You Cannot Steal Mindfulness.

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Ngawang

In Dante’s Inferno, sins of the mind, those that involved willful and conscious malice, such as fraud and treachery, were punished more harshly than those which grew from the body, such as lust or gluttony. Is that proof? No, but I think it is indicative of something that we all recognize. You can see the same thing in most state laws – murder which is thought out and planned is punished far more harshly than manslaughter, which comes from an instantaneous reaction to a stimuli.
Similarly, teaching soldiers mindfulness will not change the fact that they have, for instance, just roasted some people inside a T-72 tank to death. Perhaps one of them got stuck in one of the hatches, and half of his body was incinerated by burning propellant for the main gun before he died. I must strongly disagree with you. Hitching something which is designed for the betterment of humanity – spirituality – to something which has no point or purpose other than senseless destruction so a few men can grow wealthy on the suffering of others, is not in any way a good thing.

Ngawang

I respectfully disagree, but nonetheless, I profoundly disagree.

Ngawang

I also want to note that I’m not disagreeing with applying mindfulness or other spiritual techniques to any and all worldly things. Most people could use a stiff shot of clarity, and if that jolt finds them in their office or at the bar, then that’s where they find it. But, and this is a big but, I think that enabling people to do things which are wrong with greater clarity will only ensure that their error goes deeper.

Al Billings

You mean like teaching Zen to samurai warriors?

Ngawang

Modern warfare destroys countries, including the people who inhabit them and their economic infrastructure, because the people who plan to benefit are generally isolated from the fray. Even the worst rulers in the ancient and medieval world, with obvious exceptions like the mongols, had an incentive to keep captured populations alive and their economic infrastructure intact (slaves, tribute, and conscripts.) There’s a huge, enormous, gigantic difference between, say, a samurai, who would almost certainly only fight and kill other samurai (who have, given that they have honed their martial prowess to a fine edge, chosen to fight) and (say) firebombing Tokyo and roasting 150,000 people to death in a single night or largely obliterating the economic infrastructure of a country. There’s a reason that obliterating towns is a root downfall of the bodhisattva vows. And that’s much of what modern warfare consists of – 1000 lb iron bombs dropped on crowded blocks and 155 mm howitzer shells lobbed god-knows-where.

Stone Dog

Jason writes:
“Now me personally I can’t think of anyone in this world that I would want to act in a more mindful way than the heads of the corporations that are potentially destroying the planet or the soldiers and leaders that have to weigh the needs of security against acts that kill potentially hundreds of people.”

So if I understand your view correctly, mindfulness doesn’t just give people strength, clarity, etc; you think it can result in shifting their values for the better, making them “wiser” as well as “smarter”.

This is just what Ngawang and mister Stone (the article’s author) seem to disagree about:
“I think that enabling people to do things which are wrong with greater clarity will only ensure that their error goes deeper.”

As I see it, the crux of the matter is not whether anyone can claim mindfulness as theirs, but rather, if mindfulness has, BY ITSELF, the power to improve people from an ethical standpoint.
You say meditation enables you to make better decisions. But in what sense are those decisions “better”? Are they more effective and efficient from a tactical/strategical point of view, or are they more just, fair, generous, wise etc?

If you are going to argue, I think this should be the focus of the discussion. Any conclusion about the matter hinges on how we answer this question.

Ngawang

I, personally, think that it can either make you much better by opening up new aspects of existence and life or it can make you much worse by making you better at doing things that are bad. Medicine in one context, poison in another.

There’s actually an interesting book that kind of touches on this. It’s called _The Wisdom of Psychopaths_, and a lot of what it says is that psychopaths, holy people, and those who are extremely talented often share such traits as ruthlessness, charm, focus, mental toughness, fearlessness, mindfulness and action. It’s just that psychopaths take these qualities to extremes and apply them in inappropriate situations. (And the book is a GREAT read. I’d recommend it to everyone.)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wisdom-from-psychopaths/

Ron

I have known many who have served in our armed forces, my father being one of them. By far they have proven to be as honorable and decent as any group I am aware of, maybe more so. For those who had faced combat, as had my father in two wars, they were quite mindful about war and its consequences.

I haven’t known as many execs. I imagine there are honorable execs who work hard taking care of their companies while providing goods and services to customers. Many probably work hard providing for their families and are concerned about leaving their children a better world when they pass on.

I think providing these people mindfulness training is a wonderful idea. Maybe consumers who purchase products & services from corporations and politicians who send our men and women in harms way could also use this mindfulness training.

