Mindfulness as the Spiritual Heroin of Capitalism

Heroin was known for its numbing anaesthetic qualities even by the Chinese back in 1839 when they realised that the Chinese population was becoming more and more docile under the influence of British- imported opium.

Capitalism is failing to provide an egalitarian society and that means real suffering for millions of human beings. Inequality is on the rise as in 2017 we reached the point where 1% of the worlds population control 50% of the wealth.

Unless you belong to that 1%, the chances are that you spend your working day in a precarious job that has the end result of making someone else rich. You may have a full-time contract, but in Spain you can be sacked pretty much anytime. You will find that if you are ill, you can no longer go to the Doctor to get your free Public Health treatment, because your boss is no longer obliged to pay for your time at the doctors. You can either take a days holiday or you can lose a days pay.

You may find yourself working in a call centre to make ends meet and your daily activity is bullying and badgering people into pension plans, telephone contracts….just fill in the dots yourself. There will at all times be someone behind you bullying and badgering you into bullying and badgering more effectively and helping you hit those bullying and badgering targets.

If you are a woman, you’re more likely to be in a precarious low paid job, where you will be expected to clean 21 hotel rooms in a day and you’re only allowed 15 minutes to clean each room. You’ll be between 51 and 56 years old and your body will be held together by elastic bandages that help you get through the day without too much pain.

We are running scared, looking back over our shoulder to see who’s coming up behind us to take what little we have away from us.

Instead of rising up and protesting, we're meditating and becoming mindful

Capitalism’s answer to this has been a masterstroke in deception and manipulation. Relying on ancient eastern philosophies companies all over the world are helping their employees find relief through mindfulness and meditation.

When your back is breaking, or you’re being forced to break your own moral code, when you're underpaid and living in fear. Mindfulness is there to remind you that any toxic emotions you may demonstrate in the workplace are disruptive to workplace harmony, mindfulness will help you just observe your situation in a non-judgemental manner and will allow you to disattach to what is going on around you.

The passivity and individualistic nature of mindfulness makes it a perfect bedfellow for an ever more savage type of capitalism.

Mindfulness is the new opium for the masses

Non-attachment

I’ve always been attracted to the idea of non-attachment as promoted by Buddhist philosophy.

As someone who is invariably caught up in thoughts I often find myself attaching to the material world and in particular, outcomes. The very idea of being able to unattach is a very appealing one andI I can imagine a life of not suffering and being above all worldly pleasures.

Buddha, or Siddhartha as he was known as at the time of striking off to find enlightenment, came to the conclusion that the way to avoid the inevitability of human suffering was to detach from the constraints of pleasure, achievement, striving and reputation. Which he promptly did and found enlightenment.

His conclusion was reached one day when he’d managed to convince his father to let him go out for a chariot ride around the city where he was basically being kept a prisoner by his father. He had had a rather sheltered life and was surprised to encounter, first an old person, then a sick person and finally on his last chariot ride, a corpse.

It was at this moment that he realised the futility of human existence and that our ultimate destiny is old age, illness and death. The only way he could conceive of escaping from such suffering was to renounce the pleasures of life.

Of course the real pity of all this was that Siddhartha didn’t actually take the time to jump down off his chariot and have a quick chat with these suffering souls that he had encountered. He may have been surprised by the perception they had of their own existence.

He may have discovered that they may have been pretty content with their lives. You see people in general tend to adjust their expectations to their own reality, that is to say, as we get older we no longer expect to be able to do things that we could do when we were 20 and people who live in quite extreme poverty, although there are limits, tend to be just as happy and content with their lives, on a subjective level, as affluent middle aged middle management.

When Stephen Hawking was asked how he found the motivation to continue with his work given his physical condition, he replied that at the age of 21 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and from that moment his expectations became zero, so anything above that was a plus.

Buddha would’ve probably pitied Stephen Hawking more than Stephen hawking did himself.

But our expectations can adjust up as well as down. This can be seen in millionaire lottery winners, who after an initial increase in happiness, soon return to base default level as expectations about their own happiness increase.

People tend to adjust to adversity very well and after emotional or physical suffering our levels of contentment very quickly return to our default level as we adjust to new circumstances and adjust our expectations. In fact there is not one person I know who has gone through painful and difficult times that does not feel a better person for having done so. 

Cutting ourselves off from all worldly pleasures with the aim of avoiding suffering seems pointless, especially when it seems that suffering is a fundamental part of the human experience. On top of that, moving through adversity seems to make us better people.

