Don't think about nothing

Theodor Zeldin : the Hidden Pleasures of Life

Reviewed in the Evening Standard. Apparently, he caused a storm at the Hay Festival by his observations on mindfulness. He's against it. People are, he says, wasting their valuable thinking time on meditation and mindfulness and should stop trying to clear their heads. The practice is distracting  people from discovering more about themselves and the world around them.

Many of us have gone with the notion that focusing on our breathing going in and out is the solution to depression, stress, mental illness and the human condition generally,

"and somewhere near you there's a session where for £25 an hour, you can sit with other likeminded people in front of a candle, holding a leaf or similar, focussing on your breath and projecting compassion at the others.

Nothing actually wrong with this, of course, Free world and all that, and there's much to be said for focussing on the present moment rather than worrying about past and future - as the devil in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters observes, there's nothing worse for us than being perpetually distracted from the here and now. 

But paying for being in the present moment is the commodification of common sense. You can get a mindfulness session for free, you know, by going into your local church and sitting in silence at the back [you can sit wherever you like], contemplating the altar. [This is my way.]

 What's more, there's quite often a reason why we shouldn't be sitting focussing on our breath going in and out and why we should be thinking about other things. The danger of this Buddhist-lite embrace of the present is passivity. It can mean accepting rubbish work conditions, unsatisfactory family life, bad politics. Chilling out doesn't make for activism. And certainly projecting compassion at people does much less good than, you know, actually engaging with them."

I must find out more about Professor Zeldin: he has written quite a few books.