Upstream - McMindfulness with Ron Purser

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

Over the last few decades, mindfulness has gone viral. These days, the practice has found its way into corporations, prisons, schools, police departments, and even the U.S. military. There are many benefits to mindfulness of course, but in his book, “McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality,” author Ron Purser explores the more pernicious part of the practice by examining how capitalism had co-opted mindfulness to further exploitation and extraction. Interestingly, it turns out that mindfulness can be very compatible with our current neoliberal ideologies of individualism, inward-focus, and the watering-down of sociality. It has been expertly applied in a way which encourages us to only look inside for solutions to our problems, instead of challenging the systems and structures that drive the suffering we experience. McMindfulness is a way of pacifying a population and instilling a victim-blaming mentality: if you’re stressed, anxious, depressed, just “mindfulness up,” and get over it. How did we get here? What can we do about it? How can mindfulness be reclaimed and in fact used as a radical force for system change and psychological well being? We explore these questions and more in this conversation. You can read the full transcript of this conversation here.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. The mindfulness symbolically is a meme that represents a quick fix for the anxieties of late capitalist society. And what I mean by it is the secular forms of mindfulness that are decoupled from any sort of moral or ethical context, commodified into a set of instrumental techniques, which are deemed ethically neutral, which means they can then be deployed for any particular instrumental aim or goal. And so being kind of unmoored from any kind of vision of the social good, mindfulness is very easily commodified to the ethos of market logic. So that's part

of the issue, I think, with mindfulness. But these applications of mindfulness sort of emphasize placing the burden on individuals to accommodate and adapt to the status quo, which leads to a form of social myopia. You are listening to upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. An interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you

thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. In this conversation, we spoke with Ron Perser, author of McMindfulness, How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Together, we explore how mindfulness has been used to create passive workers and further the individualistic mindset

of neoliberalism, the relationship between mindfulness and non-western Buddhist philosophies, as well as the antidotes, the more socially just and aware ways of seeing and practicing mindfulness. Thank you so much for joining Upstream, really excited to speak with you. I'm wondering if we can start with an introduction. Would you mind introducing yourself for our listeners? Sure. I'll give you the formal rundown. First, I'm a professor of management at San Francisco State University and I've been teaching there about 24 years and before that I taught at Loyola University

of Chicago for about seven years. So I've had an academic in the field of management and organizational studies for about 30 years, which is a bit of an oxymoron or an inner conflict because I'm really not pro-management or pro-corporations at all. I'm quite critical of capitalism, neoliberalism, the whole sort of use of behavioral science techniques to manipulate employees. So I've always felt somewhat as a misfit in my field,

but luckily my field is so open and accommodating that I was always able to camouflage myself in ways that allowed me to write in certain outlets that were more receptive to critical perspectives and that goes from anything to challenging the greenwashing of corporate environmentalism to digital technologies and their impact on our sense of time. So, yeah, I'm fortunate in that regard to have had that freedom. And then in parallel, a parallel track, maybe more of a vocational thread, is that I've been a student of Buddhism, different schools of Buddhism, going back to my mid-20s. So that's always been sort of in the background influencing my thinking and my writing.

And it wasn't until maybe about seven or eight years ago that I came out of the Buddhist closet and actually explicitly started to call into question how contemporary mindfulness was being deployed in questionable contexts such as the US military and corporations. So over a period of time, that led to this book I just published actually a year ago. Yes, and that book is titled, Mick Mindfulness. How Mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality. And thank you for sharing your own relationship to Buddhism. I think that's important to note. And thank you for sharing your own relationship to Buddhism. I think that's important to note. And just to be transparent for myself as well, I would consider myself

Buddhist and actually studying to be a Dharma teacher in both engaged Buddhism and also the Pasna tradition. And yeah, really excited to talk about this. And I have to say for this book, I went back in my highlighted notes and I had 207 quotes highlighted. So I had to whittle them down. Oh, you're like me. When I get into a book, it's like 75% of it is highlighted in yellow highlighter. Exactly. So I'll pepper some quotes throughout this interview, but I'd love to just start with what inspired you to write this book. I think a couple of threads came together

kind of a convergence. Like I mentioned, I've always been critical of management and capitalist enterprises going back to my graduate school days. So I always had that lurking in the background. I guess the trigger was when I started to see how mindfulness was being used in Silicon Valley corporations. That got on my radar probably around 2010, 2011. But to be honest with you, the kind of Buddhist training I've had was not in

