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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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More Blog Posts
Forgetting that we have a mind.
Before you worry about symptoms such as depression and anxiety and how to improve or get rid of them, before you get your blood boiling arguing with people who can't deal with anything beyond their own viewpoint, before you develop and become ensconced in your own opinions, before you vilify who disagrees with you, before you shake your head wondering how seemingly obvious facts cannot be agreed upon, before you assume you have no blind spots, before you despair that crowds never learn from history, before you become bitter at humanity's collective stupidity, before you get passionate about religion, mythology, and archetypes, before all that, wouldn't it make sense to inquire into the source of all of it - these symptoms, views, opinions, thoughts, actions, distortions and, frankly, miseries?
While it does not take rocket science to realize that the source of it all is the embodied human mind, for most, embarking on its exploration is at best a big challenge, at worst insurmountable, non-sensical or incomprehensible. How many times have you heard nonsense like “I don’t believe in psychology”, as if the existence of the moon were a matter of belief? How often do patients enter their physician’s office complaining of being anxious or depressed, and are sent home with a prescription without one question that would try to understand how their mind creates such suffering? Many people, including professionals who should know better, live and act as if they had no mind.
The mind is the source of all subjective phenomena and experiences, and we are astoundingly unaware of it. Our mind’s task is to ensure survival and the propagation of our species, not to ensure we live our best life. To this end, it needs to be efficient, rather than concerned about maximizing its potential. Efficiency results by pairing down information processing to the bare minimum. Embedded in the way mind functions are mechanisms that cause reality distortions, delusions, wild beliefs, and a profound obliviousness of one’s own ignorance. Whether we like it or not, our mind drives our lives like our heart pumps blood through our veins. The universe's natural processes have caused us to evolve that way, and for better or worse, we are stuck with a mind that functions sub-optimally as it creates profound reality distortions that seem at first blush to have successfully allowed us to multiply and propagate towards earth dominance. In the long run, however, it turns out that humanity may end up stampeding dangerously close to extinction. To thrive both individually and as a species we must come to terms with our rather dangerous mind and train ourselves to use it beyond its basic survival mode by accessing its inherent potential evolution has graciously also built into it. That takes work, training, effort and patience.
Our human mind provides the capacity for reflection. The mirror reflects what’s in front of it, meaning that as reality beams itself onto the mirror’s surface, the mirror beams it back to us as an image we can then examine from the outside. Notice how what gets examined by looking at the mirror is not reality itself, but an image of it. Our brain provides a similar process in the form of consciousness, whereby it maps reality in a virtual form we then can observe and manipulate. However, while the mirror reflects reality exactly as it is, the virtual reality consciousness creates is not only a map of reality, but that map is modified into a new creation. The brain as mapper functions as our central relationship organ that enables us to reflexively develop a relationship to reality and ourselves by having access to a virtual, mapped and modified reality we can ponder and manipulate. This is how we are self-aware.
As an aside, the mind is more than the creator of a virtual adaptation of reality we can reflexively relate to and have a relationship with. It can transcend self-awareness, and knowingly experience reality and awareness without the detour of mapped mirroring duality. That is the shift from observation to being, from knowing we exist in a universe to realizing we are the universe. More about that in another context.
The eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the retina, but you don’t see it. You have the impression of enjoying a seamless field of vision without two black holes in the middle, even though the holes are there. The brain manages to fill in the missing information to make the field seem seamless. Extrapolate that to the whole brain to realize that to function effectively for everyday survival our brain adapts our field of consciousness in two ways: It fills what’s missing to provide a sense of continuity and simplifies available information to not overwhelm you. It hides blind spots from you to provide continuity and withholds information to ensure efficiency. Both these mechanisms distort reality to ensure survival, while simultaneously laying the foundations for ignorance and suffering.
We each have many blind spots, but the core blind spot affecting us all is the proclivity to live as if we had no mind. We use our minds without realizing the extent to which our experience of reality is created by our mind. Without our conscious knowledge our brain creates the reality we experience. We don’t notice that the reality we experience is our brain’s creation. We mistake our brain’s constructions for reality. This results in a dangerous situation, in which we ignore the fact that our experience is subjectively constructed. We mistakenly believe that what we see and experience is automatically true, and because it seems true it seems real, and because it seems real it cannot be changed. Our primordial blind spot towards the brain’s constructions robs us of freedom of choice, of the power of clear view, wise discernment, and respectfully compassionate mutual understanding.
Our mind’s constructions seem so real that we hold on to them for dear life and want to shove them down other people’s throats without exploring their veracity. We get strongly identified with what we believe we know, emotions take over, and the capacity to hear each other vanishes. Identification with mind processes is the single most destructive problem in the way humans use their minds. Emotions suffocate the mind’s spaciousness to freely consider, question, doubt and explore, and before we know it, we are in conflict. If we cannot agree on facts, emotions drive us to use force to impose our views instead of inquiring more deeply into the divergent realities, and if necessary, compromising to try to resolve complexities. Force can take the form of yelling and screaming at each other, or legal and physical action.
