In this article, an attempt is made to free mindfulness from its modern psychologically utilitarian interpretation and display its ontological-existential essence. To do that, the essay offers the existential roots of human suffering and the ontological meaning of attachment that is found at the basis of suffering. Heidegger’s philosophy is used to show that due to our anxious rejection of the nothingness that co-constitutes the Being of beings, we exist in a mode in which beings can only be experienced as objects of attachment. This ontological predicament is explicated in terms of radical alienation from the world, which takes the form of the subject–object dualism and founds what we normally take to be our psychological identity. The essay stresses that this predicament cannot be overcome by mindfulness as long as mindfulness is understood as a technique used to utilize one’s psychological resources. This impossibility is tightly related to the paradox that one cannot achieve liberation by intending to do so. Heidegger’s ideas of “letting-be,” “objectless waiting,” and “attention to Beyng” are then applied to show how mindfulness meditation can afford one to become acquainted with a nonintentional dimension of experience wherein liberation from suffering may occur.
Introduction
In this article, an attempt is made for a Heidegger-based interpretation of mindfulness meditation. In particular, mindfulness is liberated from its modern psychologically utilitarian interpretation and displays its ontological-existential essence. To do that, I analyze the existential roots of human suffering and the ontological meaning of attachment that is found at the basis of suffering. Heidegger’s philosophy is used to show that due to our anxious rejection of the nothingness that co-constitutes the Being of beings, we exist in a mode in which beings can only be experienced as objects of attachment. This ontological predicament is then explicated in terms of radical alienation from the world, which takes the form of the subject–object dualism and founds what we normally take to be our psychological identity. It is argued that this predicament cannot be overcome by mindfulness as long as mindfulness is understood as a technique used to utilize one’s psychological resources. This impossibility is tightly related to the paradox that one cannot achieve liberation by intending to do so. In the final section Heidegger’s ideas of “letting-be,” “objectless waiting,” and “attention to Beyng” are applied to show how mindfulness meditation can afford one to become acquainted with a nonintentional dimension of experience wherein liberation from suffering may occur.
Heidegger and Mindfulness Meditation
In Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), a book that is sometimes called Heidegger’s second major work, Heidegger opposes his thinking to Buddhism without giving any apparent reason. The opposition appears in parentheses following the idea that, to approach the truth of Beyng, we must stop experiencing ourselves in terms of beings: “The less that humans are beings, the less that they adhere obstinately to the beings they find themselves to be, all the nearer do they come to being” (Heidegger, 2012a, p. 134).
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This detachment from an immediate, unthought, and ungrounded self-understanding is said to be “the opposite of Buddhism” (Ibid.). The very fact that Heidegger mentions Buddhism in this context shows that he is aware that Buddhism also speaks about stopping one’s adherence to common forms of self-understanding. Yet, it is important to Heidegger to emphasize that not every attempt to distance oneself from what one finds oneself to be brings him or her closer to the truth of Beyng.
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Although Heidegger’s knowledge of Buddhism during the 1930s is quite limited, the critical point here is that the Buddhist practice might indeed be interpreted in various ways, not all of which bring one closer to one’s true nature and to what Heidegger called the truth of Beyng.