Vipassana or in-site meditation. It was in other schools. And some mindfulness was never really that central to what I was familiar with. So I decided I needed to learn more about Vipassana and Theravada forms of mindfulness meditation and in, insight meditation. So I took some classes with Shaila Catherine at the Sangha. She has down in Mountain View, California, the insight meditation South Bay. And I became familiar with the more traditional forms of Buddhist mindfulness as it's situated within the their avada tradition. And when I started comparing that to what was in the mindfulness movement or in contemporary and clinical forms of mindfulness,

I saw quite a divergence between their aims and purposes and the practices themselves. And then as I studied sort of the way the media was portraying mindfulness as a technique, kind of as a do-it-yourself, selfhelp, stand alone technique, kind of decontextualized from any sort of ethical and moral context. Then I really took note of that, you know, starting in 2013, I wrote a essay with David Lloyd, who is one of the pioneers of socially engaged Buddhism, called Beyond McMindfulness,

that came out in Huffington Post and went viral. Unexpectedly, I had no idea it would cause such a stir. And, you know, at that time, I felt like a lonely voice in the wilderness. But as time went on, more and more people started to link up with that had similar critical perspectives and concerns on the mindfulness movement. And so that kind of inspired me. You know, as I looked at it, I was just kind of stunned by how what was a very counter-cultural, at least in northern California at one time with the beatniks and the hippies, and you know, Zen was the hip thing back then. And it was very counter-cultural and not really commercial.

And so I was kind of stunned when it morphed quite rapidly into a $1.5 billion industry. And that's why I said, well, that's quite a phenomena. I need to look into that. And that's what led me to write the book. Yes. And in the book, you describe that the term mic mindfulness was actually coined by someone

named Miles Neal, who's a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist, and in it you have a quote from him that describes it as a feeding frenzy of spiritual practices that provide immediate nutrition, but no long-term sustenance. So maybe it's helpful to describe what do you and Miles Niel, what do you mean by mcminfulness and what isn't mcminfulness? Yeah, mcminfulness. Obviously it's kind of a derivative from McDonald's, which is a fast food unhealthy establishment. So mcminfulness sort of symbolically is a meme that represents a quick fix for the anxieties of late capitalist society. And what I mean by it is the secular

forms of mindfulness that are decoupled from any sort of moral or ethical context, commodified into a set of instrumental techniques which are deemed ethically neutral, which means they can then be deployed for any particular instrumental aim or goal. And so being kind of unmoored from any kind of vision of the social good, mindfulness is very easily commodified to the ethos of market logic. So that's part of the issue, I think, with mindfulness. But we'll get into this later in more depth, I'm sure. But these applications of mindfulness sort of emphasize placing the burden on individuals

to accommodate and adapt to the status quo, which leads to a form of social myopia, because one is kind of overly self-concerned, self-absorbed, endlessly working on self-improvement, which creates sort of this massive blind spot towards the social, political and economic context, which are generative of a lot of the stresses that we feel as individuals.

And so that's part of the problem. It's sold in a marketplace now like any other commodity. It's become a brand. It's become kind of a lifestyle, marketing, kind of a lifestyle. The media is kind of contributed to this problem that it's touted as a universal panacea or kind of an elixir for any sort of middle-class, white-mill class, upper-mill class need or anxiety. It's kind of put in service of the ego, which is quite ironic. It's all about me, I, me, and mine, kind of a mindfulness, like M-I-N-E. It's probably supposed to be called mindfulness. So let's focus on this idea that mindfulness, in the second part of your book title, how mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality. So let's explore for a minute how mindfulness both

supports and upholds capitalism and even furthers it. So here's a couple of quotes from your book. What remains is a tool of self-discipline disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that cause their problems. They may well be meditating, but it works like taking an aspirin for a headache.

Once the pain goes away, it is business as usual. Mindfulness-based interventions fulfill this purpose by therapeutically optimizing individuals, making them mentally fit, attentive and resilient so they may keep functioning within the system. Such capitulation seems like the farthest thing from a revolution and more like a quietest surrender. Two more quotes. Trickle down, mindfulness like trickle down economics is a cover for the maintenance of power. And one more, should we celebrate the fact that this perversion is helping people to auto exploit themselves. So let's make this really visible. How does mindfulness uphold and even support capitalism?

