Mindfulness: As Event. As Radical Simplicity

Awakening: A Manifesto for Radical Mindfulness ― Part 2

Note: This is the second part of a manifesto that critiques capitalism’s appropriation of Buddhism and mindfulness—while also tracing their transformative power.

New here? The Introduction sets the stage.

You’ll find a full overview of all parts here and at the bottom of the page.

The undiscovered is not far away. It’s not something to be found eventually. It is contained within what is right in front of us. […] And in this space, the undiscovered and ever―changing moment exists—a moment containing all possibilities, the totality of existence, absolute reality.¹
― H.E. Davey

Mindfulness

As Event. As Radical Simplicity

Intrusion of Reality. Almost everyone has experienced mindful moments. These are the instances of pause, when suddenly everything within and around us becomes calm and still. One gazes upon a world lying quietly and openly—a world previously unnoticed. Sunlight streams through the backyard into a room, illuminating specks of dust slowly swirling through the air—a fleeting moment of brilliance in the everyday.

Or perhaps that moment at a party: after hours of partying, you step out into the fresh air or retreat to the calm of a restroom—and suddenly, you are fully present again. It’s almost as if you had been caught in a strange dream—a fun but oddly mindless experience. But now, you are here.

The Event of a Mindful Moment

This is what mindfulness feels like: an almost ontic rupture. The world seems different, more real—as if a window to the outside has been opened. Granted, the world outside can be seen even through the closed window. But opening it, you’re struck by the immediacy of impressions rushing in. The world addresses you, and you, in turn, address the world; you are implicated, and nothing can prepare you for it.

Imagine opening a window and trying to fully anticipate the change it will bring—you can’t. You open it and are surprised. This is where the eventfulness of a mindful moment reveals itself: it brings about an “effect that seems to exceed its causes.”²

The Gaze That Transforms Everything

Radicality and Simplicity. Mindfulness is a looking up—an astonished gaze, a gentle resting in reality, an openness to what is. It is a present awareness that retains both its wakefulness and its sense of wonder: an attentive gaze that presupposes nothing, expects nothing.³

Even here, the transformative potential of mindfulness emerges: its mode of amazement and openness creates the space necessary to recognize that things could be different—a better world becomes possible.

The Presence of Possibility

And mindfulness shows us something else: a better world is not only possible—it is, in a way, already here. The astonishment of the mindful stems in part from this realization: they are surprised by the simplicity of what they find, by the sense of returning to a moment or thought space that has always already been there—something as familiar as recognizing, upon waking, that you are in your own bed.

This moment of the always-already-there—the presence of possibility—is what mindfulness plants in critical thought: an awareness of the ease of change, a hope that does not paralyze. For mindfulness points to a temporality that offers a way out of the tension between hopelessness on one side and excessive hope on the other.

The Presence of the Future

It is a paradoxical temporality, in which everything is always already possible, yet not yet here. If we can hold this apparent contradiction mindfully in thought, it can give rise to a practice that continuously short-circuits the present and the future.

Mindfulness points to a temporality in which everything is always already possible, yet not yet here.

It is a temporality that calls us into contemporaneity: A better future calls out to us, urging us forward. And its realization, rather than being deferred to the future, becomes possible in the present.

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🧭 Fields

Buddhist Phenomenology, Critical Theory, Critique of Ideology, Epistemology, Ethics, Mindfulness, Meditation, Phenomenology of Mindfulness, Philosophy, Politics, Radical Imagination, Temporality

🌊 Movements / Traditions

Critical Buddhism

🧵 Concepts

Contemporaneity, Contingency, Critical Thinking, Emancipation, Empowerment, Event, Inner Work and Outer Change, Kairos, The Open, Parousia, Perception, Potentiality, Radical Mindfulness, Radical Politics, Radical Thinking, Reality Effect, Reflexion, Soteriology, Subjectivity, Subversive Practices, Phenomenology of Mindfulness, Transcendence, Wonder

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Overview of the Series

Opening: Mindfulness: From a Path of Liberation to a Commodity

1. Introduction: The Critical Potential of Buddhism

2. Mindfulness

   1. As Event. As Radical Simplicity

   2. Making Sense of a Concept: From ‘Mindfulness’ to ‘Right Mindfulness’

   3. Mindfulness and Meditation as Cultivation of Awareness

3. Critique of Mindfulness

   1. The Dark Undercurrent of Mindfulness

   2. Mindfulness and Meditation as Strategies of Governmentality

This post was originally written in German.

1. H. E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation (Albany: Michi Publishing, 2001), 74.

2. Slavoj Žižek, Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept (London: Penguin, 2014), § ALL ABOARD. Event in Transit

3. Cognitive science experiments suggest that meditators experience recurring stimuli—such as the drip of a faucet or the ticking of a clock—not as something filtered out by familiarity, but as fresh and vivid with each occurrence. Cf. Elena Antonova, Paul Chadwick und Veena Kumari, „More Meditation, Less Habituation? The Effect of Mindfulness Practice on the Acoustic Startle Reflex“, PLOS ONE 10, Nr. 5 (6. Mai 2015).