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In The Beginning Is Now – Mindsight Intensive
The Mindsight Intensive course begins soon, and during the preparation, the notion of a beginning intrigued me.
Not only are we at the beginning of an academic year, but to me, the fall is also the beginning of a descent into the unconscious realms of our psyche, in which we roam during the winter, and hopefully derive great benefit from the creative potential to be unleashed for the upcoming spring and summer.
I am not a Christian, a Buddhist, or any other kind of -ist, but I am a student of those. As far as I know, neither was Jesus a Christian, nor Buddha a Buddhist. Originality and innovation come more from ‘going out into the world and fucking it up beautifully’ (‘Make Trouble’ by John Waters), than dutifully following a master’s creative energy without making it your own. Owning our teachers’ creations means creating ourselves by transforming traditions and teachings into something new that reflects our unique, from the originator’s different circumstances. In his ‘The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions’, Thomas Kuhn makes this point very nicely. We tend to stay safely imprisoned within a given paradigm as we contribute to its expansion and improvement, even when obvious discrepancies and limitations point to the fact that the paradigm may be inadequate. At some point, someone comes along and shows that the whole paradigm is flawed and proposes a better one. After much protestation, everyone falls in love with the new paradigm and then engages again in the process of expanding and improving it. This happened for example with Einstein’s relativity theory, which revolutionized the Newtonian view of physics. Of course, not everyone has the genius necessary to come up with and propose new paradigms, but it might at least be worthwhile exploring our tendency to defer and abdicate our creative authority and project its power on an idol we admire, thereby losing much of our own creative energy that makes us feel alive. That’s not to say that we don’t always stand on the shoulders of giants, who came before us – we do. But in integrating their wisdom, we tend to forget the importance of taking the risk of personal engagement in the journey into the wilderness, that has no signposts we can follow, and that challenges us in a profound way to allow the creativity of the unknown to transform us. That is in fact what the mindsight journey is all about. You cannot engage in the exploration of mind and expect that everything you find convenient in your life will stay the same. Mindfulness practice is deeply revolutionary, and therefore not entirely comfortable.
One giant, on whose shoulders I stand, is Northrop Frye. Around 1984 a book by Northrop Frye unexpectedly crossed my desk, and I was told that he was apparently famous and a towering figure in his field. I don’t remember which book it was, but a cursory look at it satisfied me that he was speaking gibberish to me in what obviously was a specialized treatise on literary criticism I knew nothing about. Two years later I heard the 1962 CBC Massey lectures he gave, entitled ‘The educated imagination’. Like a lightning bolt, they struck my neurofirings and opened my mind to what he had to say about the human psyche. I began reading these texts that were more relevant for my psychiatric bend – talks he had given on myth and metaphor, writings on matters spiritual and the imagination, as well as his two books on the Bible, ‘The great code’ and ‘Words with power’. Extremely interested in what he had to say about the mind and other psychological matters, I decided I had to meet the man. I was blissfully unaware at the time that Peter Gzowski, the longterm host of CBC’s ‘Morningside’, had once referred to Northrop Frye as the most difficult person he ever interviewed, because of his ‘thought-stopping silences’.
Frye graciously invited me for a chat in his office, where we spent about an hour talking and reflecting. Thought-stopping silences indeed followed his brief responses, comments, or questions he threw my way, during which he looked deeply into my eyes. As a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, I was used to that rhythm while dialoguing, where words, sentences, and stories are like pebbles thrown into a pond, after which long periods of reflection follow the waves the pebbles caused. We both enjoyed mutually created thought-stopping silences, during which much non-verbal and imaginative material was allowed to simmer like a primordial soup from which new creations arise. My time with him was transformative because I got to experience firsthand the embodied imagination of a genius from another field than my own, which frankly blew my mind. Our dialogue became increasingly animated over the course of that hour, and he ended up inviting me to audit his lectures on the Bible for free, which I attended religiously for a year at the Old Vic in Toronto. He spoke the way he wrote with immense clarity. His somewhat monotone voice seemed to be the perfectly self-effacing and humble messenger that carried his incredible wisdom to his audience. Lecture after lecture, I felt orthogonal shifts in my consciousness being triggered by his brilliance and vast imaginative vistas. Needless to say, he had taught me to look at the Bible in a completely new way as in fact the one text that shaped the imagination of western culture like no other. He helped me gain access to an intuition I already had my whole life, that the Bible, like the Bhagavad Gita, was a book of wisdom and revelation about the human mind and its liberation from delusion. It is scripture, and scripture is an art form that has been lost in our digital age. We don’t know anymore how to read it, let alone write it for what it is, a means of personal and social transformation, not a rigid dogma to confirm our own views. This is why I am now going to open the Bible on its first page as Frye would likely have wanted me to do.
