The Problem of 'Optimisation Reductionism' in Mindfulness Practice & Promotion
SOFcast Weekly Newsletter 10th July 2022
Over the last couple of years, I have created a good serving of mindfulness-type material. Guided meditations, articles & breathing manuals aimed at distilling methods learned with different teachers in various modalities over many years.
Over this time, I have noticed a curious phenomenon, seeing that this narrow range of topics is my primary interest. Meditation comes back in vogue every few years in so-called esoteric rw circles. Discussions typically follow the same cretinous dualistic good/evil dichotomy. The same argumentative dichotomy that ails the species more generally. Our rather unpleasant Aristotelean hangover.
Those who argue the affirmative tend to do so with something resembling the following line of reason:
"Meditations are important for mental hygiene because of globo-h. And optimisation. Bro or brah. Solar essence. Palm tree. Dolphin. Orgonite, raw food. Testicles, sun etc."
This general sentiment is souped up with the window-dressing accoutrements of the particular idiot making the statement, granted. Yet the essential message remains constant as thousands of their mouth-permanently-agape followers click the like button. Very mindlessly and presumably unaware of the irony in doing so. A poor reflection of the practice, without a doubt.
Arguing the negative, we usually have ourselves' some garden variety good old southern baptist fire & brimstone types. People who seem to be not only self-loathing but also weirdly scared of life and what it is. Looking for devilry around every corner. The misguided and ignorant assertions of this grouping typically take the form of something like
"I knew someone who went to 'x' retreat, and at this 'x' retreat, this someone went mental; therefore, you will also lose your mind. Also, thou shalt incur ceaseless anal rape at the behest of the devil and his anti-meditation hit-squad."
The ultimate result is, of course, those who have the unfortunate tendency to get caught up in this kind of prominent buffoonery miss out on what could be a genuinely enhancing, life-changing process.
Those embracing the affirmative takes will consequently fail, at least for a long tie, as they approach mindfulness practice from the wrong angle and make no progress.
Our negatory cohort will be prevented from realisation because they think they'll get brain AIDS from the essence of malevolence inherent in noticing one's mental process with....or something. This is fine. Usually, this type is highly strung and probably not suited to living a life examined. Often, due to their bizarre upbringings, they likely would experience some kind of temporary psychosomatic issue. My theory is that their beliefs are so strongly neuro-physiologically imprinted that when a practice aimed at contextualising these beliefs (is used disproportionately powerful way to start with, like an intense retreat), the realisation of the essential meaninglessness of their cherished beliefs creates a temporary psychotic break.
Although I've just now had a dig, these people are not the concern of this article. I just wanted to have a go cause I got on a roll.
Nay, the former affirmative types concern us, for they are foistering far more nonsense upon the unsuspecting hoi polloi.
It goes without saying that both perspectives are so utterly off the money it's difficult to believe anyone in these discussions has an IQ of over 100. Or, more to the point - have even bothered to try that of which they speak.
What's worse, the right-wing grifters are typically trying to make money from people through their usual marketing schtick. Selling the wrong message with a generous serving of their brand of offensively stupid. What's worse, perhaps, are those providing threads to appear intelligent or insightful.
Which of these compulsions is more annoying ultimately comes down to one's subjective sense of distaste.
Granted, this outcome of human folly is a natural by-product of a platform contingent on expressing opinions for tummy pats; most views you come across are like the humans on this planet - worthless and completely uninformed.
As a general life rule (one that has conferred great psychological well-being upon me), I always refrain from expressing views on things in general. And at all in my daily life. At a minimum, on things I have no practical experience in.
And it is in this humble spirit that I come to you, dear reader, to correct a few of your deviant misapprehensions regarding mindfulness and its utility. Correcting a misapplication of emphasis in something I happen to know a little about. A general state of affairs that is probably not your fault, granted.
I'd hate to see my frens' precious time wasted. Several of them are hard workers, interested in results. And this is what makes them vital men and superior. Because they want to work the right way, and they're not interested in just having opinions. Or seeking the approval of others. Just having thoughts and ideas about ideas to impress your friends; this is the way of the pleb.
Thus it is so.
LAW OF PRACTICE: MINDFULNESS IS NOT THE SUM OF ITS MAYBEISH’ OUTCOMES
For many people, what attracts them to mindfulness practice initially, are the promises of what I term optimisation reductionism. Increasingly in the modern world, people are more and more naturally sceptical.
They tend to be bombarded with articles (or Twitter threads) on mindfulness as stress relief or mental hygiene. The latter has recently shown up in such circles. Optimisation reductionism offers people hope that this or that practice works. Claims assert that the mindfulness umbrella protects us. Inducing neural changes. Stress relief or relief from chronic disease. The list gets larger every day. Often these changes are said to increase over time, in the literature, with experienced meditators experiencing these benefits more as they become more experienced. Yet within such claims lies a dangerous frame.
