Brain washing … Green washing … Guilt washing … Spiritual washing ..
From ideology & religion, to science & climate …
How to go beyond such mismanagement of our deepest dreams?
There are so many positive thinking and positive people on this planet. We just need to dig a little to find so many groups and organizations inspired and dedicated to the greater good.
Every new year we can witness so many constructive new-year resolutions. But also we can witness so many depressing year-end results…
So is there a pattern there or it is just plain bad luck?
A pattern would enable us to understand the mechanism. What is it that makes us not follow through our wish list? What washes away our deepest wishes? Maybe we just need to be more mindful while following through…
Mindfulness, mmm…there is a movement that uses this name. It has been on the rise for quite a while. By now it is in fact all over, spreading throughout the modern world like bush fires. Did it change much of our human landscape?
If it didn’t make a drastic change we could ask ourselves the following question: Mindful of what, the bolts or the system?
I mean being conscious of the whole or mindful of the details?
Mindfulness as a movement started in the end of the 20th century. It echoed basic Buddhist teachings in a non religious way. It presented to the west some of its methods to increase attention span and presence. This secularization and simplification was very good and surely needed, but through time this positive yet limited movement – now dubbed as Mac Mindfulness by Steve Pherson* – might have washed away the main point behind budhist training: Purpose, Consciousness & Awaken Actions!
The intent to extract some secular essence from a budhism that has also become washed away by too much religious interference was indeed a good thing. But by limiting its scope, mindfulness also got washed away from a more vibrant and global human purpose.
Mindfulness is a good concept though. But to be efficient – meaning making a serious difference on how we run our lives – our mindfulness would need to be conscious of the whole PLUS mindful of the details AND specifically mindful that the details fit in the whole !
After 40 years of trying to bypass those wishy-washy spiritual waters, I see the original point of Buddhism as well as any major effort to uplift our human situation – be it religious, spiritual or philosophical – as a way to wake up to the system we are part of: The Mechanics of Life.
The mechanics of life englobes our subjective experience as well as our objective situation. It includes our emotions, projections, conditioning, but also our social reality – care, sharing, hypocrisy and inequality – plus the way we manage our resources and sustainability. It also includes suffering management as well as happiness management. In one sentence it can be understood as: Doing Our Best While We Are Here!
This motto leads to the opposite of being blind folded to our illusions or blinded by our projections and beliefs ( both about our human existence or beyond the reality of our human existance). Once we open our mind beyond our short sighted or blind folded sheep-like conditioned mind, we start to be conscious of the reality around us, how we can fit in it and what we can do with (in) it .
That is why some people like to summarize this subject under the word ‘consciousness.’ But that would also be reducing it, that is why it has also often been lumped under the term ‘wisdom’.
But what is wisdom?
Firstly, to make sure we are not getting hooked on esoteric dreams, I would call it human wisdom. It is the lucid clarity that has been constructed by our accumulated knowledge and experience of the mechanics of life.
Secondly, I would add that the texture of human wisdom is being knitted by two qualities of the human mind: Consciousness and Attention (or mindfulness).
Those two needles constantly knit the texture of our human wisdom to the next level of refinement.
- They give us the ability not to lose the bigger picture while immersed in major optical, social or emotional illusion.
- They allow us to harvest all our lessons from the field of life and carry them with us in our wisdom bag.
- They help us not to wash away our dreams and moments of openness & lucidity, but instead, use those to keep evolving as a more enlightened person, society and species.
