From Mind Cure to Mindfulness: What Got Lost

This chapter considers the early, community-oriented wing of New Thought movement and the Mindfulness movement side by side and identifies several characteristics they have in common, as well as significant differences between them. The Mindfulness movement is similar in various ways to Individualist New Thought. This analysis reveals some of the problems and limitations inherent in the Mindfulness movement’s approach to meditation, from both Buddhist and scientific perspectives. By extracting meditation from its religious contexts and meanings and turning it into an individual technique for reducing stress, several important resources get “lost in translation.” These include the social and spiritual benefits of religious community; fundamental aspects of Buddhist and neo-Vedanta spiritual paths, particularly the ethical foundations of meditation and yoga; and systemic analyses of the causes of suffering and stress-related illness, including racism, sexism, and poverty.

Is Mindfulness Effective?

This chapter asks whether mindfulness is as broadly effective and powerful as proponents claim and considers methodological and other critiques of clinical research on mindfulness. Neuroscientists have produced vivid images of meditators’ brains, using functional MRI and PET scans, which seem to show clear, positive changes attributed to meditation. Such images are effective rhetorically but are produced in a “black box” of assumptions, technological constraints, and human factors that make them less definitive than they may appear. Other types of studies rely on meditators’ self-reports, which are not always reliable. A major issue in clinical research is that mindfulness is inconsistently defined and may be measured by scientists unfamiliar with the ways that meditation is described in canonical texts and understood by experienced Buddhist teachers and yogis. While research data do suggest that mindfulness can be beneficial, it is not the panacea that some advocates seem to suggest it is.

Is Mindfulness Religion?

This chapter considers whether Mindfulness can reasonably be considered a kind of religion, despite proponents’ claims to the contrary. If so, what kind? Is it Buddhist? If so, what kind of Buddhism? The rhetoric of Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the modern Mindfulness movement, is tested against several different theories of religion, as well as critiques by specialists in both Theravāda and Māhāyana forms of Buddhism. While Mindfulness is positioned as a strictly secular therapeutic method, it has all the characteristics of American metaphysical religion, as well as of modernist Buddhism and neo-Vedanta. Kabat-Zinn claims his teachings are “universal,” yet they actually reflect his own eclectic blend of elements from various religious traditions with roots in Asia, the United States, and Europe. As Mindfulness is increasingly promoted in public schools, government agencies, and the military, this raises legitimate questions about the separation of church and state.

Mysticism, Mesmerism, Mind Cure

This chapter explores the far-reaching influences in American religion and medicine of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist and mystic, and Franz Anton Mesmer, who developed Mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnosis. Swedenborg’s theology filtered into homeopathy and the religious movements of Shakerism, Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, Mormonism, modernist Buddhism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, and New Thought. Mesmer’s theories about illness contributed to the development of osteopathy, chiropractic, and hypnotherapy. Before the development of chemical anesthesia, some nineteenth-century doctors performed complex and successful surgeries on patients who were sedated only by hypnotic suggestion. Ideas and practices derived from Mesmer and Swedenborg converged in the nineteenth-century mental-healing practice of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a New England clockmaker and the first American to discover that beliefs and mental states can affect one’s physical health.

Introduction

The introduction traces the astonishing growth of the Mindfulness movement over the past four decades and sketches the usual narrative about how it began in the 1970s, when Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) protocol. This book seeks to change that narrative. It traces the origins of efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically back to nineteenth-century teachers of Mind Cure, a religious movement led largely by American women who had learned these methods from Buddhist and Hindu missionaries; and further back, to eighteenth-century research on magnetism, the unconscious, and psychic phenomena. The introduction offers an overview of the book: four chapters of history, two chapters offering critical analysis of the modern Mindfulness movement, an epilogue, and an appendix describing the theoretical and historical challenges of piecing this complex story together. This account draws upon multiple academic disciplines, including the histories of science, medicine, psychology, Buddhism, Hinduism, Western esotericism, and American religions.

Mind Cure Medicalized: The Emmanuel Movement and Its Heirs

This chapter describes how members of the American medical and religious establishment appropriated some of the suggestive methods taught by Mind Curers and channeled them into mainstream Protestantism, scientific psychology, and orthodox medicine. The Emmanuel Clinic, a mental health and social work program founded by a group of elite, male clergy and physicians, was the linchpin in this process. The Emmanuel Movement that spread outward from the original Boston clinic influenced other clergy and physicians, who went on to develop Clinical Pastoral Education for chaplaincy, the fields of psychosomatic medicine and pastoral counseling, and the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. This chapter also describes early medical research on the placebo effect, the relaxation response, and other psychological and physiological effects of meditation. Many pioneers in the fields of religion, medicine, and psychology set the stage for Mindfulness to burst onto the scene in the 1970s.

Mind Cure and Meditation at Greenacre and Beyond

This chapter examines the practices of Buddhist meditation and Raja yoga in New Thought. Leaders of New Thought were first exposed to Buddhism and Vedanta philosophy through the publications of European Orientalists and the Theosophical Society and, later, though personal contacts with Asian Buddhist and Hindu missionaries. In addition to D. T. Suzuki, who helped to spark American interest in Japanese Zen, other important early missionaries were Anagarika Dharmapāla, a Sri Lankan Buddhist and Theosophist, and Swami Vivekenanda, an Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order who launched the Vedanta Society in North America. New Thought leaders, Theosophists, and Asian missionaries met in person at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions and continued to develop relationships for more than a decade, particularly at the Greenacre conferences in Eliot, Maine. This chapter reveals the transnational nature of New Thought, which is typically considered to be an American metaphysical religious movement.

Individualist and Community-Oriented Mind Cure

This chapter surveys the rise of the Mind Cure movements that spread outward from the teachings of Quimby, including Christian Science and New Thought. Like most histories of these movements, it discusses the contributions of Warren Felt Evans, Mary Baker Eddy, the Dresser family, and Emma Curtis Hopkins, as well as the major religious organizations inspired by Hopkins’s teaching. Unlike most histories of New Thought, however, it distinguishes between two forms, community-oriented and individualist, which had different trajectories. Community-oriented New Thought was led largely by white women and centered in religious communities. Individualist New Thought stressed personal prosperity and business success. This chapter also devotes attention to community-oriented African American movements inspired by New Thought, particularly the Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine but also Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Moorish Science, the Nation of Islam, and Black Hebrew Israelism.