enterprises. It has gained corporate appeal because it promotes the status quo by diverting employee discontent from systematic sources to employee deficiency. Instead of finding ways to make the workplace more workable, so it goes, employees are told to make their minds more mindful. Termed ‘McMindfulness’ by critics, corporate mindfulness training is branded and “cloaked in an aura of care and humanity” that Purser and Loy say reinforce the roots of greed, ill will, and delusion. Like the 60s and 70s, today’s corporate psychologists are worming-out the social-ethical components that fight greed, delusion, and disintegration. The effects are massive, and Buddha disapproves. When manipulative, socially oppressive methods are commercially targeted at children, children whine for things they don’t need and are fractured from nature and diversity; and when these methods are applied to gather support for war, they become murderous.1 Unlike mindfulness, wholeness by definition resists fracturing and compartmentalizing. It is the unmistakable goal of one who holistically syncs mindfulness to their creative actions. Since wholeness is validation of being genuinely mindful, it’s immune to the commercial exploitations that put lucrative bounties on the head of mindfulness. Wholeness thus cannot be botched, denatured, or underestimated and is easily falsified when disingenuous: our own guts, feelings, and experiences provide the signals.
The fragmented self
When we feel uncertain about our decisions, especially when they’re made in virtue of people and systems beyond ourselves, we place the power of choice in others’ hands. We create our perceptions synthetically, and we feel disjointed. We base our decisions on what ‘they’ say, on commercial sex appeal, on trendy rules of society—basically on the things that don’t cohesively align with what we know to truly represent our own hopes and intentions. What could be more idiotic than that?
1
History has seen religious and philosophical ideas misused to serve murderous ends before. Hitler used Hegel’s idea of civilization climaxing in Germany to ax non-Germans; the Spanish crown commissioned butchers for ‘God, gold, and glory’; and Bush terrorized much of the Middle East with ‘Axis of Evil’ rhetoric.