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Psychiatry and the Absence of Mind
Particularly in psychiatry, patients often complain that they are immediately handed out a prescription the moment they see their doctor for psychological and emotional issues. Despite the discomfort associated with it, they frequently do not not know what else could have been done and they are not aware of alternatives. They resign themselves to taking the medication because they are in emotional pain and don’t know how to get better. They often end up taking these medications for years to come, because they are told that they have a chemical imbalance like the diabetic has an insulin deficiency requiring medication. They are told the medications are harmless and they might as well take them as a prophylactic measure to prevent a relapse. When they try to get off the medications, they experience a return of symptoms and don’t know any other interpretation than that they are obviously dependent on them for proper functioning. The problem is that medications have side effects, including for some a sense of moving through life like a zombie without much passion or sense of meaning. Medications also sometimes lose their effect over time and they prevent the person from engaging in the necessary brain wiring changes they need to grow into health. The result is nothing short of a social scourge creating a whole generation of people who have lost the capacity to develop resilience. There are undoubtedly people who need medication, sometimes for a short period of time, sometimes for a lifetime, but by far not as many as are actually taking medications. The number of people on unnecessary psychiatric medications is staggering and the symptom of a far deeper problem: namely the fact that as a society we do not foster education in the human mind. We raise our children, educate, teach and live our lives as if we had no minds, and that applies no less to the medical and even psychiatric community.
Living as if you had no mind means to be in the dark about the fact that the brain is not like a camera, providing a faithful reflection of captured reality. Instead, it is a mapping organ that constructs a reality from ‘raw’ data from the senses. However, the senses have an anatomical and physiological architecture that limits the spectrum of information they capture and pass on to the central nervous system. In short, we only see what we construct, and what we don’t construct is experienced through the restricted dimension of neural architecture. For better or for worse, in living life we largely create our own reality, and if we don’t know that, we either feel victimized by what happens to us or miss out on the opportunity to change our lives by changing the way we use our mind.
To give you access to the narrative and imaginative difference between an inquiry that assumes no mind and one that does, let me give you two very different examples of how patients can be approached. This is taken from a patient I have followed for many years. For obvious reasons of confidentiality I changed the name and certain biographical details. I will use the psychiatric assessment as the tool with which to show you this glaring difference and the wide-ranging consequences in treatment that flow from it.
This patient I will call Belinda saw a psychiatrist and a CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy) therapist starting about two years prior to her coming to see me. CBT is a form of psychotherapy that can be very effective in depression and that focuses on changing destructive and distorted thought patterns. It typically focuses on current thought patterns, issues and even problem-solving strategies, but does not delve into making sense of a patient’s history. She had seen her psychiatrist 1x/month to monitor the medication, which had to be changed or adjusted a few times because of side effects. She had also seen the CBT therapist 1x every other week at first, then 1x/month during the two years before she came to see me for a second opinion. The treatment results were unsatisfactory to her and her family physician thought that coming to see me and be exposed to a different approach might be helpful. In my chart I have a copy of the psychiatric assessment performed by my predecessor, the text of which I will use to compare the two approaches. The way the assessment is written gives clues as to the method and process used to get to know and understand the patient. To make this accessible for a short essay, I will condense the information in both my colleague’s and my assessments. Here is the gist of how my predecessor saw Belinda:
Belinda, 40 years old, has been anxious and depressed for about one year, although these symptoms have existed in a mild form for many years before that. She does not sleep properly – can fall asleep, but wakes up after a few hours and cannot get back to sleep. She ruminates incessantly, worried about the future and feeling guilty about past decisions she made. Her mood is low, she lacks motivation, finds it hard to concentrate, cries sometimes for no reason but mostly feels numb, can barely get out of bed in the morning and even fantasizes about dying. At times she is overtaken by dizziness, light-headedness, racing heart palpitations, a feeling of not getting enough air and fear of fainting. It feels like she is going to have a heart attack. In her family history her father was a depressed, abusive alcoholic and her mother had an anxiety disorder. A paternal grandmother also suffered from depression. Belinda’s marriage is ‘normal’ apart from a few challenges she figures everyone has. She has a good job and the family is financially secure. She cannot find any reason to feel this way. Diagnostically the psychiatrist concludes that she meets the criteria for a major depressive disorder and a panic disorder. She is told that her illness is genetic, given that there is a family history of depression, anxiety and alcoholism, that she has a chemical imbalance, and that the recommended treatment is a combination of an antidepressant with an anti-anxiety medication and a sleeping pill to rebalance the brain chemicals. A course of CBT is also recommended as an adjunct to treatment, so that she can learn to substitute destructive thought patterns with more constructive ones.
