Carl Rogers an example of original mindfulness

A CERTAIN KIND OF MINDFUL MAN David Brazier PhD, English Buddhist priest, head of the Amida order of Pureland Buddhism, president of the international Zen therapy Association, author of ten books on psychology, Buddhism and culture, lives in France and can be contacted via eleusis.ning.com

Carl Rogers as an Example of Mindfulness To the best of my knowledge, the word mindfulness does not occur in the writings of Carl Rogers. He was dead before it came into vogue and he did not have a great knowledge of Buddhist scripture - at least, I didn't see any when I visited his house. Nonetheless, we did all believe that Carl had been touched in some significant way by Eastern thinking, since, after all, he did make a dramatic switch of career from theology to psychology after his undergraduate trip to China. It seems that his basic inspiration remained essentially the same, but his vision had widened.

Actually, one could make a similar comment about Carl at various stages of his life. He was one of those people who hold to a basic truth constantly through life and it became his great work to articulate and apply it and to do so in progressively wider spheres. When he moved from Chicago to Wisconsin he saw the opportunity to apply the ideas of client centred therapy to more serious mental health cases. When he moved from Wisconsin to California he openned the same ideas and approach up to work first with groups and then to larger populations until he was grasping for education, politics and world peace.

Through all this time, it was essentially the same vision that drove him. Something of that vision is apparent in his assertion that, “the human being is basically a trustworthy organism, capable of evaluating the outer and inner situation, understanding herself in its context, making constructive choices as to the next steps in life, and acting on those

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choices.� (Rogers 1977, p.15). Rogers is an example of a profound and enduring faith in humanism.

This sense of an underlying vision that progressively develops and makes a life into a master work is very close to the original Buddhist idea of mindfulness, a principle somewhat removed from the present day, much narrower idea that goes by the same name. Mindfulness has latterly come to mean awareness of and attention to things appearing in the present moment. Such awareness certainly is valued in Buddhism, but it is not, there, identical with mindfulness. It is an auxilliary factor that aids investigation.

Investigation is the second of what are called the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, mindfulness being the first. One is to investigate the things that one is to be mindful of and also to investigate further, yet in the spirit of that mindfulness, and one is to do so with ardour. This is the basic message of the Satipatthana Sutta (MN10) and other major chapters in the Pali Canon, which is one of the foundational collections of Buddhist texts.

Carl was, of course, an exemplar of this kind of awareness too. This was true both in the very narrow sense and in a wider one. In the narrow sense, he certainly gave his clients truly undivided attention when he was with them, noticing every flicker of expression, every nuance of meaning and every first flush of emotion as these phenomena occurred. In this sense, he was a practitioner of here and now awareness. However, beyond this there was a bigger frame without which the narrower application would have been less sustainable.

He was deeply interested in the human condition and he had a strong faith in the enormous potential of the individual human subject. His whole opus consisted in a rather single-minded investigation of certain fundamental aspects of that condition, and, especially, of the factors affecting the interactions between two or more individuals. His work thus had a remarkable degree of coherence. When he saw an individual client, he was heart and soul with them, but he was also interested in them as an instance of all of us.

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What Mindfulness Is and Was Mindfulness, as we think of it today, derives from Buddhism, but, I suggest, that in this process of derivation it has undergone a considerable change and shrinkage from what it was in its original context. In Buddhism, mindfulness is a primary dimension of enlightened wisdom and is not merely a technique of attention. To be mindful is to be one who “recalls and recollects what was done long ago and spoken long ago” (MN 53, 16). In other words, it is to be imbued and saturated with age old wisdom.

In the last twenty years, mindfulness has come to be regarded as a technique that has some therapeutic applications in ameliorating depression, anxiety, addictions and stress. I will refer to this modern development as utilitarian mindfulness to distinguish it from, on the one hand, the original meaning of the word in the English language and, on the other hand, the mindfulness of the Buddhist texts, for which the Sanskrit term is smriti.

One could extend this idea and, if we take empathy to be one of the prime subjects that interested Rogers, speak of a utilitarian empathy that has developed out of his work that is similarly removed from his original spirit. By utilitarian empathy I am here referring to the development, especially in schools of counselling, of a technique of reflection, a distinct style of therapist response, that is really an imitation of what Rogers did that is not necessarily grounded in the deeper wisdom and faith that motivated him. Utilitarian empathy has also extended into a variety of protocols for training in communication or personal effectiveness, just as has happened with utilitarian mindfulness.

Regarding utilitarian mindfulness, I do not have room to go into the critique of its claims, except to say that much of the research to date is rather “soft” science. Early reviews of a wide range of research, such as Shapiro (1984) suggested that while utilitarian mindfulness does seem to do some good it is no more or less effective than many other things, including such other quasi-medical interventions as hypnosis, bio-feedback, or

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systematic relaxation, or indeed other more old fashioned nostrums such as country walks, a new interest in life, or adopting a general fitness programme. Since then there has been a mountain of further studies, though most include substantial subjective, self-report elements and lack controls. Reviews of research tend to confirm the earlier conclusion eg.