When I talk about the Bible in mindsight circles, there are those who are enthralled by the new vistas I present, and those who for various reasons get extremely nervous, uncomfortable, or even incensed. I always find it astonishing to see how otherwise intelligent folks internally dissociate from reason and are just unable to see past their internalized religious doctrines of all sorts. These people are not able to just read the words that are on the page without regressing to preadolescent Santa Claus belief systems they hold on to for dear life. Beliefs are thought patterns unfolding in close proximity to sensory cortical brain centers, thus giving them an unusual sense of embodied reality, even though they are nothing more than thoughts. So if you believe the Bible, or any other scripture for that matter, was written by God as an external entity dwelling somewhere you are not, you are simply deluded. If on the other hand, you realize that these texts arose from the collective human imagination and wisdom that reaches way down through our collective unconscious to the mystery of the nameless unknowable, and you want to use the word ‘God’ to denote that mystery, then I am with you.
There is little more fascinating than to know that the Old Testament was mainly written in Hebrew; that Hebrew words have many different meanings that open vast webs of potential understandings; that meanings evolved and changed during the many centuries during which the Bible was compiled; that oral transmission of wisdom stories gave rise to a plethora of different Bible mythologies, out of which only some were chosen into the official canon; that the New Testament was written in Greek; that translations of all sorts are recreations and transformations of meaning rather than exact carbon copies of the original; that indeed there is no original, but only an ongoing process of creation, recreation, and adaptation over many centuries past without a beginning anywhere; and that the Bible is not a historical treatise, even though historical circumstances shaped the language used, but a mythological inspiration, ‘mythological’ meaning belonging to the domain of story-telling, not of historical science. In short, there is nothing simplistic about reading the Bible. On the contrary, it radically confronts us with the complexity of mind, life, universe, and love in ways we tend to ignore.
Put your preconceived ideas, beliefs, non-beliefs, or skepticism aside for a moment, and let’s just read the words on the page with discerning logic, imaginative sensibility, and a generally educated humanistic intelligence. The Bible begins with a Big Bang: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ With this logically non-sensical, paradoxical statement the Bible challenges the reader right from the start – either the Bible writers were illogical dumbheads, which is greatly to be doubted, or you know immediately that you are about to embark on a most uncommon journey. This statement tells us immediately that we are not into a scientific, historical, or otherwise logical account, but a metaphorical one that will defy the rules our problem-solving left-brain minds like to live by, let alone the rules our preadolescent concrete mind wished us to indulge in as a way of making the world magical. How incredibly difficult the journey proposed by the Bible will be is then further emphasized by the fact that it takes about 15 pages for humanity to get into deep trouble, and then 1500 or more pages to get out of it. So let’s get to it – what is so absurd in this first sentence?
If there really is a beginning to the heavens and the earth, then there cannot be anything before the beginning, since the beginning is an absolute one of everything, including time. The notion of something before the beginning of time is absurd since there can only be a beginning within the context of time. What was before the beginning is thus an absurd question. Yet, the sentence sounds like there was something or someone before the beginning, namely God. But that poses problems, since if there was, it would not be the beginning. This first Bible statement gives us a warning: Don’t even try to think of or imagine God, because if you do, God becomes an entity, a noun with certain attributes, and such an entity can only exist in time, which would make the notion of God absurd. Furthermore, God cannot exist before the beginning unless we invalidate the beginning and have to ask, who created God? We begin down the absurd road of an infinite regress, turtles all the way down. The absurdity of imagining God as an entity expressed by a noun is implied by the absurdity of someone before the beginning. Unless concretized by the primitive and infantile delusional mind and projected onto the image of a person, God is established right from the start of the Bible as a verb, which cannot be imagined, a verb that suggests God is a process, the formless source of diversity.
Unless you are happy to dumb down the notion of God into banality, ‘God’ is a notion that points to a no-thing that is nameless, timeless, unimaginable, indescribable, and unthinkable. In other, quite intriguing words, we can say that the beginning arises from a creative nothingness we call for lack of a better word God, and which has no beginning nor end, only transformations. That is not eternity, by the way, since eternity means endless time. We are talking about a timeless realm! Since even ‘nothingness’ is a noun pointing to something called nothing, and no ‘thing’ can exist before the beginning, we have to take our reflection a step further and speak of no-thingness in the sense of a fundamental absence of any essence. The beginning is the creation of diversity that timelessly occurs moment-by-moment, a manifest universe from a creative pure potential realm of no-thingness without an essence we could grasp, imagine, or describe. This unimaginable nameless is to my mind quintessentially God in unmanifest ‘form’, giving rise ‘in the beginning’ to the manifest form of the universe, which always vanishes back into its unmanifest source of no-thingness before reappearing again in a new form. As a not so unimportant and intriguing aside, physicists have now figured out through mathematical explorations that our universe was created out of nothing, the closest way to rationally imagine nothingness as a creative pure potentiality. Don’t try to get any clearer than that in your logical understanding.