Let's make that clear. Right. Well, as I said, it's part of a long history. Mindfulness is just the latest technique on the scene, so to speak. It's the latest iteration of what we could call capitalist spirituality. It really amounts to kind of a colonization of mindfulness, which produces a highly individualistic spirituality, perfectly accommodated to our dominant cultural values, which requires no substantial change in lifestyle whatsoever. So it's a privatized practice, easily co-opted, and my friend Richard King, who was the chair of Buddhist studies at University of Kent,

he wrote a remarkable book called Selling Spirituality, the silent takeover of religion. And he uses this term, a combinationist. So mindfulness has an accommodationist orientation, which operates in such a way that it pacifies our feelings of anxiety at the individual level. It works in that respect. But it also has the side effect of getting pacification, so we're not really paying attention collectively or civic,

kind of a civic way to the social, political and economic context that are causing the distress that we're feeling in the first place. So by promoting its health benefits and so to speak, it's easily digested, right? It's easily assimilated into existing systems, and it works as kind of a smoothing mechanism, a salvic force that helps us to cope with the noxious influences of capitalism. And in this way, it becomes subordinated then to the economic realm. And so, I think in order to really unpack this, at some point, we'll have to talk a little bit about neoliberal ideology, because what's occurred with mindfulness, it's become part of therapeutic

culture. And therapeutic culture has its own language, it has its own narratives, you know, within a biomedical kind of paradigm, we talk about interventions, let's all kind of biomedical language. But overall, mindfulness has sort of been pulled into those narratives of taking personal responsibility, words like flourishing, resilience, happiness, and we're told we just have to look deeper within ourselves, find our authentic selves, but this is all sort of reflects that privatization of spirituality. When it's seen as a private practice, something that's occurring inside our own heads and our brains, and then on top of that you have the neuroscience neuroscientist and with all their neurobabel and rhetoric then reinforces that mindfulness

is sort of neurosentric. It's not a practice that's socially embodied within a wider social economic political historical context. So in a way it kind of creates an erasure of the social. It fosters kind of a social amnesia, and it appeals to our highly individualistic entrepreneurial ethos, which now it's all about me. It's about enhancing our personal brand. So it's thriving in this culture of narcissism,

and self-improvement, and wellness, and all that stuff. So it's become part of therapeutic culture. And that sort of displaces the practice of democracy and political debate. And it fosters this new sense of subjectivity, or sense of self, what I call the neoliberal self. And it, we're encouraged to go a to deeper, go deeper into our interior, care for our self, and in that respect, our collective and political life begin to disappear

from view. So I also sort of say that in a way that McMintlan has sort of direct parallels to the Protestant ethic because it's still serving capitalist interest. And this is right out of Zizek. Everyone's probably familiar with his critique of Western Buddhism, but we could add mindfulness to that. It allows us to, on couple, temporarily, listen to a headspace app for like five, ten minutes, get a little shot of inner peace, and then

we could go back and function as a perfect neoliberal subject in a capitalist enterprise. So that's part of it, I think. Yeah. And here's another quote from your book. You quote someone named Joshua Eisen, and this is related to the therapeutic piece. You say in the book quoting him, like kale, asyberries, gym memberships, vitamin water, and other New Year's resolutions, mindfulness indexes a profound desire to change, but one premised on a fundamental reassertion of neoliberal fantasies of self

control and unfettered agency. So, yeah, let's chat for a minute about how mindfulness and your critique of mindfulness is both within a critique of the wellness industry, also the happiness industry. And I wonder even about Western psychology in general, because I had this reflection when I heard about liberation psychology for the first time, where I was learning that folks, particularly in Latin America, Latin and South America, were saying Western psychology that focuses on individual stress and unease isn't very

helpful without the context of the social and societal challenges that people face. So this kind of more education around systems of oppression are actually central to the healing and the well-being of individuals. So talk to us about this critique of the mindful movement within the pathologization, privatization of stress in general, and how the burden of managing stress has been outsourced to individuals

and is part of the larger, a larger critique of Western psychology. Sure. Yeah. Well, I'd like to set it up in a way where we can kind of understand a little bit about how neoliberal ideology is not just an economic ideology or a political ideology. It's really a cultural ideology. It's very insidious worldview that basically presents individuals as atomized, as competitive actors, as entrepreneurs, running their own enterprise. I talk about it as the business of me, Inc, in competition with others.

