Mindfulness and quasi-religious meaning systems: An empirical exploration within the context of ecological sustainability and deep ecology

Contextualizing the back-to-the-land experience with mindfulness, a variant of meditative phenomena within deep ecology's contention that humankind re quires a fundamental shift in consciousness in order to insure ecological s ustainability, this study compares and contrasts those variables that expla in variance in mindfulness, operationalized as a quasi-religious indicator, with those that explain variance in church attendance, a measure of formal religions behavior. Drawing on a national sample for a mailed questionnair e survey of back-to-the-landers, the study found that the predictor variabl es for mindfulness share little overlap with those that explain variance fo r church attendance. The exception is spiritual mindedness, itself a quasi- religious measure, which has a statistically significant relationship with both mindfulness and church attendance. The data suggest, then, that the re ligious and the quasi-religious are relatively independent spheres of human behavior and sentiment. It would appear, consequently, at least in terms o f the back-to-the-land sample and the assumptions of deep ecology, that the adherents of organized religion are not as likely to be disposed towards e cologically sustainable frames of mind as those who center their spirituali ty on quasi-religious practices such as mindfulness.