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Nature’s Ways As Inspiration For Mindfulness
The oceanographer Francois Serano recounts an experience with a young male sperm whale, who approached the researchers with curiosity and communicated the way sperm whales usually only communicate when they intimately interact among themselves. It was a highly unusual encounter, as if the whale wanted to tame the researchers and invite them to become part of their own. This meeting of two curiosities from vastly different worlds made him feel he was in harmony with the world. This curiosity about the radically other, that which is so profoundly different from me and by all accounts appears unrelatable, and the caring respect for each other across this large divide of different realities as we spend time in the presence of each other, creates peace, calm and harmony. This peace reveals itself to be communicative.
We have a habit of wanting to make the radically other our own, to assimilate it into our own reality, even devour it as a way of satisfying our thirst for knowledge, power, safety, and belonging. Case in point: Stuffed hunted wild animals as trophies at people’s homes, ethnic cleansing, and assimilation. We use our mind and the constructed sense of self to literally suck like a vacuum the radically other such as our body’s otherness into our familiar intellectual orbit, believing that we can understand its full complexity. Alternatively, we have to defend against other cultures, who with a similar mind like ours attempt to invade us. We have no clue how to really get to know the radically other by honoring the safe distance that invites the other to reveal itself.
In the presence of a wild animal, one cannot cheat, rationalize, defend or lie. Reality is inescapable and one is completely naked, forced to embrace vulnerability and simplicity in full presence. This also applies to being with and in our bodies. The body not only keeps the score, but has an existence, motives, drives, agendas, and energy flow all its own, belonging to a very different world from our world of thoughts.
When with an empty head and open ears we offer ourselves completely to nature, the other, and the body, and when we do that with mindful attention and respect, one then discovers an unexpected and infinite world we never imagined existed, which is the world we need to share with our children. This kind of curiosity for and openness to the radical other creates the real, deep sense of peace we crave.
We will never understand the radical other, the way we will never understand a whale or a whale us. What is essential though is the fact that there is intention on both parts to bridge the vast gap of different existential realities. We don’t need to fully understand the other to feel good; all we need is to want to understand the other across vast canyons of mystery. Given that we inter-are with everything, to live in peace and harmony with everything means finding the right distance that allows for the kind of presence that is the sum of freedom and togetherness. The space between me and the other is a matter of degrees of separation that ensure the thriving of curiosity as a way of safely reaching out without aggression or hesitation. In that sense, nature is inherently deeply social and teaches us how to live in peace by honoring uniqueness and variety.
Loaded with prejudice and preconceived ideas about the radically other, we become scared of otherness and difference. We then form opinions and engage in a distorted and dangerous chatter about that, which one has never mindfully reached out to, visited, explored, or invited for tea with an open heart. The result is war, ignorance, and self-imprisonment. We ought to become aware that we are inextricably connected to this world; and then, honoring that interconnectedness, that membership in a large web that has no weaver, makes us realize how serene we become, the way nature is an interwoven world that brings serenity. Segregation, isolation, and protective demarcation cause stress and tension, not peace. In reaching out with mindful curiosity, we always discover that the other is rich, and has marvelous stories to tell. Even if it is difficult or impossible to understand each other, it is the curious attempt at reaching out with kindness that counts. Whenever one goes to meet the radically other, other cultures, other species, other environments, our bodies, one can find that right distance that allows interacting and inter-being in peace. We then discover at the same time the unity of the world through that which we all fundamentally share when it comes to important questions, but also the diversity and the inequalities that are based on everyone’s uniqueness. We should never hierarchize these inequalities, attaching value judgments to them, but recognize them as what constitutes the world’s richness.
Let’s look at the jungle, a seemingly chaotic place of deadly competition, internal survival wars, and mutual interspecies aggression. We call that the law of the jungle. A closer look reveals a very different picture. When in the wild immediate survival needs are met, what’s left is free time to caress, to play, to explore, to just be there, wander around and cultivate the useless. The law of the jungle is about laziness, frugality, and cooperation, not striving, accumulation, and war. It is our minds that create this sense of time as a limited commodity, within which we feel constant pressure, the pressure to perform, to achieve, to distract, even to kill time and never waste it. We have a pathological and oppressive notion of time as something that can be wasted, killed, used or lost, as we go through life driven by the fear of never having accumulated enough. In the wilderness of nature and the healthy nature of our bodies, accumulation does not exist beyond what is necessary for survival, cooperation is the foundation for thriving, and laziness or leisure is the name of the game.