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Moreover, the arrival of Buddhism and the meditative practices associated with it to the West is a grandiose event of translation, both in a literal sense as a translation of the Buddhist texts and teachings and, most importantly, as a translation of a peculiar sense of spirituality into something that would make sense for the West. In the quoted passage from Contributions, Heidegger speaks about the specifically Western way of thinking and experiencing that has been unfolding since the ancient Greeks and has “evolved” into the modern scientific-technological mode of experiencing ourselves and the world around us. It is this history of Western metaphysics that must be overcome to free the human essence from its current distorted mode of existence. It would be naive, however, to think that a mere introduction of a non-Western practice or philosophy could facilitate this liberation. On the contrary, I am convinced that the reason for Heidegger’s objection to Buddhism lies in the fact that Heidegger has already received a translation of the meaning of Buddhism into terms appropriate for Western metaphysics. Namely, any non-Western philosophy that enters the field of Western thought is being accommodated—mostly unintentionally—into the world of conceptual thinking that has characterized the West since the Greeks and that is flourishing today also in the spheres of humanities in general and psychology in particular. The best example of such a translation is the fact that mindfulness meditation became very popular in the modern West yet only due to a peculiar interpretation of its essence and its aim. Namely, the best sellers on the subject, as well as the scientific research of mindfulness, are of an essentially psychological and utilitarian nature. For example, Farb and his colleagues (2010) show that mindfulness training may alter the neural mechanisms underlying sadness, thus reducing vulnerability to dysphoric reactivity, while Amishi Jha, in several studies, shows that mindfulness may utilize one’s attention in a way that promotes cognitive resilience in high-stress cohorts [Jha et al., 2010a], and cause improvements in one’s working memory capacity, thus protecting against functional impairments associated with high-stress contexts [Jha et al., 2010b]). In general, mindfulness is shown to be beneficial for a variety of cognitive emotion regulation strategies. Combining cognitive and emotional factors is especially effective in tasks requiring attentional performance and cognitive flexibility. As one study says: “Meditators performed significantly better than nonmeditators on all measures of attention” (More & Malinowski, 2009). Overall, mindfulness is being appropriated as a technique for reducing disturbing emotions, achieving better cognitive performance, and generally better adapting to the growing demands of the modern world. In short, it became a therapeutic technique.
To be sure, mindfulness’s alleged positive psychological effects are more than welcomed; indeed, even if mindfulness had nothing more to offer, these effects alone would be enough to proclaim it as one of the most valuable gifts the Western world has ever received. Nevertheless, such a gift would not be enough for Heidegger since—as much as it improves one’s life—it does not aim at a radical transformation of human existence, to which, as I am convinced, both Heidegger and Buddha have sought the way. That is to say, the fundamental assumption of this essay is that the psychological interpretation of mindfulness conceals its true spiritual aim. Although in Heidegger’s times, this interpretation was not as explicit as it is today, the metaphysical foundation of this interpretation was already predominant back then, at least for someone as sensitive to this foundation as Heidegger was. The zest of this foundation can be shortly presented in the following way: meditation is a tool that one can use to become better by leaning on one’s own resources. In other words, meditation helps me utilize my own resources and facilitates the process in which I make myself better/freer/calmer/smarter, etc. If Heidegger did indeed understand Buddhism in this way, it makes perfect sense to say that his way of detaching from the adherence to common self-understanding is just the opposite of the Buddhist way.
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Indeed, Heidegger (2012a, p. 22) writes in Contributions that to carry out a dislodging of human essence (i.e., to overcome the metaphysical self-understanding of human existence) by relying on our own resources is even more presumptuous than seeing human beings as a measure. That is, those who think they can force a change in their essence do not only still adhere to the predominant understanding (measure) of what it means to be human but also fall into the arrogance of claiming predominance over their own essence. Heidegger associates Western psychology precisely with such an attitude of self-enhancing technology and will to power; for Heidegger, psychology and technology belong together.
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This does not only mean that psychology became a sort of technique but that it is founded on a peculiar interpretation of human essence, experience, and, foremost, of Being itself. In other words, the current psychologically utilitarian interpretation of mindfulness is based on a particular ontological errancy. The main aim of this essay is first to uncover the ontology of the human predicament characterized by suffering and/as attachment (Section 2) and to show that mindfulness meditation—if taken beyond its psychological interpretation—may offer a way of becoming liberated from this predicament (Section 3). These aims are achieved by applying Heidegger’s thinking both for reconstructing the problem and for clarifying the solution. Finally, the importance of a correct understanding of the mindfulness practice by the practitioner is stressed (Section 4). In the end, it should be evident that, rather than being the “opposite” of what Heidegger intends, Buddhist meditation can, in fact, serve as a practice that helps fulfill Heidegger’s intention of human transformation.