My colleague’s assessment note reads pretty much the way this last paragraph sounds, and I am sure that in reading this you probably find the story and the psychiatrist’s view of the patient reasonable – and it is to a limited extent. What is not visible in this assessment is what is left out due to the fact that my colleague’s approach assumes that Belinda’s mind is not shaped by history, experience and relationships, and that therefore Belinda has nothing to do with her illness. Her psychological symptoms are treated like physical symptoms, in that it is assumed they have no psychological meaning, but only a physical reason. Because her mind is assumed to exist independent of her history and relationships, it is also not part of the approach to understand Belinda’s autobiographical narrative. If you cough and have a fever for example, there is no meaning to the symptoms other than to say that they are the effect of a physical dysfunction, the reason for which can be found through medical tests. How you tell your physician that you cough and have fever is of no relevance – the physical findings speak for themselves and upon further investigation they reveal the nature of the illness. When it comes to the psyche and the mind, however, reducing emotional symptoms to physical processes in the brain and the body (chemical imbalance, genes) does not do justice to the fact that the mind functions according to its own laws that are different from the laws of physiology, and that the mind is storied and deeply relational. The mind cannot be reduced to the brain and the body, even though brain and mind interact.
How did the same patient look like through my assessment, which assumes that we all have a storied mind that has been shaped by our history and our relationships? The story Belinda initially tells would sound exactly the same, but the therapist’s assumptions and interventions would be very different and lead not only to a very different assessment process and relationship with the patient, but also to a very different understanding of Belinda’s situation and to different treatment conclusions. I will insert in italics thought processes, assumptions and questions I introduced into the conversation, and which Belinda often felt nobody had ever asked her before. You will see how much longer the story will be than the biologically oriented assessment of my predecessor.
Belinda, 40 years old, has been anxious and depressed for about one year, although these symptoms have existed in a mild form for many years before that. “How long before that?” Belinda adds that she probably has felt sad since at least adolescence. She does not sleep properly – can fall asleep, but wakes up after a few hours and cannot get back to sleep. She ruminates incessantly, worried about the future. Her mood is low, she lacks motivation, finds it hard to concentrate, cries a lot for no reason, can barely get out of bed in the morning and even fantasizes about dying. At times she is overtaken by dizziness, light-headedness, racing heart palpitations, a feeling of not getting enough air and fear of fainting. It feels like she is going to have a heart attack. “Why do you feel so depressed and anxious?” She first says that she feels depressed and anxious because she can’t sleep, her mood is low, she has palpitations etc. Now notice how her mind tricks her into not answering the question – it is as if when asked why the river flows into the ocean you would answer that it is because more and more water keeps flowing into the ocean. She does not notice at first that she is not able to penetrate deeper into the reason for her symptoms. When I point that out to her, she first notices that the previous therapists never asked her that question and at first she says she does not know, and that there is no reason for her to feel that way, given that her life is otherwise pretty normal. Again, what was quite clear to me at this point is that the reasons for her suffering were so deeply repressed by her mind that she had no access to them. She then ended up repeating what her previous therapist told her, that it must be a genetic chemical imbalance.