The jungle and the oceans are cauldrons of evolution, and competition is not the motor of evolution – cooperation and association are. Take corals: They are a combination of two small, seemingly insignificant, most simple organisms, and yet they have given rise to humungous structures that have profoundly changed the planet’s geography and given rise to many new and varied environments making an incredible diversification of life possible. The small has huge impacts that are only visible over time! Evolution gives rise to diversity, not privileged selections. What we are used to calling ‘natural selection’ is in fact natural diversification. Survival of the fittest and removal of the weak and dysfunctional is not the way nature works; these notions are human mind constructions about nature. On the contrary, what we thought was ‘natural selection’ and now understand to be natural diversification, is about the principle of encouragement of anything that has the ability to reproduce and survive, however imperfect, weak, or defective it may be. Evolution and its natural diversification are incredibly generous. As long as reproduction, creativity, and survival are possible, go ahead. Natural diversification supports the whole package, the unity of morphology, physiology, behavior, and where applicable social interactions, as long as the entity can reproduce itself. Nature is creative and tolerant; it is human beings that are selective, impoverishing, and intolerant. We reduce, nature multiplies. Our ideal is power, superman or superwoman, the hero, the strongman we elect into dictatorships. For nature, everyone is superman with its own uniqueness and assets, like the people of a democracy. Diversity in nature is beautiful, rich, and solid the way integration as linked differentiation manifests the FACES flow of energy, Flexibility, Adaptability, Coherence, Emergence, Stability, and health. The more we select by picking the good and discarding the weak, the bad, and the mistake, the more we reduce the potential for new creations.
Our world is now so small and we are so many that we cannot escape otherness anymore the way we could in the past with only a few human groupings on the planet. Isolationism profoundly goes against the laws of nature, which is the most creatively flexible, adaptive and stable phenomenon on this planet. Isolationism cannot lead to anything else than impoverished selection with catastrophic consequences from walls to bombs and wars as the symptom of our self-imprisonment.
The genius of nature is reproduction in the inexorable flow of change, and with such rich and enormously creative reproduction come little mistakes that sneak into the unfolding process, creating variety. The way the human mind creates by avoiding mistakes through repetition and reductive selection for a certain purpose, is antithetical to change, resilience and adaptability. The problem is that the purpose for which we select will inevitably change, and what has been selected for that purpose cannot adapt. To foster adaptability, we need errors and mistakes we can then nourish with a beginner’s mind instead of being so afraid of them, afraid of making them. Errors have no purpose and therefore tolerate any changing circumstance, thus always winning the survival game. When there is change, variety always provides at least one specimen able to do something new adapted to the demands of change. Variety always provides options to adapt. With monoculture, when there is a change, there is no variant to take over or compensate and adapt – it’s the end, meaning death and extinction. This is why in deep meditation we access the open plane of infinite possibilities, that vast, indescribable, and non-definable awareness itself as the source of everything that comes into being.
The current state of our planet causes many to give up, but giving up ignores the incredible creativity of nature that bursts open when we begin to simply protect it and not exploit it. Resignation and inaction are plainly inconceivable and morally irresponsible. The solution can only be found by humanity as a whole working together, with everyone involved.
The core learning points from all this for mindfulness practitioners consist of the following idea: To liberate ourselves from suffering, we need to liberate ourselves from the prison of stories and their associated emotions we incessantly and compulsively create in our minds. These stories are nothing more than the construction of an airtight virtual reality, in which we are the protagonists that act in the storied drama and continually try to make sense of our place in the scheme of the world. The body is the vehicle par excellence to extricate ourselves from our narrative bubble, and attention to the somatic sensations in the whole body, the breathing, and the experiences from the external five senses are paramount to teach us to disidentify from the stories we tell ourselves. However, the body and the external world are the radically other I was speaking about earlier, and it is very challenging for most to fully immerse ourselves into the experience of reaching out across a vast canyon of mystery to the radically other and unfamiliar the way the sperm whale did with the researcher and vice versa. It is this act of loving, well-meaning curiosity for and reaching out to what is entirely outside our familiar realm of comfort that lies at the core of healing and peace. The principles and laws of nature described above apply most definitely to our daily mindfulness practices, and in particular, the realization that nature entails not only the trees, rivers, forests, animals, and oceans in the external world, but also our very own embodied mind and body we inhabit day-in and day-out.
Copyright © 2021 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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