Comment 43 on Mindfulness

Linda made the point that people in the East think differently than people in the West. Boy, a good example of that is trying to keep abreast about the political news in Thailand after I discovered news that the political situation was heating up a little bit. One headline was "PM denies he's insane" and it made me think we would not see that headline here.

East meets west dialogs seem pregnant with possibility but bridging the differences can be vexing. A good friend here fell in love with an Indian philosopher, she was working on her Ph.D. in English Literature here. Both are dear to me, but they decided not to marry. In any case not only the relationship, but also the academic work my Indian friend was pursuing, really made me aware of how difficult it is to bridge the different ways of thinking, also how mysterious thinking is.

Over the weekend was a lovely party with old friends. I got to talk with the two older teenage sons of a friend I don't really know so well. One of the boys went to one college for a year but found it too expensive, so moved to local college near his mother in Texas and that didn't work. I'm sure there's so much more to the story. But my intuition was that the young man was having big thoughts--you know like "What does it all mean?" We might say he's having spiritual adventures and my curiosity was heightened. But what questions to ask so not to get the same old answers? I didn't come up with great questions.

After talking with him I read and old interview in the July/August 1982 Mother Earth News (why I even have old issues is a puzzle) with Masanobu Fukuoka.

Fukuoka wrote the book One Straw Revolution. I thought of my friend's son while reading it because when Fukuoka was a young man he also heard the beat of a different drummer like I suspect my friend's son is hearing a different beat. The interview fascinated me with the difference in East-West thinking. Fukuoka studied microbiology and plant pathology, but his life's work has been not-science. He was in the USA at the time of the interview and was asked about how his natural farming was different from organic farming. His answer was that organic farming is still thinking scientifically.

Fukuoka is still alive, and I suspect that he still thinks we in the West don't get what he's saying. He's probably right, yet he introduced no-till farming practices, considered the "father" of no-till. No-till farming is very important to agriculture in the USA today. So there's an example of how ideas can spread even when mutual understanding doesn't really jell.

Our Western ways of thinking have many streams. Certainly Christianity is an important stream. In my tradition children around 12 study a Catechism and are confirmed by the bishop. The Catechism introduces Christianity in a series of questions and the kids memorize the answers. The answer to the question "What is a sacrament?" is something like "An outward and visible sign of an inward spiritual grace." Christians argue about sacraments all the time, and perhaps I inappropriately have always heard the question more as "What is sacred?" I have always been pleased with the answer because it always has made me ponder what is grace? That to me seems a very interesting question, but I've never introduced the question to a Christian who thought it interesting too. Perhaps my reaction is peculiar, but I always feel joy when I hear or sing the song.

In my own peculiar way I think that inward spiritual grace is related to the Buddhist ideas of mindfulness and truth. In the 15th chapter of Luke are three related parables including the Prodigal Son. I've always loved these stories. The impressive thing to me is not so much the repentance of sin, but the joy one experiences in doing so. That joy has a sense of "Aha!" in the way the stories are told. If you've ever tried to teach someone something, and then they get it, "Aha!" that experience of joy is easy to relate to. Or another example is the hymn very well-know to most Americans, Amazing Grace. It was written by John Newton who spent most of his life as a slave trader.

I'm not sure at all that Schumacher wrote gave his talk on Buddhist Economics with the thought that it might launch a new approach to Economics in the West. My reading of it is at once using Buddhist precepts to reveal Western patterns of thinking for critique and to encourage tolerance about other paths of development economics in other countries. But the essay is really so smart, and many others have seen that there's something important to Buddhist Economics as an approach to economic study.

People in the West like people everywhere think about ethics, about doing the right thing. I brought up the parables and also Amazing Grace because while the Buddhist idea of becoming awake is represented somehow in them. And I mention my frustration about being keen to talk about grace, and what is sacred with Christians and there seems no words to share.

The brother of a very good friend is married to a quite fundamentalist Catholic. He is a psychiatrist and has recently become very interested in meditation, much to his wife's horror. He love's Jack Kornfield's work. As a psychiatrist he's well-aware that meditation isn't the solution for everything, but has become very meaningful for himself. I think that his understanding of the limitations has made him delve a bit more deeply into Buddhism than others would. He was raised in a very Catholic family, so his wife is worried about changes in him that are unlikely to happen--like him becoming a Buddhist.

Now my dear friend, the psychiatrist's sister, has a Ph.D. in psychology and in particular has studied transpersonal psychology. The two have never really had a way to share where they are coming from in theoretical terms. So perhaps his interest in Kornfeild will be a way for them to share a vocabulary.

I'm not trying to be argumentative about a definition of mindfulness. It's a profound construct. In my last post I was trying to make a narrow point which is that in trying to convey ideas about mindfulness to those in the West, there's trouble when people like me have been introduced to mindfulness in some way or another. Do you know the proverbial Color of the bikeshed from "Parkinson's Law?" Agreement on complex things is easy, but everyone has an opinion about little matters so agreement is harder. One lesson to take from the bikeshed is for me to shut up about mindfulness a bit ("you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so"). I don't really intend to be argumentative. My intention was to point out that many in the West already have a construct of mindfulness, or at least opinions about what Buddhists mean by mindfulness.

I'm a bit unclear whether the words in the text box are Joel Magnuson's or Linda Nowakowski's? Magnuson has treaded safely into waters I fear are difficult by using mindfulness and economics in the same breath. So I guess it's time for me to take the standard meaning of the bikeshed to heart and quit yammering. See how hard mindfulness is?

Ah, but Linda, don't for a minute waver in your work because others may not understand. Not everyone listened to Jesus and Gautama Buddha, but the ramifications of what they discovered and said are still felt today by many.