And so neoliberal ideology, basically to bottom line, is that all decisions about how society should be run should be left to the free market. And so the most efficient mechanism is to allow competitors, individuals to try to maximize their own goods and cut out any sort of state interference, any sort of collectivities, unions, social support mechanisms, safety nets, those are just obstacles to the smooth operation of market capitalism, so they should be dismantled if possible. And that's problematic. Now, where it becomes cultural is that that message is basically because you're on your own

as an atomized individual, you then have to really start to make sure that you have enough human capital to be competitive in the marketplace that you can survive. So it's all then sort of psychologized in the sense of we're working constantly on ourselves, trying to up our human potential, we're sort of faced with constantly having to update our mental capital, enhance our mental capital in the marketplace. But I think what is often left unsaid is that

we're left with pervasive sort of economic insecurity and social instability. So what that does is it creates more anxiety about the future. So we have more anxiety, and at the same time, we're hearing the neoliberal discourse that's telling us, like I said earlier, we have to retreat, we have to go inward, we have to work on ourselves.

You know, you've heard the trope, all change comes from within. That's sort of part of that. And so neoliberal ideology is subtle. It operates through our subjectivity. It's not like it's dominating us. Like there's some conspiracy out there, someone who's like pulling the strings.

No, it's very that we actually are told that we're free individuals, and then we have choice, right? And so it operates in this kind of subtle way through psychological modes that are intent on our individualistic psychic survival. So that's where the wellness industry comes in and it's sort of hand and glove with that ideology by telling us that we have to strengthen our willpower, we have to have grit and resilience, we have to enhance our brainpower, supercharge our concentration, right, with mindfulness. But for what purpose did we thrive in this unjust, this toxic, highly uncertain competitive environment. So yeah, as part of therapeutic culture, but it's also kind of infolded in this whole self-help genre, right, which the whole general trend in Western

psychology, which valorizes individual autonomy, it valorizes this idea of choice and authenticity. And so mindfulness comes out as sort of the remedy and the cure for the stresses that we're feeling on an everyday level. We'll get into that in a minute, but it tells us back basically, I like what Lauren Berlant calls a cruel form of optimism. It sells us back the promissory note, the sort of the promise that if we invest in ourselves and practice mindfulness diligently and we be, and if we're patient and positive, everything will work out along run. So I don't quite buy that issue, as you all know. So it's a wash in the biomedical

and is therapeutic language. It's reframing our problems as individual predicaments or product that we didn't make the right choices if we're a failure. And that's, you know, it's a product of neoliberalism. It's kind of blame the victim mentality. And so our personal troubles, our anxieties, are never attributed to the political and social

economic conditions. They're always framed as psychological and stresses pathologized in that respect. So the key penitent, then, of neoliberal mindfulness is that the source of our problems is all inside our own heads. We're suffering from a so-called thinking disease. We're not mindful enough. We're worried too much about the past or the future. We're indulging in mental rumination or we're not able to regulate our emotions. And so that's all part of this pathologizing and medicalization of stress, which means a remedy, right?

And mindfulness interventions present themselves as the remedy. So the message is if you can't change your circumstances, just practice mindfulness and change your reactions to circumstances. That's problematic because the explanatory narrative of stress is like privatized spirituality and privatization, which is the driving force of neoliberalism. We also had to privatize stress in our explanatory narratives.

Stress is seen as an epidemic. It's omnipresent, it's inevitable. And so therefore, it's up to us to cope and to mindful up, so to speak. And that's what the late critical psychologist in the UK, David Smail, called magical volunteerism, the idea that we're atomized, contextual individuals, and we're held fully responsible for our stress and anguishuish regardless of any social and economic conditions in which our lives are embedded.

Okay, so we have this view of neoliberalism telling us that we are atomized, isolated individuals and encouraging us to be entrepreneurs and make mindfulness encouraging us to accept the status quo and even just feel better within it. I wonder what would you say to people who'd be critical, who'd say that mindfulness actually can lead us to seeing more clearly, seeing in ways that are connected with Buddhism perhaps such as the insight that all things are transient, that change happens.

Like as one's sitting mindfully, they notice that pain goes away. They notice that they're thinking shifts or changes, right? So there's that insight of all things are transient. Another insight that some may argue would come from mindfulness would be the insight of no self, this kind of, who am I as one sits and meditates, they may find there is no I, there is no self and they may have an experience of no self. And then lastly,

there's also an insight that is the inside of the interconnectedness of life, the interconnectedness of all beings that as I breathe out, the tree breathes in, and that actually my body is made up of many different creatures and organisms that are working harmoniously to create me and I, too, am part of ecosystems larger and larger that create our Earth system, or Gaia. So I'm wondering, for folks who would say mindfulness would actually eventually lead to some of these insights, which if we compare them to the neoliberal view are actually quite antithetical or even, you know,