The beginning of St. John’s gospel in the New Testament supports these ideas so far: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.’ Let’s not forget that while the Old Testament was originally written mostly in Hebrew (some parts in Aramaic), the New Testament was written in Greek. The ‘word’ is a translation of the Greek word ‘logos’, which refers to the manifest God principle as it appears out of no-thingness through everything created, as we have seen before. In the beginning is the manifest world of diversity, of phenomena and appearances, the exploration of which inevitably leads to the discovery and realization of the nameless, timeless, spaceless, and unimaginable ground of non-manifest Being as its source. Interestingly, we can find a neuropsychological correlate to this notion of a beginning: Formless sensory experience mediated by the senses called conduit, which does not make sense to us, receives meaning through its being constructed by the brain into language-based stories. ‘The word’ here is literally the beginning of meaning, and as we all know, most narratives end up sooner or later pointing beyond themselves to the nameless ground of Being. The beginning is thus always a bidirectional transition point between the manifest and the unmanifest, the creative present moment energy flow from the source into manifestations, and through dissolution of manifestations back towards the source.
Between the beginning and the end in the obscure and extravagant imagery of the Apocalypse, we meet a God quite like a person suffering from multiple personality disorder, at different times angry, petulant, vindictive, wise, loving, reasonable, bat-shit crazy, and more. This is in fact the one-person version of many pagan and eastern multi-god versions of religious beliefs corresponding to the Jungian notion of archetypes. Buddha always reminded his disciples that we are the boss having to manage and rule over these many gods, and this is no different from the ‘God’ of the Bible after the beginning, an archetypal collection of psychological tendencies it behooves us to manage with the power of awareness. God as the unmanifest nameless underlying the beginning is fundamentally different from the manifest divine archetypes. The nameless only appears through an orthogonal shift in consciousness mediated by a serious awareness training and is the foundation from which the archetypes can be successfully managed to give our lives meaning. Paradoxically, you need to familiarize yourself with emptiness to manifest God and keep the gods in check.
The beginning, as the Bible shows, leads to catastrophe pretty quickly after about 15 pages, which is the metaphor for the inevitable beginning of human suffering. This suffering is worth it, though, otherwise, the Bible would not waste 1500 pages worth of ink exploring how to get out of the suffering mess. Suffering is our ticket to liberation and wisdom. The beginning is thus an invitation to learn to deal with suffering effectively, and the nameless ground of being the beginning implies is the mystery of initiation and transcendence we need to orient ourselves towards by a very subtle, but powerful act of reorientation: Skillfully entering the now of the present moment. If your head spins now, feeling that such innocuously appearing an idiom as ‘in the beginning …’ has morphed into an intellectually confusing meaning monster you would rather avoid, the scripture has fulfilled its purpose. By simply grasping the message of scripture intellectually we have not mastered it by a long shot. Its real meaning lies in its power of transformation, which the scripture can only suggest or point to. To discover and embody that power, the real-life embodied relationship to the world we are a part of, and more particularly to an experienced teacher, is essential. The real power of words lies in their ability to point beyond themselves to timeless truths and the mystery of Being. Like any myth, words with power conceal their meaning unless it is put into daily practice moment by moment, hour by hour. The left and right brain need to cooperate harmoniously for us to decrease human suffering.
Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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Reflections on depth in mindfulness.
My soon to be posted YouTube video 'Language and Thinking Modes' might serve as a good introduction to how my writing is best read. Most of my writings require the conscious act of identifying the embodied reality to which the written words point. Literature is written in a metaphorical language mode that automatically bypasses the disembodied left-brain intellectual function and activates the holistically embodied right-brain engagement that transforms the reader. Not necessarily so with conceptual writing such as this, which may easily be misunderstood as a purely intellectual exercise for specialists without much practical relevance, let alone transformative power. This can be changed with the knowledge that this text is the linguistic expression of embodied mental experiences we discover through in-depth mind explorations, such as those we engage in through mindfulness and mindsight training. If you invest attentional and awareness energy to discover in your own embodied experience what I write about, you will find your engagement with the text transformative.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that asserts that two dissimilar things are identical. Its formula is ‘this is that’. For example, ‘your argument is a slippery slope’, or ‘you are my favorite movie’. Notice how your mind blows open when the narrower first concept (‘argument’ for example) gets identified with a second image (‘slippery slope’). The imaginative space explodes out of its conceptual restrictions into a vast, limitless spaciousness that engages our whole embodied experience as it melts away into the unconscious, and therefore can never be fully grasped. In other words, a metaphor like ‘this deer ran by us like a greased lightning’ never ceases to open new spaces of the imagination, in contrast to denotations (explicit meanings like ‘this book is on the table’) that restrict meaning to clear definitions.
Metaphors are right-hemispheric phenomena that both historically and epistemologically come before left-hemispheric denotations. The implicitly encoded fuzzy explosion of non-graspable meaning of metaphors is from an evolutionary point of view an earlier brain function than the sharply delineated explicit meaning of denotation. In other words, before through abstraction we can explicitly see clearly, we absorb reality in non-distinct ways through complex implicitly encoded embodied intuitions.
