Welcome
Welcome! We’re going to start today by talking about mindfulness, and the limits of mindfulness (or Evan Thompson’s “mindfulness mania”. But first we’ll check do a short meditation, as this is our topic this week.
A Brief Mindfulness Meditation
Just follow the instructions!
Mindfulness Mania
Let’s now go into breakout groups to talk about the reading.
- Have you meditated since last session? How did it go?
- Do you have any practices of mindfulness in your daily life?
- What do you understand by the term “mindfulness”?
- What is Thompson’s critique of our current “mindfulness mania”, and how justified is it?
Break
We’ll have a short break!
Metta, and the Cultivation of Positive Emotion
For Thompson, the current discourse on mindfulness misunderstands the nature of human attention / cognition. And it also overlooks how mindfulness is not just an individual inner state, but also socially and culturally constructed. This, he claims, is not only incoherent, but it also feeds a selfish individualism.
Mindfulness is sometimes presented as “context-free”, a pure awareness of what is happening, seeing through the veils of culture and society to directly witness what is happening in the mind. Thompson is sceptical of this. There are ideologies about how it is good to be baked into our notions of mindfulness, and these are socially constructed.
But there are other Buddhist practices that are much more explicitly rooted in a notion of this question of how it is good to be, and one is the practice of the brahmavihārās, or “divine abidings”, which are considered, in Buddhism, optimal emotional states. These are: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
How are you feeling?
We’ll do a short meditation to check in with our feelings. Then write for 5 minutes on how we are feeling or doing.
Mettā Meditation
In this meditation, we’ll be explore Buddhist practices of cultivating positive emotion. The scriptural source of this is here: https://suttafriends.org/sutta/snp1-8/. But there is also an extended discussion of this in the text called the Visuddhimagga by the 5th century Sri Lankan Buddhaghosa, and we’ll be trying out a variant of this practice.
How are you feeling (again)?
Let’s now make a few more notes.
Feedback on the Practice
Now, we’ll discuss the practice in more depth.
Homework
For our homework, we’re moving onto another Buddhist tradition, and that is Zen (or, in Mandarin, Chan)! The Zen tradition draws out some of the paradoxes in earlier Buddhist thought, and develops them into a body of thought and practice that has been significant not just across East Asia, but also globally.