contradictory. Certainly the interconnectedness of life and the isolated individual. So what would you say to that that the power of mindfulness may lead to these insights? Right. Well, that the power of mindfulness may lead to these insights? Right. Well, that's a good question. While Michelle Fakou is somebody that I draw upon later in his life, he actually became very interested in Zen and went to Japan, but he talks about the care of the self. He was very interested in that as a way to use these practices, as a way to be a counter to neoliberal governmentality

is a word he used. In other words, there's a form of resistance to being shaped by these forces. I think the issue is they may eventually is the word he used. You have how long is that going to take? It ties into the Trojan horse hypothesis that I hear a lot about, that if we sprinkle a lot of just sprinkle kind of this gold dust of individualistic, highly therapeutic mindfulness and spread it in a corporation, for example, the trained people in these individual methods of mindfulness of breathing and emotional self-regulation, that over time eventually that there'll be some sort of miraculous, systemic,

deep transformation of that entire corporation. Okay, I'm still waiting to see that. It's been around since 2010. Google's been doing it since then. I don't see them as, you know, or Facebook, Twitter. The evidence is pretty thin on that hypothesis proving it out. But to be fair, I think that, you know, mindfulness is such a catch-all term now that,

you know, I think it's difficult to just make broad sweeping generalizations. I guess it depends on what's being taught, where it's being taught, in what context. Because if you're teaching MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction or some sort of clinical therapeutic form of mindfulness, a lot of people that take those programs, their short programs, eight-week programs, sometimes way shorter than that, they don't sign up for Buddhist awakening or not. They're not signing up for touching the deep insights into Anata or no self. They're there for clinical stress relief and one of the problems that's emerged is sometimes some people have, we don't know yet, but some people have predispositions or tendencies

to go quite deep, quite fast even with very simple clinical mindfulness practices, and they end up in very almost more distrustful states of confusion and anxiety, paranoia. These are called the adverse effects of meditation, which we're only now starting to acknowledge. We'll be right back with Ron Perser, author of McMindfulness, how mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality. ... I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station.

I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. That was White Wolf by Haunted House, written by Robert. Now back to our conversation with Ron Persir, author of McMindfulness. How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality. One of the quotes from your book is, the true meaning of mindfulness is an act of remembering,

not only in terms of recalling and being attentively present to our situation, but also putting our lives back together collectively. And so I'm really hearing, yeah, about when mindfulness is decontextualized and taken away from these other elements of Buddhism, the challenges that it leads to. And just to share my own experience with this is interesting. I went to a therapist for, I was having anxiety after a breakup.

And thinking back, I'm glad that it wasn't, I'm feeling anxiety from precariousness and, you know, economic strain. And then he recommended mindfulness. No, it was a breakup. And he said, therapeutically, I'd recommend that you attend a mindfulness meditation retreat. And so I did, and I went to Spirit Rock, which is in here in the Bay Area of Vipastana tradition, and went to a week-long practice of mindfulness meditation. And it was very therapeutic, and it was very self-focused.

I was focusing on my own anxiety, and it was helpful. And I went back for a second retreat, hoping to get some of the same dose of that helpful self-medication. And instead, the instructor was Joanna Macy, who's an ecogestus Buddhist philosopher and activist, and it was a total kick in the butt, because absolutely, I realized that it was like you just said,

fast-tr tracking this realization that I came to mindfulness for self-oriented reasons. And then of course Joanna really encouraged us to tap into honoring our pain for what's happening in the world, to get off our cushions and engage with our spiritual practices actively and also to open our heart so that we don't only get swallowed up or Wollowed in our own pain, but that we open to the pain of the world and really get into compassion for others. So Yeah, let's chat for a minute about what is Buddhism more generally besides this mindfulness that has been taken and generally besides this mindfulness that has been taken and really privatized and corporatized and also engaged Buddhism. Tell us about that. Well, that's a really big question, you know, because when you use the word Buddhism, that's already sort of got issues because there is no one Buddhism. It's not a monolithic entity. But in general, I think it's worth noting that if we take something that's quite common across all Buddhist traditions and schools,

let's take what's called the eightfold noble path, and this is something that the historical Buddha developed as kind of an action plan for awakening. And if you look at things called, there's eight factors on the path. Mindfulness is actually one of the factors, but some of the other factors like right livelihood, that's a very social dimension. You know, right livelihood means the way that you work, where you work, what you do, what you produce, does not harm other individuals or the environment.