Snomper

Those who have served in the military have higher incarceration rates (a 2004 Department of Justice Study found that nearly 1 in 10 inmates had been in the military). Clearly PTSD and other considerations play a role in this, nevertheless, the numbers are what they are. Mindfulness could help some of these people, for others it will not alter their hard-wiring. Either way, suggesting veterans are “more decent” as a group than the general population can be argued against with hard numbers, ie

“Veterans were more likely than other violent offenders in State prison to have victimized females and minors Among violent offenders, 60% of veterans reported victimizing only females during their current crime, compared to 41% of nonveterans. Veterans were also more likely than other violent offenders in State prison to report victimizing a minor. A quarter of violent offenders without prior military service said that at least one of their victims was under age 17. Among veterans the percentage was 40%. In particular, veterans (20%) were twice as likely as nonveterans (10%) to report a victim under age 13”

Multiple studies suggest CEOs have a higher rate of psychopathy, perhaps even four times the average population. Mindfulness will simply not have an effect on psychopathy.

Souris

So you oppose mindfulness teaching and meditation for prisoners, also? Where is this idea coming from that mindfulness training will somehow make the violent more rather than less so?

inominandum

There are in fact specific studies to show that mindfulness and meditation in prison populations has a markedly positive effect and does create less violence.

Inominandum

Whether it shifts their ethics or not is not the point. They can do what they do with clarity or they can do it without clarity. Clarity leads to understanding, understanding tends to lead to empathy and wisdom.

I do not see how clarity and mindfulness can possibly make the error deeper.

I also do not see how simple mindfulness techniques are claimed as the property of Buddhism or any other ism. They existed before Buddhism.

I also see many of the things that the military does as necessary evils. This is Samsara and things are not cut and dry. You kill people by dropping a bomb or sending a drone, but you also kill them by not dropping the bomb or sending the drone.

It is easy to preach non-violence from an ivory tower but when you get into the thick of it the choices are usually between two bad options, not between right and wrong.

Like I said, charge at the Dalai Lama and see how non-violent his security forces are…

Ron

Well said.

Ngawang

I said that they could make the error deeper because:

Short backstory – Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics is a foundational work in the history of western philosophy, and rightly so. In book VII, Aristotle examines the divide between incontinence and evil. An incontinent person, per Aristotle, is a person who just can’t help himself. He’d like to stop cheating on his wife, having his temper fly off the handle, or whatever, but his passions are too strong for his mind to bring into line. By contrast, an evil person is one who has no desire to control himself. He doesn’t care what his wife thinks and jail time for battery doesn’t bother him. That’s because, instead of just suffering for a passion that he can’t control, he actively has an evil will. Subsequent Aristotelian philosophers held the same view – that some morally impermissible actions were less bad because they came out merely as a result of a lack of self-restraint. Others were more bad because they came about as a result of an active desire to do something which is evil.

So what I say when I mean that they could possibly make the error deeper is that they could take an evil action which is motivated merely by a lack of self-restraint or a response to overwhelming passions, and make it the result of an active desire to do evil because there is no guarantee that meditation will make you a better person, but it can make you a more focused predator.

Souris

So we should stop teaching it to the vast swathes of people who are merely “incontinent” as you put it, because we may inadvertently help the one predator in the crowd?

Or are you saying in your last paragraph that mindfulness, rather than increasing empathy, can somehow transform a person who does evil through ignorance into one who does evil by intent?

You seem to have a very negative view of these practices. What is the use of them if you think they produce negative results in those not already saints?

Siv

Two words: Harm Reduction

If a C-level corporate employee or armed warrior responds to circumstances out of anger or craving, their actions could cause far more waste, harm, and death than if that individual were to have the proper inner space and peace in which to act in more full awareness of those circumstances. Anger and craving blind us to what’s real. Mindfulness clears the barriers to more complete awareness, and it is this more complete awareness that leads us to the experience of interpenetration or interbeing. One cannot be without compassion in the experience of interbeing. Therefore, I hope more of the world practices mindfulness, especially those in wheelhouses of power and status.

I agree wars and rampant consumerism in our world creates suffering, but they are there, and we are all responsible for them. Picking an opposing view and filling oneself with righteous indignation does nothing but add to the pool of suffering shared by all beings in the universe.

Furthermore, Buddhism did not give birth to Mindfulness. Mindfulness gave birth to Buddhism. Buddhism cannot own Mindfulness. Spiritual materialism helps nothing.

