Mind your Mind, Keep your Mind in Mind, and Never Mind Other Minds

Let me first warn you, dear reader, or perhaps excite you: This is a longer piece, one to read with leisure and time to reflect. Don’t try to start between two bites of a hamburger – we will lose each other. Have a seat, join me for a cup of tea, if possible next to a fireplace with a crackling fire, and let’s begin together a fascinating, hopefully for you, as it is for me, deeply meaningful journey.

Chances are that you have sought both medical and psychological help of one sort or another in your lifetime. You may have dealt with doctors trying to help you with chronic pain, seen human resources professionals, guidance counselors, personal coaches, counselors, social workers, psychotherapists, psychologists or psychiatrists, visited medicine men or women, gurus, Reiki masters, clairvoyants, psychics, Tarot readers, astrologists and more, and you have likely downloaded meditation recordings, work books and other self-help materials of all sorts. Have you ever asked yourself what you were actually doing by reaching out like that? To put the question differently, what do all these professionals have in common? What and who are you actually trying to understand when you are dealing with a disease? My thesis is that in all these cases, and without knowing it, you were curious about your mind, and seeking help and guidance in how to best deal with it. As you may have noticed however, doing so efficiently is easier said than done, and the mind is vexingly complex and difficult to get a grasp on.

Imagine I asked you as part of a group of people to assemble 4-word sentences from sets of 5 scrambled words, and half the scrambled sentences contained words like forgetful, bald, RRSP, Florida, gray, wrinkle, bald, healthcare, golfing, cane, etc., and then I would ask you to walk down a hall to another examination room to do another task. In a similar fashion I would also ask someone else as part of another group of people to do the same, except that the list of words would be seedling, forest, sunshine, computer, hockey, rocket etc., and they, too, would walk down the same hall to the same examination room. Do you know that you and your group would walk down the hall at a significantly slower pace than the other group? This was an actual piece of research at New York University by John Bargh, showing how we are constantly influenced by forces in the mind we do not have the faintest idea exist. In this case, the first set of words your group was exposed to all have a relationship to old age, while the second set doesn’t. The simple unconscious suggestion of old age influences your thinking and actions in what you can see is a significant and measurable way. This is called priming. The moral of the story?

You cannot approach your mind as if you knew much about it, and as for your senses, don’t trust them unless you are trained to properly work with them. As pretentious as this may sound, the mind as this most personal, private and intimate of phenomena you seem to own, is more foreign than the most distant of galaxies. What makes it so treacherous is that the mind is brilliant in its ways of making you believe that you are in charge, that it belongs to you and that therefore you know it well. Based on this assumption it can become your worst enemy and you don’t even notice it. It is like having a mole in your midst, getting repeatedly betrayed by life and not having the faintest clue that your worst enemy is the one you see in the mirror each morning. Like the drunk who at night searches for his lost key under a streetlamp, because that is where he can see, we believe that what we consciously see is reality, when in fact it is deeply constructed, molded and manipulated, and the reality we don’t see is so much vaster than the one we see.

What we are conscious of is a fraction of what determines our lives, our behaviors, decisions, actions and aspirations. Most processes that influence who we are and how we act in life are not conscious in one form or another: Either they once were conscious and went underground, they did not yet surface into consciousness or they never will. The brain has a way of filling the blanks of ignorance with made-up content so that we don’t even realize what we don’t know and we can blissfully rest in our ignorance, believing we know it all or best. After all, are you not the boss of you? No, you are not, by a very long stretch not. The clue that this is so can be found in the universal human complaint when, barring unexpected external events, despite all our efforts life does not unfold the way we wanted, hoped for or planned. We thought we paddled south and end up at the north pole – how can that be? Easily – there are other much more powerful bosses in your mind than who you believe is you. Without serious study and exploration you will not have the faintest chance to release yourself from the Kafkaesque conundrum of being ruled by invisible masters like in Kafka’s novel ‘The Castle’.

