When 'mindfulness' became popular I thought it was about the mindfulness of 'bare attention', that of cultivating awareness and attention in everyday activities. Later I learnt that the latest manifestation is about meditation, which is generally the practice of maintaining stillness and following the breath so as to quieten the mind. I appreciate that in a general sense mindfulness can embrace the concept of meditation on breath but it is widespread in the West to separate these two things. So why the change? what had happened here? I guess that the sales people of the alternative therapy world thought that the word meditation was too connected with the Eastern religious tradition wherein it arose, principally Buddhism. Meditation had to be neutralised for Western minds and called 'mindfulness'. Once this was done there was no end to the possibilities for pecuniary application. The doors of schools, corporations, government agencies, community services opened up for this palliative to assuage the confused and troubled minds of the fast-paced world. There is a tacit veiling of its ancient exotic antecedents.
The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism comprise an acesis or a formal spiritual discipline. The Four Noble Truths are at the simplest level about understanding the causes of human suffering. The Noble Eightfold Path, the corollary of the Fourth Noble Truth, is a living and dynamic path to cultivating ethics, wisdom and insight. Meditation, or what could be called concentration, is an integral part of this acesis. While intellectually extracting meditation from its foundational context may facilitate utility the extracting reduces it to technique. It becomes the old 'quick fix' beloved by our world. The fix works for a while but after the initial frisson there is no where to go. There are any number of alternative therapies that have gone under the bridge just for this reason. Again a problem with The Flight (see post 15/6/2015, Flight from God).
I would not expect people to stop meditating but ground the meditation in a secular understanding of its tradition.