Strip away the religious idolatry and “Buddhism” is just a collection of parables and anecdotes told to a fascinated audience by a man who fully internalized his locus of control, awoke from his own bullshit narratives and expectations, and thus opened himself to life beyond the bondage of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, and the fear of death. And by doing so, he was able fully live, and live mindfully.

Mindfulness predates Buddha by billions of years. It was born at the big bang and will die with the end of the universe. It is the substance of consciousness behind the dream of matter, and the understanding of its importance will continue to grow as the consciousness of humanity continues its slow grind toward adulthood.

IMO.

inominandum

I LOVE IT.

Better comment then the post itself. Very well said.

Ngawang

You make good points, but this is what worries me:

Have you ever encountered a sociopath? Like, a really good one, not just one who contents himself with petty crimes, but the kind of guy who is with it, and there, completely calm and clear to the point of being utterly fearless, and completely willing to throw you under the bus to get what he wants? The idea of someone like that meditating terrifies me, because I think it would do little other than make someone who is already a very efficient predator even more efficient. Just my thoughts.

Christine Opland

Abandon fear. I have met such a person, and they are rare indeed. More to be feared is the young kid who signs up for the military for the adventure, and accidentally causes mass bloodshed for lack of awareness of the consequences of his or her actions.

Souris

No one should learn helpful things, because that information might inadvertently become accessible to a sociopath!
You do know, don’t you, Ngawang, that sociopaths can already walk into libraries and log onto the internet?
While you’re at it, why don’t we ban hammers and saws? As well as the aforementioned libraries and internet. ‘Cause information is *dangerous*, dontcha know.

Stone Dog

@Ngawang:
Thanks for the reading tip, I’ll get it for sure.

@Inominandum:

“I also do not see how simple mindfulness techniques are claimed as the property of Buddhism or any other ism.”

Such a claim is indeed foolish, and it’s good to hear a Buddhist pointing that out.

“Whether it shifts their ethics or not is not the point. They can do what they do with clarity or they can do it without clarity. Clarity leads to understanding, understanding tends to lead to empathy and wisdom.”

English is a second language for me, so forgive me if some semantic nuances are lost on me, but won’t empathy and wisdom lead to new and different views about what is good and what is bad? And isn’t that a shift in ethics?
We can argue about the choice of words, but what I meant is simply this: your argument rests on the assumption that mindfulness practice will not only result in heightened awareness, concentration, a streamlined thought process etc, but will also alter people’s values towards a more compassionate, caring view of others (“interbeing”).

While I intuitively tend to agree with you, I’m not entirely sure that the second effect is always and necessarily prevalent. It may take a lot of time before a person that is not inclined to compassion starts to become more empathic through meditation practice. In the meantime, he or she would still learn to think and act more effectively, not necessarily in a moral way.

Moreover, while mindfulness practice cannot possibly be claimed by any particular tradition, religious or otherwise, the ideologic CONTEXT in which it is practiced cannot be ignored either.
Now, a monastic community that has non-violence and compassion as foundational values is a very different context from, say, a trading firm à la Wolf of Wall Street or a training facility for élite killers. Mindfulness doesn’t happen in a cultural and psychological vacuum. Everyone has a starting point, everyone has values that are going to play a big part in the way he or she applies his newly found awareness on the external world.
Have you considered that the preexisting values may just be too deeply ingrained for mindfulness practice to have that much of an “enlightening” effect on the meditator? If those values are morally twisted, mindfulness may indeed result in a more highly capable evildoer.

“I do not see how clarity and mindfulness can possibly make the error deeper.”

I think what worries mister Stone and Ngawang has been well depicted in the Bourne books and movies. The members of programs like Treadstone and Blackbriar have received mental training that makes them highly capable, much more so that the average soldier. The point is, they’re not mindful enough to access spiritual wisdom, but they do execute their rotten leaders’ orders much more effectively.
To borrow another example from the fictional world, but very much based on reality from what I know, Hannibal Lecter comes to mind, especially as seen in the HBO TV show.
Is that what you had in mind, Ngawang?

To clarify, I don’t have a firm opinion about this whole issue; personally, I would need more data to form one.
My personal experience with members of the armed forces tends to agree with Ron’s. I’m not in any way anti-military, nor am I preaching non-violence as a universal principle. But that is just my subjective opinion.

All I’m saying is, the worries about giving mindfulness training to potentially dangerous people are understandable, and can’t be simply brushed aside with statements like “Mindfulness practice will make you a better person no matter what”.
If you are going to take up the issue, I think you need to give stronger arguments to support your claim.

