The roots and fruits of Mindfulness

If Mindfulness is a good thing with long evolutionary roots then why do so many people not practice it, and, what is it good for anyway?

Most people do not practice it because they do not know that it exists. It might be that the hard wired framework exists in everybody but our modern culture does not highlight it and fill it in.

In terms of evolutionary psychology we can assume that the capacity for Mindfulness evolved to support more efficient and effective ways of working and relating in our 69 million days of hunting and gathering in small, competitive groups.

The details of what was involved are open to speculation. SO – here goes.

It might have been the case that:

• in the days when the rate of change was glacially slow only the sages had access to Mindfulness and that is why they were the sages
• the non-sages of the in-group were on auto-pilot and were simple minded (ie conscious but not yet conscious of consciousness)
• the sages would have played a key part in generating the creation myths that enabled peace of mind (cognitive consonance and existential closure)
• when change was needed the sages who practiced Mindfulness could think outside the box
• the sage tradition might have run in families; but there might also have been a system of recognizing and co-opting free-thinking youth and institutionalizing them so that they did not prove a threat to the status quo
• a goal of the sages might have been to support peace within the in-groups such that members of the group worked effectively together
• sages might also have promoted war directed towards the out-groups. This would have been about the ownership of local resources – especially territory.

As a process, evolution tinkers. Changes to the brain would have involved new ways of using modules and the links between them. There is a good chance that there will have been unintended collateral changes. But that is not a concern to evolution where all that matters is that this gene, organism or social group leaves more copies of itself than the competition.

Once language had evolved the door was opened to being conscious of consciousness and being able to talk about it. There has been plenty of time to support the process.

Bipedal apes first appeared 7 million years ago. Homo sapiens with language has been around for 200,000 years and agriculture based societies for only 10,000 years. So we spent 190,000 years as hunters and gatherers. Given an average lifespan of 50 years this gives us 3,800 generations during which we slowly complexified our way of being in the world.

Then about 5,000 years ago civilizations began, there was an exponential cultural flourishing and an associated population explosion. The last 250 years has seen the development of modern industrial societies and, in the last 50 years, there have been men on the moon.

BUT - Mindfulness might not have such ancient roots. Mindfulness as a conscious practice might first have appeared in the Axial Age. This is a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers to describe the period from 800 to 200 BC during which similar revolutionary thinking appeared in Persia, India, China and the Occident.

The key thinkers included the authors of the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah. Jaspers held Socrates, Confucius and Siddhartha Gautama in especially high regard, describing each of them as an exemplary human being and paradigmatic personality.

It is tempting to speculate that Mindfulness was the key innovation. It involved a heartfelt realization that ‘the reality which can be described is not the real reality’ (Lao Tzu) and this is because language did not evolve to deal with the Oneness and that therefore ‘he who knows does not speak’ and ‘he who speaks does not know’. (Lao Tzu)

Sages practice stillness and become conscious of consciousness. They also become relaxed about the thoughts and feelings that continually well up from the unconscious. The key liberating insight is well captured in the first two verses of the Buddhist classic the Dhammapada - “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.”

Once upon a time people were on auto-pilot with monkey minds and they reacted mindlessly to external stimuli. But the spiritual heroes stilled their minds and thus made calm space such that there can be mindful responses to external stimuli. Thus there is liberation, enlightenment, insight, creativity and compassion.

But, in those earlier periods, the practice of Mindfulness remained restricted to an elite. It is tempting to speculate that, with our new information and communication technologies (ICT), it is now time to go global. The program would include intellectual doses of Big History and instruction in Mindfulness Meditation for all.

The physical and ideological roots of Mindfulness are well established in the makeup of the human brain and mind. It might now be time for nurturing the branches and collecting the fruit of holistic peace and harmony in our time.