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On Good and Bad Decisions
I am next to a swimming pool in my home and both a fish and a little bear swim very fast in it. In my bedroom, a brown rabbit hops around and a mouse tries to find her way into the folds of a crumpled blanket lying on me. I try to get rid of the mouse, who keeps escaping me. But finally I can catch her by the tail and put her outside. The rabbit is obviously my pet and does not bother me. In the kitchen the cook rehearses a play. He is cross-dressed as a female cook and ends up above the ceiling rafters erupting into a belting sound while grimacing and being filmed. A black gentleman on a majestic black horse enters the scene and lifts the cook onto the horse. The horse stares into my eyes.
This is what I dreamt the night after I lost all the work I had done on this blog, because I made the ‘bad decision’ of not re-saving the work I had done after the computer did something funny. The blog was finished. I lost it all and had to start from scratch. It was 11:45 at night.
For a moment I was furious, but then soon forced to heed my own pronouncement I explain later in this blog, that there is no such thing as a bad decision unless it is taken carelessly, in haste or with a disturbed mind. Mind you, maybe I had a disturbed mind this late at night, but I thought I had done a very good job with my blog. So I went to bed stressed and did not have a restful night’s sleep. On my way to sleep I asked for guidance during the night to find the inspiration to tackle the business of rewriting my blog the next morning.
We are often afraid of taking bad decisions and strive to take good ones. Barbara as I will call a patient of mine, recently brought this problem to light in a dramatic fashion, when she displayed a panic-size fear of taking bad decisions.
Apart from exploring some of the psychodynamic reasons for her anxiety, which included being raised by rather controlling and overanxious parents, I also asked her to define what a bad or good decision is. Her answer seemed obvious, as we all would probably define it in the same way. A good decision turns out to yield good results, a bad one bad results. In other words, attributing a valence (whether it is good or bad) to a decision as we usually do is always a judgment after the fact, since at the time of making the decision we cannot possibly know the future, even less our decision’s outcome. Such a judgment after the fact presupposes that we impute to the moment of decision-making a knowledge that was not available at the time. Our brain being an associative organ, when untrained it very easily and readily connects experience contents together that have nothing to do with each other, and then makes it appear as if they belonged together. This leads to an impossible quagmire: At the time of decision-making we can become extremely anxious because we impute the capacity of attributing a valence to our decision at the time of decision-making, when this is in fact impossible, and when the result of our decision turns out to be less than desirable, we beat ourselves up for not having the power of foresight and being able to foretell the future. Very exhausting!
We therefore have to begin to tease out the different elements of decision-making in order to understand what is really going on and put an end to our suffering.
There are immediately three problems with the definition Barbara gave. One is that the decision is defined in terms of future results nobody can ever predict, since the future is unknowable. One cannot include unknowable future information in the definition of a good or bad decision just before or at the time of decision-making. The second problem is that attributing a valence to a decision such as good or bad is very arbitrary. Good means that the outcome pleases or meets our expectations, bad is what disappoints or doesn’t meet expectations. Does that really make sense? Cannot a disappointing outcome sometimes be very good and vice versa? Thirdly, unforeseen events, so called outliers, routinely occur after we have taken our decision, that completely change the landscape of our lives. Such events are prone to create a distortion in our thinking, causing us to retrospectively construct a sense of badness and weave it into our perception of the decision-making process, even though we were fairly certain at the time of decision-making that we had taken a good one.
The first problem has to be addressed by using available information at the present moment of decision-making. We can only make decisions considering the circumstances of the moment. Present circumstance has two aspects: an external and an internal one. External circumstance we mostly cannot control. It is what reality presents to us in the moment, including the physical location we find ourselves in, the historical and local events of the time and the time available to make the decision. Internal circumstance is a different story. It means the psychological state we are in at the time of decision-making, particularly to what degree we are attuned to and integrated within ourselves, have a clear view of the situation and have access to information and knowledge that is important for decision-making. How much access to information and knowledge we have can only be partially controlled through diligent fact-finding and reaching out to people who can be helpful to us.
Human knowledge is finite and the unknown or unknowable far vaster than our knowledge will ever be. As long as we do our homework of finding out as much as we can at the moment of decision-making, we need to develop the necessary humility to know that our decision-making will always be tentative and limited in its power to put in motion the future we envision for ourselves. Clear view has to be trained. The ability to think clearly and sift through the complex entanglement of our physical sensations, feelings, thoughts and intuitions, is not just given to us. If we haven’t learned it in our childhoods through intelligent and attuned parenting, we have to acquire it through our own work of self-discovery. Attunement and integration is also the result of good parenting or later self-exploration.