The reality our mind constructs and we can have a relationship with, is in fact threefold. We first have objective reality, which is what happens in the universe independent of whether we know about it or there is anyone around to witness it. This reality consists of energy flow that is independent of how our brains and minds construct reality, and therefore as far from information as energy flow can get. The black death virus killed thousands of people without them knowing what viruses are or being able to see them. Although this is the easiest reality to agree upon, like in the case of flat-earthers, emotions still manage to cause distortions of objective facts.
Subjective reality is our own private experience nobody else has access to. This energy flow is entirely within as a construction by our own brain and mind. Although it is largely independent of objective reality, it is profoundly shaped by interactions with others. Even if everyone denies that I am in pain, if I experience pain, it is totally real for me. That is a difficult reality to agree upon, because seeing it from the outside requires trust and our capacity for empathy.
Then there is intersubjective reality, which is the reality of stories. This energy flow is deeply symbolic in the sense that language and stories are symbolic, therefore experienced as information flow, and a mutual co-creation with others. It is the reality that emerges through mutual narrative construction and is neither objective, nor subjective. It only exists in the interpersonal realm containing people who are willing to participate in it by accepting the shared reality. One such reality is money, but there are many others such as all collective ideas we can share. Money means nothing and has no reality unless it is shared in the interpersonal space. This is also a difficult reality to deal with, because it depends on the mutual capacity to regulate the multilayered energy flow between our intuition, our emotions and our intellect. When that occurs, empathy and clear insight become possible, allowing a degree of harmony within the intersubjective dance of energy and information flow to emerge. Any dance couple may dance a Tango, but those in conflict will not be able to present a harmonious dance.
To manage these three realities we each have a relationship with, requires a good deal of self-awareness and emotional regulation many people don’t have. Much of the time, the mind remains transparent like air to our eyes, invisible or not known, yet profoundly determining how we relate to real reality and live our lives. Like children playing in a house on fire, we remain oblivious to the many ways our ignorance of mind causes suffering and destruction all around.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
Silence and stupidity are the foundations of mental health.
As biological beings we function in analog mode, shifting from one physical and mental state to another, using intelligence to solve problems and consciousness to guide our intuition to make the best possible choices. In contrast to intelligence, which we also find in AI (artificial intelligence), consciousness involves both feelings and the capacity to self-reflect, resulting in the ability to resist reality and by extension suffer. Our biological organism functions naturally as a continuous energy and information flow changing with time through an infinite number of states (like the grandfather clock that shows the whole flow of time), while AI is digital, based only on two discreet states, 0 and 1, from which it organizes information (like your digital watch that only shows the exact time it is now). AI as an information processing system is completely alien to our organic nature. AI is an algorithm that like a table has no feelings and never sleeps, never needs a rest, never feels anything, and is incapable of ethical consideration (if it seems to have ethical reflections it is because it has been programmed to imitate ethical views, not because it feels anything). In social media it is programmed to make money by eliciting user engagement through emphasis on information that activates feelings in human beings, such as anger, awe, attraction, joy etc. The AI algorithm just chugs along as a soulless, emotionless information process like robots or zombies if you prefer the world of fantasy.
Humans, in turn, need rest, sleep, and the cultivation of various mental states through play, intimacy, physical activity, problem-solving, daydreaming and meditation. Within that richness of mental states lies creativity, and at the core of creativity is silence and stupidity. The cultivation of silence, and by extension unknowing, is paramount for the discovery of contexts within which all knowing is embedded. Stupidity relates to the fact that a majority of thoughts we have are crazy, non-sensical, false, deluded, unintelligible, and mysterious. Like a tree spreading millions of seeds, only a few of which will thrive into a new tree, our mind spews out millions of thoughts and fantasies, only a few of which are reflective of truth and conducive to living the good life. Nevertheless, that prolific productivity is the bedrock of creativity and requires skillful management. If we want to be healthy, we need to create a safe, private space for those thoughts to live, evolve, and be processed within the entirety of the mind. That space is the silence of contemplation and the safety of intimacy. Under the incessant barrage of the AI algorithm through social media we have been robbed of such a space, because we are swept away into the algorithmic stream of likes, dislikes, approvals, disapprovals, comparisons, competitions etc. The energy of stupidity then, is used to feed our narcissistic nature and flow unchecked into the public domain of the internet, with really nefarious results.
We are far from having developed the full potential of mind. More often than not we succumb to our internal algorithm of conditioned reflexes, behaviors, reactions and mindless activities that cause untold suffering. If mind has a choice between easy and difficult, it will always choose easy. Easy is what can be manipulated in the concrete world; it is easier to control the body and fast, for example, than to practice mind concentration. We have a certain command over the body and the external world, but not over our mind. Faced with the challenge of mind exploration, we must engage in a rigorous mind training and learn to observe it without judgment.
