Heidegger and Mindfulness Meditation: Making Peace With the Abyss

Summary

Mindfulness is often treated as a psychological tool for reducing suffering, but this essay argues that its true essence is ontological-existential. Drawing on Heidegger, it claims human suffering arises from an anxious rejection of nothingness, leading to a subject–object dualism and attachment. This predicament cannot be overcome by using mindfulness as a technique, because liberation cannot be achieved intentionally. Instead, Heidegger's ideas of letting-be, objectless waiting, and attention to Beyng show how mindfulness meditation can reveal a nonintentional dimension where liberation may occur.

Study at a glance

Abstract

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.

Tags