Like nature, human nature is a subtle thing. Yet obfuscating the subtle things of life can be a source of entertainment, delusion or chicanery. It all depends upon one's ability for self deception or inclination to deceive. A stage magician knows this well, and obfuscates the subtle aspects of pulling a rabbit from a hat by a sleight of hand that obscures that there is literally something up his sleeve. The audience knows it is deceived, but does not know exactly how, and therein lies the magicians craft.
For human nature, sleight of hand becomes sleight of mind, which as with any good trick, can be revealed upon close inspection. Consider the simple mental act of making a choice. Choosing is the cognitive act that leads to the decision to follow one route of action in preference to and in exclusion of other options, which are thus thus lost or deferred. But experiment and experience tell us that choices can be 'affective' things. That is, it often hurts when we make one decision to the exclusion of others. So what are the rules behind this? Consider this mind experiment. At the start of a working day, we drive to work. While driving, we lose the opportunity to go shopping, fly to Paris, or stay home and watch TV. Indeed, there are an infinite number of 'lost' opportunities, but we are hardly bothered by these losses and are scarcely aware of them. This is because these opportunity losses are predictable and unavoidable. But if we change the underlying rules, affect occurs. Specifically, unpredictable and unavoidable or avoidable opportunity loss uniquely correlates with specfic affective events. An unpredicted or 'counferfactual' loss that is unavoidable elicits pain that is interpreted as regret, yet if the loss is avoidable, then tension and anxiety also occurs concurrently with or as a precursor to regret. Moreover, these affective events occur even for slight or momentary losses. Thus, an individual who is choosing between cars to buy will know she will likely or surprisingly lose something or 'live to regret it', and will be anxioius before and upon making a choice. Or if she makes continual decisions during a working day between work and internet surfing, these contant avoidable no win decisions or distractions will cause ongoing and ultimately exhausting tension. The emotional attributes of unpredictable and unavoidable/avoidable opportunity loss due to choice is known in modern social psychology as 'choice tyranny', where anxiety and regret is traced to abstract properties of decision making.
Enter the concept of mindfulness. Mindfulness is essentially a simple cognitive procedure that entails perceiving but not judging or choosing between the contents of experience, and results in pleasurable relaxation and enhanced alertness. But as such it renders all judgement suspect, whereas the evidence suggests that the operative cause for bad feelings is not reducing choice but in reducing an abstract aspect of choice. That is, it is not choice per se that causes uncomfortable affect, but rather how avoidable and predictable are the inevitable opportunity losses of making a decision. Thus, to be relaxed and alert, it will behoove one to radically eliminate, postpone, or reinterpret distractive or loss entailing choices rather than to avoid all choice. That is, if choice and its negative implications are made to be (through experience or circumstance) or are reinterpreted to be predictable and unavoidable, or are 'accepted', then relaxation occurs. Thus on a large scale or molar level if we accept the fact that bad things happen, then like 'death and taxes', they will not disturb us. Similarly, on the small scale or molecular level, if we consistently realize that we will never access the internet at work, then we can never by distracted by it. Again, because we 'accept' the fact that we will not choose a distracting event at work, equanimity is restored
The essence of this analysis is that it maps the affective implications of decision to abstract aspects of experience that are non-consciously perceived, and are only imperfectly contacted by language. Thus it does not require the use of highly metaphorical descriptive languages , from Buddhism to Relational Frame Theory, that aim to account for decision making and affect. And herein lies the problem. Idiosyncratic data languages that imperfectly map to subtle yet clearly definable aspects of cognition and behavior end up obfuscating the issues at hand because they interject too many variables that do not clearly map to the facts at hand. Thus rivers of ink are spilled inferring a host of intervening cognitive variables that obscure the facts because they do not specifically map to any facts, and like a magician's meaningless tap of a wand or wave of a hand, make mindfulness into magic. Whether this is self deception or chicanery is hard to say, but perhaps only a magician would understand.