The Ontological Origins of Human Suffering
In the previous section, I pointed out that Heidegger’s idea of the all-encompassing power of Western metaphysics finds its expression in the way mindfulness meditation is understood and studied today. Namely, mindfulness became a technique, a sort of “psychological technology” that can be used to improve oneself. This interpretation of mindfulness assumes a psychological subject who “works” according to specific a priori natural laws and has the power to change oneself in the scope of these laws. Most scientific studies of mindfulness are accordingly oriented toward empirical psychology in general and neuroscience in particular. As studies such as Farb’s show (e.g., Farb et al., 2010), the practice of mindfulness can—among other things—alleviate certain forms of suffering. However, it is questionable whether it makes sense in the scope of such psychological thinking to speak of achieving the central aim of Buddhism, namely, the overcoming of suffering as such. Merab Mamardashvili writes that Buddha was one of the first true philosophers because he said: “don’t think whether the world is finite or infinite, caused or uncaused, but think about the fact that everything is suffering” (Mamardashvili, 2014, p. 643). This phrase, Mamardashvili explains, does not simply mean the empirical fact that we suffer but emphasizes that we must think this way. In a more Heideggerian style, we may say that suffering characterizes our ontological situation; it belongs to the mode of our existence. For both Heidegger and Mamardashvili, philosophy begins when the questioner is questioned in her mode of existence (including suffering); only then can the legitimacy of all further questions be mindfully appraised. Although the roots of suffering are given in the fundamental Buddhist doctrine of attachment (“The Four Noble Truths”), the very notion of “attachment” is thought of today psychologically and thus becomes unquestioned. It seems self-explanatory that one clings to certain (pleasant) things and repels other (unpleasant) things. To think the fact that everything is suffering, on the contrary, requires seeking the root of this fact beyond the immediately available axioms of psychology. In what follows, an interpretation of certain Heidegger’s ideas is offered, illuminating the ontological source of suffering/attachment and displaying a larger context of the human existential predicament.
The Nothingness and Existential Anxiety
According to Heidegger, Being has been interpreted as a constant presence since the Greeks and until (i.e., including) modern science.
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That basically means that we interpret things in the world as “hanging” on their own, that is, as simply present and fully available for our investigation and manipulation (hence the predominance of technology). Yet, as Heidegger explains in many ways, such an idea of existence is ungrounded and—more importantly—does not fit the way beings manifest in our direct experience of the world. We may say that the “positive” aspect of the world, namely, the determinable ways in which things show themselves to us, is only the present side of what is. However, our experience is also constituted by various forms of absence. It is this “Being” of the “not” that Heidegger sees as remaining unthought in metaphysics. Notably, the “not” or the “nothing” does not belong exclusively to human experience but co-constitutes the very Being of things in the world. In Being and Time, Heidegger first presented an explicit experience of the nothing as occurring in the mood of existential anxiety. In anxiety, the “it is nothing and nowhere” becomes manifest; what is experienced is not a being at all but the fact that one has anxiety in the face of the world, i.e., in the face of the very accessibility of beings in their Being (Heidegger, 2001, p. 269). In “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger explains that what we are anxious about is the impossibility of determinacy (Heidegger, 1976, p. 111). The mood of anxiety is thus a paradigmatic example of a particular kind of experientiality, which emphasizes within experience not the present determinable element of beings—which we usually take for beings as such—but the way this element comes out of nothingness always in relation to other elements (the world) and to our own momentary self-understanding. Namely, beings never become “full-fledged substances,” of which we could say that their presence is solid and constant but are always also concealed and constituted by nothingness. In some texts, Heidegger describes the belongingness of the nothingness to beings in terms of emptiness, making the association of his view with the Buddhist doctrine of Śūnyatā almost inevitable. Both in “The Thing” and in “Country Path Conversations,” Heidegger speaks about the essential element of emptiness in what makes up a thing. Emptiness, says Heidegger, is the ungraspable in things (Heidegger, 2016, p. 85); it is what makes up the thingness of a thing beyond its objective standing-forth (Heidegger, 2013, p. 166).
