Mindful or Mind Empty?

In recent years, interest in mindfulness, which originates from the teachings of a 5th century Buddhist monk, has trebled from 4% of Americans using it in 2012 to 14% in 2017. More recently it has been estimated that 18%, or nearly 61 million Americans now meditate regularly. And the trend is not confined to America. It’s been suggested that, globally, approximately 275 million people meditate.

The interest in mindfulness has moved firmly into the workplace. By 2018, a massive 52% of US employers now offer mindfulness classes, up from 36% in 2017. Mindfulness is now a multi-billion-dollar industry, and it’s growing by >10% per annum. It’s even become popular in prisons, schools and in many sports.

Mindfulness, which if literally translated from the original Sanskrit would be “remember to observe”, is the 7th element of the “Noble Eightfold Path” and the 1st factor of the “Seven Factors of Enlightenment” of Theravadan Buddhism. It puts a great deal of emphasis on “correct practice”. Sadly, how mindfulness is taught in the West is far from “correct”. Much has been lost in translation.

In the West mindfulness has degraded into some sort of concentration practice, where our mind is trained to focus on one thing and hold that focus. Now concentration is a very useful skill, particularly in a world where many self-diagnose as ADHD.

But mindfulness as taught “correctly” in Theravadan Buddhism is more about lucidity and the ability to be fully present in the moment. Jon Kabat-Zinn and Thich Nhat Hahn who popularised meditation in the US in the 1970s would groan at how their teaching has now become, what some would call “McMindfulness”, a productivity-focused, self-help product rather than a practice, which when done correctly, can liberate us from suffering.

While this type of meditation practice focuses on mindfulness, others practices, like the Zen discipline of “Mushin” teach us to try to empty our minds.

So, which is it? Do we need a mind that’s full or a mind that’s empty?

To be more precise the Zen practice of “Mushin” or “no mind” isn’t about developing an “empty mind”. It requires us to develop a mind that’s non-attached to its contents.

To contrast the two different practices: mindfulness, when done correctly, trains our ability to observe, non-judgementally, the contents of our consciousness. Whereas, Mushin or emptying the mind trains us to dissolve our attachments to the mind’s content.

Mindfulness gives us objects to observe, while mind emptying teaches us not to observe or grasp at the contents of our mind at all.

If you develop the quality of your mindfulness and train the way you observe the content of your consciousness you can alter your perception of time. Specifically, if you narrow your focus and increase the number of details your take in this can slow time.

Training your mind to slow down can create the experience of living a very full and rich life. This would be you correctly practising the 1st factor of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment in Theravadan Buddhism. Conversely, Mushin can speed up your experience of time.

One of the specific mindfulness disciplines that teaches you to study what's in your mind is called Vipassana. In this practice you thoroughly examine the content of your consciousness. You are basically training your ability to investigate your own mind and generate insights. You see through the content to the underlying meaning of that content and why it has arisen.

This should not be confused with the second great pillar of Buddhist meditation, Samatha, which is designed to still rather than fill the mind. This practice involves focusing on a single object, and rather than investigate that object to generate insights the aim is to quieten your mental turbulence until you eventually achieve unwavering clarity. In cultivating a stilled mind, through the 40 practices of Samatha, the goal is not for your mind to go blank, rather for it to be radiantly awake, with all the usual noise, distraction and chatter of ordinary cognition completely at rest.

In contrast to these two main types of meditation, mindfulness and mind stilling, the Zen practice of Mushin teaches you how to widen your focus and become non-attached to anything. Here you remove the ‘signal importance’ of everything that you are perceiving and just live in the moment. You stop looking for anything. You stop seeking, stop grasping and learn to profoundly let go. You become ‘pure awareness’, prior to content. In this state you can make time fly (a very useful skill for minimising jet lag by the way).

So, Samatha approaches stillness as a destination; Zen approaches it as a recognition of what was always already present. The journey versus the sudden seeing. The Taoist tradition has its own version of this stillness which appears throughout the Tao Te Ching and anchors it to nature.

The origin of Mushin practice comes from the Indian monk Bodhidharma, who brought a form of meditative Buddhism to China around the late 5th century CE. It’s said that Bodhidharma sat facing a wall at the Shaolin monastery for nine years in silent meditation. This approach didn’t simply transplant Indian Buddhism into China, it integrated Taoist principles, specifically the idea of wu wei (non-doing, effortless action). The Taoist sage doesn’t force; he aligns. He doesn’t grasp at enlightenment he ceases to obstruct it. This Sino-Indian integration brings a characteristic aesthetic of simplicity, naturalness, and sudden insight.

This tradition spread to Japan in the 12th and 13th centuries, where it became Zen and profoundly shaped Japanese culture integrating with Japanese Shintoism. The latter is the indigenous spiritual tradition of Japan, rooted in the animist and shamanistic practices and beliefs of the Japanese people. Shintoism predates any written records and dates back several thousand years. The aesthetic of simplicity, naturalness, and sudden insight influenced Japanese architecture, the tea ceremony, archery, swordsmanship, and garden design.

If we look deeply into the origins of mindfulness, we see how it has been an integrating force moving from India to China and then via Korea to Japan.

It’s possible to benefit from these ancient practices without having to be an advocate of any religious or spiritual tradition. With diligent and persistent effort, we can train our minds and profoundly improve the quality of our thinking. Western cognitive psychology has only recently started to embrace these deep insights into our own study of consciousness.

Hopefully, these writings will help you go way beyond the McMindfulness of Western training, which almost entirely misses the vertical developmental dimension. The practices described here, in their original forms, point at something genuinely transformative about the nature of mind and self. They’re not about a more serene commute.

If you’re curious, if you want to know more and want to develop the ability to fill, still or empty your mind and explore how such practices can help you to be a better, smarter leader, with greater wisdom, deeper compassion and a more abiding sense of self, keep following this Fresh Thinking Newsletter and I’ll try and help you cultivate some very advanced abilities that can change your life for the better.