Looking at Mindfulness by Christophe Andre

Author:Christophe Andre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2015-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

Meditative intelligence

Pascal used to say that there were “two excesses: excluding reason and accepting reason alone.” Reason and meditation go well together. The latter allows the former to range more widely. Mindful meditation does not soften the mind, it is not passive contemplation. On the contrary, it feeds our intelligence.

Exerting our intelligence means making connections, linking ideas and concepts and coming to conclusions or decisions as a result. But it also means seeing that these connections can or do exist. So being intelligent means starting by observing what is, rather than trying from the outset to impose our presence on reality. Intelligence is first of all connecting with the world, before linking its different elements and developing rules and laws from them.

This connection between the world and ourselves lies at the heart of mindfulness, the practice of which is at once a laboratory, where we can observe the workings of our mind (we can talk of a “science of the self”), and a gym, where we train it to acquire certain qualities—capacities for reflection, concentration, resistance to distraction, creativity and mental flexibility.

For example, mindfulness facilitates what psychologists call accommodation. The notions of assimilation and accommodation were identified by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. They describe the way that our mind integrates potential contradictions between the world and our vision of it. So, if an element of reality contradicts one of my beliefs, I can assimilate (distort reality to make it fit my beliefs) or accommodate (modify my belief to integrate the reality).

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