So engaging in war, working for a defense contractor, working at Monsanto, for example, which is notorious for its carcinogenic products, maybe even working at some tech companies, like Facebook that are generating all sorts of polarization, digital technologies which are designed for distraction and addiction. What I'm getting at is that I think we have a misconception that that's happened over a period of time, especially in the West, that the mainstreaming of mindfulness,

we now seem to think that Buddhism equals meditation period. So the image that we have of Buddhism is the sitting monk, and there's almost an Olympic competitive spirit now among a lot of Western Buddhist practitioners that I've seen is like, well, I've went on a 10-day retreat. How many times have you gone on a 10-day retreat? You know, it's really kind of ridiculous. But I think it's this privileging of meditation without really understanding that the Buddha Dharma or the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, we're not just about mindfulness or meditation. The Buddha was quite an outspoken social critic of the prevailing social order, which was

based on Brahminism and the caste system, for example. And he sort of overturned that. He created a Sangha, which was formed around this idea of kind of a democratic assembly. It wasn't based on caste. I could go on and on, but I think the point is that Buddhism does not equate strictly to meditation. And that the Dharma had a lot more to do with critical, fundamental inquiry into the causes and conditions that lead us to unwholesome mental states, actions that cause suffering, to suffering

within our own mind streams, but also to suffering that we co-produce in our social and political systems. So there are other aspects to the path which are not strictly valorizing solitary confinement in meditation retreats. I think one of the other pitfalls because of this misconception is, it's become a bit of an intellectual movement in that respect, privileging of silence and language. Language is how we communicate, how we transmit these teachings through history.

And language is not the enemy in a way. I think that we have to recover our ability to engage in vigorous dialogue in ways that can bring out sort of our hidden blind spots. Can't do that if we just stay silent. blind spots. I can't do that if we just stay silent. So, you know, I think that it's a work in progress in terms of Buddhism and its sort of migration to the West. It's still a work in progress. It's sort of landed in psychology. It's sort of landed in clinical, therapeutic psychology. But I don't think it's like you said, what socially engaged Buddhism, that framework or that paradigm is not going to be conducive to expanding our notion of what suffering means. This suffering is not just occurring in our individual mind

streams. It's occurring institutionally. It's occurring collectively. This is what David Lloyd coined the term social duke, social suffering. And so we need a more radical form of mindfulness, which I think cultivates a more expansive, non-dual awareness. What I mean by that is by melting the sense of separation between self and other and self in the natural environment, it's not merely learning how to be more calm and peaceful, but of tuning into the causes of suffering and pain, like you said. It's not just my own personal suffering that's on the table, but the suffering that's caused by exploitation and justice,

economic inequities, social political oppression, and so forth. So we really have to come to kind of this awakening that my personal well-being and happiness is intimately interdependent with the well-being and happiness of every other sentient being. And so a radical mindfulness will allow us to cut through the illusion of separateness and sort of opening up a wider vision of reality, a new consciousness, which sees our body as not just a self-enclosed physical body,

but the body of all sort of phenomena is our body. And so it's a radically inclusive sense of self or body. And then our speech and our language, the way that language has shaped the way that we think, we have to have a critical penetrating inquiry and questioning the operation of culture and how it's shaped and limited our way of examining our own sort of automatic feedback process that we have by accepting a lot of assumptions that have been untested and so to speak. So this is critical inquiry and dialogue

has to be factored into sort of a new communal practice. So it cuts through disillusion of separateness. It opens a wider vision. It sees us all as interconnected and independent. It's a wider vision. It sees us all as interconnected and independent. It's a social practice, and it goes beyond just trying to gain a little inner peace here and there. We really have to come to terms to see how we've been socially conditioned, right?

How our identities have been shaped within the capitalist economy. And we have to help people connect the dots, right, between personal troubles and public issues. And that's what I'm really called civic mindfulness. That's sort of, I think, very different than just dealing with one's own personal anxiety. And so, in a way, that's how mindfulness could be liberated, become more of a kind of

a godendian truth force, right, for social and political change. And I don't think that's going to happen through corporate mindfulness. It happened really in the grassroots, sort of in the movements that we're seeing today, even wearing a mask is a form of civic mindfulness, right? Not just, you know, I'm not going to wear a mask because I'm a free individual. So, again, that's sort of a really extreme form of neoliberal ideology operating, and that sort of way of thinking. One more point is that even if we go back to classical mindfulness, mindfulness is not just internal, it's also external. It's focusing internally and externally.