The emptiness of the nothingness here does not mean a simple nihil, like an unoccupied space, but an anxiety-inducing abyss as a creative origin of all possible determinability of beings.
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That is not to say that beings also have some hidden, mystical characteristics, but that the very sense of existing as a being, that is, of manifesting in the world, includes being abyssal.
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Being (Sein) conceals itself and only in this way lets beings (Seinde) be. Moreover, this refusal or withdrawal of Being is experienceable as it constitutes the way anything is present for our experience.
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Anxiety is precisely the attunement in which the refusal, that is, the nihilating pervasion of the nothingness, becomes predominant over the familiar presence of beings-as-a-whole.
The Ontological Origin of the Psychological Subject
Now, after this short excursion into the idea of existential anxiety, we can begin fathoming the ontological origin of psychological subjectivity and the suffering that necessarily accompanies it. According to Heidegger, human experience is not a subjective representation of a closed world of (determinate) entities but a participation in an open region in which the concealed essence of Being unfolds as the basis of the uniqueness of beings. That is, although in our current mode of existence, we think and experience things in the world as instances of a universal essence (every apple is just another “apple”), this is a radical deformation of the essence of experience on the one hand, and of the experienced beings on the other hand. What is being lost in this deformation is nothing less than the uniqueness of Beyng and beings. As Heidegger writes in Contributions, were we experiencing Beyng in its uniqueness as an event, “[t]here the essence is not the general but is the essential occurrence precisely of what is unique in each case and of what constitutes the rank of the being” (Heidegger, 2012a, p. 53). Nevertheless, what allows for such uniqueness is precisely the self-concealment of Beyng (Heidegger, 2012b, p. 129). In other words, the nothingness constitutes the mode of existence of everything that is in such a way that every being is essentially indeterminable to some extent, thus always remaining open for its own creative re-determination (e.g., in the work of art or meditative experience) and unique in the sense of simply being what it is, incomparable to anything else. The blooming of the rose is then an event that “has no why” and is absolutely unique in its Being.
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However, Heidegger says, we only rarely experience such a pure event of what can be called the “suchness” of the blooming rose (Heidegger, 2005, p. 117). The reason for the rareness of such experience is also the reason for the human predicament and suffering—we reject and flee anxiously the concealment of Beyng, that is, the nothingness that pertains to all things.
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The question then arises: How can one flee the abyss (i.e., the nothingness) if it belongs to Beyng? In a sense, one must flee from Beyng while still encountering everything that is. In Why Poets? we read that the only possible way to both encounter beings and flee the abyss is to create barriers in the open of Beyng (Heidegger, 2002, p. 213). Representational consciousness arises by thus trying to defend itself from the abyss and constructing barriers against the open. Yet, rejecting the emptiness of things by letting the world only appear in terms of what is representable is terrifying and unsettling (Heidegger, 2013, p. 164). To enact a defensive attitude toward the open to which one belongs is to enclose oneself and to become excluded from the open (Heidegger, 2002, p. 213). In such exclusion, we lose our nearness to things (Heidegger, 2013, p. 164). We may say that this is the source of psychological subjectivity in the sense of a self-grounding will: In the face of the abyssal nothingness, we—as human beings—have enclosed ourselves by creating defensive barriers between ourselves and the world, yet, since we can never be fully detached from the open, we experience an ever-increasing pressure of the abyss (the call of Beyng) and must ever enhance the defensive walls of our subjective self-grounding. The so-called human egoism results from the situation in which we deny the proper ground of our existence (the abyssal character of Beyng), yet we still require some ground and, encapsulated within our own defenses against the abyss, we have only ourselves to rely on.
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Hence, I suggest thinking of the self-centered will-to-power, which, according to Heidegger, characterizes the history of the West and culminates in a destructive technological will-to-will, as a covert rebellion against the nothingness (or the abyss). Indeed, Heidegger himself names “rebellion” or “uprising” as the origin of subjectivity (Heidegger, 2016, p. 154).
