The Pali word sati, which is tremendously important to Buddhist thought, can’t be translated into English. The closest equivalent would be a whole sentence, like this one: “A harmonious awareness of oneness.” Becoming fully aware of an object, in Buddhism, means participating in the object’s fluctuating, protean existence. Everything is “alive.” Everything “thinks.” If you want to see the trees around you, think like a tree. Try to realize that you, and they, only exist in relation to each other. You’re linked like the words in this sentence.
Many know enough about the broad strokes of Buddhism to read about all this comfortably. “Sure, go ahead—commune with the forest, if that makes you happy!” But that’s glib. Reverse the dynamic and you’ll see at once what I mean. Imagine a Buddhist calling out: “Go ahead! Pretend you and the forest are different! I can’t forbid you from constructing a miserable, illusory self.” Sati isn’t a hobby, or a useful tool for blowing your own mind if cannabis is still illegal where you live. It’s fundamental. You can’t begin to talk sensibly about the world until you’ve become aware of its true nature by practicing sati.
But sati is more than an activity. It’s more than just a word. It’s the hub for a whole system of beliefs. “All things are one,” in the West, is an insult to most of Western philosophy. It’s a sacrilegious, heretical assertion that runs counter to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Things are very distinct from each other in the West. Most crucially, we separate persons, who are capable of action, from the inert world of things.
If “I am thinking,” I am using “my mind” to do it. I can proceed however I wish; thinking grants complete independence. This attitude is so ingrained that René Descartes, to liberate himself from his senses and surroundings, climbed all the way to Heaven on a ladder of pure thought. There’s something darkly funny about Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. You get to watch him pushing the world away like someone excusing themselves from the dinner table. “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes writes, skipping lightly over enormous differences between intention, act, and meaning. “Certainly,” we might reply, like the infamous Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. “But… who are you.”
For to “be presently aware,” in the sense of the Pali word sati, requires us to keep ourselves busy. Everything you do, you’re obliged to do in a way that harmonizes with your entire environment. Imagine eating your lunch, at a food court, in a mall. Now imagine doing it in a way that aligns gracefully with everything you see, hear, and observe around you. Remember, too, that a truly harmonious meal expresses (in some reasonable way) your own feelings as they glimmer and evolve. Above all, you must continually remind yourself of the transience at the heart of all clusters, all things. You’re using up food, easing your hunger, and then moving on. You’ll gather up the plastic serving baskets, crinkle wax paper into a ball, and sweep lettuce off the table with your hand. In the end, it’s like you were never there.
If you want the closest Western equivalent to Eastern notions of impermanence, applied specifically to snack foods, I give you the wisdom of stand-up comic Mitch Hedberg: “I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut; I don't need a receipt for the doughnut. I'll just give you the money, and you give me the doughnut, end of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this. I just can't imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut.”
It's funnier when you see Hedberg perform it, but the essence of his humor shines through at the end: I can’t imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut. Hedberg tried to imagine a scenario involving that pointless receipt. He felt he owed the receipt, and the doughnut shop, at least that much. That’s what sati is all about: not merely jamming some receipt in your jeans, after taking it reluctantly from the cashier, but letting it whisper things to you about all the transactions that clutter up our lives.
You’ve probably already guessed what happened, in the late-19th century, when English-speaking translators set to work on sati. They settled on the term “mindfulness.” It’s a crucial misunderstanding. “Mindfulness” implies either a mind full of busy ephemera, or, worse, some kind of richness that’s purely mental. Sati is neither; it’s a state of harmony thoughtfully and slowly achieved. Perhaps it belongs entirely to a slower world more permeated with natural events; regardless, it has little or nothing to do with the process of “observing” one’s own feelings and letting them drift past, unjudged, which is how it’s come to be understood here in the West.
