often taught as though it were a glorified version of an executive stress ball. It's

a tool you want in your tool kit. It prepares you emotionally to go into a new experience

with a positive attitude and you know you're not hauling around baggage from the past.

And that's true. Actually having focus and having your mind in the present moment is

a little bit of a superpower in situations that we're all in from day to day. But that

actually undervalues what mindfulness really is and its true potential. It's more like

the large hadron collider in that it's a real tool for making some fundamental discoveries

about the nature of the mind. And one of these discoveries is that the sense of self that

we all carry around from day to day is an illusion. And cutting through that illusion

I think is actually more important than stress reduction or any of the other conventional

benefits that are accurately ascribed to mindfulness.

The enemy of mindfulness and really of any meditation practice is being lost in thought,

is to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking. Now the problem is not thoughts

themselves. We need to think. We need to think to do almost anything that makes us human

– to reason, to plan, to have social relationships, to do science. Thinking is indispensable to

us but most of us spend every moment of our waking lives thinking without knowing that

we're thinking. And this automaticity is a kind of scrim thrown over at the present

moment through which we view everything. And it's distorting of our lives. It's distorting

of our emotions. It engineers our unhappiness in every moment because most of what we think

is quite unpleasant. We're judging ourselves, we're judging others, we're worrying about

the future, we're regretting the past, we're at war with our experience in subtle or coarse

ways. And much of this self-talk is unpleasant and diminishing our happiness in every moment.

And so meditation is a tool for cutting through that.

It's interrupting this continuous conversation we're having with ourselves. So that is

– that in and of itself is beneficial. But there are features of our experience that

we don't notice when we're lost in thought. So, for instance, every experience you've

ever had, every emotion, the anger you felt yesterday or a year ago isn't here anymore.

It arises and it passes away. And if it comes back in the present moment by virtue of your

thinking about it again, it will subside again when you're no longer thinking about it.

Now this is something that people tend not to notice because we rather than merely feel

an emotion like anger, we spend our time thinking of all the reasons why we have every right

to be angry. And so the conversation keeps this emotion in play for much, much longer

than its natural half-life. And if you're able, through mindfulness to interrupt this

conversation and simply witness the feeling of anger as it arises you'll find that you

can't be angry for more than a few moments at a time. If you think you can be angry for

a day or even an hour without continually manufacturing this emotion by thinking without

knowing that you're thinking, you're mistaken. And this is something you can just witness

for yourself. This is – again this is an objective truth claim about the nature of

subjective experience. And it's testable. And mindfulness is the tool that you would

use to test it.

One problem is that most of the people who teach mindfulness – and I know many of the

great vipassana teachers in the West and in the East and I have immense respect for these

people. I learned to meditate in a traditionally Buddhist context. But most people who teach

mindfulness are still in the religion business. They're still – they're propagating

Western Buddhism or American Buddhism. The connection to the tradition of Buddhism in

particular is explicit and I think there are problems with that because when you, if you

are declaring yourself a Buddhist you are part of the problem of religious sectarianism

that has needlessly shattered our world. And I think we have to get out of the religion

business. That whatever is true about mindfulness and meditation and any introspective methodology

that will deliver truths about the nature of consciousness is non-sectarian. It's

no more Buddhist than physics is Christian. You know the Christians invented physics or

discovered physics but anyone talking about Christian physics clearly doesn't understand

the significance of what we've understood through that means. It's the same with meditation.

There's going to come a time where we no longer are tempted to talk about Buddhist

meditation as opposed to any other form. We're just talking about turning consciousness upon

itself and what can be discovered by that process.

Now it just so happens that Buddhism almost uniquely has given us a language and a methodology

to do this in a way that is really well designed for export to secular culture because you

can get to the core truths of Buddhism, the truth of selflessness, the ceaseless impermanence

of mental phenomenon, the intrinsic unsatisfactoriness of experience because you can't hold on

to anything. No matter how pleasant an experience is it arises and then passes away. And no

matter how much you protect yourself, unpleasant experience is destined to come. These features

of our minds can be fully tested and understood without believing anything on insufficient

evidence. So it's true to say that despite all of the spooky metaphysics and unjustified

claims within Buddhism you can get to the core of it without any faith claim and without

being intellectually dishonest. But it is intellectually dishonest, I think, to keep

talking about these truths in an exclusively Buddhist context because it's misleading.

It subtly gives the message that in order to have rich, meaningful, important spiritual

lives we must somehow continue to endorse religious sectarianism. We must still frame

this inquiry with an ancient allegiance to one accidental strand of human culture as

opposed to using all of the concepts and tools and conversations that are available to us

in the twenty-first century.