Not at all, this stuff is GREAT! Pretty soon I can add “Armchair Psychologist” to my list of self-given titles.The title for anyone interested in fact checking, etc...is Testing mindfulness with perceptual and cognitive factors: External vs. internal encoding, and the cognitive failures questionnaire. Whew! Sounds scary!
I believe that the key to “changing the mind” (or “healing the mind”) is right in line with the Buddhist notion of “meditation”. However, I think the notion of “meditation” has different meanings to different people. By “meditation” I don’t mean sitting on the floor chanting Om, Um, Ohm all day (although that can be relaxing). I use the terms “meditation” and “meta-cognition” synonymously. “Why am I thinking this way?” “What is causing me to perceive this in a negative way?” “Why does this make me feel angry/jealous/hurt?”When I started re-reading some of these that I have read over the years, it became more obvious that being mindful is very much about removing emotional attachment to what we perceive. This is tricky stuff to grasp here in the West, we tend to attach emotion to everything, no?
Only by achieving the state of “meta-cognitive thought” do I feel that a person can actually me “mindful”. I become aware of an internal reaction, look at it from an “external” perspective, and then the internal reaction subsides and I let go. Strong emotional responses hinder this process (believe me, I know).
I think the “ego” plays a strong part on the emotional side. Now eliminating the ego, may be a separate notion than mindfulness, but I’ll throw the question out there. Can a person truly be “mindful” and have an “ego”? Isn’t the ego all about “internalizing”?
I’ve been attending an Eckhart Tolle meetup group. I associate “living in the now” the same thing as being “mindful”. However, Tolle does focus on the elimination of the ego to achieve this. It’s interesting that some people interpret the notion of “living in the now” as “being oblivious to outside stimuli”. “I don’t have to file my tax return, because I’m living in the now”. Whereas I think a mindful person would say “I need to take time to fill out my tax forms so I don’t have to pay a fine”. The difference here I believe is that a mindful person is “proactive” to outside stimulus. Thoughts?
A hermit may be constantly “living in the now”, but to live in a “society”, a person should be “mindful”.