Differentiating Third-Wave Cognitive Mindfulness From Meditative Mindfulness Using a Gurdjieffian Phenomenology of Awareness

Abstract

Current literature on mindfulness offers inadequate distinction between neo-traditional mindfulness and cognitive behavioral mindfulness, to the extent that both approaches can be included within the same meta-analyses. A close examination of the mechanisms of action in several forms of mindfulness using a lens of Gurdjieffian phenomenology of awareness can point toward a clear and well defined distinction between varieties of mindfulness. The phenomenology of cognitive behavioral mindfulness suggests that it involves an enhanced attention to the cognitive contents of awareness, as in Gurdjieff’s second state, but give no evidence of attaining self-reflexive awareness in which attention attunes to its own presence as the context of cognitive processes. Neo-traditional and meditative forms of mindfulness are more likely to attend to both the contents and the context of consciousness, a change associated with a shift in state of consciousness. Using Gurdjieff’s phenomenology of awareness, neo-traditional mindfulness can be seen as similar to Gurdjieff’s self-remembering, in which awareness attends to the cognitive contents of experience as well as to its own presence. Cognitive behavioral versions of mindfulness differ from both of these in that the object of attention does not extend self-reflexively beyond cognitive contents.