Mindfulness and attention: Towards a phenomenology of mindfulness as the feeling of being tuned in

Abstract

ABSTRACT There is a consensus in the contemporary literature that mindfulness is a kind of attention. From here the literature divides into two opposing camps:the ‘Quietists’ and the ‘Cognitivists’. For the Quietists mindfulness is ‘bare attention’: the kind of attention that remains when all higher-order mental activity is suspended. For the Cognitivists, by contrast, mindfulness is a kind of retentive attention that brings into play specific kinds of cognitive processes . Through a critical analysis of the contemporary literature this essay will try to establish that the common assumption is mistaken, and that mindfulness cannot be identified with any kind of attention. It will be argued that we get much closer to the true nature of mindfulness if we conceive of it as an example of what Matthew Ratcliffe has called ‘feeling of being’ . Mindfulness is the feeling of being tuned in to the intrinsic intelligibility of the things themselves.