In keeping with a long tradition until Daniel Siegel came along about 10 years ago, notice how I have been talking about the mind without defining what it is. Because we believe to be so familiar with this most intimate of ‘things’ we call the mind, we don’t even bother defining it, assuming that we all must instinctively know what it is. At the same time, if we start trying to define it, we are likely to get embroiled like the builders of the tower of Babel in messy arguments without commonalities to ground ourselves in, and we will begin to argue about minds, intellects, souls, spirits, psyches, consciousnesses, true selves, true natures, and more. I am thus grateful to Daniel Siegel for his attempt at a definition of mind, which he based on a consilient view of the human condition that takes into account what commonalities there are in the energy and information flow (EIF) of being human across different ways of knowing reality. As grateful as I am to Dan for teaching me how to think about the mind, to mention the definition here would make no real embodied sense to anyone who has not explored these realms in depth, and besides, someone will for sure argue with me about the definition and want to define it differently. Now, that’s OK, and the exploration of the mind is exactly about inviting such questioning and dissent. Not only that, but as you will see the mind is not ‘a thing’, an object, but rather a process, a moment-to-moment unfolding that is always in flux, changing itself as it arises in a recursive way. Don’t shudder at the word ‘recursive’, as I will explain it to you in due course. In order for me to define the mind, more a verb than a noun, in a way that makes sense to you, I first have to take you on a tour of discovery into energy and information flow (EIF). Follow me please in this unfolding story, the purpose of which is to not only tell you a story you can receptively enjoy, but also change your thinking about the mind in the process. You will change your mind about the mind forever, and never again underestimate its far-reaching tentacles that can ultimately reveal to us the vast unfathomable mystery of unknowable reality.

The work to get to know your mind is not only huge and lasts a life time, but also the most difficult task you will ever take on. Count a good 10 years and 10 thousand hours of training and practice to begin to feel some sort of consistent mastery in your acquainting the mind and its nature. To study the mind you need to study both science and sentience, what science tells you about the objectively knowable, externally observable and quantifiable world, as well as what your private subjective experience tells you about the personally knowable, externally non-observable, unquantifiable inner world. So on we now go to energy and information flow.

The universe can be seen to fundamentally consist of change. Look around and as far as you can see, everything changes. Even the apparently most rock solid mountains change and there will not be anything you will ever find that does not change. If you examine more deeply what ‘everything’ is that changes, you will find that it comes down to energy. According to Einstein’s famous equation E=mc², all the ‘stuff’ or matter you see is energy. So energy in a constant state of change is fundamental to reality.

The brain is a mapping device. With its immensely complex neurocircuitry, energy that flows from the outside world through our external senses and from inside the body through our internal senses into the brain, gets spun around many brain cell networks (both neurons and glia). This spinning of energy through successive layers of increasing complexity is a process akin to mapping. One spin cycle leads to a map of the original energy flow. An additional spin cycle creates a map of that first map, called a first-level meta-map. And so it goes on through levels and levels of meta-mapping until the original energy flow has changed so much and has become so complex that it turns into a new phenomenon, a new kind of energy flow with a new quality that the original energy flow did not have. In the brain’s case this new quality is the fact that the original energy flow now points beyond its own flow. It has suddenly acquired a content, a meaning, and such transformed energy flow we call thoughts, which flow like energy, but also mean something else than what they are. Nobody has any idea how that occurs, and how physical firing patterns in the neurons, consisting of electrical currents and neurotransmitter releases within and between neurons, become thoughts, even conscious thoughts, and the whole world of subjective experience. Coming back to our energy flow, both the sensations of heat in your palms and a thought about your grandmother are energy flow, only that the heat in your palm is just what it is, heat, while your thought, also energy flow of a new sort, points to something other than itself, your grandmother. It has a meaning, a content, and energy flow with content we call information. To lovingly complicate things for you a bit, I should mention here that scientists have quite generally differing opinions on what is more fundamental in the universe, energy or information. Some consider energy the carrier of information, others say information is fundamental and energy results from that. Be this as it may, to satisfy our need for precision (and my obsessive nature), I will be talking about energy and information, always keeping in mind that information is a form of energy, and possibly vice versa. Since energy and information as mentioned above are always subject to change, we will be talking about energy and information flow, or short EIF, as a fundamental aspect of reality.