The Existential Roots of the Buddhist Doctrine of Suffering
In this light, we can rethink the existential foundations of human suffering. Namely, by emphasizing that existential anxiety is not a “subjective” phenomenon that can be “explained” by a common-sense fear of death but is an ontological event of resistance to the abyssal character of the world, indeed an event that first lets something like a psychological subjectivity (and a “fear of death”) arise, we can figure out why beings manifest in a way that causes suffering. Namely, suffering can be seen not as a result of something that the psychological subject does “wrong” but as the mode of existence that shrinks in front of the nothingness of Beyng and obstructs both the open character of experienced beings and the open character of the experiencer. Moreover, we may suggest that the primary character of attachment at the root of suffering expresses a rebellion against the nothingness. The defenses which, as Heidegger stresses, exclude us from the world must be comprehended foremost on the level of our preconscious and preintentional relation to beings. Since the “object” of our rebellion is the abyss of Beyng, it is an ontological rebellion, i.e., a rebellion that constitutes our mode of existence. Accordingly, although in principle we reject the abyssal indeterminable character of (the Being of) beings, our rebellion also and most immediately characterizes our relation to experienced beings. That is to say, we do not let beings be what they are in the way they are. In particular, since our psychological subjectivity is based on a rebellion, it is easy to see that it rejects whatever does not comply with its individual historical self-concept. However, such a rejection and a clinging to something—which is simply a rejection of not-having it—are only possible as an entanglement in beings. Namely, we cannot explicitly rebel against the abyss but only under cover of a rebellion against something. It is this defensive rebellion that we need to overcome. As Heidegger stresses, the only way to overcome the defenses of representational consciousness and be appropriated back into the open is to become absolutely defenseless and be a “yes sayer” to everything life offers,
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including death. To cling to beings, on the contrary, is to say “no” to their transience, or, as Heidegger puts it in Anaximander’s Saying, to introduce a dis-jointure into the harmonious jointure of everything that manifests only “for a while”:
The dis-jointure consists in the fact that what stays awhile tries to have its while understood only as continuation. Thought from out of the jointure of the while, staying as persistence is insurrection on behalf of sheer endurance. In presenting as such presencing which lets everything that presences stay in the region of unconcealment—continuance asserts itself. In this rebellious whiling, that which stays awhile insists on sheer continuation. It presences, therefore, without and against the jointure of the while. (Heidegger, 2002, p. 268)
To reject the abyssal character of beings is to force beings to manifest as merely enduring, that is, as constantly present. Considering the problem of attachment, it means that beings are being reified into objects of desire-repulsion to which one must cling. Namely, it is not that we experience beings as they are and then do something wrong (psychologically) to create an attachment to them. Rather, there is no other way to experience beings but by being attached to them as long as beings are being deprived of the concealed/abyssal element of the nothingness. My idea is that in both Heidegger and Buddhism, there is an important relation between the doctrine of emptiness/nothingness and the human predicament. Indeed, I suggest that what was earlier described as the existential origins of psychological subjectivity corresponds to the role of selfhood in the Buddhist doctrine of suffering and attachment. In particular, the abyss-less manifestation of beings necessitates attachment for the following reasons.
First, beings are experienced as being “too real.” That is not to say that beings as such are “not real,” but that they are “real enough” without the need to be fully determinable or constantly present. The “extra realness” that is being added to beings by a psychological subject consists in beings’ asserting themselves as a reality that is only real in terms of sheer continuation and full determination. Yet, for a being to present itself as something that is fully determinable and that can continuously exist as such, it must be transformed into and reduced to a particular subjective projection of the experiencer. Only then can a being manifest as real for the subject. This transfiguration of a thing into an object of one’s inner subjective world creates a simulacrum that feels “more certain and real” (i.e., is hyperreal) as it was deprived of its uncertainty by “filling” its undeterminable part with the experiencer’s own self.
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Accordingly, the attachment is never to the thing but is always to one’s own selfhood.