Nothing can be explicitly clear before having first implicitly existed in a faintly murky fashion. Thus, metaphor is how the truly new (not just the novel) announces its existence, while explicit knowledge with its seductive clarity keeps returning and tying us down to what we already know. Explicit knowing, which comes with a sense of seeing clearly, is always seeing something already known, and therefore cannot possibly be anything truly new and creative. It is mostly a cognitive re-presentation ‘in our heads’ devoid of the complexity of presence (presentation) – just a thought, not full presence.
The choice of metaphor therefore determines our level of understanding of the world and ourselves. We are subject to an imaginative countermovement that seems paradoxical: On one hand, we need to become permeable to and to some extent penetrate the implicit realm that is ‘beyond’ the surface of what can be explicitly stated and grasped, yet on the other hand we simultaneously must always and inevitably return back to the explicit realm for reasons of communication.
A metaphor that characterizes mindfulness is depth, which as a non-distinct language trope refuses to be grasped. Depth connotes (not denotes) something lying beyond the seemingly obvious. It is not just a word for a measured distance, but instead captures our holistic intuition of limitlessness and immeasurable surprise and resonates with layers of our being beyond the imaginable. It is what we may think of as context, which envelopes the obviously clear both around and beyond it as if in three-dimensional space. What’s clearly in focus as knowledge lives surrounded by the murky depth of unknowing it depends on, like the biodiversity of individual species and specimens finds its most powerful source in the murky marshes and impenetrable forests of nature.
To bring things into clear focus is the left brain’s task. But remember, what is brought into clear focus is a re-presentation, not presence, and always already-known knowledge. Furthermore, the left brain abstracts its content from its context to give us clarity at the expense of a holistic vision and wisdom. We have the illusion of knowing what is in clear focus, when in reality it is just a paired-down, simplified, even impoverished version of itself in the form of an information bit – useful, yet devoid of life. To see something clearly is to know it only partially, not as it really is, largely devoid of embodied experience and presence.
To really know something deeply as it really is, to honor its depth, in other words, the clear attentional focus function of the left brain needs to be married to the contextual awareness function of the right brain that provides access to depth. The context that the right hemisphere provides allows for a holistic apprehension of what is in clear focus, resulting in a complete vision of real reality that combines the experience of knowledge with embodied presence and wisdom. Clarity is married to depth, left- and right-brain functions are finely coordinated like a finely attuned Tango dance. Only then do we see reality as it really is, which paradoxically is not at all what we believe to be objective reality.
My programs are an invitation to explore these depths of the human mind, the most complex phenomenon of the known universe.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
The ego is an esteemed member of a person's life adventure.
On May 12, 1797, with Napoleon’s troops lined up for an attack on the shores of the lagoon, the great Council of Venice met for the last time and abdicated in favour of a revolutionary government controlled by the French military command. On May 15, 1797, the last doge Ludovico Manin left the Palazzo Ducale forever. That was how the thousand-year-old history of the Republic of Venice ended.
last doge of Venice
In this painting from 1887 by Vittorio Bressanin, the elderly senator descends the Giants’ Staircase of the Palazzo Ducale. Far from reading decadence, we can sense a reflection on the intimate drama historically experienced by the magistrate. Dressed in full majestic attire with the old-fashioned wig and the famous red gown of Venetian Senate members he becomes a symbol of the entire city and its thousand-year history. His heavy steps and lowered gaze show both dignity and resignation as we can feel the agony of a grand era meeting its demise.
The thousand little deaths we encounter in meditation in preparation for the final transition of this life’s journey came to mind as I stopped dead in my tracks in front of this painting. Our lives have a similar grandeur replete with a mosaic of tradition and new discoveries, arguments and agreements, accomplishments and failures, satisfactions and disappointments, celebrations and funerals, gains and losses. The drama takes several intermingling shapes like tragedy, comedy, romance and satire brought forth by the dance between our left and right brain. Reality and all human experience, no matter of what ilk, is always complex, never simplistic, a rich tapestry of contradictory and complementary energy flows vying for harmony between the extremes of chaos and rigidity.
There always comes the time, sooner or later, smaller or bigger, more subtly or fiercely, when the drama finds its demise. Can we sail off into the sunset with dignified rather than defeated resignation? Can we slowly develop over the course of the many mini-deaths of our practice the majestic elegance of a passing storm that allows us to dance with the flow of destiny no matter what pleasant or unpleasant currents move us? That is what I might view as the grand undertaking of mindfulness and meditation. The person that we are is a dynamic exchange between the executive ego, the integrating self and the mysterious vastness of the mostly non-conscious organism, partaking in a life that for better or for worse must be lived. And lived it is, more or less skillfully, with more or less suffering, never perfect, always sloppily meandering across the landscape of necessities, seeking an elusive freedom that tends to recede behind the many conditionings that unawares imprison us. When lived fully, which means with a minimal amount of hesitations and regrets, the full catastrophe of life is well worth its tribulations, unapologetically splendid and impressive, and deserving of a dignified nod to impermanence as we learn through mindfulness how to let go, how to get out of our own way, living freely and easily in the market place, and rejoicing in our internal resurrection from the ashes of ignorance.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
I am looking to circumambulate two propositions: That impatience stems from a skewed relationship with time, while nothingness and the serious engagement with death are profoundly integrating and healing.