One way to define energy is to say that it is the potential to do something. It moves and combines in many different patterns and forms, such as particles, light, sounds, molecules, organisms, galaxies, mind and consciousness. Energy waves arise in patterns or changes of energy flow that emerge moment-by-moment. When I say ’emerge’ I mean more than just ‘arise’. What I mean is that some EIF patterns have a way to combine into larger wholes, such as the human organism. In other words, individual energy patterns get linked together, forming a certain balance between keeping their individual uniqueness, yet linking with other patterns to form a pattern network. The pattern network that is created from the coming together of all these smaller patterns emerges as a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Because it is larger than the sum of its parts, it has characteristics that the individual parts don’t have, and those characteristics are called emergent properties. This means that to study this grater whole, we have to use laws and principles that govern such greater wholes, and we cannot use the same laws and principles we used to study its parts. Moreover, this greater whole with its emergent properties recursively regulates its own emergence. In other words, as the greater whole emerges, it immediately has an effect backward down into the dance between its individual parts and regulates this dance in accordance with what it requires on the level of the greater whole. Of course, this greater whole is also in relationship with its environment, exchanging energy flows with it. The word we use to define this whole shebang, greater wholes that function like that, is ‘open complex system‘ (OCS). The human organism, the brain, the mind, our relationships, all are open complex systems. The state of an OCS depends on how balanced the linkage is between its parts. If its parts retain too much of their uniqueness and are not linked enough to each other, which means they are too differentiated (cancer cells), chaos ensues and the whole system becomes dysfunctional (illness). If on the other hand its parts lose their uniqueness and become too much linked (arteriosclerosis), rigidity ensues and the whole system again becomes dysfunctional (disease). If however there is a nice balance between differentiation and linkage, the system is optimally functional and integrated (health), meaning that it becomes flexible, adaptive, coherent, freely emergent and stable.

Coming back to our beloved EIF, just keep in mind that OCS are EIF combined in many layered patterns. We said earlier that energy is the potential to do something. Of course, it follows that as OCS emerge, they follow the law of energy being the potential to do something. The question arises, whether we can measure or even experience this potential, and how we would do that? Here it is: Say your energy flow in this moment is to watch TV and be engrossed in a fascinating movie. The potential for a change of your energy flow towards standing up and going to take the garbage out is very low, maybe 2%. In fact, because the thought of garbage is not in your consciousness at all, the probability that you are going to empty the garbage at that moment is even 0%. However, imagine that while you watch the movie you suddenly hear the garbage truck arriving and you remember that you have forgotten to take out the garbage. Immediately you think of the garbage and the fact that you could possibly take it out for it to be taken away by the garbage truck, and the probability for you to do that jumps to say 50%. The possibility that you might do other things, including watching the movie, is still there, but the probability of staying to watch the movie has now decreased from 100% to 50%. You then realize that you haven’t taken the garbage out in a long time and you really have to get it out. Suddenly the probability that you will interrupt what you are doing to take out the garbage may skyrocket and you quickly get up to do that. In this case the probability of the take-out-the-garbage EIF has risen from 0% to 50% at first, and now to 95%. Why only 95%? Because between the moment you decide to take the garbage out and the moment you actually get up and do it you may die of a heart attack. So now the open possibility to do anything else is still there, but its probability has decreased to almost zero. The moment you actually get up, the probability of the EIF to take out the garbage is 100%, and the possibility for other things has now morphed into the actuality of taking out the garbage. This long story tries to explain to you how we measure the EIF’s potential to actualize: The potential of any EIF to move into a particular direction is measured as its movement between possibility and actuality along a spectrum of probabilities. As I am writing these lines the probability of me getting up and driving to the airport is almost 0%, meaning that the EIF of getting to the airport remains only an open possibility, since I just came back from vacation. If however I get tired of the winter and while writing these lines I intend to call my travel agent tomorrow to book a southern vacation, the probability of me getting to the airport has now increased to say 30%. If I then write my last lines before the taxi picks me up to go to the airport, the probability has jumped to 95% and within a few minutes will be 100% as the ‘getting-to-the-airport’ energy flow becomes actuality.

Since our organism is EIF like anything else in the universe, we can make a few statements about how energy and information flow in the form of our human organism. First of all, the energy flows in the form of organs, including a brain, an extended nervous system throughout the body and a body. So the energy flows within the organism and we can say that the physical body is the mechanism by which energy and information flow. The EIF of our bodies is also in EIF exchanges with other human organisms, our environment and the universe at large. In other words, the EIF of our organism is also in relationship with the world around it and thus between organisms. Finally, these two forms of EIF that we are as human organisms, a mechanism within in the form of a body and relationships between organisms, combine to give rise to a third form of EIF, a third OCS that defines who we are, and this is called the mind.

Since everything is energy and information flow, there is thus no reason to exclude the mind from also being based in energy and information flow. I will now just repeat what I have already said above, but in this new context of mind. The mind is based on a system of energy and information flow that happens to be very curious about itself and the world, and capable of examining itself. We call this kind of EIF system an open complex system. What that means among other things is that the interactions of the different parts of the system of the mind, such as the organs, the body and our relationships as we saw above, give rise to a new level of EIF, a new OCS called mind. This mind is not reducible to its parts, meaning that the whole (in this case the mind) is larger than the sum of its parts and has to be understood on its own terms, the same way that you cannot study traffic by examining how its components, the cars and drivers, are built. This phenomenon is called emergence. The whole then (in this case the mind), recursively influences and modifies the processes by which its parts interact to give rise to the mind, and that is called self-regulation. In other words, self-regulation refers to a process whereby the mind changes the very processes that lead to its own becoming.