I am not saying these things don't happen. I often reference such literature in my own work for fun mostly. Overall, science is probably on to something.
Yet, I was forced to remember last Thursday that large quantities of alcohol also change one's brain. Bad habits can change your brain. In fact, we are plastic in all sorts of ways, for better or worse. So it is not just mindfulness that creates neurological changes in people. Recently while writing my book on Hara, I discovered that even when science is at its most esoteric, I never really came across anything I would claim as the ultimate reason to pursue mindfulness. If hard science can't do it with fMRI and mathematics, then those interested from a perspective of optimisation reductionism certainly can't do it, either.
If any of the supposed benefits of optimisation reductionism were to be wholly disproven or deboonked, I would continue practising all the modes of meditation I do. The ultimate reason is not contingent on any of these outcomes or claims whatsoever. The ultimate reason is far deeper and profound. In ways we can barely conceive of when we first start out, encouraged by the pretty lies of optimisation reductionism.
Approaching mindfulness from this angle will ensure two things, however. Firstly, you'll be expecting the wrong thing and miss the point.
Secondly, you'll stop doing it because when done incorrectly, you may not experience the effects of it in the same way as having a beer, for example. The spiritual valium will disappoint. It induces wrong-view in the truest sense, setting us up from the perspective of the subject. We don't need to sit down on a cushion to do this. We do this every minute of every day, automatically.
No, it is none of this. There are portals here that right now you may not even realise exist. If we approach meditation from this purely utilitarian angle, we miss them. Simply put, we are missing the point of approaching meditation with a desire for its proposed subsidiary benefits. No sweet dew drop shall be supped upon by such a person. Starting from the point of expectation. This automatically diverts your focus on an elsewhere. Elsewhere is not the place we want to be.
We can view my general point through analogy. Take writing, for example. We know that there appears to be some neurological effect of writing a short passage with both hands upon waking up; it synchronises the brain and confers some measured cognitive benefits. Remember this as it ties in with my point here.
And although writing certainly has drawbacks, it allows humankind to time-bind (borrowing from Alfred Korzybski) methodologies and knowledge through generations. Our most outstanding creations and achievements would have been impossible without the utility of binding knowledge with symbols. Technological civilisation would have been utterly impossible without the ability to time-bind knowledge.
So with something so profound as symbol use, do we then take the view that we write simply because it may or may not help to synchronise the brain in the morning when we use it?
Obviously, that would be a stupid reason to promote writing. Reducing the totality of writing to some kind of optimisation benefit. So it is with mindfulness practice. This analogy encapsulates what I'm asserting as the absurdist shortcoming of optimisation reductionism in promoting mindfulness-type activities. Of course, there are more subtleties when it comes to how a belief in such things can hinder your progress entirely.
This pernicious high-performance gymnasium culture in our modern world shades the messaging surrounding such things. Many Twitter frens spend their entire lives feverishly trying to optimise themselves. Many of our favourite reductionist optimisers jump from fad to fad faster than Tim Ferris on crack.
If you approach the way this way, ironically, the true benefit will not be conferred to you.
The true gift is cultivating (for lack of a better word) the ability to notice everything as it truly is, as consistently as you can. This ability to notice reality or consciousness as it truly is. When one approaches these practices from the proper perspective, the character change one undergoes is so utterly profound as to render the optimisation culture claims completely asinine, rather like finally realising the true magnitude of writing after only using it for 20 minutes in the morning for a benefit.
Taking us back now to my own frustrations with the way popular accounts portray things: This is how I know these people have not obtained a single drop of insight from what they're doing. And they're misleading people into approaching it the wrong way. You should not waste your time listening to such people. Even worse, you're wasting your precious attention listening to them. This is the real irony.
The aim is nothing less than an understanding of the very nature of our consciousness. Once someone has a glimpse of this, with mature guidance, adherents' entire worlds and assumptions are upended.
Most involved in optimisation reductionism actually have no intention of changing themselves fundamentally. Most of them prefer to uphold an image to their customers that they have mastered everything and therefore I can sell the plebs their wares. What a shame it is to be them.
What we should be doing here is nothing short of fostering our ability to focus. To the degree that we can notice the totality of processes within consciousness, which is the only thing we can ever really know, with one-pointed clarity.
This world that commoditises our attention is replete with many different parties vying for it. This can be a corporation, a gumroad buy-my-course account, whatever it is. Ideology is the least important thing in reality.
In this environment, the profound skill we're fostering reaches new levels of importance.
As I always say, most humans are being lived; they're not living. In its purest sense, this really refers to not being aware of how your attention is being diverted. Your most valuable commodity. If you develop this skill correctly, you find that you're perfectly able to decide where you want to focus your attention, for fun and profit. With this profound change, one may begin to notice how one was being lived. How the world fights for domination over individuals' mental processes.