Here in the West, we are privileged to live in a Democratic, more or less egalitarian society, where we’ve never been so healthy or lived so long. We enjoy culture and art and can argue about politics. We feel passionate about things and surely a life of unattachment is a life that lacks passion.

We are spiritual beings that are fortunate to enjoy a brief spell of worldly pleasure. Dive in I say, indulge and drink deeply from the well. Let’s make mistakes and embrace our neurosis, enjoy every moment of pain as we do every moment of pleasure. 

Always, always, always live well

Chris and Mirella

Chris and Mirella stood together high on the cliff top with majestic views over the whole valley below. As they looked yonder they could see the slaves of the science paradigm each heaving huge blocks of stone into place, there was a multitude, each with a very specific role in the construction of the pyramids built to honour and preserve the evidence based scientific paradigm. Each slave laying the block of stone that was to become their prison, and each slave learnt to see the pyramid as they had been told to see it by the wise teachers in the schools of learning without realising that they had forgotten how to question.

“¿Why should one question?” declared Mirella and it was true, because engraved on each of the pyramids were the words p=<0,05,  thus it was written from that moment on all knowledge must be p=<0,05 as a testament to it’s objectivity and all other knowledge which does not bear this sign shall be rejected and ridiculed, and so it came to pass.

As Chris and Mirella looked on an old man Kierkegaard came to them and declared “The people still suffer!” “¿Do you not see?” “The people no longer exist, but are lost completely to objectiveness.” Kierkegaard sunk deeper into his cloak and turned mumbling “mark my words!! Objective madness is the worse type of madness because one regards oneself as just another fact. People with objective madness have no soul.”

Chris turned to Mirella and asked “maybe the time has come to be authentic and admit our incoherencies.”

“I am always coherent!!!” cried Mirella, to which Chris answered “That may be so, but isn’t it also true that when we claim to be something we shed responsibility for our actions?”

Chris paused, “we can never just be, we chose and do”.

Mirella sunk deeper into her woollen jacket, for it was beginning to get cold, her voice trembled either from the cold or because it was the first time she felt uncertainty “But if I step outside of the scientific paradigm, what shall become of me?”

Chris wished there was a way to offer certainty but the truth must be told “Life will become meaningless; this is the price one must pay for being a free thinker. To be free means to assume freedom, for it is through our choices that we really become free. Accept the unavoidable, the here and now and assume the responsibility of our choice in every situation. For if we are what we do, then we are nothing but the choices we make.

“Are you suggesting that you and I..my life are all nothing?” despaired Mirella.

“On the contrary, we can only strive to be nothing; nothingness is a state which is never permanent, even if we achieve it, it cannot be maintained; It would be false to believe we are nothing, but striving to be nothing frees us from the restraints of dogma and paradigm.. When we lean on scientific paradigm we flee from our choices and our responsibility, the same as our ancestors relied on religious doctrine to avoid choices and responsibility. Who does evidence based intervention serve? Does it help the patient or does it help free the therapist of responsibility...?”

Chris turned up his collar as the winds began to chill his spine. “In the vain hope of becoming a CBT therapist, we shed our responsibility. The moment we make our bed with any school of thought we are relieved of all choice and responsibility and thus lost”.

Just at that moment the pyramids began to tremble. “You see? A theoretical framework is a fortress that we build for security, but beware for it is built upon the moving sands of uncertainty and change; any feeling of control is at best fleeting”.

“We must embrace freedom, for as much as we try to hide behind dogma and paradigms, we can never be liberated of our responsibility. We do not take an exam, there is no certificate, we cannot become, only strive to become without becoming. Once we become we stop striving and just are, we are safe in the knowledge that never again must we make another decision”.

Mirella shook her head and muttered “But being and becoming makes me feel good, should I reject that?”

“Feeling good is only temporary, it is doing that is important. What is more important to you, to feel good or live well? It is futile to try to be at one with oneself. Anxiously holding onto our theoretical framework enables us to avoid this truth and any thoughts we may have of being “right” are just thoughts and we should abstain from attaching importance to them”.

Mirella once more shook her head and replied “Surely we owe it to our clients to follow those who have gone before and what has proved to work?”

“But if I can’t make a decision free from dogma, what right have I to make decisions for others? Surely we need a committed response to each situation, not just a manual to follow. When we create our own values, we encourage our clients to be the artists of their own lives and not just followers of what has gone before”.