I am looking to circumambulate two propositions: That impatience stems from a skewed relationship with time, while nothingness and the serious engagement with death are profoundly integrating and healing.
“I had the flu and was too sick to practice meditation.” “My father-in-law died, and I had to stop practicing because we were too busy taking care of family stuff.” “After ten minutes of practice, I get impatient, uptight, need to move around, and have to stop my practice.” “I was so distracted that I was not able to practice.” Does this sound familiar?
What if I told you that no conceivable life circumstance can hinder your practice, and unless you don’t want to practice, the inability to practice does in most circumstances not exist? What if the above statements would have to be rewritten as follows? “I had the flu and was so sick and overwhelmed that I did not feel like or know how to use my meditation tools.” “My father-in-law died, and I stopped practicing because the hustle and bustle of the circumstance increased my mind’s forgetting function and thereby strengthened conceptually constructed illusions.” “After ten minutes of practice, I get impatient, uptight, need to move around, and I don’t have the experience to check what skills are missing in my practice.” “I was so distracted that I forgot that the distraction is itself a mental state like any other to be held in awareness and explored.”
Let me be clear: I am not saying that everybody should or can practice mindfulness meditation, or that there are no contraindications to doing so. I am simply addressing the unsuspecting majority of people who have legitimately taken steps to begin mindfulness meditation training and end up happily deceived by rationalizations to give up.
Because humans are fickle and crave instant results, it cannot be emphasized enough that mindfulness meditation is a skill to be learned, honed, and practiced over a long period of time – a thousand years on average. We are not talking about practicing a skill so that eventually we will arrive at the promised land while in the meantime we toil in hell. We are practicing this skill because the very act of doing so is the promised land. Immediately, when seen this way, we realize that the promised land sits on the ruins of etymology – ‘pro-mittere’ in Latin means ‘release/letting go/send forward’ (mission). What’s forward in this notion of ‘promised’ is the vast unknown of creativity, and by releasing into it we submit to the principle of impermanence that always changes everything without ever being static. Done skillfully, this opening to the unknown is called meditation, the gift that keeps on giving in the form of noticing improvement. What a delight to have no other goal than noticing improvement. On this path, unexamined impatience has no place. Mastering the right techniques is essential for success, success meaning a significant decrease, if not even disappearance of suffering when we realize that we are always already there where we are supposed to be.
When we appreciate the mind as the most complex phenomenon in the known universe, which thanks to all its splendor also affords us a limitless capacity for self-deception, we will hardly fall prey to cavalier attitudes believing that in a few weeks of training, we can know how to meditate, and life will all be better. Take just these three statements seriously – that mindfulness meditation is the hardest thing you will ever pursue in your life, that it takes a thousand years of training in learning precise mind tools, and that with the mind you are up against the most complex phenomenon in the known universe – and you will solve almost all challenges presented to you by the mind on this fascinating journey of discovering its nature, the nature of reality and truth, and the many ways we construct reality and let it affect our lives.
Impatience is one of those poorly recognized states of mind that interferes with all manner of growth and healing. Yearning for quick fixes and therapy shopping from one to the next in the hope of finding the imagined final solution to one’s problems is a ubiquitous mind trap one has to guard against. Desperate for water in the middle of the desert, digging one hundred shallow wells will not yield results; you have to dig one deep well, and that takes patience and time. This causes us to come face-to-face with another facet of the reality we usually quite desperately and unconsciously avoid like the plague – nothingness. Patience and impatience, time and nothingness are thus closely related topics central to mindfulness meditation and one’s healing journey in general.
Here is the mystery: You have more than a thousand years ahead of you because the thousand-year journey is timeless with no duration. It is a journey to nowhere one might feel one needs to go, achieving nothing one believes needs to be done, changing nothing one has the urge to escape from, and providing the freedom to be nobody else than who one already is. With no place to get to, it is a curious journey beginning at King’s Cross Station and involving platform 9¾. Everything is already there, including the end of suffering – all you must do is cultivate the mindset that gets you through the concrete pillar. To the untrained mind, the pillar is impenetrable and platform 9¾ non-existent, and finding the end of suffering appears as a daunting, almost insurmountable proposition. To the trained mind it is clear and simple, an orthogonal shift to a multidimensional awareness mode.
