The word keeps on popping up, it seems to have some sort of navel-gazing yogic definition, but no one can seem to come up with a simple, clear, unambiguous description.

A tour through Google only reveals a mixture of the usual New Age obvious and unprovable; “to be fully aware of one’s surroundings and how one reacts to them”. Duh? Isn’t that what we normally call ‘consciousness’ or ‘self-awareness’. Google Translate maps the word to the Spanish (the only language other than English I know) for ‘consciousness’. But ‘mindfulness’ seems to have some other meaning these days, one not immediately apparent from its etymology. At least, the concept doesn’t seem to exist in Spanish. Come to think of it, the concept didn’t seem to exist in English until rather recently, when I started seeing it in self-help books in stupormarket checkout paperback shelves (along with the Jesus, astrology, diet, celebrity and cooking advice).

Borrowing from my Julian Jaynes, perhaps it means not just the normal day-to-day processes of the human mind as it navigates reality, but the internal monitoring we conduct of our own thought processes to evaluate and control them AS we navigate reality. You know, you just don’t drive a car or conduct a conversation, you observe yourself driving or talking to make sure you are understanding and accomplishing what you really want to do or say. Think of it as a sort of bicameral function, the mind contemplating itself as it goes about its normal day-to-day functioning; a sort of built-in autopilot. Maybe that’s why our brain is divided into two separate but connected hemispheres, One does the thinking, the other monitors, supervises, advises, perhaps even intervenes in the thinking of the other. One side handles the routine shit, the other doublechecks and approves the result.

But isn’t that what we all do anyway? At least, that how I always understood my mind worked, ever since I was a kid. I don’t just observe and react to the universe, I observe myself while I’m doing it. And my “higher level functions”, (if that’s what you want to call them), although not necessarily right, DO have veto power.