beingswere not part of my self at that moment.

Speaking of moments: One phrase that hasnt occurred in this piece so far is living in the moment. This may seem strange, since this theme is so commonly associated with mindfulness, and so emphasized by meditation teachers. Indeed, The New York Times recently defined mindfulness as the desire to take a chunk of each day and simply live in the present. Stop and smell the roses.

Theres no denying that deep appreciation of the present moment is a nice consequence of mindfulness. But its misleading to think of it as central to mindfulness. If you delve into early Buddhist writings, you wont find a lot of exhortations to stop and smell the rosesand thats true even if you focus on those writings that contain the word sati, the word thats translated as mindfulness.

The ancient Buddhist text known as The Four Foundations of Mindfulnessthe closest thing there is to a Bible of mindfulnessfeatures no injunction to live in the present, and in fact doesnt have a single word or phrase translated as now or the present. And it features some passages that would sound strange to the average mindfulness meditator of today. It reminds us that our bodies are full of various kinds of unclean things and instructs us to meditate on such bodily ingredients as feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine. It also calls for us to imagine our bodies one day, two days, three days deadbloated, livid, and festering.

Im not aware of any bestselling books on mindfulness meditation called Stop and Smell the Feces. And Ive never heard a meditation teacher recommend that I meditate on my bile, phlegm, and pus, or on the rotting corpse that I will someday be. What is presented today as an ancient meditative tradition is a selective rendering of an ancient meditative tradition, in some cases carefully manicured.

But thats OK. All spiritual traditions evolve, adapting to time and place, and the Buddhist teachings that find an audience today in the United States and Europe are a product of such evolution. In particular, modern mindfulness teachings retain innovations of instruction and technique made in southeast Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the main thing, for our purposes, is that this evolutionthe evolution that has produced a distinctively Western, 21st-century version of Buddhismhasnt severed the connection between current practice and ancient thought. Modern mindfulness meditation isnt exactly the same as ancient mindfulness meditation, but the two can lead to the same place, philosophically and spiritually.

Whats more, they start at the same place. The Satipatthana Suttathe Bible of mindfulnessbegins with instructions that will be familiar to a modern meditator: Sit down, with legs crossed and body erect, and pay attention to your breath.

The text then enjoins the meditator to pay attention to lots of other thingsfeelings, thoughts, sounds, smells, and much, much more (yes, including pus and blood). Then, at the end, it makes an extraordinary claim: If you practice mindfulness assiduously, you are following the direct path for purification of beings and so can achieve nirvana. Sufficiently diligent mindfulness meditation, apparently, can lead to true awakening, complete enlightenment, and liberation.

Of course, that other Buddhist text Ive mentioned puts the story differently. It says that what leads to enlightenment is the apprehension of not-self. I hope by now its clear why these two claims coexist easily: Mindfulness meditation leads very naturally toward the apprehension of not-self and can in principle lead you all the way there. And the reason it can do so is because its about much more than living in the moment. Mindfulness, in the most deeply Buddhist sense of the term, is about an exhaustive, careful, and calm examination of the contents of human experience, an examination that can radically alter your interpretation of that experience.

Most meditators dont give much thought to going all the way down the path toward this radicalism. And many meditators, like me, would love to go all the way but arent optimistic about making it to the end. Which leads to a question: Why keep meditating if you suspect that this path wont realize your deepest aspiration, wont lead all the way to full enlightenment?

The easy answer is that meditating can make your life bettera little lower in stress, anxiety, and other unwelcome feelings. But thats the therapeutic answer. The spiritual answeror at least my version of the spiritual answeris more complicated.

It begins with one of the more striking claims made by Buddhismthat enlightenment and liberation from suffering are inextricably intertwined. We sufferand make others sufferbecause we dont see the world, including ourselves, clearly.

One common conception of this relationship between truth and freedom is that you see the entire truth in a flash of insight, and then you are free. Sounds great! And what a time-saver! Im not just being sarcastic here; there are people who seem to have been blessed with the spontaneous apprehension of not-self, and an attendant sense of liberation. But the more usual experience is incremental: A bit of movement toward trutha clearer, more objective view of your stress, for exampleleads to a little freedom from suffering.

Importantly, this incremental progress can work in the other direction: a bit of freedom can let you see a bit of truth. If you sit down and meditate and loosen the bonds of agitation and anxiety, the ensuing calm will let you observe other things with more clarity.