‘Orthogonal’ (Greek) means ‘at a right angle’, and I remember encountering this metaphor in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work. So let me briefly yield to his words before continuing (Jon Kabat-Zinn, ‘Coming To Our Senses’, 2005 first edition, extracts from p. 347-351):
“As a rule, we humans have been admirable explorers and inhabitants of conventional reality, the world ‘out there’ defined and modulated by our five classical senses. We have made ourselves at home within that world, and have learned to shape it to our needs and desires over the brief course of human history. We understand cause and effect in the physical world. …
And yet even within science, looking at the edges, it is not so clear that we comprehend underlying reality, which seems disturbingly statistical, unpredictable, and mysterious. …
In the conventional everyday reality of lived experience … we dwell mostly accepting the appearance of things and create quasi-comfortable explanations for ourselves about how things are and why they are that way … really-not-looking-but-pretending-to-yourself-that-you-are.…
All the while, we are immersed in a stream of thoughts whose origins and content are frequently unclear to us and which can be obsessive, repetitive, inaccurate, disturbingly unrelenting and toxic, all of which both colour the present moment and screen it from us. Moreover, we are frequently hijacked by emotions we cannot control and that can cause great harm to ourselves and to others ….
Unpleasant moments are bewildering and disconcerting. So they are apt to be written off as aberrations or impediments to the ever-hoped-for happiness we are seeking and the story we build around it. … Alternatively, we might build an equally tenacious unpleasant story around our failures, our inadequacies, and our misdeeds to explain why we cannot transcend our limitations and our karma, and then, in thinking that it is all true, forget that it is just one more story we are telling ourselves, and cling desperately to it as if our very identity, our very survival, and all hope were unquestionably bound to it. … What we also forget is that the conventional, consensus reality we call the human condition is itself inexorably and strongly conditioned in the Pavlovian sense. … all this conditioning adds up to the appearance of a life, but often one that remains disturbingly superficial and unsatisfying, with a lingering sense that there must be something more, …
Such discomfort … may be all pervasive, a kind of silent background radiation of dissatisfaction in us all that, as a rule, we don’t talk about. Usually it is unilluminating, just oppressive.
But, when we look into what that disaffection, that background unsatisfactoriness actually is, when we are drawn to actually question and look into ‘who is suffering?’ in this moment, we are undertaking an exploration of another dimension of reality altogether – one that offers unrecognized but ever-available freedom from the confining prison of the conventional thought world, …
The process feels like nothing other than an awakening from a consensus trance, a dream world, and thus all of a sudden acquiring multiple degrees of freedom, … It is akin to the transition from a two-dimensional ‘flatland’ into a third spatial dimension, at right angles (orthogonal) to the other two. Everything opens up, although the two old dimensions are the same as they always were, just less confining. …
… we are initiating nothing less than a rotation in consciousness into another ‘dimension’, orthogonal to conventional reality, and thus, able to pertain at the same time as the more conventional one because you have simply ‘added more space’. Nothing needs to change. It’s just that your world immediately becomes a lot bigger, and more real. Everything old looks different because it is now being seen in a new light – an awareness that is no longer confined by the conventional dimensionality and mind set.
… [this is] a glimpse of what Buddhists refer to as absolute or ultimate reality, a dimensionality that is beyond conditioning but that is capable of recognizing conditioning as it arises. It is awareness itself, the knowing capacity of mind itself, beyond a knower and what is known, just knowing.
When we reside in awareness, we are resting in what we might call an orthogonal reality that is more fundamental than conventional reality, and every bit as real.
The conventional reality is not ‘wrong’. It is merely incomplete. And therein lies the source of both our suffering and our liberation from suffering.”
Kabat-Zinn does not directly talk about the three awareness modes I have been exploring in detail with my students in the Mindsight Intensive, the fields of consciousness, nothingness, and emptiness. A deeper exploration of those must be left for elsewhere. We can, however, taste some aspects of this journey towards freedom by recognizing how unique the expectations are with which we must take on meditation.
Meditation offers us a powerful sequence of interrelated processes serving as a royal road to deep peace – impatience resulting from a skewed relationship to time vanishes through the examination of the nature of time to make room for patience necessary to discover the inevitability of coming face-to-face with nothingness and death. Impatience, time, patience, and nothingness/death are basic realities on our path to liberation.
Once you master the basic tools used by the meditation guild and have gained some expertise in navigating the complex neighborhoods of your mind, you then must give the fire of awareness time to transform the mind’s energy flow and the brain’s neurofiring patterns – not unlike having mixed all your ingredients into your soup, and then giving the heat time to cook it. Easier said than done. During that time of ‘hanging in there’ without agenda, stabilizing attention one-pointedly on an object of awareness, and allowing everything else to unfold in the background of peripheral awareness with an open and accepting attitude full of curiosity, you invite and allow everything to be just as it is. Remember that you are not ‘hanging in there’ for a specific gain, but because it is so deeply healing just noticing improvement.
