Mindfulness and Mindlessness

Definitions

What is mindfulness? Phenomenologically, it is the feeling of involvement or engagement. How do people achieve it? Learning to be mindful does not require meditation. It is the simple process of actively noticing new things. It doesn't matter how smart or relevant the new distinctions are; just that they are novel for the person at the time. By actively drawing novel distinctions, people become situated in the present, sensitive to context and perspective, and they come to understand that although they can follow rules and [Page 573]routines, those rules and routines should guide, not govern, their behavior. It is not difficult to understand the advantages to being in the present. When in the present, people can take advantage of new opportunities and avert the danger not yet arisen. Indeed, everyone thinks they are in the present. When they are mindless, however, they're “not there” to know that they are not in the present.

What is mindlessness? It is not the same thing as ignorance. Mindlessness is an inactive state of mind that is characterized by reliance on distinctions drawn in the past. When people are mindless, they are trapped in a rigid perspective, insensitive to the ways in which meaning changes depending on subtle changes in context. The past dominates, and they behave much like automatons without knowing it, where rules and routines govern rather than guide what they do. Essentially, they freeze their understanding and become oblivious to subtle changes that would have led them to act differently, if only they were aware of the changes. As will become clear, mindlessness is pervasive and costly and operates in all aspects of people's lives. Although people can see it and feel it in other people, they are blind to it in themselves.

Mindlessness comes about in two ways: either through repetition or on a single exposure to information. The first case is the more familiar. Most people have had the experience, for example, of driving and then realizing, only because of the distance they have come, that they made part of the trip on automatic pilot, as mindless behavior is sometimes called. Another example of mindlessness through repetition is when people learn something by practicing it so that it becomes like second nature to them. People try to learn the new skill so well that they don't have to think about it. The problem is that if they've been successful, it won't occur to them to think about it even when it would be to their advantage to do so.

People also become mindless when they hear or read something and accept it without questioning it. Most of what people know about the world or themselves they have mindlessly learned in this way. One example of mindlessness is described in the book The Power of Mindful Learning. The author was at a friend's house for dinner, and the table was set with the fork on the right side of the plate. The author felt as though some natural law had been violated: The fork “goes” on the left side! She knew this was ridiculous. Who cares where the fork is placed? Yet it felt wrong to her, even though she could generate many reasons it was better for it to be placed on the right. She thought about how she had learned this. The author didn't memorize information about how to set a table. One day as a child, her mother simply said to her that the fork goes on the left. Forever after, that is where she was destined to put it, no matter what circumstances might suggest doing otherwise. The author became trapped without any awareness that the way she learned the information would stay in place in the future. Whether people become mindless over time or on initial exposure to information, they unwittingly lock themselves into a single understanding of information.

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