The PBG and The False Promise of Mindfulness
Within a week of coming out of my recent 6 month silent vipassana retreat, I found myself pulled back into the tumbling vortex of daily life. Within two weeks I had broken out in shingles, my doctors warning me that I could lose vision in my left eye if I wasn’t careful.
“Are you stressed?” the ophthalmologist asked. “Maybe you should try meditation.”
The experience of a vipassana retreat isn’t very well-represented by the stylized images of meditation we regularly come across in the media: people with perfect posture keeping their thumb and index fingers touching oh-so-lightly for a frozen eternity. These images of cool-looking yogis are largely informed by and perpetuate powerful misconceptions about the nature of “mindfulness” in our contemporary era. In reality, the longer the meditation retreat, the deeper, generally, is the drop into the uncool. Practitioners often come back to the wider world acting like people who have buried below the earth for a thousand years: squinting at the sun, flinching at every sudden noise, and taking every chance we can to hide in the bathroom until we adjust to so-called “real life” after a few days. You can make it look cool in a magazine. But it’s pretty hard to make it feel cool.
While mindfulness-based meditation is powerfully liberating on its own turf, the mind/heart, the results are less predictably useful in the broader society whose foundational values are often at odds with the qualities of understanding and kindness a yogi seeks to cultivate. Meditation practice can have very real benefits outside of oneself but these effects are beyond predictability and the road toward them is meandering and mysterious.
I was acutely aware of this as I nursed my fragile, stinging eye. While noting “stabbing, stabbing, aversion” during my convalescence, I came across an online article that began dubiously: “It may have started as a trend among Silicon Valley tech companies, but mindfulness seems to be here to stay for all of us.” The piece proceeded to layout “13 Things Mindful People do Differently Every Day,” such as “take walks,” “seek out new experiences,”and “let their minds wander.” Being a recent yogi myself, I wondered why “smash their computers on the floor” didn’t come up. Maybe if the list had gone to 15 it would be there; right after “floss their teeth every night” or “pay their bills on time.”
What has happened to traditional Yoga since it came into contact with “the West” has now happened to the core tool of Buddhist practice: it has been reformulated to make sense within the bounds of what we understand, value, and hope to become; a God in our own image, as it were. The aspiration to attain worldly success through devotion is not at all new to Asian Buddhism but mindfulness-based meditation as an expression of it is new and seems to have parallel life throughout contemporary Asia as well. Thus, it is appears that this new phenomenon is not simply a cultural desalination program in the West that has turned the ocean of the Buddha’s teaching into vast warehouses of bottled water: It’s also a historical process of political economy, specifically, what Karl Marx termed the bourgeois relations of production.
From this perspective, the newfound popularity of mindfulness might be understood as something of a “petty-bourgeoisification” of the Buddha’s teaching. The “Petty Bourgeoisie” (from here on, let’s just call them “the PBG”) is essentially the middle and upper-middle class: people who don’t have to sell their labor power for wages (the proletariat) but who aren’t involved in large-scale capital accumulation and appropriation (the “big” bourgeoisie) either. They are store owners, managers, lawyers, doctors, and educated professionals of all stripes. I’m using “PBG” because the term “petty-bourgeoisie” has become rather toxic: the result of a century of Communists around the world using the phrase to condemn anything and anyone that questioned or challenged the orthodoxy or party-line; sometimes to humiliation, sometimes to death. Marx himself had a much more nuanced view of “The Notorious PBG”: he understood its tenuous position to be the non-personal result of an historical process from which their complicated class interests and actions were an unavoidable result.
Marx was well aware that many PBG are sympathetic to the hardships facing the working class, but they generally restrain from revolutionary solidarity with them. Why? Because the PBG identify with bourgeois success and often have a vested interest in capitalism and the society it has created. The liberal PBG want to expand the benefits of capitalism without acknowledging the negative social conditions that it necessarily creates. Therefore, they are more inclined to tinker with legal structure of bourgeois society rather than overthrow it: a reformist rather than revolutionary approach. While discussing the history of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état in France, Marx polemicizes against the social-democratic movement of the PBG,
The peculiar character of social-democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonisms and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. 