We have now shown how the mind is self-regulating as it emerges from the interactions of its parts and recursively influences the very way it emerges. Its main parts, the body and relationships, are also open complex systems in themselves, the body being the mechanism by which energy and information flows, and relationships the way we share energy and information flow. So the mind emerges from a mechanism of EIF being shared in relationships as the regulator of EIF. Arisen from both within the body and between bodies in relationships, the mind is both within and between. Within it gives rise to our internal mindscapes (inner subjective experiences with thoughts, emotions, memories, dreams etc.), between to our social mindspheres (shared cultural contents). However, mindscapes and mindspheres are not really separate, because unlike the body, which is bounded by the skin, the mind is both internal and relational at the same time, thus marking a space that is the one location of mind. Siegel calls that location ‘withinbetween’.

EIF has one more peculiar characteristic. Being at the foundation of the universe, energy and information changes within 4 dimensions known as width, length, height and time. In this 4-dimensional space-time continuum, energy and information can flow in the form of microstates on the level of the tiniest particle dimension that follow the laws of quantum mechanics, or it can flow in the form of macrostates such as all the ‘things’ we can see, following the laws of classical or relativity physics. Here comes what’s peculiar: On the quantum level, the fourth dimension, time, is bidirectional and reversible, which means that the notion of time as we know it is not applicable and we may well be able to replace it by the experiential notion of timelessness. On the level of classical physics, however, time is unidirectional and irreversible as it follows the second law of thermodynamic that says that the universe evolves to ever greater levels of disorder and chaos (entropy). Now even that is strictly speaking not quite correct: The business with entropy is correct, but even in our macrostate world time is a brain/mind construction to deal with change. You can say that the sense of time is the way the mind makes sense of change across probability patterns, or the way it makes sense of probability patterns of occurrence across change. Yesterday has a 100% probability as it has happened and is actualized. Tomorrow, and the further you go into the future, has almost 0% to 0% probability as it is wide open as infinite possibility. Today, now, is always emerging as we speak and has a very high probability on its way to being actualized. So that was a bit of an aside, but if we want to stick to our familiar experience of flowing time, entropy is one of the reasons why we as our bodies are mortal, folks, and how we experience our embodied time-bound existence! It stands to reason that given the mind’s essence as regulator of EIF, and EIF having both feet in different worlds so to speak, the timeless micro-world and the time-bound macro-world, the mind has both qualities of time-bound and timeless EIF. Therefore, we might not be as mortal as we think, and able to partake in a timeless mystery of existence beyond our views that are limited by the time-bound nature of our embodiment.

We have now enough background on the mind to venture into defining it. This definition as you will see encapsulates all the facets of its elements as we have explored them above. So here it is: The mind can be defined as a process of EIF that is embodied and relational, emergent and self-organizing, and that regulates (meaning monitors and modifies) EIF both within and between in a world that spans the time-bound limitation of an embodied existence and the unimaginable spaciousness of timeless vastness. This process of mind can be seen as having four aspects we can detect through direct experience and we use in our work with the mind: (1) Self-organization: There is no director inside us that controls the workings of the mind. (2) Information processing in the form of subjectively felt, therefore conscious experience that is both personal/internal and relational/external, such as conscious thoughts, memories, emotions, sensations, perceptions, beliefs, hopes, dreams, longings, attitudes, intentions, and relations. (3) Consciousness, i.e. the fact that we are aware, including the knower and the knowing. (4) General non-conscious information processing in the form of non-conscious thoughts, memories, emotions, sensations, perceptions, beliefs, hopes, dreams, longings, attitudes, intentions, and relations.

