Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 8: The Buddha and “Mindfulness”
Continuing Siddhartha’s story, he experienced a deep disillusionment upon encountering the instances of suffering and the mendicant in the streets, and thereafter resolved to renounce the palace life. He initially tried to practice asceticism, but eventually found that self-denial was just another manifestation of the Having mode, not its transcendence.
Eventually, he observed the tuning of the violin strings and discovered the idea of the middle path, which is based on the notion that attention should neither be “too tight” nor “too loose”. This led him to Sati, the remembering of the Being mode, which we nowadays try to reenact through mindfulness. Put in a different way, enlightenment is like waking up, in the sense that we are able to remember what it is like to be in contact with the real world.
In our attempts to explain mindfulness, we should be cognizant of the distinction between the language of training and the language of science. By analogy, we might train memory through various mnemonic techniques such as memory palaces, but attempting to understand memory with that language will lead to confusion. By the same token, when we say that mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment in a nonjudgmental way, we should try to carefully understand what we actually mean by those terms.
When discussing mindfulness, we might have a feature list like being present, non-judging, insight, and reduced reactivity, which we can categorize into actions and results, respectively. But we still need to ask questions such as, what are the causal and constituency relationships? In particular, we can think of being present as a particular kind of concentration, where attention is neither “too tight” nor “too loose”. Another way of describing this type of concentration is soft vigilance (Mindfulness, Ellen Langer), where we focus on something by gently and constantly renewing our interest in it, thereby exploring it.
To understand this, we need to understand attention as not simply a spotlight, but a complex optimization process that leads to optimal engagement with a subject. Like practicing, it is not something we directly do, but something we do while optimizing some other process, such as seeing, hearing, or thinking. In other words, it is an act of cognitive unison.
