Comment 11 on Mindfulness

Opps, I see what I wrote actually was published. LOL well you can see my editing in action with the two posts. I know that's not an advantage, too many words simply get in the way. But the issues you are addressing are so important and I don't really have others in my life who are talking about them seriously as you are.

Having already repeated myself with the two similar posts above, perhaps it's a bit annoying to try to summarize the points. But I'm trying to strain out the solid bits.

One of the threads in these posts has to do with the nature of economics as a discipline. The point is to make a critique of economics. Many economist consider the discipline as science. The scientific method is a powerful way of knowing, but not the only way. The most significant advancements in scientific knowledge are about physical things. Stuff is obviously an important object of study for economists. But there is a pitfall which economists often fall prey: The map is not the territory; the name is not the thing named.

You define mindfulness:

mindfulness thinking about what you are doing thinking about why you are doing it thinking about what the effects of doing it are going to be

Oh yes all of that, but I can't help but think there is something essential about Buddhist ideas of mindfulness that definitions obscure. One insight of Buddhism and of mediators everywhere is: "We are not our thoughts." So one of the purposes of meditation to to appreciate our being not just our thoughts about being.

So my purpose for trying to critique the discipline of economics especially in re science as a method, is to point to the challenge of being clear about a distinction between names and objects.

I put in Fuller's stab at what wealth is because it seems odd that economics pays little attention to definitions of wealth. It seems to me that how we envision wealth has a great impact on how we think about the economy. I am quite fond of Fuller's humanistic conception of wealth.

John Robb quotes Rothkopt in the Financial Times--the link has expired-- with a disturbing factoid:

Rothkopf: "the world's 1,100 richest people have almost twice the assets of the poorest 2.5bn"

Most people "know" that a few people have almost everything and most people have almost nothing, but I think most people have a hard time fathoming that. It doesn't make sense. Perhaps that cognitive dissonance is part of the reason most people have a hard time being too interested in economics.

So one reason to put Fuller's notion of wealth into the mix is to suggest that one of the great appeals of Buddhist Economics is that it's economics as if people--regular people--matter.

Phil's distinction between the economy and money is quite useful. First it's helpful to understand that the economy is not money. Second, I think his observation that the economy is a communication system is quite important.

Our current economic system concentrates assets in the hands a very few. Money seems to flow all about, but there is a very clear direction to all the flows. I think of myself as a reasonably well-informed person, but I don't believe I could name even a dozen of the 1100 richest people in the world. Money flows to a very few, but few of us know to whom the money flows.

Introducing the notion of the economy as a communication system is a way to introduce links to people thinking about the ways that the Internet changes things and my attempt to find some connection between those discussions and mindfulness.

I love the TED Talks although I've not really watched and listened to many of them. What I've done is to listen to a few talks over and over ;-) One of the talks I've viewed several times is Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain researcher who had a stroke. She talks about her keen observations about her experience of a stroke.

One of the points she makes is that we have two brains. She says: The right hemisphere functions as a parallel processor and the left hemisphere functions as a serial processor. This talk says something very important about the nature of mindfulness. Mindfulness isn't simply thinking. Mindfulness includes the parallel processing of our right brains