“When our clients come with anxiety, we should encourage them to embrace anxiety as bearer of the ultimate truth, that life is pointless. Temporary avoidance quickly disappears like sand through our fingers and objectivity can never be obtained because to understand something is to interpret it.”

Mirella turned to go as now it was getting dark, Chris thought he heard “You’re out of your fucking mind” but the wind carried it away

Globalization of Addiction

To get the full picture on addiction we have to look, not only at the ways in which it is bad for us, but also the way that substances provide something that is lacking in our lives. Something that family or society has been unable to provide, for whatever reasons.

We can consider addiction as the act of constantly seeking something outside ourselves to curb an insatiable yearning for relief or fulfillment. The aching emptiness is perpetual because the substances, objects or pursuits we hope will soothe it are not what we really need, although they did work for a while and gave temporary relief.  

Addiction is a dysfunctional way of attempting to escape from disconnection and an overwhelming feeling of fear and despair. Manifesting in a variety of shapes and forms, shopaholics, workaholics, gambling, internet, all are to a lesser or greater degree on the same continuum of dysfunctional lifestyles and an attempt to soothe something that is inside with something from the outside. It’s a form of self-harming and a failed attempt at taking back control, not dissimilar to the way an anorexic believes that the only thing they have control over in their life is the food that they ingest.

Some people are prepared to risk their lives for a brief moment of fulfilled life and a sense of connection to something.

The basis of all addiction lies in the central nervous system and neurochemicals known as neurotransmitters and their corresponding receptors. Although the Central nervous system and neurotransmitters exist, they do not exist in isolation and it’s essential for any real, in-depth understanding of addiction that we take into account the person in their entirety, that is to say in a holistic manner. The physiology of someone’s brain does not develop in isolation of an emotional and social context. On the contrary, it is very much influenced by and influences on the social and the emotional.

The false promise that substance or behaviour will make all the planets line up and everything will somehow fall into place makes them the false prophet of a distress free life. It would be wrong to label addictive behaviours as just a bad habit or a lack of willpower and falls short of understanding that all addiction is functional.

All addiction has its origins in emotional pain, whether conscious or unconscious. Powerful narcotics such as Heroin and Cocaine are anaesthetics and are extremely good at relieving pain.

A high percentage of people who engage in addictive behaviours have suffered trauma in childhood, although not all. Trauma is not a requirement for engaging in destructive behaviours, but in my clinical experience, there has been hurt, be it through a particular parenting style that cannot be called abuse, or through a deep-rooted feeling of disconnection with loved ones or the world. One thing that advances in neuropsychology show us is that stress through adversity in childhood has an enormous effect on the physiology of the central nervous system.

But its not just childhood trauma that creates an aching hole in our soul. The way society is constructed in a Neo-liberal market is enough to make my Conservative grandfather turn in his grave.

Modern market culture promotes a feeling of emptiness as we all strive to be the best we can. The fabricated Facebook shopfront of other people’s lives and successes can leave us reflecting on our own failures.  We all feel emptiness; dissatisfaction and frustration in an ever-globalizing world, but many of us have found tactics for keeping them at bay through distraction, be it through professional success, riches, sex, substances or addictive behaviour. But I know through personal experience that the moment this distraction stops, a void of emptiness can open up before us producing a continual white noise of anxiety buzzing away in the background that gets louder and louder as the years go by.

Drugs can offer relief to the lost and you only have to look at the way indigenous communities have dealt with the destruction of their way of life. When the glue of society’s fabric fails, substances are always there to step up the challenge.

It is not a coincidence that drug abuse is on the rise. In 2016, 20 million Americans suffered from a substance disorder, with 2 million addicted to opiates. The social fabric that held societies together is being ripped apart. The Market demands that we are a mobile, fluid workforce, uprooted and disconnected from society and from any ideology that may interfere with the globalised market forces, such as a sense of community, patriotism or religion. Certainty in the job market no longer exists making planning for the future a source of anxiety and worry.

Modern day addiction is neither a disease or a moral failure, it is a maladaptive means of survival. One where the drug user tries to buffer himself from a feeling of complete disconnection from society. It is a form of adaption that is never going to work and one can never feel whole through drug use, which will not only affect the health of the drug user, but also leave them feeling hollow, empty and craving for more.

Traditional drug care has always been based on the individual, but without a caring, inclusive and egalitarian society, recovery will always be against the odds.