And I think that somehow we've gone way to the extreme of the internal. And so it requires turning that kind of critical inquiry outwards towards the social political institutions, all these inter-linking systems of power that are kind of exasperating, you know, human suffering and stress, and really have to kind of see how we've been sort of duped into buying into this idea that we're fully responsible for our own suffering. Absolutely. One of my favorite metaphors for this inner and outer transition comes from Sophie Banks, who's part of the transition town movement, and she described once in a workshop I was in that inner and outer transition

play together as if writing a bicycle, where to ride the bicycle, we need inner strength and resilience and poise and balance, and we also need forward movement. We need progression. We need direction. And that direction, that movement, is the outer transition, that outer system change, and the inner strength balance, poise is the inner transition or inner attention. And if we only have direction,

if our activism is only outer focused, and it just keeps going, we can crash and literally burn out. Or if we only have the inner focus and no direction, we'll just fall over on the bicycle. So I really appreciate what you're saying about this inner and outer parts together. And when I'm hearing the kind of takeaways for how to move mindfulness to be better, is one to look at mindfulness and to really examine it and to challenge it, to become more a vehicle for creating non-dual awareness, to widening our perception of the self,

to the ecological self, to becoming more of a social practice, this idea of civic mindfulness, practicing with others, and then also not taking mindfulness outside of the other elements of Buddhism, the eightfold path that you spoke about, so that we see mindfulness, not just as this internal,

but as a practice that's part of a larger, ethical way of being, that like you said, includes right livelihood as well as right speech, I believe, right view, a couple others. And yeah, so that part of that eightfold path. And then the other piece is this idea that the happiness industry, mindfulness as well as Western therapy in general, ought to include a realization of the way that our systems impact our health, our well-being, and happiness, and that they examine and challenge and even educate folks on the structures of oppression, and how they influence our stress, and how doing work to change those systems would actually be

beneficial to our health and well-being. If you were talking to somebody who was just starting out or practicing mindfulness or even someone who was an MBSR teacher, what else would you recommend that they look towards or that they try? I think fundamentally would be to examine through inquiry how our experience arises. That sounds a bit abstract, but I think there are some issues around how our knowing, our capacity for knowing is already restricted. It's already been sort of shaped and confined by some fundamental presuppositions

which have gone on examined, particularly our notions of how we are as embodied spatial beings, and secondly, our experience every day, experience of time. And so these fundamental presuppositions of reality, part of our humanity, how we understand space and how we act and live in time are often not the focus of any sort of mindfulness inquiry. Those deep insuptions are influencing the kind of reality that we're creating as a human species, because if we see ourselves as fundamentally enclosed within our own bodies as spatial beings, then we're already reproducing sort of a dualistic way of knowing, which has many, many problems. It's very fragmented.

The perspective of the self is the primary one who knows, and that self has a bias that stands back from experience. It's always reporting to itself. It's always commenting on its experience, but it really doesn't fundamentally understand how this particular self arises. It's fundamentally taken as a given. And so that, to me, is the heart of where we need to go. Now that is me sound a bit ambitious or unclear, but I think that's because these fundamental aspects of our experience were like fish and water, right? We don't question them. And when it comes to time, I mean, let's look at what's going on. You know, in the last 10 years, maybe the last five,

we've seen this rapid acceleration of time through time-space compression through digital technologies. Our whole way of knowing, and you could look at this historically, that the medium that we use shapes are thinking, it actually changes actually, neurosurcates in our brain actually. You know, when we went from oral culture to the printing press and we went to written culture,

our visual sense became very the most dominant sense. So when I'm getting at, when it comes to the temporal dimension, our sense of anxiety, the sense of always feeling that we never have enough time that we're being controlled, there's some sort of an inexorable force that's alien to us, you know, a kind of distraction, the temporalities of distraction that are now dominating us, we have to look more critically at these dimensions of our human experience, because that's where freedom can open up. That's the key to greater knowledge and expanded consciousness, which goes beyond even the sense of death. The whole framework of birth and death is also a set up of time. And these are very deep existential questions which have remarkable and I would say tremendous potential

for the next wave of humanity I hope. Whew, I just love that you're a management professor. And yet you have this vocation of these really deep and thoughtful questions and also thinking about mindfulness. And yeah, I'm wondering if we just look at the location of where you are in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. I don't know if you're familiar with the paper California Ideology by Richard Barbrook and they talk about the Silicon Valley ideology, kind of as neoliberal ideology, really exaggerated even.

But yeah, just wondering if you'd say anything about, especially you and I being in the Bay Area near Silicon Valley, you've mentioned Google and Facebook several times. But yeah, what is the the world view here? And I myself have actually, I've even said it out loud that I hoped that mindfulness could be a Trojan horse for engaged spirituality and a shift to a more ecological world view. Obviously reading your book and talking to you, I doubt that that's going to happen. But I still hope that that's possible. But yeah, just tell us a little bit about the view or the ideology of Silicon Valley and how that fits into it, mindfulness and any potentials for change there.