To summarize and circumambulate the mind again, here is what we can say: (1) The first aspect of mind is that mind emerges from energy and information flow. (2) This EIF in the form of mind not only correlates with EIF in the form of neurofirings in the brain, but also EIF in the form of energy and information exchanges between people in our relationships and with the world and the universe at large. This means that mind is not limited by either skull or skin, but is both fully embodied inside you and relational between you, others and the world around you. Keeping this embodied and relational nature of mind in mind, always remember that when I mention the mind, it is not just about an intellectual faculty, but a whole organismic human experience that includes all levels of neuroprocessing, the body, emotions, thoughts and relationships. Your mind is in your head, in your heart, in your guts, in your toes, in your children’s neurofirings, in everyone you ever met, in your cat and your dog, in everyone you never met, and likely even farther than that. (3) Most of the EIF of mind arises as non-conscious information processing, a fact we are largely unaware of because we quite literally never know what we don’t know. This means that the brain and the mind have sophisticated ways of filling cracks, gaps and ignorance with internal constructions that have nothing to do with reality – illusions and delusions so to speak, which we then mistake as reality. (4) In ways we do not yet understand, the arising EIF becomes known as subjectively felt, therefore conscious experience that is both personal/internal and relational/external. These are the contents of the mind, such as perceptions, sensations, imaginations, feelings and thoughts. (5) EIF in the form of the actual knower, as different from the known content of subjectively felt experience, is an integral aspect of mind that can be explored separately, and the combination of the knower with the known is the knowing we call consciousness, also an aspect of mind in its own right. (6) This whole energy and information unfolds in an orderly way through successive stages of complexity to constitute what we call mind, which means that the mind is a regulated and regulating EIF that ensures at least the survival, if not the wellbeing of the human organism. From complexity theory we know that this regulation is not somehow imposed by an external factor, but that the mind, like the whole human organism, is a self-regulating open complex system. What that means is that the EIF that arises as mind directly regulates in a recurrent feedback loop the very processes of EIF that give rise to mind. (7) Last but not least, given the roots of EIF in both the timeless world of microstates and the time-bound world of macrostates, we can use our mind’s regulating function to help us navigate our painful mortality by accessing our timeless and immortal essence that transcends not only our embodiment, but also our time-bound left-brain imaginative capacity. This we do through our practices of integration, which include mindfulness meditation and mindfulness-based psychotherapies.

Did I say ‘integration‘? You may wonder what that is – or not after having read so far. Seemingly redundant perhaps, I will go over this aspect one more time in a different way. Self-regulation is typical of an open complex system such as the mind. Its characteristic is that its overall state depends on the way its individual parts relate to each other. Like all open complex systems, the mind has many components that all have their own individual characteristics, but are also meaningfully linked with each other. In other words, the components of mind are like the players in an orchestra simultaneously differentiated from and linked to each other. If there is a balance between differentiation, the part’s ability to maintain its own uniqueness, and linkage, the part’s ability to collaborate with other parts, we have what is called integration, and when the mind experiences integration, we subjectively experience that as health and wellbeing. If some parts are not able to collaborate well, holding on too fast to their own uniqueness, such as you could imagine in an orchestra the first violins wanting to play what they want without considering what the rest of the orchestra plays, then we have too much differentiation, which manifests as chaos within the system. On the other hand, if the parts lose their identity and connect too much with other parts, such as in an orchestra you could imagine the first violins, the flutes and the cellos deciding to play the same notes, then you have too much linkage, which results in rigidity. Both chaos and rigidity are subjectively experienced as painful, and all the diseases you find in medicine and psychology can be assigned to one of those states of the open complex system that we all are, chaotic, rigid or a combination of both.

The point of all this is that we can actually learn to use our mind to rewire and integrate the brain, harmonize and integrate our relationships, and contextualize and integrate our existence. That is what mindsight is all about, which we can for example develop through both meditation and psychotherapy, keeping in mind that meditation and psychotherapy integrate different aspects of our minds. Mindsight is the ability to have (1) insight into our own internal subjective experience, (2) insight into other people’s inner subjective experience, called empathy, and (3) the ability to consciously regulate EIF away from chaos and rigidity towards integration and harmony. The way we regulate is by first learning to monitor the EIF of mind, which includes monitoring (1) the five main categories of subjective experience (external perceptions, internal sensations, emotions, thoughts and relationships), (2) awareness itself and (3) the way self-regulation unfolds; then we modify the monitored EIF towards integration, and there are many ways to do that I cannot get into right now. Both processes of monitoring and modifying are complex and require training and skill, but when earnestly pursued with patience and perseverance, lead to the most unexpected and unimaginable insights into this wonderful reality that keeps eluding us as long as we do not mind our minds. I would like to finish with Buddha’s words, or at least paraphrasing him: The unexamined and untrained mind is your worst enemy, the examined and trained mind your best friend.

I wish, dear reader, that you may now have become curious about the mind, your mind, our mind, no mind, and hopefully meet me again on the journey of minds into timelessness.

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Depth in Mindfulness

Reflections on depth in mindfulness.

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June 16, 2023

“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.

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