#len1950

When we practice mindfulness and focus on phenomena, we have already focused on phenomena that our consciousness has already “selected”. It does more harm than good

By the time “phenomena” appear as objects of attention, selection has already occurred. Consciousness does not receive a raw manifold and then choose what to focus on; it is a selective system. Salience, relevance, threat, usefulness, and familiarity are built in upstream of attention. Mindfulness does not intercept this process. It arrives late, after the filtering, after the framing, after the world has already been carved into “this rather than that.” So what it trains is not openness to reality, but obedience to the existing selection mechanism.

This is why the practice is not helpful for understanding. It creates the false belief that what we see is the same as what is real, just because we look at it calmly. When we pay attention, we mistakenly think that what we notice is important and true. Instead of holding back our opinions, we end up supporting our earlier choices as if they are valid. The world we focus on seems more “real” because it has already been shaped by our unconscious judgments.

That’s where the damage happens. The practitioner learns to trust appearances more, not less. The cognitive system becomes smoother, quieter, more efficient at running its own biases. Projection becomes harder to detect because it is no longer noisy or anxious. A calm projection feels like insight. A stabilized delusion feels like wisdom. This is why mindfulness pairs so well with moral certainty, spiritual bypassing, and instrumental reasoning by training compliance with the given structure while dissolving resistance to it.

And notice the asymmetry. We cannot adjust ourselves to the albatross or whatever object, but we can adjust the albatross to our knowledge or, worse, to our ignorance. Mindfulness accelerates this adjustment by removing friction. It produces a subject who no longer questions the legitimacy of their own perceptual cuts. The bird becomes “just what shows up.” No struggle, no doubt, no interrogation of the frame.

So, the harm is not accidental. It is structural. Mindfulness is a technology of attentional obedience. It does not expand epistemic humility; it reduces it. It trains the subject to inhabit appearances more comfortably, not to recognize their contingency. Calm attention does not liberate perception; it anesthetizes doubt.

Mindless Instrumentality

The most significant tragedies faced by living beings are not caused by humans to other humans, but rather by humans towards animals. The suffering we impose on animals reflects our own primal instincts projected onto them.

We often label animals as cruel or violent, despite the fact that they do not inherently possess these qualities. This tendency to project our traits onto other beings prevents us from recognizing their value as individuals, as we instead interpret them through a lens of our own flawed reasoning.

Contingent and correctable biases.

Contingent biases and correctable biases are fundamentally different. These biases are habits that build upon existing structures. For example, confirmation bias is when people look for information that supports their existing beliefs. In-group bias occurs when individuals favor those they identify with socially, rather than based on logic. Other biases, like authority bias and availability bias, also fit into this category.

These biases can change depending on culture, training, and emotions, but they can be reduced through statistical methods, critical thinking, and self-discipline. The purpose of science is to address these biases, not to ignore the deeper structural ones. When psychology claims that all biases are of the second type, it wrongly assumes a perspective that is not truly attainable.

It is a mistake to believe that fixing contingent biases will lead to a completely unbiased understanding of reality. Instead, it only helps to minimize confusion within certain limits. Kant’s idea remains relevant. Even the most accurate data and the most honest scientists work within frameworks they did not choose and cannot escape. The real issue is not that we have biases; it’s that we often confuse the ways we understand things with actual mistakes.

You cannot think without filters; you can only learn which filters are structural and stop blaming them for being unavoidable.