Yeah, that's a good question. One point I want to make is that the mindfulness movement in general, and we'll get to Silicon Valley, has been an elite movement led by elites and I see the same thing happening in the tech sector. It's kind of the mindful elite that have used their wealth and power to really kind of sort of paint themselves as these benevolent self-appointed business gurus and they have a lot of market savvy, and they have this hipster facade. You know, it's sort of the pseudo-corporate spirituality. It's very capitalist-friendly. You know, this idea of conscious capitalism, which is a complete oxymoron, you know,

can become a mindful capitalist, a mindful leader. And so does this whole corporate takeover of mindfulness that ensures it will never become a countercultural force to challenge corporate capitalism. So Silicon Valley, it's kind of an idiosyncratic blend of free market libertarianism and spirituality. And anyway, with the decline of institutional religion, this is kind of a historical trend that it's kind of led to the prosperity hospitals, it's led to this kind of business-minded religion

that we have now, very kind of consumer-oriented spiritual marketplace, right? But if we look at the history of Bay Area counterculture, so we're situated in the Bay Area going back, you know, this was sort of the hotbed of the beatnix down in North Beach and the hippies with the grateful dead and Timothy Leroy. So we see that even though they were also focused, the transformation of the self, they were also focused on this inward journey. They were embedded pretty much in a community. Think communists, communists came out of the hippie generation. And they were asking, they were counter to the mainstream. They were

asking profound questions about the meaning of life, the nature of society, but then we see this massive shift to a focus on wellness, which is a very ambiguous term, and it offers no counter, offers no challenge, very market-friendly, very corporate-friendly. So we have that, on one hand, we have the counter-cultural history, where there was this compatibility with meditative practice, with psychedelics, the whole anti-establishment, anti-harchy, but they saw this weird connection between that and the sort of

anti-authoritarianism of computer information processing back in the early days of Silicon Valley, right? So you have people, you know, like John Perry Barlow, who was the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He was one of the first early proponents of cyberspace, right? It's kind of a consciousness-expanding technology. Steve Jobs, of course, you know, he was, he went to India and, you know, he was practicing Zen here and there. So we have that sort of weird combination, but these counter-cultural leaders, such as Jobs, they really, at heart, were spiritual libertarians if you want to put it that way. They really still believed in free markets. And that Silicon Valley was outside the bounds of legitimate critique, right? The digital technologies are benign.

They can help cultivate human virtue. It's a very elite subculture, right? I mean, look at Google, the gender gap at Google. It's very exclusive sort of culture when it comes to gender and race. It's an ethos of privilege and entitlement. Zuckerberg, CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. Jack Dorsey, you probably remember this, he had this vanity, where he also went on a tindy meditation retreat, a digital detox, off the remote island of Myanmar, and of course he tweeted out his accomplishment on Twitter, with 117 photos with mosquito bites and all. It's become kind of a status symbol, like this is the form of techno-maradedom, minus any real action

to curb any of the noxious effects of what they're producing. Steve Jobs, as I mentioned, supposedly he was all Zen, but he called his employees shitheads. He was seen as a tyrant. So bottom line is that corporate mindfulness works works very subtly to train employees to serve employers. It's not an industrial form of brainwashing, but it is a way of shaping a sophisticated form of bio power, which always kind of says, well, you know, your dissatisfaction in a workplace is psychological problem. And we have the remedy, whether it was the human relations

movement in the 1930s, whether it was active listening, whatever it may be, it always comes back to trying to manipulate the subjectivity of the worker, or the employee. And we're looking at farther back in history, it was the worker's body that had to be improved and optimized. Going back to Taylorism, Frederick Taylor,

and a so-called scientific management, tried to industrial engineer optimize the physical movements of the laborer. But now we're doing mental work and knowledge work. So now it's become, you know, we're doing mental work and knowledge work, so now it's become, as a... B.H.H.H.H this conversation with you and I just wish for our conversation to contribute to awakening and to liberation and to deeper reflection on all the themes that we've shared. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you and thank you so much for the work that you do.

Well, thank you, Della. Thank you so much as well. I really enjoyed it. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Ron Perser, author of Mick mindfulness, how mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the non-profit organization Independent Arts and Media, any donations that you make are tax exempt. If you haven't already, make sure you check out our latest radio documentary, Debunking the Myth of Homeoeconomicus.

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