Some of these observations may seem trivial. Had I never started meditating, Id never have realized that the monotonous-seeming hum generated by my office refrigerator actually consists of at least three distinct sounds, weaving a rich (and surprisingly pretty!) harmony. But sometimes these observations have larger consequence. If you view your wrath toward someone with a bit of detachment, you may realize that the irate email youve written to that personthe one sitting in your drafts folderwill, if sent, create needless turmoil.

And if you carry this kind of calm beyond the meditation cushion, you may find youre less likely to label someone a jerk just because hes at the checkout counter fumbling for his credit card and youre behind him and in a hurry. Which Id say qualifies as movement toward truth, since its logically contradictory to consider someone a jerk for doing something lots of people you dont consider jerksincluding youhave done.

Indeed, according to Buddhist philosophy, not seeing this person as a jerk is, in a certain sense, movement toward profound truth. The Buddhist doctrine of emptinessthe one Jack Kerouac cryptically alluded towould take eons to explain fully, but one way to put the basic idea is to say that all things, including living beings, are empty of essence. To not see essence of jerk in the kind of people youre accustomed to seeing essence of jerk in is to move, however modestly, and in however narrow a context, toward the apprehension of emptiness.

Here again, ancient Buddhist philosophy gets support from modern psychology. In many circumstances, it turns out, we do tend to project a kind of essence onto people. We may naturally conclude, upon observing a stranger for only a few seconds, that she is a rude person, periodrather than entertain the possibility that shes had a stressful day that led her to behave with uncharacteristic rudeness. This tendency to attribute behavior disproportionately to dispositional factors, and to underemphasize situational factors, is known as the fundamental attribution error. To commit the error, as humans seem naturally inclined to do, is to see a kind of essenceessence of rude person, in this casewhere one doesnt actually exist.

Anyway, the key point is this: The two-way relationship between enlightenment and liberationthe fact that a slight boost in either may boost the othercan create a positive feedback loop that doubles as a spiritual propellant, pushing you down that slope toward deeper exploration. If sending fewer incendiary emails and spending less time fulminating in checkout lines reduces the amount of agitation in your life, maybe this effect will be so gratifyingso liberatingthat it encourages you to meditate for 30 minutes a day instead of 20. And maybe that will lead you to view more of your emotional life with greater claritylead to more enlightenmentand this enlightenment will further reduce the needless suffering in your life and further deepen your commitment to meditation. And so on. Before you know it, youve gone on a meditation retreat, absorbed some Buddhist philosophy, and are driving the Adam Grants of the world even crazier than more casual meditators drive them. Well done.

But does this really qualify as a spiritual endeavor? After all, upping your investment in meditation certainly has its therapeutic payoffs. Id say the answer depends partly on how far you gohow far toward not-self, for examplebut also on how you think about the exercise, what you take away from it. When youre standing in that checkout line, judging that credit card fumbler more leniently than usual, is that just a fleeting effect, the welcome byproduct of a particularly immersive morning meditation session? Or is it part of a sustained effort to be mindful of how casually and unfairly were naturally inclined to judge peopleand how those judgments are shaped by self-serving feelings that, actually, we dont have to consider part of our selves?

And when youre getting some distance from stress and anxiety and sadness, is the ensuing comfort the end of your practice? Or is there ongoing and deepening reflection on the way feelings shape our thoughts and perceptions, and on how unreliable they are as guides to what we should think and how we should perceive things?

For many of usmyself included, I fearpursuing enlightenment is doomed to failure if we think of enlightenment as a kind of end stateif we hope to eventually attain the elusive apprehension of not-self, of emptiness, and sustain that condition forever, living wholly free of delusion and suffering.

But you can always think of enlightenment as a process, and of liberation the same way. The object of the game isnt to reach Liberation and Enlightenment with a capitalL and Eon some distant day, but rather to become a bit more liberated and a bit more enlightened on a not-so-distant day. Like today! Or, failing that, tomorrow. Or the next day. Or whenever. The main thing is to make progress over time, inevitable backsliding notwithstanding. And the first step on that path can consist of just calming down a littleeven if your initial motivation for calming down is to make a killing in the stock market.

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Is mindfulness meditation a capitalist tool or a path to enlightenment? Yes - WIRED