Almost mindfulness

I have just finished re-reading Edward O Wilson (1998) Consilience – the unity of knowledge. I have been dipping into it for over a month. In every chapter there was so much to absorb that I hit overload after only a few pages.

I feel very much at home with his root viewpoint as a scientist (biology flavor) and with his focus on the ‘cosmic zoom’ and what later would be called ‘big history’. The breadth, depth, and multidisciplinary nature of his understanding of the human condition in space and time is awesome and mind bending.

He was greatly inspired by the Rio Summit (1992) and with the resultant Agenda 21: where the spotlight was put on biodiversity and sustainability and the triple bottom line – environment, society and economics (ESE).

But mainstream politicians and economists - with their entourage of narrow focused academics - have not made the paradigm shift to systematic and multi-disciplinary holism. There is need for a change in the types of evidence that are produced and in how they are used.

He points to the need for meta-cognitive understanding but realizes that better rationality is not enough on its own. Feelings, emotions, instincts and intuitions are also involved and must be handled in appropriate ways. Creative artists and secular religions have their parts to play.

In dealing with the concepts of mind and consciousness he draws on the work of Dennett and Pinker amongst others:

“All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental process in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness.” (p105)

“There is no single stream of consciousness in which all information is brought together by an executive ego. There are instead multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thought then phase out. Consciousness is the massive coupled aggregates of such participating circuits. The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity.” (p120)

The description is not bad for a non-meditator. But I reckon there is a greater consilence emerging eg between Thich Nhat Hahn and neuroscientists. (And also between the Dalai Lama and  western scientists.)

The new view is that mindfulness meditation can rewire the brain (wipe the dust off the mirror) such that there is re-emergence of renunciation, compassion, wisdom and a range of other potentially desirable mind states which are ancient, hard-wired aspects of living in a hunting and gathering in-group. The instinctive mind states associated with the out-group will be more difficult to handle using mindfulness. But I am now seeing it as almost the only way to affect mind change on a mass scale.