A Small Dispute About a Squirrel
William James, the founder of modern psychology and a philosopher begins the second lecture of Pragmatism, “What Pragmatism Means,” with a small story. He has returned from a solitary walk in the mountains and finds his companions caught in what he calls a “ferocious metaphysical dispute.” The subject of the dispute is a squirrel. The squirrel is imagined as clinging to one side of a tree trunk, while a person stands on the opposite side. The person tries to see the squirrel by moving around the tree, but the squirrel keeps moving too, always staying on the far side of the trunk. The person circles the tree completely, but the squirrel always remains hidden.
So the question arises: Has the person gone around the squirrel?
Some say yes. Of course he has. He has been north of the squirrel, then east, then south, then west. He has made a full circle around the place where the squirrel is.
Others say no. He has never been behind the squirrel. The squirrel has always faced him, always kept its back turned away. If going around a squirrel means passing from its front to its side, then to its back, and finally to its front again, then he has not gone around it at all.
James answers with the sentence that carries the whole point of the story: “Which party is right,” he says, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel” (1).
What the Dispute Reveals
The disagreement sounds almost absurd, but James sees something important in it. The problem is not intelligence or foolishness, but that both sides are using the same words in different practical ways. What does it mean to “go around” something? Does it mean to move around its position in space? Or does it mean to move around the animal’s own body — front, side, back, side, front?
Once this is clarified, the argument changes. Both sides can be right, depending on what practical meaning is given to the words. The question is no longer solved by insisting more loudly on one definition. It is solved by asking what difference the definition makes.
The Pragmatist Point
This is the pragmatist point James wants to make. A concept becomes clearer when we ask what changes in experience, orientation, expectation, or action if we understand it one way rather than another. James describes the pragmatic method as a way of clarifying disputes by tracing their practical consequences: what difference would it make if one view rather than another were true?
This matters for MBEL — Mindfulness-Based Ethical Living, a framework grounded in the original understanding of mindfulness, one that keeps the concrete life situation and its ethical dimension always in view.
When we ask, “What is mindfulness?”, we may at first think we are asking for a correct definition. Is mindfulness presence? Is it attention? Is it awareness? Is it acceptance? Is it being in the present moment?
But the pragmatist question asks something sharper: What kind of practice does this definition make possible?
What Kind of Practice Does a Definition Create?
If mindfulness is understood mainly as the ability to sustain present-moment awareness, then practice may naturally move toward presence, calm, and inner awareness. These are important. They may help us pause, settle, and come back from distraction.
But MBEL asks whether this is enough.
If mindfulness is understood as an intentional activity — as making experience present, holding it clearly, and understanding it in context — then practice begins to shift. The question is no longer only: Am I present? It becomes: What is becoming visible in my experience? What bodily signal is appearing? What feeling tone is shaping this moment? What interpretation is forming? What impulse is beginning to move? What habit is being activated?
And the field widens further: What conditions are shaping this moment — biological, psychological, relational, and social? What might follow from my next response? Who may be affected by what I say or do?
Sati, Clear Understanding, and the Field of Experience
The definition of mindfulness shapes what practitioners learn to notice. The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, an ancient Buddhist discourse, is one of the root texts of mindfulness practice. Many contemporary forms of mindfulness, especially those shaped by modern mindfulness-based programs, stand directly or indirectly in relation to its basic structure: the contemplation of body, feelings, mind, and patterns of experience. In the discourse, mindfulness is associated with being keen, aware, and mindful while observing body, feelings, mind, and principles or patterns of experience (2).
In this discourse, mindfulness is not presented as sati alone, but together with clear understanding — what the tradition elsewhere brings together as sati-sampajañña (the sutta’s own formula names three qualities — ardent, aware, and mindful). The practice is not only to be present, but to know what is happening in body, feeling tone, mind, and patterns of experience. A definition of mindfulness guides attention: either mainly toward inner settling, or also toward reactivity, relationship, context, and consequence. For MBEL, this is where context-sensitive mindfulness becomes important: mindfulness reaches beyond the isolated inner moment.
Context-Sensitive Mindfulness in MBEL
For MBEL, context-sensitive mindfulness means that practice does not remain with an isolated inner state. This holds regardless of whether one approaches it from a Buddhist, secular, or any other background. It includes the bodily, emotional, relational, and ethical conditions in which experience forms and action becomes possible: What is happening here? What conditions are shaping this moment? What response is becoming more likely? What consequences might follow?
In this way, mindfulness becomes more than inner settling — a way of seeing reactivity, relationship, context, and consequence, and of supporting the shift from automatic reaction toward responsible response.
A Working Hypothesis to Be Tested in Experience
For MBEL, this remains a working hypothesis, not a finished claim: what matters is not only whether a definition is intellectually convincing, but whether it makes a difference in practice — in perceiving, understanding, meeting reactivity, and acting.
Each participant can investigate this directly: Does the practice change when mindfulness is not understood only as “being in the present moment,” but as making experience present, clarifying it in context, and cultivating the capacity to respond responsibly?
This brings us back to James’ squirrel. The argument could not be resolved by repeating the same words — “going around” — more insistently; it became clear only once their practical meaning was examined. What difference does one meaning make compared with another?
The same applies to definitions of mindfulness. If mindfulness means mainly inner presence, one kind of practice follows. If mindfulness means making experience present and clear within its bodily, emotional, relational, and ethical context, another kind of practice follows. The difference is not merely semantic. It changes what becomes visible.
Returning to the Squirrel
In James’ story, the squirrel is always there, but something about it remains hidden depending on how the situation is understood. From one perspective, the person has gone around it. From another, he has not. The object of the discussion has not changed; the practical meaning of the concept has.
In MBEL, something similar can happen with mindfulness. The experience is already here: the body signal, the feeling tone, the interpretation, the impulse, the habit, the relationship, the possible consequence. But depending on how mindfulness is understood, different aspects of this field may remain hidden or become visible.
A narrow definition may help us settle. A wider, context-sensitive definition may help us see how experience is forming and where response becomes possible. This does not make the wider definition “true” in advance. It makes it something to be tested: Does it reveal more of the situation? Does it help us notice reactivity earlier? Does it support a more responsible response?
What Mindfulness Makes Possible
The squirrel story reminds us that definitions matter only when they make a difference in lived experience. In MBEL, the question is not what mindfulness or ethics means, but what a particular understanding of it makes possible.
Does it help us pause? Does it help us see more clearly? Does it help us understand the conditions of a reaction? Does it help us act with greater care and responsibility?
In MBEL, these questions are not left abstract. They converge on two practical, checkable measures: was the response helpful, and was it appropriate to the situation. This is what makes ethical mindfulness, in this understanding, a matter of practice and evidence rather than belief.
This is the pragmatic question at the heart of MBEL. Mindfulness is not defined once and for all from the outside. Its meaning becomes clear in practice, in experience, and in the consequences of how we respond — evident to any practitioner willing to walk the MBEL path and test it in their own experience.
References
James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means.” New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907, pp. 17–19. The squirrel story appears at the opening of Lecture II; the quoted sentence appears on p. 18.
MN 10, Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta / Mindfulness Meditation, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato. The discourse presents the four fields of mindfulness — body, feelings, mind, and principles or patterns of experience — and describes the practitioner as keen, aware, and mindful.
