MacMindfulness

Without drugs, modern citizens are turning their eyes upon themselves as a way of coping with the insane demands of our digitally-liberated lives. I remember when I was a teenager and many commentators were welcoming the new dawn of technology as a liberation from work and an invitation to explore the boundaries of leisure. We teens were so very lucky to be born into this new world, at this bright new beginning.

‘Up’ and ‘Tits’ spring to mind.

We are more enslaved now than ever before and our puny little minds are being exposed to huge waves that are battering down our defences. Anti-depressants are fighting a rearguard action in an attempt to not cede complete control to those forces of ruination and madness. The world beyond the wall is baying for our collapse, each and every one of us. But there is an answer.

The answer is US. And a whole lotta mindfulness.

Mindfulness has gone mainstream, with celebrity endorsement from Oprah Winfrey and Goldie Hawn. Meditation coaches, monks and neuroscientists are attempting to convince us that the answer lies within ourselves. With their psuedo-religious/science hybrid, the are claiming that the current crop of nuts can be cured by a mixture of meditiation and lotus positions.

Indeed, the founders of the mindfulness movement have grown ‘all evangelical y’all’ telling us that mindfulness “has the potential to ignite a universal or global renaissance.” So sayeth, Jon Kabat-Zinn (good name) who just happens to be the inventor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Mindfulness, he proclaims, “may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple of hundred years”.

Maybe I am not seeing this right. My thinking was that we attempt to find a cure for that which s intent upon harming us rather than find ways to accommodate and live with it. Having said that, it is not my business idea to set up Mindfulness centres across the world and serve inner-peace, using the same formula, right across the world.

Now I know why it’s called a Happy Meal.