This brings us to the second reason. That selfhood in terms of which the psychological subject renders the world of beings (by projecting itself upon beings and reducing beings into the desirable-repulsive reification of what is projected)
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is not human selfhood per se but an artificial construct which—to avoid the abyssal indeterminacy of its own existence—strives for a psychological consistency. Indeed, if beings are to be kept constant, the terms on which the constancy of their realness is experienced must themselves be sustained as something more or less constant. Moreover, the need to deprive beings of nothingness is also a need to deprive oneself of nothingness—the two motivations are merely two sides of the same event of one’s anxious encounter with the open region of Beyng. The two are strictly separated only after introducing the subject–object distinction, which lies in the foundation of representational consciousness; namely, the separation between the two motivations already belongs to the results of one’s fleeing the abyss and being excluded from the world.
The artificial selfhood which seeks consistency—and which we usually take to be our true subjectivity—is what Merab Mamardashvili calls a “point of singularity of individual experience” (Mamardashvili, 2014, p. 79), within which, for example, one does not merely live but also has fulfilled oneself in one’s human dignity and one’s high ideals, became “self-identified.” All this, says Mamardashvili, cannot be taken apart (Ibid.). That is to say, one cannot “get rid” of one’s self-identity and reach one’s true self by attempting to do so intentionally. Not only will all one’s explicit motivations and actions stealthily continue to reinforce the core of one’s psychological identity, but the very interpretation of such liberation in terms of some determinate goal excludes a priori the abyssal in-determinability which one allegedly tries to welcome. Therefore, Heidegger stresses that to find the essence of the human, we must look away from the human (Heidegger, 2016, p. 68). The word “human” is here used with two different emphases: If we want to liberate ourselves and find our true human essence as belonging to the open region of Beyng, we should not try to study and manipulate our quasi-human psychological selfhood. Such a manipulation would be a kind of willing that is in truth a rebellion against the abyss and hence would be unable to bring us closer to it.
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Moreover, psychological introspection belongs to representational consciousness, which can only observe that which is identical to itself. What we need, however, is to break off the rational identity of ourselves with our (psychological) “selves” (as well as, e.g., an identity of a blooming rose as a numerically concrete “rose” that “does the blooming”).
This is the reason why classic phenomenology (such as Husserl’s) is useless here.
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We may say with Mamardashvili that classic phenomenology assumes that its object is available (and identifiable) for intentional inspection any time the observer wills to observe it (Mamardashvili, 2014, p. 273). However, such an object is, as previously discussed, a simulacrum, and whatever formal structure we succeed in “reading off” from it (e.g., Kant’s or Husserl’s categories) is nothing but a set of universal conditions for being a simulacrum, that is, for being reified into whatever subjective entity one can experience as real (i.e., constantly present) in terms of one’s own identity-sustaining projections. Moreover, the phenomenological will to observe is of a specifically intentional nature—it can will only what has been already transformed into a subjectively representable entity. Classic phenomenology thus avoids the nothingness and operates within the walls of one’s defenses against the open. Heidegger, on the contrary, speaks of “reaching into the abyss” and becoming absolutely defenseless, thus returning to the open and fulfilling one’s essence in terms of this belongingness. Accordingly, if the roots of human suffering are based on our attachment to beings, which results from our exclusion from the world, and if my Heidegger-inspired analysis of the existential-ontological nature of this exclusion as a rebellion against the abyss is correct, we should be able to achieve a nonpsychological interpretation of mindfulness meditation as a practice that embodies those principles of Heidegger’s thinking, which pertain directly to human transformation beyond the grip of representational consciousness and the suffering that it entails.
