The most overwhelmingly popular self-help cult in existence today is unquestionably Mindfulness. It is a simplistic framework that makes no effort whatsoever to hide the fact that its entire basis lies in obscure variants of Hinduism and Buddhism, unlike TM, which eventually tried to disguise its origins almost completely. But like TM, an enormous effort has gone into bogus "experiments" and "studies" which claim to validate the wonderful benefits that result from practicing a mindful form of meditation. The idea is nothing more than to sit down, relax, and try to become fully aware of your immediate surroundings. (Looking out the window is not permitted.) But here is a more official, recent,  and much vaguer definition from a Mindfulness web site: "Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. Mindfulness is a quality that every human being already possesses, it’s not something you have to conjure up, you just have to learn how to access it." The more popular the practice gets, the vaguer and more all-embracing the state to be achieved becomes. Eventually Mindfulness branched, with an alternative requiring concentrating entirely on inner mental states! Here is yet another description of Mindfulness from an official web site: "It is a self-regulation practice focused on training attention and awareness, with the goal of bringing mental processes under greater voluntary control. Being mindful of one’s breath, for instance, is a common form of mindfulness during meditation." This is what happens when a cult has no "fearless leader" who is the source of all unquestioned dogma, which all believers must subscribe to. The total vagueness of the whole vacuous concept of Mindfulness leads inevitably to this kind of splitting into diametrically opposite and irreconcilable concepts, each asserted to be the core of the practice!

One of the earliest proponents of mindfulness was Baba Ram Dass, aka Richard Alpert (1931 - 2019). A Harvard professor who experimented with psychedelic drugs, Alpert became a full-time guru, and his most famous rule for right living was "Be Here Now!" The other founders of the self-help cult are usually said to be Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn (1926-2022) and Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944 - ).

Baba Ram Dass

Thich Nhat Hahn

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Note the usual reduction to infantile selfishness in the Mindfulness memes here. Instead of focusing on the external world of physical reality, and concentrating on your specific location in it... "be here, now"... you are instead to concentrate on your purely internal state, your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your needs, etc.! This type of total contradiction is one of the major symptoms of pseudoscience.

There are two realms in which Mindfulness can become exceedingly dangerous... one lies in using this vacuous approach in a "treatment" of genuine mental illness... only harm can result. The other is seen in the frequently found claims that Mindfulness can treat problems related to physical health, which can only carry Mindfulness into the crowded and deadly dangerous realm of medical quackery.  Here a user of the procedure talks about some of its dangers.  Another user notices the often severe side effects of the supposedly harmless practice. This is a serious issue because the popularization and use of Mindfulness as a panacea for all ills has exploded beyond belief since 2000. The more people try to use it, the more serious mental and physical health issues inevitably arise.

Mindfulness is a fad rather than a cult, but its very popularity makes it dangerous. And it is interesting that believers in whatever faction of Mindfulness they happen to like are following directly in the footsteps of Transcendental Meditation, in generating hundreds of worthless and meaningless studies attempting to show that Mindfulness in some version or other has some kind of measurable health benefits. This symptom should serve to warn those casually interested in these inherently religious ideas that what we are dealing with here is the all-too-common remarketing of religion as some wild but "real" version of valid science.

The TM cult is well aware that since 2000, the Mindfulness fad has been a major, in fact overwhelming competitor of the expensive-to-join TM cult, so TMers have been working overtime to provide "scientific proof" that TM is "better" than Mindfulness. Actually, of course, neither activity is physically distinguishable from the other, or has a measurable physiological or medically-detectable effect on the human body.

The willingness of large numbers of health care professionals to use an obvious pseudoscience in their treatments is a sad indictment of that group's general grasp of what constitutes a valid scientific claim, and what criteria a valid scientific study must satisfy.  It has been pointed out in the past by many scholars that, indeed, health care professionals as a group show a very poor understanding of the methodology of actual scientific investigations. For example.