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Initiation Renaissance In Our Pandemic Times
Mindsight in Our Pandemic Times
COVID is one of those unpredictable natural phenomena that throws the whole of humanity into multi-level turmoil, challenging much of how we thought we can live our lives. We are forced to reflect, review and rethink how we live on this planet, making it improbable to hold on to the old consciousness horizons we were used to. This can be seen as a form of initiation we are willy-nilly subjected to.
Initiation is a rite of passage. The person undergoing initiation, the initiate, enters either by tradition, design or chance into a psychologically embodied process of transformation that opens her consciousness to further dimensions of human existence not previously aware of. Initiation is a transformation, in which the initiate is ‘reborn’ into a new role. Examples of initiation ceremonies might include Christian baptism or confirmation, Jewish bar or bat mitzvah, acceptance into a fraternal organization, secret society or religious order, or graduation from school or recruit training. A spiritual initiation rite normally implies a shepherding process, where those who are at a higher, more experienced level of consciousness, guide the initiate through a process of greater exposure to a fuller breadth of knowledge. One famous historical example is the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece. Puberty rites were historically very important as a way of channeling the adolescent’s unruly states of mind towards a contextually more encompassing and knowledgeable view of reality. The adolescent has to learn to see beyond the consciousness of his own tribe into the vastness of world reality. In short, the importance of initiation lies in its consciousness-expanding effect, so that we do not remain stuck in the false, and frankly often painful belief that the state of consciousness we spontaneously slide into during the transition from childhood to adulthood is all there is.
With the dawn of quantitative science a few centuries ago and the temporary amnesia with regards to the fact that humans have minds, the notion of initiation became obsolete, because initiation is a mind process. With the recent (a few decades) recognition of consciousness and mind as possible objects of scientific inquiry, and the central importance of subjective experience as an aspect of mind so necessary for living the good life, I think it is time to revive the notion of initiation, which can teach us so much about our human existence and how to make it more bearable.
Initiation entails a fundamental structure seen across cultures, which we can use as a psychological guide on our exploration of mind and consciousness and our development of mindsight. This is why in this year’s Mindsight Intensive I have been focusing attention on initiation therapy and the transcendental aspect of human existence.
Every initiation rite teaches five negative and positive truths that need to be absorbed. These are:
- Life is hard and full of suffering, but there is a way of easing this burden.
- You are not that important, yet there is a way of realizing that you are everything.
- Your life is not about you, but you can discover that you are about life.
- You are not in control, yet you can learn to become an active participant in the inevitable flow of life.
- You are going to die, but you can discover that you are much more than what dies.
The transformation algorithm meditation we practice in the Mindsight Intensive, essentially a practice focused on the phases of the breathing cycle, allows us to access these five dimensions of initiation in a most direct and efficient way. Each initiation dimension, when deeply incorporated and assimilated, contributes to decreasing our suffering.
1. Through mindsight we discover that the inevitability of suffering cannot be met successfully through avoidance of pain. We learn to let go of the fight against the inevitable. Instead, we embrace as best we can the full complexity of reality and the full force of truth with a kind and welcoming intention that helps bring clarity to our awareness of what is really going on. With that awareness, we gain more freedom of choice when it comes to possible actions that contribute to decreasing our suffering. Embracing our breath the way it is without manipulation teaches us that.
2. Science tells us that so far in the evolution of the universe we are an infinitesimal afterthought the universe can do without. From a cosmic perspective our solar system will soon be burnt up and transformed into cold nothingness. So when it comes to you and me in the individual physical form we came into existence, we have precious little importance. However, our mindsight reveals the possibility of a great fascination we can cultivate with how energy and chance conspire over huge periods of time to give rise to something as marvelous as our human consciousness; and we can do that without having to resort to any extraneous notion of a creator. Not only that, but the expansion of consciousness through mindsight allows us to touch the direct experience of actually being the unfolding universe. Each one of us is the universe and life in its unfolding, beyond the temporary and mortal carcass we presently find ourselves imprisoned in. In fact, once we see our bodies more deeply within the large context of universal reality, and realize that we not only have, but also are a body, the body ceases to be a prison, but becomes the vehicle of liberation. The breath teaches us to see beyond the physical concreteness of our body into the limitlessness of our Being.