Mindfulness: Making Peace With the Abyss
In light of what was discussed as the ontological origin of attachment (which is the source, or better, the existential form of human suffering), we can agree that if mindfulness meditation can indeed help become liberated from attachment, it must allow the practitioner to get beyond the limitations of representational consciousness. That is to say, one must dis-entangle from the hyperreality of the simulacra constructed based on a mixture of real beings deprived of their abyssal element of “nothingness” and the identity-sustaining projections of one’s psychological subjectivity, which cover up this deprivation. Both the illusory nature of beings and the psychological self-identity of the subject must be dissipated. In Buddhist terms, this would mean—as Nishitani puts it—achieving an ego-less, absolute selfhood “as nonobjectifiable nothingness in the conversion that takes place within personality” (Nishitani, 1983, p. 73). Such a self-less selfhood would then be “the home-ground on which we are what we are in our self-nature and the home ground on which things are what they are in themselves” (Nishitani, 1983, p. 107). The tricky point to grasp is how our psychological self-identity can be dissipated on its own rather than destroyed by the subject. As it will be presented here shortly, meditation is just what allows preparation for such an event of self-dissipation.
Foremost, it is crucial to remember that the entire problem of psychological self-identity and the reification of beings into objects began with the rebellion against the abyss. The rebellion stage is unavoidable as it signifies a leap from being an animal to being a human experiencing the world—to be human is to understand Being, that is, to face (even if by fleeing it) the abyssal openness of the universe and leave behind the blissful state of mindless assurance in its realness and determinability. However, one can never really close oneself entirely against the abyss; one can never be entirely excluded from the open. Accordingly, the open draws us back into the harmony of its openness. Although Beyng withdraws from us (i.e., remains concealed), Heidegger insists that it “draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it immediately, or at all” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 9). Moreover, the very human existence, as being constantly drawn into the open, is pointing into the withdrawal (Ibid.). This, Heidegger says, is what defines human existence as such, namely, to be a pointer or a sign of the abyssal withdrawal of the open. Basically, it means that we do not have to do anything particular to be liberated from the barriers that we constructed against the open but only allow or let the drawing power of the open do its work. More so, this letting-draw should be the most natural thing to us as it fulfills our very essence as the signs of its drawing-withdrawing truth. Heidegger even goes as far as to interpret Erfahrung (German for “experience”) by stressing that “the ‘fahren’ in ‘erfahren’ has the original meaning of going, of drawing or being drawn somewhere” (Heidegger, 2002, p. 139). Namely, human experience is originally not a subjective representation of some independent realm but a participation in an already occurring being-drawn into the each time unique event of Being-in-the-world. Accordingly, my idea is that mindfulness meditation is precisely the nonactivity that allows us to be drawn back or, at least, to become aware of the dimension of our existence in which this drawing can be experienced and appropriated.
In particular, trying to “just sit” and contemplate one’s breath is a trick that does not aim at becoming more focused and efficient in one’s daily tasks—though such focus and efficiency do result from consistent practice—but at breaking through the tendency of consciousness to seek some intentional object. Indeed, we should seek a nonintentional consciousness (sometimes called “no-mind”). We should do it for two reasons: First, all our current intentional objects are simulacra and can only be seen as such if we refrain from the very tendency to intend them as objects; second, one can notice during the praxis the anxious need to grasp anything whatsoever (an idea, a memory, a feeling) and fade out into it. Namely, the attempt to remain focused on one’s breath and let all other intentional objects pass by without stealing one’s self-awareness reveals a specific space “between” the intentional objects passing by and the level of experience that does not cling to them but remains empty. This space “between,” if one stays long enough with it, points toward the direction of the drawing of the open; yet, at the same time, it is experienced (at least by the beginner) as a vacuum that actively seeks to be filled with intentional objects. Indeed, one can discern a particular anxiousness in this tendency to cling to any object and become absorbed in it. When, on the other hand, one maintains a neutral attitude—one that does not trigger the desire-repulsion identity-sustaining mechanism in relation to the practice itself—and remains open to see what happens, one enters the state of object-less waiting.
