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Life is beautiful, Sapiens is tragic.
In anticipation of the fall a few sobering words. I am known to be a party pooper. Life is not just beautiful. Sapiens is mostly a tragic figure. In its entire history (with only few localized exceptions), humanity as a whole has never proven to be capable of anything else than self-destruction. As of this writing, there is no evidence of the contrary – we are racing against a wall at 200 km/hour with no meaningful sign of slowing down, happily counting our pennies.
Consider this true story: In 1983, the Russian atomic control center’s alarm went off that the US had launched several missiles against Russia. The commander at the time chose not to believe the computers because he did not trust them. He waited until the missiles could be directly detected by radar. By that time it would have been too late and the Russians would have had just time to fire off a counter attack. The moment came, and the radars did not detect anything. It was a false alarm by a glitch in the computer.
One atomic bomb today far exceeds the destructive power of all bombs used during the second world war. If in 1983 the Russians launched just one atomic missile to the US, over 50% of the North American population would have been dead or gravely wounded. The US would then launch a counterattack on predetermined targets, which would basically wipe out most if not all life on this planet. Just sit quietly for a moment and ponder this: What kind of a species, what kind of a brain creates such folly? Where does your cherished mindfulness enter the equation?
It is difficult to imagine anything different than homo sapiens being doomed, because we are deeply enslaved from within. The environmental destruction train we have unleashed has long left the station of irreversibility and nature has begun to shake us off. Mind you, our planet does not care. It has done that many times before, wiping the slate clean and making room for new evolutions, and it will do it again. It is one thing though when cataclysmic cosmic events change the landscape; it is another to destroy ourselves when we could enjoy the bounty of this marvellous universe for many more centuries to come. To realize how dire things are on this planet, you need to look closely and read the fine and not so fine print of scientific evidence. Like the boiling frog anecdote, environmental changes occur gradually and we happily bicker about which tea set is most appropriate for afternoon tea while the boat is already sinking and we are about to be cooked to a crisp. Where does mindfulness come into play?
Educated to compete and pursue unlimited growth, when the economy shrinks from 7% to 3% we panic, and we argue about whether carbon reduction targets should be met 30, 50 or 100 years from now! We are on the same road like the former inhabitants of Easter Island. Their mindset and class system dictated that vast amounts of timber be used for elaborate temple constructions and buildings for the upper class. Locked in by this mindset they continued pillaging the island until every single tree was gone. With the last tree the ecosystem that sustained them was also gone and the society collapsed. What role does mindfulness have in this?
Rampant social injustice destroys us. The dog eats dog world we project on nature reaches all the way to humans where sapiens eats sapiens. The survival of the fittest is well alive and thriving even in civilized societies that profess to be humanistic. We chase return of capital, yield, profit and relentless expansion at the expense of others and nature. The terrible tyrants of yesterday have morphed into the politically correct corporations of today. We live in the bubble of a limitless imaginary world of our own creation, out of touch with the limited reality of the natural planet that sustains us. Where is mindfulness to be seen?
Other species were doomed in the past because of external natural circumstances such as meteors and climatic shifts which destroyed their sustaining environment. We are doomed because of how our psyche works. Quite simply, we have the powers of creation and destruction, yet are in the unfettered grip of our grandiose left brain with its unsavoury characteristics.
We think we know it all and that we can go it alone without nature. So we waste and pillage, counting on nature to clean up after us.
We are plagued by unrealistic expectations and play like Peter Pan without regard to the limitations of resources. So we consume far beyond what is reasonable.
We are paranoid, unable to trust and inspire trust, and always in need of feeling in control. So we compete out of fear of survival and are in a constant state of war with nature and others.
We are overly optimistic and unrealistically positive, so we endlessly postpone dealing with the reckoning that sits at our doorstep.
We are in denial about our shortcomings, so we entertain grandiose ideas about our ability to solve problems.
We are unreasonably certain and see the world in black and white terms, so we dismiss everything that does not fit our agenda and launch like the apprentice sorcerer into activities and experiments far beyond our expertise.
We create stories and opinions that are woefully wrong and out of touch with reality, but don’t even notice it because our theories always reflect back on and confirm themselves. When reality does not match our fantasies about it, we will invent lies to confirm our delusions. So we act in terribly destructive ways and become the authors of countless suffering.
We manipulate truth with the loudness of our voice. So who has the loudest voice has the truth.
We manipulate reality by controlling the means of argument such as pseudo logic and detachment. So we ignore the truth that emotions and intuition hide.
We are hugely reactive and incapable of wise discernment. So we make terrible decisions that have terrible consequences.
We are unable to see the long-term picture and have a short memory for history. So we never learn from our experiences and repeat destructive courses of action again and again.
On a global scale I have no solution, because the energy flow that determines the behavior of masses is way beyond anyone’s control. The only point of influence is the individual, not just because the individual is the only one capable of saving himself, but because masses can change direction when enough individuals change direction. Despite my realism (or pessimism?), whether we’ll globally succeed or not in changing direction as the global family of sapiens is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, we can put ourselves on the right side of history.
To be on the right side of history means to examine the instrument with which we play the tune of our lives, learn from it and apply its lessons. One of the tools (and possibly the most powerful one) is mindfulness. On the surface it seems like mindfulness has taken off like wildfire, at least in Europe and North America. This is not the first time. Thousands of years ago whole countries embraced its principles. But on the large scale of masses its depth gets diluted, not surprisingly hijacked by the left brain which molds it to its particular worldview. Today, mindfulness as a nice idea, a cool trend that fits into our lives between a golf game and dinner, has reached epidemic proportions. With it comes a sense of gratuitous facility with which we play with the toy of mindfulness – with the result of course that changes are much diluted. Mindfulness has morphed into the MacMindfulness of people trying to rewire the brain to make things better. But making things better is more a side effect of mindfulness than its soul. It is fast-food-mindfulness lacking access to the nutritious potential of its depth. I hear Shania Twain’s line pop up in my mind, ‘… that don’t impress me much!’
Will we really free ourselves from the scourge of the left brain gone berserk with 10 minutes a day of mindfulness as we try to cure our high blood pressure? Not a chance! The tens of thousands of years of evolutionary conditioning will wipe us out before we say boo, even with lower blood pressure. So making things better is noble, but not where it is fundamentally at.
With mortality bestowed upon us, we are the lucky ones. Richard Dawkins writes: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
Mortality is an opportunity to discover our nature as ‘that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred’. With mindfulness it is not illnesses we need to cure. It is mortality itself. Yes, we need to cure mortality, or put differently, we must learn to die from death, not from illnesses. In our left-brain narrow-mindedness of MacMindfulness we chase after the cure of disease and the removal of pain. If you are old enough, you know all too well that this does not work.
To cure mortality is to heal and cure our lives by gaining access to our birthright, the nameless vastness of timelessness. Only then true liberation from suffering can be found, trust and love can flourish, and the missiles can be taken down. There is a reality we are blind to, that is far more real than the one we think we see. The material world is not the end all and be all. Beyond it lays the promised land of pure awareness, our real identity transcending the limitations of time and space. It is the land of birthlessness and deathlessness, where birth and death are transformations of the same unknown we are made of. It is also the land of humility, justice, reverence for life and love. It is the land of nature if we know how to listen.
The fine dining of mindfulness is the big challenge we are taking on this year (as we have every prior year), but with a twist: One of the Mindsight Intensive groups will be devoted to non-duality and its mysteries.
Dr. T.
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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.
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.
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.
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