As Christians we are somewhat conditioned to look east, for east has long been believed to be the direction that Our Lord’s triumphant return. While we wait however there are some of us who have looked further east and sought to adopt spiritual elements from the religions in the Far East. The latest practice to be pondered is Mindfulness.
One of the most vocal proponents of Mindfulness is Dr. Gregory Bottaro. As a practicing clinical psychologist and Catholic, he has sought treatments to help his patients in ways that are consistent with the Catholic vision of man. To that end, he has been using Mindfulness within a clinical setting and has even written a book called The Mindful Catholic defending its use.
Mindfulness finds its origins in modern Theravada Buddhism and purports to create within the practitioner an awareness and acceptance, without judgment, of what he or she is thinking or feeling. Or, to use Dr. Bottaro’s simple definition, mindfulness is “paying attention to the present moment without judgment or criticism.” It is this inherent connection to a “New Age” practice that has many people concerned about its use.
Dr. Bottaro believes, like the Church herself, that even if a technique is borrowed from a New Age religion, it does not automatically make it wrong. Instead we must look to see whether the technique can be stripped of its spiritual elements so that it can be “baptized” and used and prescribed licitly by Catholics. In the case of Mindfulness, Dr. Bottaro claims that it is possible and that Mindfulness is not just a therapeutic technique, but one that all Catholics should be practicing. This, of course, has been met with serious opposition questioning whether or not it can be severed from its Buddhist roots, including a book written by Susan Brinkmann as well as those at EWTN. We will not add another voice to that particular debate here, but instead will examine Mindfulness from a different angle, namely Catholic anthropology.
Mindfulness and Catholic Anthropology
In the opening line of Appendix I of his book, Dr. Bottaro makes the claim that “Catholic mindfulness is built on Catholic principles.” It is not clear from the rest of the article which principles he has in mind. He seems to spend the bulk of his time defending its use against New Age claims that he never gets around to discussing how mindfulness harmonizes with Catholic anthropology. It is in this arena of Catholic anthropological principles that mindfulness fails. Rather than leading to mental health, it can facilitate further mental illness.
In anticipation of an immediate objection, what qualifies me, a theologian, to answer the question as to whether Mindfulness can lead to mental health? To ask the question is to admit just how steeped we have become in the empirical mindset. There is a distinction of vital importance to be made between what I will call the philosophy of psychology and the science of psychology. The philosophy of psychology is concerned with, to use Dr. Bottaro’s terms, “Catholic principles” while the science of psychology is concerned with the clinical application of those principles through various techniques. The theologian or philosopher can ask whether a given technique can lead to mental health (i.e. it leads to actions in accord with human nature) while a psychologist, once he knows the answer to this question, can ask if a given technique does in practice lead to mental health.
Foundational to Catholic anthropology is the fact that each one of us, to greater or lesser extents, is mentally ill. This is said not to make us all victims or belittle those who suffer greatly because of serious mental illness. Instead it is to point out a fundamental flaw in that we have a tendency to embrace the brokenness that comes from the Fall. We equate natural (what we are) with normal (what everyone around us is doing). This means that mental health can only come about through practices that restore what is natural and not necessarily what is normal.
Man, by nature, is an intellectual creature. This means that he was made to rule himself by right reason to do the good passionately. In other words, the intellect in man was to reign supreme, guiding the will to the good which had full cooperation from the bodily powers including the emotions, memory and imagination. Post-edenic man finds his intellect darkened by ignorance, the will weakened and the bodily powers running amok. The Fall left man in disarray, but not beyond repair. God, using supernatural means such as actual and sanctifying grace can heal us. But there are also natural means at our disposal to heal these effects. Primary among those means are the virtues by which we develop habits that overcome the effects of the Fall. The virtues rescue what is natural from what is normal.
Secondly because man is (and not just has) body and soul, the soul depends upon the body for its operation of knowing. It does this primarily through the imagination and memory. They provide the “raw material” upon which the intellect works. The intellect abstracts the contents of its thoughts from the image (called a phantasm) provided it by the imagination, an image it received either from the outside world or from the memory (or both). It is not just productive, but also reproductive in that it exercises insight and control to produce images as reflections of ideas. This puts flesh to concept so to speak. When we think of a concept, say like God, some image comes into our mind, even though we have never seen Him. The images we form greatly affect our thoughts. Imagine a demon who looks like a terrible dragon. Now imagine a demon wearing red tights with horns. Which of these reflects right thought about demons?
