Speaking of moments: One phrase that hasnt occurred in this piece so far is living in the moment. This may seem strange, since this theme is so commonly associated with mindfulness, and so emphasized by meditation teachers. Indeed, The New York Times recently defined mindfulness as the desire to take a chunk of each day and simply live in the present. Stop and smell the roses.

Theres no denying that deep appreciation of the present moment is a nice consequence of mindfulness. But its misleading to think of it as central to mindfulness. If you delve into early Buddhist writings, you wont find a lot of exhortations to stop and smell the rosesand thats true even if you focus on those writings that contain the word sati, the word thats translated as mindfulness.

The ancient Buddhist text known as The Four Foundations of Mindfulnessthe closest thing there is to a Bible of mindfulnessfeatures no injunction to live in the present, and in fact doesnt have a single word or phrase translated as now or the present. And it features some passages that would sound strange to the average mindfulness meditator of today. It reminds us that our bodies are full of various kinds of unclean things and instructs us to meditate on such bodily ingredients as feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine. It also calls for us to imagine our bodies one day, two days, three days deadbloated, livid, and festering.

Im not aware of any bestselling books on mindfulness meditation called Stop and Smell the Feces. And Ive never heard a meditation teacher recommend that I meditate on my bile, phlegm, and pus, or on the rotting corpse that I will someday be. What is presented today as an ancient meditative tradition is a selective rendering of an ancient meditative tradition, in some cases carefully manicured.

But thats OK. All spiritual traditions evolve, adapting to time and place, and the Buddhist teachings that find an audience today in the United States and Europe are a product of such evolution. In particular, modern mindfulness teachings retain innovations of instruction and technique made in southeast Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the main thing, for our purposes, is that this evolutionthe evolution that has produced a distinctively Western, 21st-century version of Buddhismhasnt severed the connection between current practice and ancient thought. Modern mindfulness meditation isnt exactly the same as ancient mindfulness meditation, but the two can lead to the same place, philosophically and spiritually.

Whats more, they start at the same place. The Satipatthana Suttathe Bible of mindfulnessbegins with instructions that will be familiar to a modern meditator: Sit down, with legs crossed and body erect, and pay attention to your breath.

The text then enjoins the meditator to pay attention to lots of other thingsfeelings, thoughts, sounds, smells, and much, much more (yes, including pus and blood). Then, at the end, it makes an extraordinary claim: If you practice mindfulness assiduously, you are following the direct path for purification of beings and so can achieve nirvana. Sufficiently diligent mindfulness meditation, apparently, can lead to true awakening, complete enlightenment, and liberation.

Of course, that other Buddhist text Ive mentioned puts the story differently. It says that what leads to enlightenment is the apprehension of not-self. I hope by now its clear why these two claims coexist easily: Mindfulness meditation leads very naturally toward the apprehension of not-self and can in principle lead you all the way there. And the reason it can do so is because its about much more than living in the moment. Mindfulness, in the most deeply Buddhist sense of the term, is about an exhaustive, careful, and calm examination of the contents of human experience, an examination that can radically alter your interpretation of that experience.

Most meditators dont give much thought to going all the way down the path toward this radicalism. And many meditators, like me, would love to go all the way but arent optimistic about making it to the end. Which leads to a question: Why keep meditating if you suspect that this path wont realize your deepest aspiration, wont lead all the way to full enlightenment?

The easy answer is that meditating can make your life bettera little lower in stress, anxiety, and other unwelcome feelings. But thats the therapeutic answer. The spiritual answeror at least my version of the spiritual answeris more complicated.

It begins with one of the more striking claims made by Buddhismthat enlightenment and liberation from suffering are inextricably intertwined. We sufferand make others sufferbecause we dont see the world, including ourselves, clearly.

One common conception of this relationship between truth and freedom is that you see the entire truth in a flash of insight, and then you are free. Sounds great! And what a time-saver! Im not just being sarcastic here; there are people who seem to have been blessed with the spontaneous apprehension of not-self, and an attendant sense of liberation. But the more usual experience is incremental: A bit of movement toward trutha clearer, more objective view of your stress, for exampleleads to a little freedom from suffering.

Importantly, this incremental progress can work in the other direction: a bit of freedom can let you see a bit of truth. If you sit down and meditate and loosen the bonds of agitation and anxiety, the ensuing calm will let you observe other things with more clarity.