How much time do you need? Ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, a day? On this level of discourse, an hour a day of formal practice for the rest of your seven lifetimes is a good cruising velocity. The soup will cook nicely – you will accept with ever greater ease and elegance the satisfaction of noticing improvement for its own sake. However, most people crumble under the weight of time way before the hour has passed. Quite quickly, conditioned organismic processes make themselves felt in a variety of highly unpleasant experiences that drive us to abandon our cushions. The antidote? Access to timelessness
But how do we find timelessness within our time-bound lives? If you can’t trust your own subjective observation of the mind, you can trust physics to tell you that time is not a fundamental feature of reality. In other words, we must examine how our mind constructs time. It is thus not primarily about keeping track of the number of minutes you practice (although this number does give you a clue about your level of skill), but more about your skill in examining the ways numbers and minutes get constructed in your mind. In a more overarching way, it is about developing a clear sense of the subjective experiences created by the brain’s default mode network (the constructor) as distinguished from a very different set of experiences we call ‘the conduit’.
The default mode network’s constructor is the mind function that uninterruptedly creates stories. It is responsible for the incessant mind chatter filled with content and meaning we are all not only so familiar with but also so profoundly and completely identified with, that we end up confusing its content with reality. The conduit, on the other hand, is the entirety of direct somatic and sensory-motor experiences, which don’t have a content or storyline with meaning we can follow. These are the experiences we have through the external five senses of touch, sight, sound, taste, and smell, and the physical sensations in the body. In short, the real reality that gets directly presented to us through the conduit becomes transformed by the constructor (default mode network) into a virtual re-presented reality. The constructor is like a menu you read or a map you consult – though intellectually useful and interesting, it will never slake your hunger, quench your thirst, or immerse you in the landscape. The conduit is the actual meal you eat or the territory you hike in. We are so not used to realizing how virtual our thoughts, beliefs, and stories are, that we constantly confuse them with reality. This results in disembodied, stressed lives lived ‘in our heads’ in times (past and future) that don’t exist.
The moment your meditation dives into the intricacies of that construction, recognizing it as such and not confusing it with reality anymore, you discover that the foundation upon which you live is the conduit with its timeless moments that flow like a river to nowhere. Indeed, the stories of your construction themselves turn out to be no more than energy flow processes, not finished products experienced as truths for sale to other people. Consequently, even deeply held beliefs and meaning become no more than a fleeting appearance like the clouds in the sky. This applies equally to the construction of time, which can be directly observed, both individually and culturally in cultures without clocks or a sense of time like ours. Upon close examination, both conduit and constructor unveil their fleeting nakedness as they slip through our fingers like water we try to grasp. Your relationship with time changes profoundly.
When steeped in that conduit, the sense of ‘not being able to bear it anymore’ dissipates for several reasons. ‘I am not able to bear it anymore’ is recognized as just a thought, a construction, not real reality. As such it is as fleeting an energy flow as any other. Now grounded in conduit without any of the goals and meanings created by the constructor, you can recognize resistances and defenses that cause the experience to be felt more dramatically than it really is. You can emphasize curiosity, openness, acceptance, and allowing and letting be as a way of breaking past conditionings. Finally, time is revealed to just be a fleeting construction; there is no sense of less or more time that affects your expectations of how the immediate future needs to look. You touch timelessness. In the face of that realization (‘realization’ meaning an embodied awareness of reality), conditioned organismic processes that drive you on autopilot appear in a different light. Instead of being unpleasant experiences or problems, which you feel you need to bear, solve, or escape from by leaving your cushion, they are ‘just’ complex energy flows, each with their own qualities, direction, and destiny. Ten minutes, an hour, neither is either more difficult or less productive. They are just different, and with this ‘just’ the struggle and resistance fall away. Practicing for an hour changes from being an endurance game to becoming an invigorating massage instead.
Patience with nothing is quite a treasure. Remember: Nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to change, nothing to know, nobody to be – nada, zilch, squat, zippo. Timelessly surrendering to the vast emptiness of Being. It is like having assembled all the soup ingredients in a pot and all you now have to do is stir occasionally while letting it simmer on the fire. When everything is said and done – dreams are cleared, emotions regulated, memories integrated, thought rivers understood, and actions wisely measured – when nothing is left to say or do, the second of the three legs of our thousand-year journey begins by confronting nothingness and death in awareness.
Neither nothingness nor death are negative or nihilistic states, nor are they pessimistic outlooks on life. Granted, from the perspective of ordinary waking consciousness we call the field of consciousness, death, and nothingness appear as dark, cold, forsaken, and gloomy realities, which in Western philosophy existentialism has wrestled with. But Western philosophy being a largely intellectual exploration within the context of ordinary everyday consciousness does not manage well to pierce through the existential despair and discover an orthogonal dimension waiting to be realized. It does not use the awareness tools necessary for that. Mindfulness meditation offers that option, and we discover that quite on the contrary, death and nothingness are optimistic, positive, dynamic, and creative. When approached properly, they affirm the value and meaning of life in the face of suffering and death and open up a new horizon of freedom and responsibility for human beings. Prepare to die wisely and you will have a full and meaningful life.
