‘The Miracle of Mindfulness’: A Guide to Present-Moment Awareness
A review of The Miracle of Mindfulness, by Thich Nhat Hanh; Beacon Press, 1975.
It is a bit of a shame that ideas like ‘living in the moment’ and ‘going with the flow’ have acquired such unfortunate connotations, for they point to something important, and true, which is that we are at our best when we stop thinking about what we are doing and just live it. ‘You are what remains when your thoughts disappear,’ writes Pablo d’Ors. This may even be true at the civilisational level: the great process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead noted in An Introduction to Mathematics that ‘civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them’ and later, in his Dialogues, that ‘A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyse itself.’ We stop thinking when we engage fully with our experience, whether we are washing the dishes or having a conversation. This is what it means to be mindful, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness is one of the classic texts on the subject.
It is, like Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, one of those accidental books, in that it began as a letter to a friend. Though rooted in Buddhist thought, its relevance is universal; for at bottom it concerns experiences shared by every human being. The heart of the book is, of course, mindfulness, and how to cultivate it. Meditation is the principal path; but Hanh shows us that every task we do is a chance to become more aware. When we focus on the thing at hand, we step outside of what Henri Bergson called ‘clock time’, or temps, and become part of the living, unbroken flow of reality, durée. ‘Clock time’ is useful time, that is, time that can be broken down and deployed in service of our aims. It is bound up with the self; and when we are engaged with out experience the self, or our perception of, falls away.
When we focus on the thing at hand, we step outside of what Henri Bergson called ‘clock time’.
The fact is that for most of us, this almost never happens. We are blessed if we have found a hobby or interest we love, and that challenges us, for when we are immersed in something of that kind, we often enter a state of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (that’s ‘me-high, cheek-sent-me-high’, by the way) called flow. Flow, like mindfulness, involves intense present-moment awareness. It differs in that it only occurs while we are doing something. But we have the impression in both cases of stepping out of time, or perhaps of time stepping out of us. Time flies when you are having fun, and so on. But, as I say, this is rare for many of us, and perhaps getting rarer. For in what Joseph Henrich calls the W.E.I.R.D. countries, that is to say, Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic countries, we have so much choice that we do not have to stick with anything for long if we do not wish to. Hence we do not develop the skill of attention, which is essential for mindfulness, indeed perhaps the essence of mindfulness, and we do not ‘sink into’ things. The Victorians read more books than we do in part because there wasn’t much else to do in the evening. Moreover, technology, and screens in particular—and this is discussed very well in Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows—leads us to scan, not engage. Thus we skip across the surface of life, as it were. This is not conducive to mindfulness.
But back to the book. Hanh writing well before the explosion in digital technology, describes a man he saw taking a segment tangerine before finishing his last one as ‘eating the future’. He makes a compelling case that if we cannot learn to be mindful at a time like that, we cannot really enjoy life. Yes, you can chase pleasurable experiences; but good luck finding lasting happiness, purpose and a sense of meaning, those higher forms of human thriving. One reason for this is that we do not pay attention we do not see quite how rich and deep our experience and our world are. When we are truly engaged, we perceive the world as being almost infinitely profound. The edges of the things we see seem sharper, as though a camera lens has come into focus; and there is an ‘aliveness’ even to inanimate objects. Every moment is fresh: we can actually see that everything is changing all the time. These experiences are, I believe, what is meant in part by ‘spiritual’, which I take to mean involving mental and emotional communion with being itself, or, if you like, with that ‘I am that I am’ mentioned in Exodus 3:14. It is an encounter.
Hanh blends stories, personal insights, practical steps. His tone is warm and inviting. He speaks from lived experience, making abstract ideas feel real, concrete. He touches on aspects of Buddhist philosophy, including the three marks of existence, which are first principles in Buddhist thought. Nothing is permanent and everything is always changing; everything is fundamentally unsatisfactory; and nothing is fixed or permanent. He suggests, in connection to the principle of interconnectedness, that when we wash a dish, for instance, we should understand that we are connecting with the dish, the water, the earth and all the people who made that dish. At every moment, because of interconnectedness, we are relating to everyone, everywhere, at every time. This feeling of being part of a continuity is important to human wellbeing. It is defended robustly by Edmund Burke in his spontaneous conservative manifesto, Reflections on the Revolution in France. He mounts the case that society is a trust, binding the dead, the living and the yet-to-be-born, and preserving and building on the social capital passed down to us by our forebears is our duty, as well as a means by which we ensure that our culture has continuity.
Nothing is permanent and everything is always changing; everything is fundamentally unsatisfactory; and nothing is fixed or permanent.
Mindfulness, then, which brings to mind an image of a serene man in saffron robes, sitting alone on a hilltop (or, on the other hand, perhaps a new-age InstaGuru), is not as individual as it might seem. Through the attentiveness we develop when we meditate or practise mindfulness some other way, we perceive our connection to others and so its global nature. More could be said about the kind of disposition that mindfulness cultivates—open, trusting, kind—and how that stitches us into the fabric of our community, and helps to contribute to its flourishing. Thich Naht Hanh himself was a highly engaged person: he made meaningful contributions to social, political, intellectual and spiritual life. Indeed, anyone who thinks there is no time for spiritual practice, or that the time is better spent on something else, might want to consider quite how much Hanh, or Thomas Merton, managed to accomplish.
The prose is spare, unpretentious. Hanh strives to be clear, grounded, kind. His style fits his subject matter. And it helps to make The Miracle of Mindfulness a good book, one that does not promise Zen-like serenity or an end to life’s troubles, but a means of meeting life in a spirit of openness, dignity and grace. It would be an appalling cliché to say that this has never been more important, and I do not know if that is true at any rate; I suspect it isn’t. But if it is true that we are distracted, skating on the surface of existence, then a means to, as it were, crack through the ice, and lose ourselves in the water, would be of value.