That said, I want to thank you for the post, which is as always very stimulating and worthy of attention. Thanks to all other commentators, too. I love that I can come on a blog about magic and discuss controversial subjects with other occultists in such a reasonable, civilized manner. I guess we are all meditators ourselves. 🙂

Christine Opland

My thought, for what it’s worth, and I am not so much a student of history as I am of human behavior, is that most people have the desire to see themselves as the hero of their own life story. Mindfulness training gives the opportunity to open us up to a less egocentric view of the world, and a greater likelihood that we will see both the positive and negative effects of our own actions on other people.

Since most people are not sociopaths, and the gods know I have met such people, mindfulness training, liberally distributed among those who are most likely to do harm, would have the effect of creating far more good than than bad in the world.

By the way, the sociopath in modern society is not a very effective person. I have not seen the movie “Silence of the Lambs”, but when I was a teenager I went to church with Robert Hansen from “The Frozen Ground.”

I met another man who was clearly a sociopath. For a long time he got away with living off of other people, but eventually he had to start moving around in order to find other “suckers” to live off of. To the best of my knowledge he is now homeless.

Norene Childs

Ngawang said, “Have you ever encountered a sociopath? Like, a really good one, not just one who contents himself with petty crimes, but the kind of guy who is with it, and there, completely calm and clear to the point of being utterly fearless, and completely willing to throw you under the bus to get what he wants?”

Before I knew what a sociopath was, I dated one that was so much better than “really good.” After that ordeal, I actually wondered if I dated a djinn! At the time, I was half-a## meditating all along, however, I stepped up my mindfulness medication practice, which helped me hold and recover very well. I mention my ordeal with this sociopath because this person DID meditate!

Plenty of sociopaths are in upper echelons of the military and corporations, who’s to say many have not practiced/do not practice “mindful meditation” as means to their ends, growth, successes, etc? Just my thoughts …

Snomper

“By the way, the sociopath in modern society is not a very effective person”

They can do very well, particularly on Wall Street. Even someone at the Wall Street Journal admitted as such–

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203986604577255750107057014

I have come to know many psychopaths, from Ponzi-schemers to book-cooking corporate executives. They are always charming and narcissistic. They display wonderfully glib senses of humor and spin the truth like a roulette wheel.

It is often difficult to argue that these people are indeed sick until the day they have to exchange their Armani suit for an orange jumpsuit.

I only know one man who openly admits he’s a psychopath. I called him to see what he thought of the numbers Ms. DeCovny reported.

“First of all, it’s not one out of 10,” says Sam Antar. “It’s probably eight out of 10.”

Mr. Antar was the chief financial officer of Crazy Eddie, an electronics retailer in the New York area that became one of the more infamous stock-fraud cases of the late 1980s

Ron

I have some personal experience with meditation and firearms. Shooting various firearms has been a lifelong hobby of mine. Late in 2000, I began to hang out with New Agers, Pagans, Hindus and Buddhists and learned many meditation techniques which I practiced several times a week. I stopped shooting during this time until 2008 when I decided to take it up again. I found that I was a far better shot than I had been before stopping. I get very focused when I’m around firearms in general and shoot best when I can get in and stay in a meditative state. I can imagine an improvement in the fighting skills of military personnel who regularly meditate.

miyamoto musashi

Westerners have such strange ideas about the east. As another example I got into an argument about the bhagavad gita. Its set in a war and the main character arjuna is having a crisis of conscious about engage in war with his relatives and its meaning in a spiritual context. He talks to his holy guardian angel in the middle of the battle. Like the planet mars, the angel tells him its to restore balance , to cleanse the world of corruption. It gives and esoteric meaning to destruction and cataclysm. Some people think, for some strange reason its about flowers and love man. In ancient India the used elephants in war and that one on the front( of the one I have anyways)Not a caravan of pot smoking gypsies. A lot of people seem to think all they do in asia is meditate, smoke weed and eat tofu, for some strange reason I will never understand.

Ngawang

It has nothing to do with the topic of this post, but your comment is something that I really needed to see.

Ian

This is one of those discussions that would really benefit from everyone taking a breath and reflecting a bit on the subject rather than falling into what appear to be fairly comfortable reactive patterns. Really, people, mindfulness has existed since the big bang? Charge the Dalai Lama and see how his bodyguards respond? I am hardly the Buddhism expert, but this leads us to some seriously shallow silliness.

(I’m not even Buddhist–I’ve just studied some because I have found mindfulness useful and wanting to deepen my work with it a bit.)

