Beyond the tortoise and the hedgehog - Francis de Sales’ way of being drawn into loving meditative interiorisation

Abstract

Chris Goto-Jones notes that “The cultural importance of mindfulness in contemporary Western societies seems to have reached a level at which it requires consideration as a social movement.” Critical voices of concern on this western phenomenon, presenting itself as a sort of meditation craze, have been raised in terms of “the intersections between mindfulness, wisdom and ethics” especially because when taken out of its religious and philosophical humus, in ŽiŽek’s terms, meditative practice and mindfulness seem to become in themselves elements of the “hegemonic ideology of global capitalism” One cannot decline to admit that on a secular plane meditative practices have been uprooted from the religious and spiritual contexts that birthed them, more often than not from Buddhism, to be commercialised and made to serve the capitalist economic and political programme of providing a clinical tool as a sort of destressing lozenge to practitioners caught up in the anxieties of the capitalistic worldview, keeping them at bay from actively opposing the real cause of unwellness.