Mindfulness is being heavily (albeit dishonestly) pushed by many institutions at present; the practice is useless at best - harmful in its strategic intent.
If Western institutions were teaching prayer in the absence of Christianity, that people should just be praying but not to anybody or anything in particular - but because the process of praying is somehow good-for-you, the incoherence would be obvious.
Mindfulness is a fragment of Buddhism - a partial means to the ends of Buddhism, in which context it makes sense. But what kind of sense can it make without any religious objective?
Well, this religious practice is supposed to be a kind of therapy, or to make people feel good. That's all. It is like advocating going to church every week to enjoy the singing. In other words, it is shallow and at the level of pleasure.
But mindfulness is presented as if it is a spiritual activity, good for the spirit.
The question is why, aside from bureaucratic empire-building and perhaps the promise of a more effective or compliant workforce, mindfulness is being pushed - by whoever is pushing it.
My best guess is subversion of religion. Promoting pseudo-Buddhism is subversive of Christianity (in a Western context) and also subversive of any possibility of genuine Buddhism.
The implicit teaching of mindfulness education is that what matters about religion is not truth, but how you feel - putting religion on a level with entertainment, social media, alcohol and drugs.
Since real religion is the only genuine threat to the mainstream modern Establishment - this is plausible to me.
The usual 'at least' cover story is used to protect the subversion; 'at least' people will have a little bit of religion, 'at least' they will be encouraged to set aside some time away from media for thinking (albeit thinking about nothing, and with no purpose)...
Maybe mindfulness could be a gateway to real religion? This might be semi-plausible if almost exactly the same kind of content-free 'spritituality' hadn't already been tried multiple times since the Beat generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 60-70s and the New Age movement of the 80s...
Well, did all this partial and diluted religiosity lead to more genuine religiousness, to more genuine spirituality? Look around - the obvious answer is no No NO! It led to, facilitated or permitted a vast expansion of materialist bureaucracy and totalitarianism on one side; a culture of hedonic distraction on the other.
And there we have our answer as to why mindfulness is popular among the bureaucrats and micro-managers...