(And I won’t even touch the sociopathy…I hope someone throwing the term around here is a practicing psychologist with some meaningful clinical experience; it looks to me, though, like the shark just got jumped. Having met sociopaths and having read some books about them doesn’t really qualify anyone to talk about the effects of teaching them meditation.)

I want to see if I can turn the other direction, maybe? Sorry, this will be a little long in an already long thread, but I think it is worth the time.

Let’s start from the top, shall we, with the original post on Salon and Ngawang. Nonviolence has been taken up by a lot of Western Buddhists (and some Eastern ones, yes) as Buddhist, but it isn’t really. Nonviolence as most Westerners mean it has its roots in the inimitably peculiar yet admirable intellectual synthesis of Ghandi (himself decidedly peculiar and admirable).

Nonviolence owes a lot to Jainism, and a fair bit of Buddhist teaching developed in counterpoint to what they saw as extremism in Jainism. Incorporating Buddhism and Nonviolence can (doesn’t have to, but can) distort the Buddhist Dharma.

If you are going to defend the Dharma from the military, you might also need to defend it from Ghandi and MLK, too. No disrespect meant to either of those fine men, but neither were Buddhist and neither made mindfulness their center (unless you are talking about mindfulness in some really vague way).

Siv, the whole point about the Dharma is that it can come into existence only under certain conditions, namely human life and at specific times. Animals, gods, demons, ghosts? Mindfulness doesn’t flower among them. It has historical specificity. Mindfulness as extracted from Buddhist techniques isn’t once and forever, it comes to be because Buddhas nourished it and spread it. Consciousness, sure, predates and postdates Buddhism and humanity, but consciousness is not the same thing as mindfulness.

Yes, obviously, mindfulness isn’t owned by Buddhism, but it has rarely been more carefully studied and explored. There is bound to be some confusions and errors in there, but the teachings around violence in Buddhism aren’t just dogmatic. They reflect centuries of effort in which Buddhists have had to deal with living a mindful life in violent situations. They reflect an understanding of the interaction between mindfulness and violence.

Which gets me to Jason, his post and comments. Who cares about hypothetical what-ifs? Tell me about what the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards have actually done to protect him (this one or previous ones if there aren’t any actual cases with the present one) and tell me about what they have done afterward to deal with it.

Heck, tell me what they do beforehand. I seem to recall a lot of work goes into preparing someone to pursue the Dharma and be in a place where they might have to take a life, because mindful death-dealing is just plain tough. Death-dealing of any sort wears, but to have to do that while cultivating mindful nonattachment? Whew.

Samurai have been Zen…well, some of them. It wasn’t exactly a smooth thing, though. Folks like Musashi explicitly state that you cannot be Buddhist and a warrior. During the heady days when a lot of samurai were diving into Zen, there were some strides in advancing what we would call just war conventions, but it clearly wasn’t an easy fit. More than a few samurai abandoned their position for monkhood because Zen made the death and suffering they cause seem pointless (and, uh, Ngawang, can we avoid romanticizing the Samurai in counterpoint to today? Samurai were dueling each other, yes, but their was plenty of torture and destruction).

Mindfulness and militarism are unstable reactants. The original salon post doesn’t exactly get this right, but it is a good deal closer to the issue. If you teach someone to be mindful without giving them the tools they need to be mindful in the face of killing people, you are likely to make things harder rather than easier on them.

That strikes me as the real concern that no one is getting at–Buddhism doesn’t own mindfulness, but it knows an awful lot about it. Adopting its tools without its caution does strike me as irresponsible and potentially quite disruptive of the Dharma’s mission (which, again, I totally respect even if I don’t follow it).

Now, of course, from reading the Salon article, I can’t tell what is actually being taught, so the concern might be unjustified. But I think we can be reasonably suspicious and having an article flag that isn’t a bad thing.

From another context dealing with the mismatch of teaching and caution: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/17/my_tantric_awakening_turned_me_off_sex/

inominandum

But see Buddhism doesn’t have cautions about mindfulness. There is no warning to train before you engage in meditation or mindfulness training. Mindfulness training is part of the Dharma training because it helps give rise to the very conclusions that the Dharma teaches.

But let’s say it doesn’t. Let’s say it completely does not shift ethics or wisdom in any way. We still have a choice between people being mindful while performing an act and being un-mindful when performing an act. This is the choice. Soldiers are going to kill, and CEOs are going to do business – neither are going to become Buddhists en-mass, if that was even a healthy thing for them to do. They can do their thing with mindfulness or without it. To me it is a no-brainer and I am still kind of scratching my head at why, fictional super-assassins aside, you would not want them to meditate or practice mindfulness.

