What is an appropriate state of mind at this time? I try to be a reflective citizen. I would like to have the negative capability that Keats wrote of, but he was writing about Shakespeare. Harold Bloom sees Shakespeare as god-like in his humanity. Nothing wrong with aiming high. As they say, don’t be a Buddhist, be a Buddha. Do Christians have the aspiration to sainthood? I think Thomas Merton suggested that they should.
We could use more prosaic language and talk of a paradigm shift. I was in the bank yesterday, paying in cheques. It was a Friday and I was expecting delays as local small businesses sorted out their cash returns. In fact it was not so bad, a wait of five minutes or so, but a woman ahead of me was saying that it was disgusting, the delay, and she would be writing to head office. I thought: if waiting at the counter is the only difficulty we’ll be facing at this time of potential financial meltdown, then I’ll settle for that.
What other states of mind might be useful? An apocalyptic vision is helpful when everything is collapsing around you. There is a great exhibition at Tate Britain at the moment.
And you need to be paranoid when the others are out to get you. The human skeleton is designing for running, not walking.
We find it hard to think of prosperity without growth. We are not used to facing years of austerity – that is, when we are not going to be reassured all the time that we are getting to be better off than before.
We are hearing all that time that this is the biggest, smallest, hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, fastest, slowest, whatever since ten years ago or twenty, or a hundred years, and increasingly, since records began.
We need mindfulness, to keep in touch with the interconnectivity of all things, but not as a quick fix for depression. There is something about the human condition that we have great ideas, great religions, and we reduce them to a concern about inessentials, what we wear on holy days and rubbish collections and 2p on the price of petrol.

mindfulness at work

Buddhist psychology – which has brought the concept of mindfulness to our attention in thinking how people may have more control over their lives, in the context of stress, addiction, depression – starts from the premise that we do not understand ourselves or the world we are a part of. We start from a position of ignorance. We just don’t know. We don’t get it. What we have are a whole lot of habitual ways of seeing things and doing things. These inform our consciousness of what we experience – whether this is a door or love affair. At any moment we are in contact with the world of which we are a part, through our senses, sight, hearing, smell, touch, the work of our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and our thoughts, the work of our mind. Buddhist theory says that this contact is at first pleasurable or not, or it is neither pleasurable nor not pleasurable. And then we give it a name, a description, we build a story around it. We create a meaning for the contact, which becomes our way of understanding the world. So a pain becomes something that has been done to us, and it makes us angry. We look with hostility for the perpetrator. The pain is not the problem, according to this analysis: it is our reaction that is the problem. This is how we react and overreact to each and every stimulus that arises.
This is a psychology that is asking the question how. This is how we feel, think, and behave. It is not interested so much in the question why, which is a more familiar question in psycho-analysis. The Buddha ridiculed those who want to know why all the time. When you are shot with an arrow you just want it taken out, not wait to get a detailed description. But if you are always getting shot at when you are out and about, it seems sensible to ask who is shooting the arrows and a description is then very helpful in identifying the enemy. This is after all the way of diagnosis in medicine, and the Buddha is said to have been diagnostic in his description of the four truths of the existence of suffering, of craving as the cause of suffering, that suffering can cease, and there is a way of making that happen – the eight-fold path, involving a profound understanding of how things really are, an ethical framework for living, and a training in how to be fully aware of how things really are. It is called an eight-fold path but they are none of them independent of the others. Buddhists make lists but this is deceptive, as their approach is always integrative and holistic.
The theory of dependent origination is itself a theory of causality; that everything that we might call a fact has in fact been constructed; it could not be as it is but for other stuff that came before, necessary but not sufficient for its present existence. This door could not be as it is without a thousand acts that contributed to its existence, and each of these acts were themselves consequent on previous acts, and so back into the mists of time. But the final act – say, of cutting the wood – in that moment the craftsman was paying greater or lesser attention, the line is more or less true … With each act there is renewal of intention. So much for a door – so much more complex for a love affair … how you met, that first contact, pleasurable, not pleasurable, neither pleasurable nor unpleasurable.
It is not the thing in itself but the idea of the thing that is important. The thing in itself does not exist as such. An organisation, for example: in what sense does it exist in itself? We talk instead of an organisation-in-the-mind. The organisation is made of all kinds of stuff – there is plant, there are people, there is trade, there are raw materials, products and services, there is intellectual property, there is legal identity. But what is Accenture or Marks & Spencer , or, to take a particular example, the NHS? How we think about them makes them what they are.