Most importantly, non-judgmental inquiry requires the privacy of our own intimate space with ourselves and a few chosen people we trust, where stupidity can have full latitude of manifestation. Caring for stupidity requires free private and intimate time, which should be a basic human right. Stupidity and silence are gold mines guaranteeing mental integration and expansion of awareness towards larger contexts. Once we have incorporated such mind hygiene into our lives, we are better equipped to meet the demands and responsibilities of reality, including social reality, and wisely chose what we responsibly allow into the public domain. The non-judgmental attitude of intimate and private investigation needs to give way to the discerning attitude of social manifestation and public expression. In the public domain it has catastrophic social consequences if anything goes and the first thought that enters one's mind is spewed out. Social authenticity in the public domain has nothing to do with spontaneously spewing out whatever stupidities and unformed thoughts fly through one’s mind. It is rather based on one’s capacity to cogently and responsibly express what is relevant to the demands of any life situation after having sifted through the chaos of one's thoughts. In that sense, opinions must be carefully crafted if we want a society that functions wisely.
This dialectic between internal freedom for stupidity and silence and external responsibility for wisdom and perspective requires a difficult ingredient – the capacity to face the truth. Information and truth are not the same, and most information is not truth. We are flooded daily with plenty of information, but truth is a rare and costly kind of information integration process that requires hard work and time to be discovered. Truth is costly because it demands research and investment. Fiction and fantasy (not as literary genres) are cheap and don't require any investment; they can be made as attractive as you would like them to be. They are simplistic, deluded and disconnected from reality. Truth on the other hand is complicated and complex, often painful and unattractive, and the hallmark of our mind’s connection with reality.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
Important changes to the Mindsight Intensive program 2024-25
1. Administrative introduction:
In order to accommodate divergent needs of individual students in the group, I am considering modifications in the group's process. After the first 10 weeks of the fall trimester, during which we lay foundations together as one group, we might explore the possibility of giving students the opportunity to continue through the winter and spring in one of two separate streams of their choice depending on their perceived needs. The decision to continue as one group or split into two will organically emerge from a process of discussion within the whole group when the time comes.
Here are the two streams:
- There are those who primarily feel the need to develop and consolidate the scaffolding of meditative technique as their main objective.
- Others feel generally quite confident in their mastery of meditative technique, and are therefore more focused on exploring the psychodynamic, socio-political, existential and spiritual implications of embodying the daily meditative attitude their mastery of technique affords. This includes the expansion of awareness into the modes of nothingness and emptiness.
These two interest streams are paradoxically both complementary and potentially conflicting. On one hand, mindfulness practice invites the student to cultivate beginner’s mind in a non-striving, non-hierarchical fashion. On the other hand, there is a sequential evolution of skill in one’s ability to apply meditative techniques, much like when one learns to play an instrument, creating a hierarchy of skills and stages the meditator walks through over time. Mixing students from both streams in one group is important as it allows for mutual fertilization of experience, expertise and wisdom. By the same token, this differentiation of needs sometimes requires different teaching approaches and emphases in the material that is taught. Naturally, I always endeavor to navigate those two streams within the group as a whole in a way that allows for integration of the two.
2. Long-term commitment:
Students who are interested in the Mindsight Intensive already have mindfulness experience. Therefore, they are all familiar with how challenging it is to embody mindfulness as a way of life. It is therefore assumed that everyone signing up seeks immersion into the hard work required to meet defenses and avoidances head on that can sometimes arise during practice. This can only be achieved through the long-term effort that facing our mind’s complexity deserves and demands. The program is thus structured to run through a whole academic year of thirty sessions, and students with different, more short-term needs who might want to leave after a trimester or two should not join. The work’s intensity requires group cohesion and safety, as well as a shared sense that we can count on each other to work through tough challenges and moments together.
3. Session structure:
Every session will have the following elements:
- A meditation guided by me of at least 1/2 hour.
- Time for processing individual students’ journey through the trials and tribulations of their practice. This is the difficult part, because it requires from each student to honestly take on and address difficulties, defenses and avoidances that may arise during their practice and their daily lives. Ignoring these challenges invariably causes the journey to falter and shrivel back into the automaticity of the monkey mind.
- Theoretical considerations necessary to make sense of our mind explorations presented by me, and sometimes elaborated through group exercises and processing.
4. Immersion at home:
- In every session I will suggest homework. By diligently following and practicing the homework, the student can enter a path of transformation that will automatically and effortlessly unfold.
- Before starting the program, please make sure to rearrange your schedule so that you can dedicate around an hour/day to formal mindfulness meditation practice. This may vary at times depending on both external circumstances and internal mental states, but aiming for that amount of time will ensure rewiring and transformation. Although formal practice time can occasionally be broken up throughout the day, what ensures penetration of depth (see my blog ‘Depth in Mindfulness’) is the long uninterrupted stretch of time that inevitably causes deeper conditionings and unconscious forces to emerge into the light of awareness.
- Throughout the duration of the program, students can request ad hoc individual sessions, should they feel that the available group time has not provided the opportunity to address important issues that arise. For this to be covered by OHIP, you must have been seen by me in consultation through your family physician’s referral within the last two years. If you are not a regular patient of mine, ask Reena whether you must first get your doctor’s referral to see me or not.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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