The issue of the Dalai Lamas security is meant to show that the world uses and relies upon security professionals who use violence as part of their trade – even the Dalai Lama. As you might imagine finding records of incidents are rare as they would be tied up in legal issues and undisclosed. I do however have the privilege of knowing a person that was on his detail and it was a story he shared that brought the example to mind. Also the history of Tibet has plenty of examples of violence and harsh punishments and such. Suffice to say that March 1oth is Tibetan Uprising Day, and it is not to celebrate a peaceful event. I myself was caught in a March 10th Riot in Boudha that was kicked off my a Monk tossing abrick at a policeman. All of this takes us further away from the point.

The Sex article is quite different. Tantric practice (or whatever they were teaching at this weekend workshop) is not similar to mindfulness practice. It works on a different principal entirely.

Ian

“To me it is a no-brainer and I am still kind of scratching my head at why, fictional super-assassins aside, you would not want them to meditate or practice mindfulness.”

Fictional super-assassins aside (far, far aside, I hope), for me it comes dow to something fairly simple. Namely, my (limited and far from deep) practice with mindfulness has left with the sense that mindfulness will do what it can, wherever it can. However, the nature of its environs seems to leave its mark on its development.

The Buddhist Dharma have struck me as a means to realize it in a very healthy and full fashion, but it does seem like it will grow into a crooked and bent fashion, too, where those opportunities are absent. Being a crooked and bent sort, I won’t knock it too hard. The crooked tree is still a tree. Heck, sometimes it is exactly the right tree.

But, divorced from that Dharma and nurtured by corporatism and militarism? It is an experiment and experiments are things we don’t necessarily know the results of. That isn’t a no-brainer for me–especially when it is being packaged and advertised without that in mind.

I’m not saying it will be bad or has to be bad, but this is basically being advertised therapeutically without all the data in. We tend to think of therapeutic things like this as good or neutral, but that isn’t really the case. These sorts of things can be harmful, too.

Is it going to kill someone or turn them into a monster? Well, no, probably not. But might it make them less happy, more dissatisifed, without the tools to work through it? Might it disrupt their daily life, put them at risk for depression or somesuch? Well, yeah, maybe. Might it disrupt their marriage or lead them to question their patriotism? It’s not impossible and those can be troubling places to end up.

Lots of that, and the virtues of mindfulness get muddied and the tools for dealing with that (the various Dharma teachings) get lost, and you have done the work a bit of a disservice.

Anyway, I don’t think we are far apart on some of this; I think there are ways this can be a good. I don’t think it is necessarily good, though. We are probably far enough apart not to agree, though. No big deal.

inominandum

There is a story of a Mahasiddha named Khadgapa who was a thief. He burgled the house of a great Guru (some say he met him in a charnel ground while running from soldiers) and he asked the Guru to make him invulnerable to attacks so that when he robbed people they could not stop him. Rather than rebuke him, the Guru gave him initiation and taught him to meditate at a particular stupa for a particular amount of time and he would gain the power he sought. He did but he also became awake from the experience and thus gave up thieving.

There is in fact precedent IN Buddhist tradition itself for teaching meditation as well as other Yogas to thieves and soldiers and business people, and having those people grow spiritually through the practice even though their immediate goals are worldly. So in a way, this is very much in keeping with tradition.

Also when we consider the Dalai Lamas many statements about it not being necessary to become Buddhist in order to practice mindfulness and meditation , even donating to scientific research on the matter which will lead to theraputic uses, I am left thinking that the people upset about this are westerners that have delusions of the Dharma being practiced in a sort of Hippie Utopia of peace and love only.

The effects of meditation and mindfulness training has beenstudies scientifically and is less of an experiment to see what happens, than it is the application of a proven technique to new areas.

But again, I am left with the question: Even if it does not shift ethics towards wisdom (and there are indications it does), even if it does not reduce violence (and there are indications it does) WHY would you not want soldiers and businessmen to practice mindfulness?

Might it lead to depression, disruption of marriage, or even worse dilemas. I can settle that question for you: Yes it might. It has. In very small numbers of people, most of whom practice it within the context of Buddhism.

There is in fact a strong argument that Mindfulness and Meditation are better applied OUTSIDE of Buddhism for people who are not of that culture. In fact the cultural baggage of Buddhism has cause more of these kinds of problems for people than Meditation or Mindfulness practice ever will.

miyamoto musashi

Jason is right, 60’s hippie sub-culture really had a distortion of eastern philosophy and spirituality. I had a traditional martial arts teacher and he did not like hippies, he did not like long hair on guys either.

miyamoto musashi

Your discounting the shaolin monks they were not pacifists. From reading Miyamoto Musashi, he said he used the mirrors of heavens as his guide and relied on inuition rather then instinct. It says in the books that warriors also taught buddhist monks.