Gaynor (2014) showing small positive benefits, similar in scale to those of many other wholesome activities. So, we may say that utilitarian mindfulness is a generally good thing, but not the miracle cure that it is sometimes cracked up to be. Similar comments apply to utilitarian empathy. It can be an improvement upon some common patterns of interpersonal communication, but it falls short of the whole vision that Rogers had in his heart.

Given the current emphasis on attention and awareness, I have been interested to ferret out what the role of such attention and awareness was in the original Buddhist scheme and to see how it fitted with mindfulness as the term is there understood. We had better firstly clarify the latter. The word smriti derives from a word for “remember�. This is very close to the original English use of the term mindfulness, meaning to keep in mind.

Mindfulness is none other than the fact of one's mind being full of something, and the basic notion is that if one's mind is full of good things a good life and wellbeing will naturally follow whereas if one's mind is full of rubbish and corruption then there will be a corresponding result in one's manifestation in action in the world. This basic easily understood notion is readily recognisable as central to the Buddha's teaching throughout his dispensation.

We can apply this idea easily to the life of Carl Rogers. He is a notable example of somebody who kept something wholesome and altruistic in mind and applied it in ways that in due course were an aid and an inspiration to a measureless number of people.

Whichever of Carl's books you pick up and almost wherever you open it and read, you get something of the same message coming through. The application, the examples used, the mode of researching, or the context may all be different, but the core message remains.

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This message expresses his sense of human thriving depending upon factors that it is no great stretch to characterise as love. Reduced to this core, one asks oneself, if this is not the central message of all great innovators in the field of human relations, delivered, pehaps with greater or lesser sophistication and complexity, but, in the final analysis, a simple and perennial inspiration. Is this not, in fact, “what was done long ago and spoken long ago” and is it not the task of all of us to do something similar, each in our own way, according to our capacity?

So how, if at all, do these two notions of mindfulness fit together? In Buddhism, mindfulness is a “factor of enlightenment” whereas awareness and attention, while valuable, are not. The difference of status is important. Awareness and attention are supposed to be servants of mindfulness in its full sense. The Buddha's teaching has a dynamic quality. It is not simply the imparting of a static doctrine – a kind of final revelation.

It has more the quality of method or approach. One is supposed to listen and learn, but while that is necessary, it is not sufficient. One has to investigate. One has to go beyond what one has learnt, deepening one's understanding and making it one's own in the process. If mindfulness is the first factor, investigation is the second (MN 118, 29 et seq). It is this investigation that leads to enthusiasm and confidence and it is in this area of investigation that awareness and attention really come into their own.

Carl Rogers would have heartily agreed with these sentiments. He was a great investigator. The first person to put recording machines into psychotherapy consulting rooms, he really wanted to know what happened, how it happened, what resulted and why.

He was an enthusiast for finding out. “The facts are friendly,” he would say, with the clearly implicit admonition for us to go out and find them. He was as much an investigator as a facilitator and, substantially, for him, these roles were not that separate. His therapy was an investigation. What he facilitated was the client's own investigation of his own experience. This was productive in itself but it was also a way of inducing the client into an investigatory mode. If his therapy was investigative, it is also true that his researches were

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intended to have therapeutic effect, not only for individuals, but more widely in finding remedy for the ills of our society and conflicted world. As Jacob Moreno famously said, “No therapy worth its salt should have less and objective than the whole world.” Rogers was like that.

However, we must once again pause to note the similarities and differences. The kind of awareness and attention that go into a programme of research or investigation such as Carl undertook and Buddha advocated is somewhat different from the more static form of attention involved in fully savouring the taste of a grape. The latter has a value in enhancing sensory awareness, but it lacks the purposive dimension that is apparent in Rogerian research as in Buddhist meditative inquiry. Buddha did not, in fact, advocate awareness per se as an end in itself.

Utilitarian mindfulness has adopted the idea that awareness in itself is a therapeutic ingredient that can be applied in a quasi-medical fashion as a “treatment” for the conditions mentioned earlier – anxiety, stress, depression and addiction – among others. I don't see evidence of Rogers having done anything of this kind in his professional practice, though I imagine that he would have thought that appreciating colour, texture, form and substance were intrinsic goods. He was an amateur photographer, after all.

A Sort of Scientific Faith So there is a value in just looking, but I think that Carl mostly looked for a purpose and it seems to me that Buddha did too, and in both cases the purpose had to do with finding understanding that leads to liberation. In this there is a teleological sense. Rogers was purposeful, but not in the manner of setting specific goals for the client to achieve. His sense of direction was more natural and cosmic. He believed in an underlying directional tendency that remains rather mystical in his work. He conceives each person as eternally in a process of “self-actualisation” and to him this self- actualisation is embedded in a greater universal actualisation process at work in the cosmos as a whole. We could say

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that Rogers had an anti-entropic philosophy. I am reminded that when the scientist R. Lovelock was asked what one should look for as a sign of the existence of life on distant planets, given that life might take a very different form there from here, he said that one should look for signs of negative entropy. The inanimate realm is one in which entropy seems inexorable. It is life that reverses this trend or struggles against it. Rogers was interested in bringing people to life and that meant reducing the entropy in their existence.