The likelihood of making ‘good’ decisions thus increases with increasing capacity for humility, clear view and attunement to ourselves. However, it would be foolish to think that we will always be optimally humble, clear and attuned every time we make a decision. And even if we are, or think we are, the human capacity for self-deception is limitless. We can therefore never make the perfect decision, but only the best possible one considering the circumstances of the moment. We can only make perfectly imperfect decisions.
The second problem is our attribution of valence to decisions. Can a decision ever be good or bad, unless it is taken carelessly or in a mentally disturbed state? We can certainly feel more or less on top of things in the moment of decision-making, but given that we have presumably done what we can to make the best possible decision, our sense of comfort or discomfort cannot possibly be a measure for the valence of the decision itself. The decision is always just what it is, a decision, neither a good or a bad one.
Moreover, decisions that turn out to lead to less than desirable outcomes are opportunities for looking at the circumstances of the decision-making moment with fresh eyes, looking at old unskillful patterns we repeat even though they lead to undesirable results, and engaging in new creative actions in the moment. Take the invention of sticky notes for example. The researcher involved was working on trying to synthesize a super-strong glue for airplane wings I believe. Unbeknownst to him his team made a calculation mistake, and when they went to manufacture it, the glue turned out to be super-weak. While working on correcting the problem he had this flash of insight that his super-weak glue could be used for other purposes, thus the sticky notes. Take Roosevelt, who became president of the United States despite having his brilliant career as a congressman cut short by polio, which paralyzed him and subsequently caused a state of deep depression. How about Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, my former Zen teacher, who had his major enlightenment experiences while on death row for a year after the second world war, then went on to become the first Westerner to bring Zen to the West? And what about the person who misses a flight to attend an important meeting because they tried to squeeze in a task before leaving, and later hears on the news that the plane they would have taken crashed? History abounds with such examples, making it clear to my mind that it is nothing but hybris to judge decisions we make as either good or bad. They are simply the best possible ones considering our circumstances at the time of decision-making, just good-enough – no more is possible. Once the decision is made, the rest is but further fodder for the inquiring mind to grow and learn, to stretch known boundaries and walk towards the sunset of wisdom.
After these reflections Barbara’s anxiety had all but disappeared. She now felt empowered that she could make a necessary decision knowing, that right from the outset she only had limited information, and that she was not in a position to feel confident about her decision, because she did not know exactly what she really wanted. Her decision was going to be a tentative one, which could lead her to a place she does not presently feel she wants to be in. However, she was now free to embrace the imperfection of her decision, open to tackling the possibility of a less than desirable outcome with openness, curiosity, flexibility and creativity, learning from the process in the meantime. All her life her overanxious parents had raised her to obey and follow their decisions without making her own. This ended up causing her untold anxiety and stress. In this situation she pleaded with me to make a decision for her. What was entirely new for her was my guidance in simply teasing out the intricacies of her situation in detail, thus freeing her to see clearly and come to make her own perfectly imperfect decision, without me ever telling her what would have been the right or wrong one. Her relief was palpable.
This version of my blog is more complete than the original one I lost the previous day. I ended up doing a better job the next day than I had done the day before. Losing it all led me to have a disturbed night in between the two versions, and the question is whether my dream answered my prayers for inspiration. It is quite chaotic, partly expressing my stressed state, but also giving me the gift of having to hold this seemingly incomprehensible chaos under the one umbrella of my awareness. My blog last night was more left-brain logically constructed at the expense of creativity, thus not doing as much justice to the complexity of this topic. My writing today was more fluent, weaving left-brain logic to a much larger extent into right-brain contextual complexity than yesterday. This allowed me, I believe, to capture the topic in a more complete way without losing its logical threads.