So it is with the PBG approach to mindfulness: people often do not want to escalate the antagonism between delusion and wisdom, they want to transform it harmoniously. Many people love the Dalai Lama but few are inclined to seriously take on the radical struggle against greed, hatred, and delusion themselves. They are seduced by the notion that mindfulness will help them achieve higher worldly aspirations by increasing their mental capacity or by softening the emotional edges of capitalist alienation. Mindfulness appears to be that secret ingredient that promises to smooth over life’s rough patches and give us the winning edge in whatever game we are playing. With a little meditation in the morning we will be more successful parents, athletes, investors, students, soldiers, activists, prisoners, wardens, guards, and executioners. But just as Marx did not call for harmony between classes as a response to the antagonisms at the root of bourgeois society, the Buddha did not call for a smoothing out of the rough edges of suffering or a negotiated peace with greed, hatred, and ignorance. He called for their complete usurpation, abolition, and annihilation by the forces of love and wisdom. He posited mindfulness as one essential tool for a process of disenchantment that illuminates the profoundly unstable, undependable, and disappointing nature of everything in existence: a revolutionary rather than reformist approach. In one classic refrain, he states,
Bhikkhus, on one occasion I was dwelling at Uruvelā on the bank of the river Nerañjarā under the Goatherd’s Banyan Tree just after I became fully enlightened. Then, while I was alone in seclusion, a reflection arose in my mind thus: ‘This is the one-way path for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the passing away of pain and displeasure, for the achievement of the method, for the realization of Nibbāna, that is, the four-establishments of mindfulness.’ (SN 47.43, The Path) 
He continues elsewhere,
What four? Here a bhikkhu dwells contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. He dwells contemplating feelings in feelings… mind in mind… phenomena in phenomena, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. This is the one way path for the purification of beings… that is, the four establishments of mindfulness. (SN 47.18, Brahma) 
Given our contemporary social foundation, it is unsurprising that the character of many new mindfulness programs reflects the persistence of “covetousness… in regard to the world” in the form of desires to be more capable of success within the parameters that many people understand and value. Nevertheless, one can see that this approach explicitly contradicts the Buddha’s design for his method of liberation.
In Marx’s analysis, the mechanics of Capitalism eventually put intense downward class pressure on the PBG. This pressure is generally resisted and agonized over by the PBG until the inevitability of their proletarianization is fathomed and the spark of revolution may be glimpsed in their minds. The ensuing alliance with the proletariat has been at times a critical factor in the success or failure of a revolutionary moment. It is resonant with the classical insight experience of dissolution that confronts a yogi as they deepen in their practice. The experience, in which the profound instability of all phenomena is fathomed, can be one that inspires the meditator to go deeper and find liberation within this truth or that pulls them back from further progress out of fear. For the Buddha, the broader process of revolutionary disenchantment, of which this experience is a part, could take eons,
For a long time, bhikkhus, you have experienced the death of a father… the death of a brother… the death of a sister… the death of a son… the death of a daughter… the loss of relatives… the loss of wealth… loss through illness; as you have experienced this, weeping and wailing because of being united with the disagreeable and separated from the agreeable, the stream of tears you have shed is more than the water in the four great oceans… It is enough to experience revulsion towards all formations, enough to become dispassionate toward them, enough to be liberated from them. (SN 15.3, Tears) 
Some critics characterize the middle class’ newfound interest in meditation as escapism or evidence of their anti-social self-absorption. Perhaps it is actually a sign of what Marx predicted: that the PBG is feeling stressed by downward economic pressure and is seeking ways to manage that deep disenchantment. When their class-slippage becomes apparent, the PBG is more likely to grasp at their class identity with increasing desperation until the stabilizing revolutionary qualities have properly been cultivated. Similarly, a yogi must go through the process of loss again and again before they are able to turn their energies away from any investment in conditioned phenomena.
Marx believed strongly that the proletariat needed to engage in non-revolutionary political, social, and economic organizing in order to build the organizational and educational capacity needed for revolutionary leadership, action, and institutionalization, and to succeed in their revolutionary mission when conditions were ripe. Some “more radical” contemporaries of Marx disagreed, believing that workers should mobilize solely for revolutionary action, regardless of social conditions, and criticized Marx himself as being a reformist. Perhaps, then, these reformist approaches to mindfulness are necessary entry points that can begin a longer process of spiritual radicalization.
