Mindfulness Traps and the Entanglement of Self: An Inquiry into the Regime of Mind

Mindfulness meditation can provide salutary therapeutic benefits, as well as lead advanced practitioners to states of calm and equanimity. In this paper, we argue that such forms of meditation may subtly entrap practitioners in circular, self-reflexive feedback loops. Because these meditation traps fail to clearly discern the operations of mind, they offer a temporary oasis of peace within an unaltered dualistic realm of mind that leaves the root delusion of self-identity intact. Drawing upon Tarthang Tulku’s seminal book Revelations of Mind, we present what he refers to as the “regime of mind,” the processes of cognition, identification and re-cognition in which body, mind and language work in unison to maintain a persuasive experience of a self that knows an external world. Because these very same mechanisms are operative in meditation, the states of silence, no-thought, peace, calm, and mental blankness that can occur deceive practitioners into interpreting such experiences as signs of progress and spiritual attainment. By developing an understanding of how the regime of mind operates, such clarity can function as a corrective to the common traps of meditative practice fueled and obscured by subtle dualistic structures of self-identification and self-grasping. This clear ground of understanding can reveal how reflexively dualistic structures of knowing are constructed, opening up wider focal-settings that go beyond dualistic mind, offering more liberating options for exercising human freedom and intelligence

24/7: time and temporality in the network society

For better or worse, the information and communication revolution has transformed our economic, cultural, and political world. On an individual scale, many of the traditional social, political, and cultural habits of mind and ways of being that evolved under the regime of the clock are changing rapidly, including the way individuals save, spend, and optimize time. At the organizational level, the pacing of innovation, levels of production, and new product development, are no longer temporally fixed due to the effects of living in a networked society and in the networked economy. 24/7 brings together leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines to analyze the differing relationships to time in an accelerated society. Offering much-needed insight and perspective into new issues and problems, this unique volume is the first to offer a wide range of cutting-edge thought on the new economic, cultural, and political world of the networked society. The book includes contributions from the leading scholars in this area, such as Barbara Adam, Mike Crang, Thomas Hylland Erikson, and Geert Lovink

The Presents of the Present: Mindfulness, Time and Structures of Feeling

Mindfulness, as the cultivation of ways to become attentive to the present moment, has grown exponentially in some areas of the global north over the past decade or so. As such, it has generated much important debate about its efficacy and the politics it produces, especially in terms of whether and how mindfulness is a response to, or effect of, neoliberalism. Drawing on Berlant’s argument that affects are structured and collective but not necessarily determinative of how people feel and act in relation to them, I explore the affective relations between mindfulness and contemporary (neo)liberal culture as a series of relays, modulations, or recalibrations. More specifically, I approach these affective relations through focusing on temporality. I argue that the practice of mindfulness as a deliberate and conscious focus on the present is central to how its value is imagined by those who promote it and experienced by those who practice it. Drawing on interviews with mindfulness practitioners, analysis of mindfulness books, online forums and communities, I centre the significance of the present to an understanding of the recent proliferation of mindfulness. I draw out the affectivity of mindfulness presents and think these ‘mindfulness presents’ alongside Berlant’s identification of the significance of the present to contemporary liberal-capitalism. Situating my argument within broader work that sees time, temporality and affect as central means through which contemporary capitalism is organised and hence should be conceived, I examine how mindfulness is perhaps one way in which contemporary liberal-capitalism is felt and lived with