The worst thing you can do, as a person seeking to experience sati, is to flip through your phone until you find a meditation app, and then pressing “play” on one of their little guided trips. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with going on someone else’s mental adventure; that’s what reading is. But there is something wrong with achieving serenity by harmonizing yourself with an environment that’s been scraped down to a soundtrack, using noise-cancelling headphones that edit out the sirens, passing cars, screaming children, and other nuisances that make your environment so difficult. Are you consciously directing your attention? No, you’re letting Calm or Headspace do that for you. Are you achieving a state of awareness that makes it possible to “let in” the sirens of ambulances heading for strangers? No, you’re discounting their existence. It’s not necessarily easy or pleasant to work your way towards sati in an environment saturated with crisis, but it’s precisely the difficulty of that endeavor that makes the goal worthwhile. In other words, the nagging discontent that you feel when you’re trying to meditate may not be the app failing you, or you failing the app. It may be the world outside, knocking desperately for admission into your calm, tailored headspace.
Alan Watts, the philosopher and mystic who (perhaps) has tried the hardest to wake Westerners up from their misunderstandings of spirituality, put the matter thus in The Wisdom of Insecurity: “Once there is the suspicion that a religion is a myth, its power has gone. It may be necessary for man to have a myth, but he cannot self-consciously prescribe one as he can mix a pill for a headache. A myth can only ‘work’ when it is thought to be truth, and man cannot for long knowingly and intentionally ‘kid’ himself. Even the best modern apologists for religion seem to overlook this fact. For their most forceful arguments for some sort of return to orthodoxy are those which show the social and moral advantages of belief in God. But this does not prove that God is a reality. It proves, at most, that believing in God is useful. ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ Perhaps. But if the public has any suspicion that he does not exist, the invention is in vain.”
Watts is talking about articles like this one, published in the omnipresent and pernicious periodical Psychology Today, which concludes: “One large population study, led by Harvard Professor Tyler VanderWeele, found that young adults who prayed daily tended to have fewer depressive symptoms, and higher levels of life satisfaction, self-esteem, and positive affect, in comparison to those who never prayed.”
What are we to make of this? Consider the lurking argument for fundamentalism that seeps in around the edges of this claim. If a child who prays is better off—less depression, higher “life satisfaction,” and so on—then who’s to argue if that child also believes that homosexuality is a sin against God, and that the world was created in seven eventful days? At least they believe in something, right? They have accidentally found the cure for everything that drives the rest of us to distraction.
Modern advice concerning gratitude is no better. (See, for example, this article, which is one among thousands and also appeared in Psychology Today.) Why, it takes only minutes a day! But a stickler like Watts is every bit as unimpressed with trumped-up gratitude as he is with believing in God because it’s good for you, like eating your vegetables: “If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.”
It never fails to strike me as both laughable, and sad, that the film Eat, Pray, Love highlights the importance of gratitude at an Italian meal where its protagonist, and spiritual tour guide, Elizabeth Gilbert tells everyone she’s grateful for a meal served by a family she barely knows. The next day she departs for India. André Gregory put it well in My Dinner with André: “A child holds your hand, and then, suddenly, there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?”
The things for which we’re currently most grateful are as fragile and fugitive as the years themselves. That isn’t to diminish the importance of being aware of the goodness that sends its shivers through the world like arrows of light. But it’s to recognize, like Hedberg in the doughnut store, that where we are is here, with all its attendant difficulty and chaos. The adventure of sati is an adventure in the real world, where things are in flux, and where difficulty, madness, and want is as much a part of the fabric of existence as ease, health, and plenty. To live shrouded by manufactured gratitude is another way of filtering the world down to what it isn’t.
For many years, I wondered what the point of melancholy (or even despairing) artwork could be. It seemed perverse to get enjoyment from the music of Bon Iver, or the paintings of El Greco, when there are (somewhere) fluffy clouds and choirs of sweet-voiced singers, carrying on and trying their best. Ought we not to be most grateful for them? Then, as I was meditating on the 1960s mantra “Be here now,” I thought of the story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” by Denis Johnson. In the story, a woman loses all of her family to a senseless accident. When she finds out her husband is dead, she screams. Johnson writes, “She shrieked the way I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”
And the hardest lesson of all to learn is that that feeling is looking for us, every moment, if we’re willing to let ourselves listen, and hear it: again, again, and again, in time with the real world’s broken beating heart.