This he termed actualisation or, simply, “on becoming a person”.

Rogers never even attempted to demonstrate experimentally the actualisation tendency as a cosmic constant. It was an article of faith, a construction built upon primary intuition. I'm sure that Rogers shared the faith of science that the universe is comprehensible in principle even if modern cosmology seems to demonstrate what intuition has told us all along that we shall never be in a position to have access to all the information that would make such comprehension a reality for ourselves, not least because vast amounts of information must be locked up in so-called “black holes” and other inaccessible singularities. Like it or not, when it comes to our sense of ultimate ends and meanings, we have no option but to proceed in faith, however “scientific” we think we are being.

So Carl's mind, and heart we could say, was full of such a faith, that life was meaningful, worthwhile and constructive and therefore worth actualising and that such actualisation could be fostered by certain definable conditions that we sometimes manage to provide for one another. He formulated this hypothesis in terms that academia, the helping professions and the modern culture generally could accommodate, avoiding such terms as faith and love and preferring more technical sounding circumlocutions such as unconditional, positive regard.

Intrinsic and Boundary Ethicality The founders of the modern utilitarian mindfulness have had to adopt a similar strategy, though perhaps to an even more exacting degree and this accounts for much of the gap

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that has opened up between mindfulness as we now know it and as it once was. In particular, in the sculpting of the utilitarian mindfulness it has been necessary to strip out any reference, not only to faith and love, but even to elements that could be labelled as moral. This has yielded as supposedly ethically neutral technique.

This refinement has led to problems. The ethically neutral technique can, obviously, be used for unethical purposes. Indeed, it is arguable that here and now awareness and sharp attention occur most naturally in activities like hunting and fighting. Acute attention is essential to a sniper, for instance. When John Kabat Zinn evolved the method, he did so within a medical context that already had its own ethical boundary. The Western approach usually is like this: to favour the use of techniques that are ethically neutral in themselves within a frame that has an ethical professional boundary. Once the method of utilitarian mindfulness had escaped from that boundary, however, Pandora was out of her box.

Rogers' ideas, to a lesser degree, suffer from a similar problem. Avoiding the terms love and care, he spoke of empathy. In and of itself , empathy presents as an ethically neutral technique, having, “no more moral status than the circulatory system” (Shlien 1997, p.67).

It is quite clear from the context that Rogers only conceived of it as a component in work of great compassion. However, strictly speaking, there is nothing in the skill of “understanding another as though you yourself were that other without ever losing touch with the as if condition” that of itself ensures that such understanding will be used for good rather than ill. It was John Shlien, a close colleague and supporter of Rogers, who, in the book Empathy Reconsidered, pointed out that you need refined empathy skills to be a good torturer.

The past several decades have seen a near obsession with boundaries in the helping professions. Where the sixties and seventies, which were a hayday period for Rogers, were a period of experimentation with freedom and abolition of limits, the subsequent epoch has been much preoccupied with re-establishing them and even asserting them as

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a foundational principle of action, a course with many dubious consequences. The utilitarian mindfulness phenomenon is the latest example. The problem was, however, much less acute for Rogers in his time. Although he too created concepts that were relatively technical and neutral, like “congruence” rather than sincerity, in his work as a whole the concern with intrinsic goodness rather than mere boundary definition is apparent. In this, he was much closer to the original mindfulness than to its modern counterpart, even though, in his hypotheses and formulations he had to kow-tow to current orthodoxy.

Summing Up So, in this short essay, I have tried to give a picture of Carl as a man in keeping with the original spirit of right mindfulness, a man whose mind was replete with inherently good intention, struggling to present the insights and intuitions that that goodness provided in a form that could pass muster in a world that was becoming increasingly locked into a more detached, technicalised, boundaried, defensive stance that has got more extreme since his demise. The founders of utilitarian mindfulness have had to adopt similar manoevres, but in more extreme circumstances.

I have also tried to bring out how, nonetheless, the man himself was substantially in line with the intention of the original propagator of “unremitting mindfulness”, Shakyamuni Buddha. Such earlier mindfulness could be as unremitting as in and out breathing because it was a matter of things deeply internalised, laid up in the heart, things that were as much a part of the person as blood and bone, perhaps more so. This reverce for deep quality was something shared by both these men, something they hoped to promote, foster and cultivate in those around them and that they each tried to present in ways tailored to the exigencies of the social climate in which they lived and worked.

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Reference

MN refers to Majjhima Nikaya, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha.

Gaynor K. 2014 “A critical review of mindfulness-based psychological treatments for worry and rumination.” OA Behavioural Medicine 2014 Feb 19;2(1):2.

Rogers C.R. 1977. Carl Rogers on Personal Power. New York. Delacorte Shapiro D.H. 1984. “Overview: Clinical and physiological comparison of meditation with other self-control strategies.” Shapiro D.H. & Walsh R.N. (eds.) Aldine Publishing NY Shlien J. “Empathy in psychotherapy: A vital mechanism? yes. Therapist's conceit? All too often. By itself enough? No.” in Bohart A.C. & Greenberg L.S. Empathy Reconsidered: New directions in psychotherapy. Washington DC. American Psychological Association pp.63-80

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