The number of animals in the dream is significant. They were the center theme weaving through it all. It felt to me as if I was invaded by animals, suddenly finding myself in a richly animated world of creatures that all have very different forms of consciousness and therefore ways of constructing reality. These other forms of consciousness, which feel more ‘animalistic’, body-centered and incomprehensible to the rational mind, enriched my work today as I was writing this blog. The human drama occurring in the dream felt like a Shakespearean play around animal forms of consciousness that wanted to be integrated into the hyper-rationality of my left-brain thought patterns. The dream felt both disturbing and hilariously bizarre like a farce, weaving different characters into a complex web of interactions and explorations that disturb the familiar order of things. Of course there is much more one could read into the dream, but I clearly needed to be disturbed, to be shown different types of awarenesses and greater freedom of creativity, in order to be more open to and inclusive of all that I myself don’t know, thus hopefully doing the topic of decision-making better justice.
Copyright © 2016 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.
Important changes to the Mindsight Intensive program 2024-25
1. Administrative introduction:
In order to accommodate divergent needs of individual students in the group, I am considering modifications in the group's process. After the first 10 weeks of the fall trimester, during which we lay foundations together as one group, we might explore the possibility of giving students the opportunity to continue through the winter and spring in one of two separate streams of their choice depending on their perceived needs. The decision to continue as one group or split into two will organically emerge from a process of discussion within the whole group when the time comes.
Here are the two streams:
- There are those who primarily feel the need to develop and consolidate the scaffolding of meditative technique as their main objective.
- Others feel generally quite confident in their mastery of meditative technique, and are therefore more focused on exploring the psychodynamic, socio-political, existential and spiritual implications of embodying the daily meditative attitude their mastery of technique affords. This includes the expansion of awareness into the modes of nothingness and emptiness.
These two interest streams are paradoxically both complementary and potentially conflicting. On one hand, mindfulness practice invites the student to cultivate beginner’s mind in a non-striving, non-hierarchical fashion. On the other hand, there is a sequential evolution of skill in one’s ability to apply meditative techniques, much like when one learns to play an instrument, creating a hierarchy of skills and stages the meditator walks through over time. Mixing students from both streams in one group is important as it allows for mutual fertilization of experience, expertise and wisdom. By the same token, this differentiation of needs sometimes requires different teaching approaches and emphases in the material that is taught. Naturally, I always endeavor to navigate those two streams within the group as a whole in a way that allows for integration of the two.
2. Long-term commitment:
Students who are interested in the Mindsight Intensive already have mindfulness experience. Therefore, they are all familiar with how challenging it is to embody mindfulness as a way of life. It is therefore assumed that everyone signing up seeks immersion into the hard work required to meet defenses and avoidances head on that can sometimes arise during practice. This can only be achieved through the long-term effort that facing our mind’s complexity deserves and demands. The program is thus structured to run through a whole academic year of thirty sessions, and students with different, more short-term needs who might want to leave after a trimester or two should not join. The work’s intensity requires group cohesion and safety, as well as a shared sense that we can count on each other to work through tough challenges and moments together.
3. Session structure:
Every session will have the following elements:
- A meditation guided by me of at least 1/2 hour.
- Time for processing individual students’ journey through the trials and tribulations of their practice. This is the difficult part, because it requires from each student to honestly take on and address difficulties, defenses and avoidances that may arise during their practice and their daily lives. Ignoring these challenges invariably causes the journey to falter and shrivel back into the automaticity of the monkey mind.
- Theoretical considerations necessary to make sense of our mind explorations presented by me, and sometimes elaborated through group exercises and processing.
4. Immersion at home:
- In every session I will suggest homework. By diligently following and practicing the homework, the student can enter a path of transformation that will automatically and effortlessly unfold.
- Before starting the program, please make sure to rearrange your schedule so that you can dedicate around an hour/day to formal mindfulness meditation practice. This may vary at times depending on both external circumstances and internal mental states, but aiming for that amount of time will ensure rewiring and transformation. Although formal practice time can occasionally be broken up throughout the day, what ensures penetration of depth (see my blog ‘Depth in Mindfulness’) is the long uninterrupted stretch of time that inevitably causes deeper conditionings and unconscious forces to emerge into the light of awareness.
- Throughout the duration of the program, students can request ad hoc individual sessions, should they feel that the available group time has not provided the opportunity to address important issues that arise. For this to be covered by OHIP, you must have been seen by me in consultation through your family physician’s referral within the last two years. If you are not a regular patient of mine, ask Reena whether you must first get your doctor’s referral to see me or not.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
Silence and stupidity are the foundations of mental health.
