David L. McMahan in his piece about secular subjectivity in Secularizing Buddhism, writes, “ They might be used to shore up the "buffered self" and reassert the lost sense of autonomous selfhood. Popular culture in the United States and Europe (and increasingly around the world) tells us that we, indeed, have a self that we need to discover, and to discover it we need to look within. When we discover who we are, we must be true to that self, casting off socially conditioned influences to emerge as a truly free, autonomous self-contained being. Some Buddhist-derived approaches to mindfulness implicitly take this approach, using contemplative methods originally designed to undermine the perception of a fixed, permanent self instead to reinforce the individualism so deeply rooted in Western culture. They attempt to strike back against fragmentation by using meditation to reaffirm the integrated, singular individual-the man in the mirror. In this sense, meditation, mindfulness, self-monitoring, and self-observation have the potential to exacerbate the sense of individual isolation, separation from the world, and even narcissism. These interpretations of mindfulness tend to be either purely introspective or instrumental, offering either private psychological comfort or increasing one's effectiveness at doing whatever one happened to be doing anyway. If mindfulness is a tool to enhance the efficiency of the autonomous self, then it can, in the current context, simply reinforce a sense of isolated individuality, to which instrumentalized, decontextualized, commercialized, and corporatized applications of mindfulness become an appendage.”
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