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Such a waiting, Heidegger points out, is not an awaiting upon something but a leaving open that upon which we wait (Heidegger, 2016, p. 75). Such a waiting “lets itself be involved in the open itself” (Ibid.). Namely, although intentional objects can still populate our minds, the focus of our experience shifts away from intentionality without ceasing to be an experience. This shift is crucial since in order for it to be maintained, one must let go—at least to some degree—of the subjective projection of one’s self-identity (which is always directed onto some projected simulacrum) and, at the same time, of one’s existential fear of a nonintentional experience. The gap between our artificially maintained focus (e.g., on the breath) and the swirl of intentional objects in our minds allows a friendly acquaintance with the dimension of experience, which is essentially undeterminable, objectless, yet also engulfing in a way that first may be experienced as threatening. The threat is real indeed, yet only for our psychological self-identity and only to the degree that we are unable to enact it without becoming it.
With some cautiousness, we may say that the object-less waiting maintained in mindfulness meditation waits for an experience of Beyng. We must be cautious not to think of this as an intentional experience of something but think of the experience of Beyng as a shift in our experience from the intentional mode in which my “I” is prior to something experienceable and is related to it, to the mode of participating in an experience of Beyng, that is, in an experience that belongs to the open and in which I experience myself as myself by partaking in it. Heidegger relates such an experience of Beyng to a specific mode of ontological attention which is not a subjective act but a letting-encounter (Heidegger, 2001, p. 74). This letting-encounter, however, is the opposite of the defensive stance against the nothingness and the abyssal nature of beings. Indeed, Heidegger stresses that the current mode of human existence is characterized by an inattentiveness to Beyng (Heidegger, 2012b, p. 147). Remembering that Beyng conceals itself and withdraws, we understand that attentiveness to Beyng is precisely the attentiveness to the nothingness that pertains to everything that is. While in the previous section, it was insinuated that the lack of such attentiveness constitutes the origin of human suffering, now we can state that in mindfulness meditation one can let this attentiveness grow as one maintains the gap between oneself and the intentional objects which—due to their mode of manifestation—support one’s turning away from Beyng. The dimension of a nonintentional experience draws us back by drawing our attention to a more original mode of attentiveness.
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Concluding Thoughts
Notably, an explicit awareness of the draw of the open, which allows one to be properly drawn, is what Heidegger calls thinking (Heidegger, 1976, p. 17). Perhaps the most important point of this essay is that the meditative practice is only what it is if it is thought correctly. Otherwise, we may get positive results but never notice our own essence, which calls us and requires our mindful attention. The attention to what we “do” in meditation must be mindful in the sense of Heidegger’s Besinnung. Besinnung, Heidegger says, is a question that searches into the meaning of our belongingness to Being (Heidegger, 2012a, p. 36). It is, he continues, a meditation (Besinnung) on oneself, not as a reflection on ourselves as given beings—that would still be an intentional experiencing precluded a priori from threatening the psychological subject on which our attachment to beings is dependent—but “the grounding of the truth of selfhood out of the domain of what is proper to Da-sein” (Ibid.). Applied to the practice of mindfulness, this means that the self must become a question to itself, and the proper domain of its essence has to be sought for and experienced. As Keiji Nishitani stresses, when our selfhood becomes a question, it lets the negation of the abyss emerge from the ground of our existence (Nishitani, 1983, p. 4). Rather than representing or intending nothingness, we allow it to appropriate us in the mode of letting ourselves to become a question. For that, we must learn the skill of inviting attention to the difference between ourselves as experiencers and the intentionality of our common experience, which, as Nishitani stresses, “block[s] off the way to an opening up of that horizon on which nihility appears and self-being becomes a question” (Ibid.). An overcoming of the subject-object distinction that arose as a ground for setting up defenses against the abyss requires a reunification of the experiencer with the original nonintentional event of experiencing.
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This, however, requires letting ourselves be drawn back to this event without enacting resistance against the intentional objects during the meditation. Instead, we must remain distant and watch them mindfully so that their hyperreality could dissolve by itself. Such a mindfully thoughtful understanding of the practice must always also fulfill the historical essence of Heidegger’s Besinnung since that which we need to see and let go is shaped historically—the road of disillusionment is a winding one as it must follow the long history of the forgetfulness of Being.