As biological beings we function in analog mode, shifting from one physical and mental state to another, using intelligence to solve problems and consciousness to guide our intuition to make the best possible choices. In contrast to intelligence, which we also find in AI (artificial intelligence), consciousness involves both feelings and the capacity to self-reflect, resulting in the ability to resist reality and by extension suffer. Our biological organism functions naturally as a continuous energy and information flow changing with time through an infinite number of states (like the grandfather clock that shows the whole flow of time), while AI is digital, based only on two discreet states, 0 and 1, from which it organizes information (like your digital watch that only shows the exact time it is now). AI as an information processing system is completely alien to our organic nature. AI is an algorithm that like a table has no feelings and never sleeps, never needs a rest, never feels anything, and is incapable of ethical consideration (if it seems to have ethical reflections it is because it has been programmed to imitate ethical views, not because it feels anything). In social media it is programmed to make money by eliciting user engagement through emphasis on information that activates feelings in human beings, such as anger, awe, attraction, joy etc. The AI algorithm just chugs along as a soulless, emotionless information process like robots or zombies if you prefer the world of fantasy.
Humans, in turn, need rest, sleep, and the cultivation of various mental states through play, intimacy, physical activity, problem-solving, daydreaming and meditation. Within that richness of mental states lies creativity, and at the core of creativity is silence and stupidity. The cultivation of silence, and by extension unknowing, is paramount for the discovery of contexts within which all knowing is embedded. Stupidity relates to the fact that a majority of thoughts we have are crazy, non-sensical, false, deluded, unintelligible, and mysterious. Like a tree spreading millions of seeds, only a few of which will thrive into a new tree, our mind spews out millions of thoughts and fantasies, only a few of which are reflective of truth and conducive to living the good life. Nevertheless, that prolific productivity is the bedrock of creativity and requires skillful management. If we want to be healthy, we need to create a safe, private space for those thoughts to live, evolve, and be processed within the entirety of the mind. That space is the silence of contemplation and the safety of intimacy. Under the incessant barrage of the AI algorithm through social media we have been robbed of such a space, because we are swept away into the algorithmic stream of likes, dislikes, approvals, disapprovals, comparisons, competitions etc. The energy of stupidity then, is used to feed our narcissistic nature and flow unchecked into the public domain of the internet, with really nefarious results.
We are far from having developed the full potential of mind. More often than not we succumb to our internal algorithm of conditioned reflexes, behaviors, reactions and mindless activities that cause untold suffering. If mind has a choice between easy and difficult, it will always choose easy. Easy is what can be manipulated in the concrete world; it is easier to control the body and fast, for example, than to practice mind concentration. We have a certain command over the body and the external world, but not over our mind. Faced with the challenge of mind exploration, we must engage in a rigorous mind training and learn to observe it without judgment.
Most importantly, non-judgmental inquiry requires the privacy of our own intimate space with ourselves and a few chosen people we trust, where stupidity can have full latitude of manifestation. Caring for stupidity requires free private and intimate time, which should be a basic human right. Stupidity and silence are gold mines guaranteeing mental integration and expansion of awareness towards larger contexts. Once we have incorporated such mind hygiene into our lives, we are better equipped to meet the demands and responsibilities of reality, including social reality, and wisely chose what we responsibly allow into the public domain. The non-judgmental attitude of intimate and private investigation needs to give way to the discerning attitude of social manifestation and public expression. In the public domain it has catastrophic social consequences if anything goes and the first thought that enters one's mind is spewed out. Social authenticity in the public domain has nothing to do with spontaneously spewing out whatever stupidities and unformed thoughts fly through one’s mind. It is rather based on one’s capacity to cogently and responsibly express what is relevant to the demands of any life situation after having sifted through the chaos of one's thoughts. In that sense, opinions must be carefully crafted if we want a society that functions wisely.
This dialectic between internal freedom for stupidity and silence and external responsibility for wisdom and perspective requires a difficult ingredient – the capacity to face the truth. Information and truth are not the same, and most information is not truth. We are flooded daily with plenty of information, but truth is a rare and costly kind of information integration process that requires hard work and time to be discovered. Truth is costly because it demands research and investment. Fiction and fantasy (not as literary genres) are cheap and don't require any investment; they can be made as attractive as you would like them to be. They are simplistic, deluded and disconnected from reality. Truth on the other hand is complicated and complex, often painful and unattractive, and the hallmark of our mind’s connection with reality.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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