Rose Weaver

“Modern warfare destroys countries, including the people who inhabit them and their economic infrastructure, because the people who plan to benefit are generally isolated from the fray.”

I generally remain out of these discussions but felt compelled to comment. Modern warfare, nay… all warfare… also destroys soldiers which is why Mindfulness is being taught.

I feel what is being forgotten is that the type of soldier described in some of the comments above is an incredibly small percentage. The vast majority are very good individuals, most of whom entered the military with truly good intentions; perhaps naive, yes, but most had no idea the true nature of what they would encounter and the effects of the resulting traumas.

Speaking as a Veteran who naively enlisted after being pushed to do so, and one whose only family which remains are fellow Veterans incredibly damaged by their experiences within the military, whether they were in a war zone or not, I can express with all assurance that Mindfulness is being taught to assist with the effects of PTSD after returning home from enlistment to help with transition back into civilian society; and not only that, to assist with coping with the incredible traumas, wartime or not.

It is now being utilized to assist, rather than doping people up with medications which are dangerous and not helpful. Acupuncture and massage therapy are also being utilized, though not yet to the same degree as of yet.

Is using Acupuncture “appropriation”? If so, why are we not all up in arms about this when it has been, and is being, used within our society by CEO’s, Veterans, and civilians of all types?

Holistic healing, we know, works. This is not “appropriation”. I’m grateful the military and the VA are finally waking up, as are other Veterans.

I thank Jason for this post, and Siv for his comment.

Dinos

“They can do what they do with clarity or they can do it without clarity. Clarity leads to understanding, understanding tends to lead to empathy and wisdom.
I do not see how clarity and mindfulness can possibly make the error deeper.”

Bear in mind that Breivik, who pulled off one of the largest terrorist attacks on civilians in modern history, practiced meditation regularly as preparation. Would you be writing in the same terms if the Salon writer was criticising Breivik? Why/why not?

For what its worth, for my value system, the US military when judged historically and given its scale is far far worse than Breivik.

inominandum

There have been a lot of terrorists that practice meditation. Aum Sinrikyo comes to mind. Yes I would be writing in the same terms.

Meditation did not enable them to do it anymore than it will enable US Soldiers to do their jobs – it WILL make them better able to do it.

The difference is that we have a military for a reason that most people agree that it is necessary. Do you want them to do their jobs with mindfulness or not?

If it is a matter of you not wanting them to do their job at all – that is another matter, and one that is not going to be solved by them doing or not doing meditation.

If you want them to do their job, but not do it from a place of mindfulness I think that is just insanity.

I am not getting into a value discussion on the military.

Dinos

Yeah I don’t want to get into that discussion either but it is a major part of your case.
I live in London. There are people who would gladly blow up the bus or train I am on if they could. I hope they are as bad at doing this as possible. I hope they are constantly distracted and undisciplined and unmindful! In a similar way, I hope the US military is inefficient. The ideal situation would be to have a more enlightened leadership over the military… but that is very different from having troops learning mindfulness in order to follow orders more efficiently.

Ngawang

To frame things a little differently, cops are (according to an ex-cop and prosecutor named Dale Carson, who wrote an awesome book called Arrest-Proof Yourself) primarily visual “predators” (his term, not mine). They primarily decide who to target based on what looks off or unusual. He also says that they get promoted based on how many people they can arrest, not whether those arrests are remotely valid. Barring a massive change in their ethics and in their mentality of arresting as many people as possible and letting the courts sort it out, I want them as lazy, confused, and distracted as humanly possible.

inominandum

Yeah…. I have actually had my house raised by cops on a case of mistaken identity and you know what? They treated my wife with great respect even when they thought I was the person they were looking for. They apologized for the mistake and went on their way.

I taught meditation for another cop who ran a holistic studio that did amazing healing and spiritual work.

My cousins life was saved by a cop who was on the ball in visually spotting something that looked off.

Overall my run-ins with police have been overwhelmingly positive, and I find them a beneficial force in society.

Painting all cops and soldiers as somehow unethical by nature, or unnecessary is not gonna fly. I want them to do their jobs better, and honestly if anything has a chance of creating an ethical shift – mindfulness practice does.

So basically your argument is “I don’t like cops”.

Stone Dog

“I want them as lazy, confused, and distracted as humanly possible.”