With this unfolding understanding, we realise many of the ideologies and outlooks we once held were not really a result of us at all. Mere unintended consequences.
Often the things we found we fixed our attention to were wastes of our limited time on earth. We realise that ideologies, arguments, and memes are simply devices that, for the most part, are in the way of us living well. We are entirely able to choose what we choose to focus on. We can break the linguistic daze we've been living in at any moment we choose. The accoutrements of reality out-there have nothing to do with this - the truest form of human freedom.
This is the great irony of something like Twitter. As one particularly relevant and egregious example of diminishing one's potential. Many thunkers furiously defend its utility. To some degree, I agree. It's ok for news, some comradeship and networking.
Yet, very few people can manage their use in such a way. It is designed with the ravenous consumption of your attention in mind. Beyond leftism, isms in general, and all the silly arguments no one remembers five minutes later - the app itself wants your complete attention. Twitter is a BPD woman. It desires all your attention. It wants to consume all of you, all of your energy. It traps you by making you think you're doing something and consumes you because you're stuck.
In reality, unless you're fostering an audience that pays you for content, nothing is being achieved by the individuals using it. You're simply commodifying and packaging your attention for someone else to feed on. This is true of our example of Twitter, but generally, all of life is this way.
Our attention is being directed by forces outside of ourselves. On to subjects that we, otherwise, would never have heard or cared about. Why would an Australian compulsively raise their cortisol to life-diminishing levels because of what blacks apparently do in the Jewnited States?
Yet I see it all the time, in myself also. Hours are spent, having attention slapped this way and that. Valuable time can be used in otherwise fruitful, exciting and individually enhancing ways.
Imagine taking up your phone or logging on to Twitter - particularly if you have a job, unlike some content creators. So you head to that platform to log in for your nightly shift 'owning the elites' or tweeting king emojis on accounts with greek letters - several hours can quickly go by in which you exist in a pattern of complete attention-reactivity. Usually an emotively angry or disgusted few hours.
You lose your 8 hours at your job and a few more being online. So what's left for you? A few hours for a meal and heading to the gym. I am painting things with a broad brush here, but my point is simple. Without a mindfulness practice, your attention is not your own in these scenarios or in life. This world and its players are ensuring you're being diminished rather than enhanced.
Our lives are simply the sum of how we affix our attention - thus, many young men's lives are less than they could be. Sorry to say, this benefits the naughty elites.
As an aside, I'm not an important man, but I assure you, I know a few elites, and none of them is spending their time sending memes to trannies for a few hours every day.
We have short lives. Instead, why not learn the most profound of skills and affix your attention to something real and tangible, something practical? I assure you that the "elites" don't care about you or your thoughts. They're not threatened by you or your memes. Love or hate them, for now, they have real power, networks, and the ability to move things in reality. Matter acting on matter. And they have systems that fight for the attention of the masses, like social media. If nothing else, the only real battle we're engaged in is nothing more than someone more powerful and their fight for our attention.
There is great irony in arguing over meditation in Twitter threads. It is endlessly amusing that people exhibiting extreme inattention try to promote, debate, or misinform about a practice that is, at its heart, nothing more (or less) than cultivating attention to the totality of the contents of consciousness.
Bringing these thoughts back to mindfulness. Living a mindful life is the opposite of any of this. It is the opposite of optimisation reductionism. The more you determine your attention, the more freedom you find in life. If vitality is anything, it is freedom. All freedom is ultimately of a mental origin. The totality of freedom is resultant of the freedom to choose what you affix your focus on. Anything that seeks to induce you into a fugue state is inhibiting your chance for freedom, in this moment. Even those who have the apparent luck or good fortune to be easily able to construct the world to their liking will nevertheless also be subject to this reality. Nothing out there will ever really offer true deliverance and freedom. Not without refining your inner world and mental states.
We have the opportunity to completely reset ourselves, literally thousands of times a day, with the right skills. We can completely change our lives in this way. We can recognise paths that extend out before us when such things were never really apparent previously. We notice that we always have choices. We can choose to eliminate the parasites that feed off our energy. We can choose to pursue freedom and life on our own terms.
You begin to truly see the lies, the reason for the lies, and your own lies. And have insights about lies. And have insights into your true motives underneath your lies. Motives that may not be anywhere near as flattering as you may think. As unpleasant as this may be to face up to, within this lies the true path to freedom.
You want such insights. How else can you become a more powerful person? This is what it means to live an examined life. This is what mindfulness achieves. It is not merely some mental hygiene or some other optimisation reductionist concept.
Next week I introduce a new breathing method I've been working on. A way to balance sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. There'll be a new product accompanying it that can be used to amplify the Hara methods in my book. As usual, you'll need to work in reality and discard precious opinions. So I gather it won't be popular.