Given the material prominence of the imagination and to a slightly lesser extent the memory, one can readily see how important they are to mental health. Whether we like it or not, they affect not just what we think about, but also how we judge. A trivial example might help. Suppose I fall out of a chair because I wasn’t being careful. The next time I see a chair that memory will be invoked and I may recall the pain of the fall. Chairs (and not just that one chair) will become associated with pain and something to be feared. My intellect must then make a judgment on the phantasm that the chair poses no danger. If I do not make that judgment, or I judge wrongly that chairs are bad then the association becomes stronger causing fear each time the phantasm is present, reinforcing the idea that chairs are dangerous. A feedback loop is created and mental illness is comes about. This can only be corrected when the judgment that chairs are not harmful is adopted and the intellect “corrects” the phantasms attached to chair. Until the imagination comes under the complete control of the intellect, the person will still be torn between reality and perception.
Quieting the Interior Chatter
Obviously the memory and imagination are necessary faculties for mental health and therefore we can’t simply shut them off. Instead they must be schooled so that they do not, as Adolphe Tanqueray says in his classic book The Spiritual Life, “crowd the soul with a host of memories and images that distract the spirit” but fall under the control of the intellect and the will.
Although he never says so explicitly, it is these two faculties, memory and imagination, which mindfulness attempts to govern. Dr. Bottaro says that the goal is to turn away from the “interior chatter.” This interior chatter comes from overactive memories and imaginations that lead to wrong ways of judging reality. He suggests that by focusing on the present moment through mindfulness exercises you can begin to bring these powers under the control of the “mind.”
In this regard Dr. Bottaro is no different from many of the spiritual masters who say that one of the best ways to mortify the interior senses of memory and imagination is by focusing on the present moment. However, there is one important difference—none of them would say that you can learn to govern the interior senses by “paying attention to the present moment without judgment or criticism.” Mental health consists in the right judgment of reality. The remedy to judging incorrectly is not to cease judging. Any exercises that promote this lead away from mental health and not towards it.
Why is this the case? Because the mind judges “automatically.” It judges because that is what it does. The mind has three acts—understanding, judgment and reasoning. Once the mind has grasped what a thing is (understanding), it immediately attempts to relate it to other things (judgment). As Blessed John Henry Newman put it, “It is characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgment on the things which come before them. No sooner do we learn that we judge; we allow nothing to stand by itself.”
Inevitable Path to Buddhism?
Dr. Bottaro says that “mindfulness does not meaning turning off the thoughts in your mind, but using them as a door to greater awareness of yourself. This is actually one of the essential differences between Catholic mindfulness and Eastern-based forms of meditation.” But one cannot simply turn off judging without doing violence to the natural process of reasoning. In essence by trying to abort the second act of the mind, it shuts down the mind completely, precisely what the Eastern-based forms are proposing. It seems the very thing he is trying to avoid, he inadvertently brings about. Perhaps those who are concerned about the spiritual traps of Buddhist practices are right after all. Mindfulness may be not just a practice that Buddhist use, but a Buddhist “sacrament” that brings about the desired outcome of emptying the mind. This happens regardless of the intention of the practitioner. Perhaps there is a “genius” in the technique that, by doing what a Buddhist does, it causes the person to think like a Buddhist. And once they think like a Buddhist they begin to act like one.
This may explain why, given that the doctor is also a “patient” of mindfulness that his book has a number of New Age red flags in his book when he attempts to articulate some Catholic principles. Under the sub-heading Finding Peace, Dr. Bottaro sounds more New Age than he does Catholic. He describes Jesus as “the human person of God, Jesus Christ.” As Nestorius found out in the 5th Century, Jesus is not a human person but a Divine person who took to Himself a human nature. One might excuse this merely as a lack of theological precision except he goes further making the reader wonder whether the label Catholic can be applied.
In the same section he also says “You have heard that you are a temple of the Holy Spirit, but you are also more than that. You exist in the form that God Himself would take if He were to enter into the created universe…”(emphasis added) To say that we are more than temples of the Holy Spirit has a very Buddhist “feel” to it. The only thing “more than” being a creature with the indwelling Holy Spirit is to be God Himself, something a Buddhist would readily accept. Christ did not take to Himself a human nature because human nature was so great, but because He is so great. In other words the doctor gets it backwards by putting man at the center instead of God. We should not be surprised then when he says that “the central being that is consistently in your awareness in each present moment is you. Therefore, mindfulness is a journey to find peace with yourself.”
Buddhism is a journey to find peace within yourself. Catholicism, however, is a journey to find peace with God; peace that is only found outside of man. The two are not compatible. You will look forever, perhaps we might say eternally, for peace with yourself and you will never find it. For Buddhists peace is found within because God is found within. But for Catholicism the interior division that we experience is caused by our division with God and only when that is healed, can be even begin to experience the “peace with surpasses all understanding” (Phil 4:7 ). Perhaps it is better not to let our gazes go any further east than Rome and leave Mindfulness to the Buddhists.