Well let me ask you this then: how would you like your criminals to be?

I am a bit more cautious than Jason and others about the effects of meditation on the typical predatory CEOs and such simply because I fear it will make them smarter a lot faster than it will make them wiser, but in the case of cops, smarter is not a bad thing. I live in a country where corruption is rampant, probably much more so than in the US, and the only problems I ever had with cops were due to them being too slow, too few, too dumb, too lazy, or having an inflated ego. Not to them being overly violent with the wrong people, and certainly not too smart, clear-minded etc. It’s usually the criminals that give me problems for being too smart as well as aggressive, so meditation for cops has my vote. And I speak as one who has had his house mistakenly raided too, thank you very much.
ON THE WHOLE, having more clear-minded, effective cops will do much more good than harm.

I guess the most basic reason this would at all be framed as a problem is that many of us associate meditation with wisdom and spiritual evolution, and we somehow want it to be a privilege of the people we like, starting with ourselves of course. For example, we all have some politicians that we hate. The first reaction to the idea of meditation programs given to them is likely to be “I don’t want something good being mixed up with something bad”. But that’s because we fear the bad will somehow “twist” the good and turn it to its ends and, in part, because we want to feel more deserving of the benefits of meditation than they are. But when I try to think about actual politicians that I dislike practicing meditation, I feel that even just their decision of engaging in such a practice would have benefits for all of us. In a nutshell, meditation would make them less animal and more human, and even if they push ideas very different from mine, that would likely elevate the general level of the discourse.

As I said, I myself am more cautious about this than others, but if we don’t like the idea of certain CATEGORIES of people practicing mindfulness, maybe the best answer is not excluding them from meditation, but instead, leveling the field again: giving meditation programs to EVERYBODY, starting in kindergarten. No one will be at a disadvantage, so to speak, and the overall effect on society is very likely to be a strong improvement.

Ngawang

Kinda. :-p

Stone Dog

I found something about “prison contemplative programs”, meditation programs for inmates. According to the wikipedia article, inmates became significantly less violent and less likely to engage in acts of crime after they were released.

So while some of them may have become more effective in their violence, it seems that for the most part meditation did indeed reduce harm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_contemplative_programs

How Do You Own Mindfulness? | Salt Your Bones

[…] lovely Chirotus posted a link to an article titled “You Cannot Steal Mindfulness” today. The post links back to a Salon article titled “Abusing the Buddha: How the […]

Christine Opland

It kind of all boils down to what you believe about the human race. Do you see us as inherently evil? Do you see us as inherently good?

I see us as basically good, but having trouble wading through our own mistakes and miss-perceptions.

Is this a perfect view of humanity? No. But I think it’s a healthy paradigm, and since I believe that most all of us want to believe we are right and good, I also believe that meditation and mindfulness training will create more good in the world than bad.

Can I prove my own belief? Well, no, that’s the nature of faith. But I have met absolutely lovely people who have done horrible things in their past. I have a brother I would just love to hate because he has done horrible things to me, but my training tells me it’s a birth order issue, and with other people he is kind to a fault.

Am I right? I hope so.

Lonnie Scott

I teach Mindfulness to anyone who is willing to practice. The benefits to my students have been amazing. Every one of them have described themselves as more positive, empathetic, and possessing improved concentration and sleep. They come from all walks of life. Granted, I haven’t dealt with a fictional assassin, terrorist, or sociopath CEO’s.

I’m a martial artist. Both the confidence in my own fighting skills, and my practice of meditation, allow me to walk away from most violence. The clarity of focus that comes with my meditation practice allows more of my own mental and physical abilities to respond in a heightened adrenaline situation.

My last point concerns the Military. I have a friend who was seriously injured and received a Purple Heart during a tour of duty in Iraq. Doctors did save his life with multiple surgeries. It was an experimental Mindfulness program that saved his mind. I can tell you that the guys I served with would’ve benefited from Mindfulness practice. Any person can benefit from a better relationship with their body, emotions, and mind.

Excellent post, Jason!

Jeff

I imagine they put meditation and mindfulness exercises into a bag, and had seal team six chopper it out.

As for the Buddhists, do you remember who they were and what they did?
Or are we indulging in a consequence free fantasy properly sterilized for public consumption? As I am sure Jason can attest, the religious conquest of asia was not achieved without bloodshed.

How Do You Own Mindfulness? | Song of the Firebird

[…] lovely Chirotus posted a link to an article titled “You Cannot Steal Mindfulness” today. The post links back to a Salon article titled “Abusing the Buddha: How the […]

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