Most dedicated Buddhists around the world take a very very long view of the process of liberation, recognizing that the inner revolution is not simply a matter of will-power but of committed ethical integrity, rigorous mind training, and deepening sensitivity to reality. Indeed, they often commit over many, many lifetimes, to cultivating wholesome mental qualities that will support them in the eventual overthrow of greed, hatred, and delusion. This long view doesn’t make people less dedicated or their approach less “revolutionary,” it means they have fathomed the magnitude of the project and are pacing themselves appropriately; cultivating both patience and determination. Essential to this view is the understanding that the humility, kindness, and wisdom that come from this path are rewards of the practice in and of themselves and to look beyond them for our motivation, to external markers that satisfy our unexamined personal and social delusions, is folly. Keeping the north star of complete liberation always ahead of us is a fundamental part of staying on the path with integrity.
Any entry point into a sincere meditation practice is wonderful, indeed it is priceless, and any mental or physical suffering that is alleviated therefrom is extremely valuable. I know many people whose starting place in meditation practice was a world away from where they ended up in their quest for “stress-reduction”. On the other hand, I was relieved to hear about the new systematic review and meta-analysis: “Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being.” The study surveyed 47 different studies on the efficacy of meditation practice on a variety of mental phenomena. It showed “modest” or no evidence of improved anxiety, depression, pain, mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, and weight among the 3515 participants. It also found “no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment (ie, drugs, exercise, and other behavioral therapies).” As more and more people make more and more money from the mindfulness movement, it probably won’t matter much what future research proves. Most likely is that we begin the absolute bourgeoisification of mindfulness where the owning class and the bourgeois state try to use it as a tool for the reification of class dominance and imperialism.
If this sounds over-dramatic, consider another recent essay, “The Militarization of Mindfulness,” which highlighted a $4.3 million grant the U.S. Army and Department of Defense has provided University of Miami researchers for a so-called “Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training” for pre-deployment soldiers as well as $31 million for a “positive psychology” program that will include mindfulness education for 1.1 million soldiers. The Dalai Lama himself gave his approval of the program. I can only imagine that His Holiness has such profound faith in revolutionary nature of mindfulness that he is unconcerned with the utterly dubious ethics associated with training soldiers to be more mindful killers. If so, he is obviously taking the longest of long views.
While the Buddha and Marx have deeply divergent perspectives on the nature of human suffering and emancipation, in many ways they thought very similarly about these very different things. There are places where their perspectives function as imperfect mirrors of each other, of the inner and the outer revolution. These reflections and refractions can help us see that much more is at stake in this contemporary mindfulness phenomenon than merely the lifestyle whims of the PBG. Mindfulness as taught by the Buddha is not merely a pacification of stress but one important aspect of a deep engagement with suffering that has a revolutionary nature, distinct from but in some ways complementary to that of the social revolution. Appreciating mindfulness for its revolutionary potential is not simply respectful of the Buddha’s teaching, it may be the only thing mindfulness is actually good for.
My shingles eventually went away on its own and my eye seems to have made it through the turmoil unscathed. I’m not sure my meditation practice helped at all but thanks to mindfulness, I had truly accepted the possibility of my loss of vision in a way that I never would have otherwise been able to do. It teaches me every moment about the undependability of things and this has powerfully developed my heart toward a natural response of peace and compassion in the face of suffering. Part of me longs for the day when a study proves, once and for all, that mindfulness is entirely useless for anything beside the development of wisdom and kindness. If it can’t make us beautiful or successful, if it won’t heal the world, if it won’t help us lose weight or win the game, maybe it will get tossed aside by the big money-makers and those seeking to affirm, achieve, and fortify the bourgeois relations of production through contemporary spirituality. Then, those who are interested in liberating their minds from the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion can get back to work without feeling like they are missing the boat on the “mindfulness revolution” just because their lives aren’t magically and blissfully transformed through meditation. Until then, it would be good, at the very least, if people didn’t go around thinking that it all started in Silicon Valley.
 Marx, Karl. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, International Publishers, 1963) p50.
 Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya, (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2000), p1661.
 Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, p1647.
 Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, p652.