I came across an article, yesterday, talking about the importance of being mindful.
Mindfulness, it said, was the act of being in the moment. Instead of thinking about the past or worrying about the future or just being elsewhere mentally, it is the act of bringing the mind back to the present and keeping it there. It identified meditation as a chief mean to achieving mindfulness but offered that if one did not know how to meditate one could simply practice mindfulness by cuing in to one's senses in the present.
Listening to sounds of the water at the beach or the birds overhead; noticing the brightness of the day or the whiteness of clouds above; noticing the coffee smell in a coffeehouse or the salty smell at the beach or noticing the grainy, rough feel of sand beneath the feet were all ways to zone in to our present sensory experiences and, thereby, be mindful.
I thought for a moment: This is great advice. Of course we want to be mindful. Of course we don't want to spend our time worrying about the future or ruminating over the past. After all our bodies react to the emotions that overtake us when we do. And when we imagine our fears of the future, the stress hormones come out to play, draining our energy and depressing our spirits or making us anxious and agitated.
Then mid-thought, and quite by impulse, my mind made a sharp mental turn to this book I read a month or so ago called A House in the Sky by Sara Corbett about the harrowing experiences of journalist Amanda Lindhout at the hands of her captors in the Middle East.
And it was then, an epiphany rose in my mind - well, I'm not sure its a true epiphany or if it just smelled like one. But I began to ask myself: If mindfulness is the gold star then what is the value of its opposite? What would we even call its opposite?
Mindlessness?
Because that didn't sound right. Probably because being mindless has long been associated with being inconsiderate, or clumsy or a dreamer who can't do anything right in life because his head is always in the clouds.
Have you no memory of having been scolded as a child or teen for "mindless" behavior? Because I sure have. You may have been told it's why we forgot something important or why we did not respond appropriately to someone trying to engage us. You may have been called mindless on being accused of not paying attention or having done something stupid.
Lets then just say, its not used to describe a positive aspect of ourselves.
Let me appear to digress again, (though I am not). I read another book about 6 months ago by renowned psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. It wasn't the more popular On Death and Dying but a smaller more obscure piece of literature which seemed more a compilation of essays or shorter writings than a cohesive piece. It appeared to have been written earlier in her career when she was studying near-death experiences.
In it she details the immediate after-death experience as one in which we, no longer limited by the physical body, are able to transcend space and time. According to her, we are at that point, able to be in all places at once and from my understanding, there ceases to be any such thing as a past or a future. According to her, we have access to time in a similar way that we have access to space.
After remembering Kubler-Ross's recount of the after-live experience I then wondered: Is this description, the essence of what it is to be '"mindless"? The ability to move beyond the limitations of space, time and our body? Is our mindlessness in life, a ghost, a fringe, a leftover or foretelling of the state of our soul, or spirit when we are not limited by a body?
Of course, if this is true, pertaining to afterlife, it wouldn't even make sense to call it mindlessness since we no longer have a body and therefore a mind. It would just be the state of being.
Within our earthly bodies though, perhaps the closest we can come to this body-less, mind-less state of being, is through mindlessness.
I drew parallels with the book A House in the Sky because, aside from being a gripping memoir beautifully told, it recounts how the protagonist Lindhout, dealt with the horrible torture inflicted upon her by her captors. At its worst, she builds in her mind, as the title tells, a 'house in the sky.'
Basically, essentially, simply put, she imagined. She used the power of mindlessness to occupy, to the extent she could, another space and another time. She allowed herself to do, seemingly, what the author of the mindfulness article cautions against. She drew the strength to endure from the human ability to be mindless.
While mindlessness didn't prevent Lindhout from feeling the horrible physical pain, or maybe even the emotional pain caused by her captors cruelty, she indicates that it quelled the pain enough to allow her to get past the most harrowing of moments and by this, she found the will to live.
Could it be then that mindlessness is a gift and not a curse after all? I am beginning to wonder. I might even propose that mindlessness is a mercy - from God. Far-reaching you may say, but hear me out. I envision that he allowed us to retain this bit of magic when we came into this world as a means to endure, as a card we can play, a magical power we can exact at the moments we may most need it. Perhaps he foresaw in the human experience a likelihood of finding ourselves in horribly deplorable situations where were we unable to transcend our physical bodies even momentarily we might succumb to its condition, unable to endure and fill out our purpose. Unable to tell the truth that exists on the other side of suffering as Lindhout did. The truth of human resilience and who knows what else?
I'm even going to go a step further and speculate that our mindlessness is a leftover from our pre-life existence, when we were not limited by our physical bodies and thus had no concept of time or space. It is a ghost of who we once were and perhaps even a foretelling of what we will be again.
In light of such divine beginnings, I’m going to then say:
Yes to mindlessness!
Just don't go crazy with it.