Nothingness is the ground of being, the source of all possibilities, and the ultimate reality that transcends all dualities and categories such as subject and object, self and other, life and death. Nothingness is not something that can be grasped by rational thought or empirical observation, but only by a radical transformation of one’s consciousness and existence. It can provide a way to overcome existential crises and achieve a deeper understanding of oneself and the world. The only way to overcome the nihilism of existentialism is to go through it, to face in full awareness the nothingness that lies at the bottom of human existence, and to realize that it is not a negative void filled with death, but a positive source of creativity and freedom. By awakening to this field of nothingness, one can overcome the alienation and anxiety of existentialism and attain a new mode of being that is authentic, compassionate, and open to the infinite possibilities of existence that provide a deeper sense of meaning and joy. By implication, we need death to really get to know life at its deepest.
That powerfully transformative nothingness is waiting for you in many different cloaks and disguises at every turn: When you are bored, ‘nothing’ seems to happen, it all seems always the same, you can’t stand it anymore, you are lost, you have better things to do, you are assailed by the question ‘and now what?’, you have lost all sense of life’s meaning, or you are frantically searching for an imagined something to improve the life that eternally eludes you, like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot. Without falling into forgetfulness, you stop waiting, you stop searching for the elusive prize that like the mirage of an oasis forever recedes as you approach. You rest in the awareness of nothing, a rich and creative void of unimaginable spaciousness, power, quality, and luminosity, and instead of waiting, you are present, waiting for nothing as everything is already there, doing nothing as everything of essence is already done. Instead of searching, you just receive; you revel in just being. This has by the way something to do with the capacity to be alone.
One of my students recently put it beautifully in an email as a question:
“Is it possible to reach a stage in your transformative journey of the mind where things stop making any sense, seemingly out of nowhere? It’s like, you’re practicing, formally and informally, working the tools and over time, you become a fairly skilled surfer, riding the waves with a sense of relative ease, stability, and flow.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, as you seemingly ride the same waves in the same ocean, you can’t seem to stay on the surfboard with any sense of stability anymore. But you haven’t any clue why. You just can’t. Your balance is off. You don’t know anything anymore. Seemingly without any warning, you’re a beginner again.
The only thing I can say about this is that I notice a deeper widening within me, a deeper felt grief and sadness about our world in rapid chaos, and a felt confusion around how to be with the impermanence of civilization with reverence and faith.”
There is no room left for impatience when we examine the construction of concepts and time in meditation. Impatience is the escape from the truth by trying to escape to somewhere else than where we are; it is just resistance to the inevitable truth of ‘just Being’ in our practice of ‘just sitting’ with what ‘just keeps hitting you over the head the more you try to dismiss it’. When we settle in the flow of the foundations of our Being rather than precariously balance on the rooftops of our storied existence, impatience melts away like snow in the sun. The resulting holy water inspires the daily hour we sit on our cushion to become a transformative bath in the timeless vastness of Being – like a nurturing oasis amid the vast desert of existence with its trials and tribulations that toss us to and fro.
One must resist the temptation to make ‘the flow of the foundations of Being’ or ‘the timeless vastness of Being’, or indeed ‘nothingness’ into some ‘thing’ we can eventually find, get to, or achieve. Absolute nothingness is so profound that concepts must be released as what they are – puffs of smoke. If there is any trace of something called ‘nothing’, it must be released. This also applies to death. It is a no-thing and therefore no more than a process of transformation the likes of which we have spent a lifetime absorbed in. This absolute nothingness is ‘no thing’ whatsoever, and since all we can imagine are ‘things’, ‘no thing’ cannot be imagined. Just because it cannot be imagined or thought about does not mean it cannot be lived and known – not known in the sense of intellectual knowledge of something, but in the sense of unknowable knowing even beyond intuition.
The grace of opening those further dimensions of our awareness and orthogonally falling into a larger context with more dimensions than ordinary waking consciousness comes with the realization that we own nothing, we cannot hold on to anything, we are forced to unknow everything to end suffering, we lose everything we believed we had, and we ultimately are ‘no thing’ at all. No-thing is what death reveals when we get close to it. It is also the discovery of an orthogonal dimension we did not see before. In embracing this reality, ‘we die before we die in order not to die when we die’ as Buddhists tend to put it. Dying is radiantly liberating as it dissolves our conditionings to the point of revealing death as a transformation instead of an end, and thereby an inextricable feature of a life well lived.
All of reality is transformation, and there is no more powerful way to challenge old conditionings and make room for new, creative growth than to allow us to be purified by the awareness mode of the field of nothingness.
Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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