All I can say is Finally. I have been inept at all these things all my life. You wouldn’t believe what a mess I make out of trying to sit down. “Wait, so I bend my knees like…this? And then lower my butt…? And…oh, it’s no use, I’ve tied myself in a knot again!” And don’t even get me started on trying to put one foot in front of the other…
There is something irresistibly funny about reducing these Buddhist subjects to titles that sound like instructions written for a recently assembled android. I especially like the escalation:
How to Sit — remedial
How to Walk — intermediate
How to Eat — advanced coordination
How to Relax — frankly, graduate-level work
How to Love — whoa there, Thich. I’m still trying to get into this chair.
Flipping through the volumes, they all had that vaguely-Hallmark feel to them, the rhetorical equivalent of incense. Which can itself be a vibe the self-consciously “mindful” or “spiritual” person starts chasing. Brad Warner wrote a funny post about this once. Suddenly an activity that required no conceptual apparatus at all has acquired a little supervisory bureaucrat in your skull. Am I sitting correctly? Am I walking mindfully? Am I sufficiently present while eating this sandwich? Was that loving enough? Shit, I forgot to relax properly.
“Mindfulness” starts as an attempt to remove mediation and often ends by supplying a whole new layer of mediation: the vocabulary, the posture, the tea, the breathing exercise, the self-monitoring, the little internal narrator saying, I am now eating this raisin mindfully. You are no longer merely eating the raisin; you are watching yourself play someone who eats raisins correctly. As Alan Watts said, “In the midst of enjoying myself, I examine myself to see if I am getting the utmost out of the occasion. Not content with tasting the food, I am also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy, I want to feel myself feeling happy — so as to be sure not to miss anything.”
In a lot of popularized spirituality, a temperament gets smuggled in as an anthropology. Calm, deliberate, unhurried, observant, undistracted consciousness becomes what human beings are supposedly like when they have stopped doing life incorrectly. Then the restless person, the daydreamer, the enthusiast, the obsessive maker, and the person whose mind wanders while his hands work all become defective versions of the sage. But absence is also part of consciousness. Fantasy, reminiscence, anticipation, abstraction, or getting carried away by an idea while your body performs some dull task aren’t necessarily failures to inhabit your life. They are your life. Some of humanity’s better products were almost certainly conceived by somebody who was doing a lousy job of being present while washing a plate.