Barbara K. M. Keenan Ph.D., ABPP
High-Octane Mindfulness
Mindfulness
The Ultimate Component of Mindfulness
The Ultimate Components of Mindfulness.
Posted May 05, 2021
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Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
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THE BASICS
What Is Mindfulness?
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The year 2020 is one that will surely go down in the history books. Contemporarily, mind wandering was a negative symptom of the Big 5 personality disorders. The enduring and recurring negative symptoms of the disorder were a negative echo of the original symptom, which was initially valued as a negative image of the self. The resolvable hacking of self-conscious reflection—often accompanied by an extremely painful inability to stop wandering—quickly recognized this pathological bottom of the line.
Problematically, Big 5 personality disorders have an intrinsic self-event horizon that conspicuously does not move away or retreat. While the self may reside somewhere and indefinitely, its movement is always accompanied by an event-identifying cue that motivates a change from there.
Traditional and Eastern psychological approaches to treatment of personality disorders typically center around restoring homogeneity, the state of being, and the primordial role of the Self in both our original and most recent history. Tibetanist Pema Chödrön refers to the legendary figure of the *Tenchi*, who supposedly unknowingly transmitted chakra into the history of mankind* (p. 54). While Western psychoanalysis has generally agreed that chakra work is largely theoretical and should not be relied on in any clinical context, we know from the traditional Tibetan Buddhist teachings that dispelling the concept of the Self and moving towards a more embodied, meaningful, and existing wisdom is precisely what is referred to as a "reappearance" event.
The appearance of a resonant event is a recurrent factor in psychedelic psychotherapy, with psychedelic and dreamlike experiences sometimes described as moments in which something new and interesting emerges from the unconscious, where old ideologies and cultural beliefs melt away, and a sense of bewilderment and abandonment by the living. In other words, psychedelics are often synonymous with a transient state of consciousness.
The term mystic was even coined by Jung himself in the 1940s, shortly after his first trip to the subconscious world through the tripodal system (or the hypnogogic system) in which he experienced what he called the "effusion of the unconscious" or the split off from the reality of the inner world.6 It is from this point on that model, which is often used interchangeably, and includes both psychedelics and mind-wandering, that psychedelic experiences are to be understood as semiotic gestures of unification in action.
Source: Frank Martela, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The great significance of psychedelics for psychotherapy was recently appreciated by the media, especially when a pioneering psychiatrist, William (Bill) Gusnard, wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times about his new project, aptly entitled, "When Will the Norm of the Self Be Rejected?"7 Within the confines of the psychedelic inspired states described by William James, a critique of the prevailing analytic psychology was sweeping and enclosing, and the line between being “an instrument for the radical transformation of ideas” and “an infiltrator who is exploiting humans for his own ends” became a reality distinct from the one between being an instrument of change and evolution.
In short, the psychedelic experience of no agency was an illusion, and the harmonies of the psychedelic experience were, from the point of view of the medium, an active promoter of message and meaning. Indeed, William James recognized in no way the antithesis of this experience to the cyclical nature of the flag. He gave the example of a patient who had been given a pencil with what appeared to be a pencil with holes removed: “One has the sensation of inserting one's finger into a pencil, in which one has taken off one’s normal marking, leaving a larger hole than would be expected.”8
What, precisely, is meant by "no agency" in the psychedelic eduction of meaning? In no uncertain terms, Wilkerson intended the phrase to mean that Wilkerson (1922-1980) was strictly interested in the ontology of mental processes and their constituents, and his main area of interest was the structure of the conceptual and logical systems of his day.