3. Life is not about you, because this separate ‘you’ or ‘I’ we always refer to is but a construction of the mind, just a thought, a notion, and not anything real, the same way a wave thinking of itself as a separate entity is but a movement of the ocean. Our mental capacity to construct a ‘me’, or more accurately many different ‘mes’ from moment to moment, which we are usually unable to differentiate, is a gift of human consciousness that allows us the freedom to realize how our existence is about life. The universe lives in part through us as marvelous conduits of its awe-inspiring enormity. In the outbreath we learn to relinquish this constructed notion of a separate self.
4. Science tells us that we are biological algorithms as I have written elsewhere, and as such control far less than we believe. Having little control does not mean we are at the mercy of the slings and arrows of circumstance. We can actively participate in the universe’s creation! We need to relinquish our sense of omnipotence by learning to get out of our own way and not resist the inevitable flow of reality, which causes so much suffering. I love swimming down the Rhine in Basel. The current is strong, and there is no way to swim upstream against it. But carried by the current, you can swim closer or farther from the shore, and decide when you want to get out of the water. After the long pause at the end of the out-breath, the in-breath will arise whether you like it or not – you might as well not waste your energy taking the in-breath – instead, just let it happen.
5. Although you are going to die, the question is who ‘you’ is. As in the above paragraph 3., our mindsight examination of this question reveals that we are not defined by the boundaries of physical birth and death. The pause at the end of the out-breath is an opportunity to enter the nameless, timeless essence of your Being and realize how constructed your sense of time-bound separateness is. This is your chance to learn to die before you die and lose your fear of death, so that you won’t die when you die.
This whole initiation process causes a basic change in one’s existential condition, liberating us from the profane of time and history, so that we can fly like a butterfly into the sacred dimension of timeless life. The mundane becomes sacred, and this sense of sacredness alleviates our suffering. As Mircea Eliade would say: “Initiation recapitulates the sacred history of the world. And through this recapitulation, the whole world is sanctified anew. The initiate can perceive the world as a sacred work, a creation of the Gods.” This is a way of saying that we don’t have to be tyrannized by an autopilot mode of consciousness that leads to living and destroying like animals, but that we have the capacity to meaningfully participate in the awe-inspiring mystery of our universe’s unfolding in a constructive and beneficial way. Eliade again: “Initiation’s function is to reveal the deep meaning of existence to the new generations coming after us, and to help them assume the responsibility of being truly human and hence participating in culture.” This human world in the deepest and most evolved sense of the word, reveals a world open to the limitless capacity of human consciousness we call transcendence, because it transcends the limited view of an untrained human mind.
To this end, we cannot stay stagnant in our endeavors to improve our lives, as if we were trying to improve the script of a dream, even though we all want to use any means available to us to make ‘the dream’ of our physical and social reality as palatable as possible. Beyond that, initiation towards transcendence is about waking up from the dream and touch a dimension of consciousness that allows us to feel the mystery of life in a direct and compelling way beyond all suffering and time-bound existence. This awakening also called an orthogonal shift in consciousness, is not some kind of remote prize for the chosen few, even though so many people look for it their whole lives without success. It is quite simply speaking an inherent capacity of most human beings, for which we are all wired. What’s difficult is the methodical training process necessary to activate this dormant faculty, which requires dedicated work on challenging every assumption we are used to living by within the boundaries of every day, untrained consciousness. Once seriously launched on this journey, its beauty lies in the fact that there is no return, no place to reach, and no achievement to pursue. There is only the walking on the path to nowhere and everywhere, knowing that we never ‘get there’, but can simply notice an improvement in our ability to lovingly get out of our own way and surrender to what is, whether we like it or not, moment by moment. Our conscious walking is Being.
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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