Some of these observations may seem trivial. Had I never started meditating, Id never have realized that the monotonous-seeming hum generated by my office refrigerator actually consists of at least three distinct sounds, weaving a rich (and surprisingly pretty!) harmony. But sometimes these observations have larger consequence. If you view your wrath toward someone with a bit of detachment, you may realize that the irate email youve written to that personthe one sitting in your drafts folderwill, if sent, create needless turmoil.

And if you carry this kind of calm beyond the meditation cushion, you may find youre less likely to label someone a jerk just because hes at the checkout counter fumbling for his credit card and youre behind him and in a hurry. Which Id say qualifies as movement toward truth, since its logically contradictory to consider someone a jerk for doing something lots of people you dont consider jerksincluding youhave done.

Indeed, according to Buddhist philosophy, not seeing this person as a jerk is, in a certain sense, movement toward profound truth. The Buddhist doctrine of emptinessthe one Jack Kerouac cryptically alluded towould take eons to explain fully, but one way to put the basic idea is to say that all things, including living beings, are empty of essence. To not see essence of jerk in the kind of people youre accustomed to seeing essence of jerk in is to move, however modestly, and in however narrow a context, toward the apprehension of emptiness.

Here again, ancient Buddhist philosophy gets support from modern psychology. In many circumstances, it turns out, we do tend to project a kind of essence onto people. We may naturally conclude, upon observing a stranger for only a few seconds, that she is a rude person, periodrather than entertain the possibility that shes had a stressful day that led her to behave with uncharacteristic rudeness. This tendency to attribute behavior disproportionately to dispositional factors, and to underemphasize situational factors, is known as the fundamental attribution error. To commit the error, as humans seem naturally inclined to do, is to see a kind of essenceessence of rude person, in this casewhere one doesnt actually exist.

Anyway, the key point is this: The two-way relationship between enlightenment and liberationthe fact that a slight boost in either may boost the othercan create a positive feedback loop that doubles as a spiritual propellant, pushing you down that slope toward deeper exploration. If sending fewer incendiary emails and spending less time fulminating in checkout lines reduces the amount of agitation in your life, maybe this effect will be so gratifyingso liberatingthat it encourages you to meditate for 30 minutes a day instead of 20. And maybe that will lead you to view more of your emotional life with greater claritylead to more enlightenmentand this enlightenment will further reduce the needless suffering in your life and further deepen your commitment to meditation. And so on. Before you know it, youve gone on a meditation retreat, absorbed some Buddhist philosophy, and are driving the Adam Grants of the world even crazier than more casual meditators drive them. Well done.

But does this really qualify as a spiritual endeavor? After all, upping your investment in meditation certainly has its therapeutic payoffs. Id say the answer depends partly on how far you gohow far toward not-self, for examplebut also on how you think about the exercise, what you take away from it. When youre standing in that checkout line, judging that credit card fumbler more leniently than usual, is that just a fleeting effect, the welcome byproduct of a particularly immersive morning meditation session? Or is it part of a sustained effort to be mindful of how casually and unfairly were naturally inclined to judge peopleand how those judgments are shaped by self-serving feelings that, actually, we dont have to consider part of our selves?

And when youre getting some distance from stress and anxiety and sadness, is the ensuing comfort the end of your practice? Or is there ongoing and deepening reflection on the way feelings shape our thoughts and perceptions, and on how unreliable they are as guides to what we should think and how we should perceive things?

For many of usmyself included, I fearpursuing enlightenment is doomed to failure if we think of enlightenment as a kind of end stateif we hope to eventually attain the elusive apprehension of not-self, of emptiness, and sustain that condition forever, living wholly free of delusion and suffering.

But you can always think of enlightenment as a process, and of liberation the same way. The object of the game isnt to reach Liberation and Enlightenment with a capitalL and Eon some distant day, but rather to become a bit more liberated and a bit more enlightened on a not-so-distant day. Like today! Or, failing that, tomorrow. Or the next day. Or whenever. The main thing is to make progress over time, inevitable backsliding notwithstanding. And the first step on that path can consist of just calming down a littleeven if your initial motivation for calming down is to make a killing in the stock market.

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Is mindfulness meditation a capitalist tool or a path to enlightenment? Yes - WIRED