My wife has said to me that she doesn’t understand how someone who engages in as many spiritual practices as I do can get so angry so quickly.
She’s not wrong. If a car driver pulls out in front of me and forces to brake sharply, or doesn’t slow down to let me pull out, even though I don’t know him, and even though our contact has only been a matter of seconds, I will hate him with a vengeance, and curse him out from the safety of my own car. In my defence, and regardless of the claims of books, apps and YouTube channels, spiritual practices are not designed to make life easier, or make you a better person. Rather, they challenge you to become a better person. After all, becoming a Christian doesn’t automatically make you a good person. Rather, you try to live your life following Jesus’s example, and usually falling short.
Since meditation got rebranded as mindfulness in the 1990s, people seem to have forgotten that it’s a religious practice and religious practices are challenging.
The Buddha taught that:
“Short is the life span of human beings, the good man should disdain it. One should live like one with head aflame: There is no avoiding Death’s arrival.”
The modern mindfulness industry does not want to remind its customers that they’re going to die. They tell us that mindfulness can help us find more happiness, joy and meaningfulness in our lives and that this can be achieved by being present in the moment. We’re told that because of the fast pace and hectic schedules of modern life that anxiety, stress, and unhappiness are the new norm. The panacea for agonising about the past and worrying about the future is to be in the here and now, because that’s all there ever is.
Now, on one level, this is perfectly true. We cannot physically revisit the past, and the future hasn’t happened yet. This is what the physicist calls “The Arrow of Time”, the irreversible one-way direction of time.
However, if we don’t reflect on the past, we do not learn. If we do not consider the future, we do not plan wisely. The very act of taking up mindfulness is a consequence of looking at the past and going, “I don’t want to be like that anymore,” and planning for the future by taking up practices designed to make you calmer, and less fretful about things you cannot change.
Mindfulness in its modern form is presented as a holiday from everyday life. The trouble with holidays is that they end and we have to return home to a normal routine. There is even a recognised medical condition called Post-Vacation or Post-Holiday Blues, with symptoms including tiredness, loss of appetite and depression. Ironically, one of the treatments is planning the next vacation!
It’s the same with mindfulness. After you’ve taken a break from life, watching your breath and observing your thoughts and letting them go, you’re back in the real world, dealing with all your own problems and the problems of others – or the problems they give you!
Most religions recognise that our relationships with other people are central to our well-being. Christians are encouraged to “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” There is a Hadith (a record of the words of the Prophet) in Islam that says, “None of you believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” And in the Talmud: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”
Buddhism attempts to deal with the problem with a meditation called “Metta Bhavana”, from the Pali language which translates approximately as “Loving Kindness.” Essentially, it involves sending loving thoughts to yourself and others, including friends and enemies.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, who wrote The Hagakure, the code of Bushido for the samurai of 18th Century Japan, had no time for that aspect of Buddhism. He said that it made things two-sided, and that urging Buddhism on warriors made them cowards. What can be accomplished with gentility and compassion, he asked. On the other hand, he was quite happy with meditation practice that focussed the mind on the present, and what he considered the one task of a samurai: living and dying for your lord.
And this may be the problem with modern mindfulness. It will help you cope with the stresses and strains of everyday life, but will it make you a better person? And should it? If all you want is the tools to survive until you die, then there are plenty of mindfulness apps and books that will help you. But if you think your purpose on Earth is more than just getting by, because the fact that we are here at all is a cosmic miracle of statistically inconceivable proportions, what should you do?
Buddhism would say that you should seek enlightenment, the Semitic religions expect you to obey God, but again, achieving enlightenment or following the word of God does not mean that you won’t continue to have to deal with life, unless you become a hermit. Those who come down from the mountain, however, find themselves in the same position as St. Augustine, probably the significant Christian thinker after St. Paul, who wrote in his “Confessions”:
“Oh, Master, make me chaste and celibate – but not yet!”
We all face “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” and all the other problems that Shakespeare lists in the “To be or not to be” speech, and the choice seems to be to withdraw – through suicide, according to Hamlet, or to go back to that cave
on the mountain – or to live and deal with those problems.
The American Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön, says:
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
So, to conclude the case for the defence, if you follow a spiritual path, life gets harder, not easier, because the people and situations that irritated you before still irritate you, but now you get irritated with yourself as well for being irritated with all the things you think shouldn’t be irritating you anymore!
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