“What were your parents and your relationship to them like?” She now starts crying and describes not only an abusive father, but also a short-tempered, constantly stressed, overly critical mother who never had time for the children and was emotionally quite cold and angry. In her family history her father was a depressed, abusive alcoholic and her mother had an anxiety disorder. A paternal grandmother also suffered from depression. “It must have been very painful to have been raised in those kinds of family circumstances!” She agrees. “And how do you think that affected you growing up?” Now she remembers having been a bed wetter for many years and having had trouble concentrating at school because she was so preoccupied with what was going on at home. She therefore failed high school and had to finish it through correspondence classes later on while working for money. She felt so lonely and unhappy at home with her parents that she married her husband to escape her family of origin. “So what is your marriage like?” Although her husband has a good job, he is like her mother, emotionally absent, critical and putting her down a lot, but she has gotten used to it and finds that ‘normal’ like other of her friends’ marriages. This is what she meant before when she said that her marriage is ‘normal’ apart from a few challenges she figures everyone has. In short, her marriage is a major source of sadness, depletion and stress. Thanks to her intelligence she has a good job, and the family is financially secure, but the family atmosphere is everything but secure.
She now admitted that there are likely many reasons for her to feel this way. Although she diagnostically meets the criteria for a major depressive disorder and a panic disorder, it has now become clear that in the course of her childhood the dysfunctional family atmosphere wired her brain to develop a dysfunctional mind that causes a lot of suffering. As an adult she perpetuates the mind habits that cause her to be depressed and anxious without knowing that she is creating her own suffering.
The genetic theory is very much in question, first because there are no genes that without fail cause these dysfunctions. A lot hinges on gene expression, which is dependent on environmental influences. Humans not only evolve through gene mutations that propel natural evolution, but also through the way we pass on our minds (emotional and thought patterns) to our offspring through cultural evolution. Generally speaking, natural evolution moves at a snail’s pace as genes mutate very slowly over thousands of years, which is why our brains (hardware) are likely very much the same as the brains of our ancestors living 30,000 years ago. On the contrary, cultural evolution is fast and the dominant factor in human evolution, which is why compared to our ancestors our brains are wired differently (different software). When it comes to psychiatry, I have come to understand that the same applies; I am rarely impressed by genes in understanding my patients’ suffering, but over and over again do I see how generations after generations pass on dysfunctional mind habits to their offspring, thus perpetuating suffering against their often good intentions to make it better for their children. It is crucial to reiterate that because our mind is embodied, when we use our mind in unhealthy ways, we miswire our brain and the brain of those we interact with, and end up developing ‘chemical imbalances’ in ourselves and our loved ones. Fortunately, this cycle of suffering can be stopped. I see it all the time in people who have gone through the process of learning to use their minds to rewire their brains, allowing them to stop passing on their parents’ sufferings and miseries to their own children. They have learned to use their minds to correct chemical imbalances in themselves.
In Belinda’s case there is certainly enough evidence of disturbances in her parental attunements to explain why her brain was shaped by these psychological influences to provide her with a deeply conflicted mind. She clearly has a chemical imbalance, but in this view it is due to the way she has learned to perpetuate faulty thought and feeling patterns and behaviors to cause her own suffering. Given her capacity for insight, her motivation to look at herself, the fact that she was able to cope and the human mind’s embodiment, the recommended treatment was primarily a combination of psychological tools to help her get to know and use her mind to rewire the brain. Medication was very much optional and in the long run not needed. As she engaged in a longterm (3-5 years) combination of psychotherapy and mindfulness training, she ended up divorcing her husband who categorically refused to see his part in the marital misery and therefore refused help. She eventually worked through all the issues from her childhood and found a new partner, with whom she was able to engage in a healthy marriage. She now lives happily, her ‘chemical imbalance’ rebalanced through the healthy use of her mind. Her symptoms have disappeared and she has no need for medication.
Continuing to do what we did in the past and hope for different results in the future is one of the definitions of insanity. For all those patients who unnecessarily take medication (and there are far too many of them), the corollary is that ignoring the mind and taking medication instead allows them to maintain insanity and feel better. This is how people for example stay in unhealthy marriages despite their toxicity, masking the pain these relationships create with medication that allows them to function and keep the status quo. Learning to use the mind to rewire the brain is not for the faint-hearted and implies being prepared to make profound life changes, some of which can be very difficult to implement. The advantage of this path lies in the solidity of the result and the frequent liberation from medication dependence.
Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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Reflections on depth in mindfulness.
My soon to be posted YouTube video 'Language and Thinking Modes' might serve as a good introduction to how my writing is best read. Most of my writings require the conscious act of identifying the embodied reality to which the written words point. Literature is written in a metaphorical language mode that automatically bypasses the disembodied left-brain intellectual function and activates the holistically embodied right-brain engagement that transforms the reader. Not necessarily so with conceptual writing such as this, which may easily be misunderstood as a purely intellectual exercise for specialists without much practical relevance, let alone transformative power. This can be changed with the knowledge that this text is the linguistic expression of embodied mental experiences we discover through in-depth mind explorations, such as those we engage in through mindfulness and mindsight training. If you invest attentional and awareness energy to discover in your own embodied experience what I write about, you will find your engagement with the text transformative.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that asserts that two dissimilar things are identical. Its formula is ‘this is that’. For example, ‘your argument is a slippery slope’, or ‘you are my favorite movie’. Notice how your mind blows open when the narrower first concept (‘argument’ for example) gets identified with a second image (‘slippery slope’). The imaginative space explodes out of its conceptual restrictions into a vast, limitless spaciousness that engages our whole embodied experience as it melts away into the unconscious, and therefore can never be fully grasped. In other words, a metaphor like ‘this deer ran by us like a greased lightning’ never ceases to open new spaces of the imagination, in contrast to denotations (explicit meanings like ‘this book is on the table’) that restrict meaning to clear definitions.
Metaphors are right-hemispheric phenomena that both historically and epistemologically come before left-hemispheric denotations. The implicitly encoded fuzzy explosion of non-graspable meaning of metaphors is from an evolutionary point of view an earlier brain function than the sharply delineated explicit meaning of denotation. In other words, before through abstraction we can explicitly see clearly, we absorb reality in non-distinct ways through complex implicitly encoded embodied intuitions.
Nothing can be explicitly clear before having first implicitly existed in a faintly murky fashion. Thus, metaphor is how the truly new (not just the novel) announces its existence, while explicit knowledge with its seductive clarity keeps returning and tying us down to what we already know. Explicit knowing, which comes with a sense of seeing clearly, is always seeing something already known, and therefore cannot possibly be anything truly new and creative. It is mostly a cognitive re-presentation ‘in our heads’ devoid of the complexity of presence (presentation) – just a thought, not full presence.
The choice of metaphor therefore determines our level of understanding of the world and ourselves. We are subject to an imaginative countermovement that seems paradoxical: On one hand, we need to become permeable to and to some extent penetrate the implicit realm that is ‘beyond’ the surface of what can be explicitly stated and grasped, yet on the other hand we simultaneously must always and inevitably return back to the explicit realm for reasons of communication.
A metaphor that characterizes mindfulness is depth, which as a non-distinct language trope refuses to be grasped. Depth connotes (not denotes) something lying beyond the seemingly obvious. It is not just a word for a measured distance, but instead captures our holistic intuition of limitlessness and immeasurable surprise and resonates with layers of our being beyond the imaginable. It is what we may think of as context, which envelopes the obviously clear both around and beyond it as if in three-dimensional space. What’s clearly in focus as knowledge lives surrounded by the murky depth of unknowing it depends on, like the biodiversity of individual species and specimens finds its most powerful source in the murky marshes and impenetrable forests of nature.
To bring things into clear focus is the left brain’s task. But remember, what is brought into clear focus is a re-presentation, not presence, and always already-known knowledge. Furthermore, the left brain abstracts its content from its context to give us clarity at the expense of a holistic vision and wisdom. We have the illusion of knowing what is in clear focus, when in reality it is just a paired-down, simplified, even impoverished version of itself in the form of an information bit – useful, yet devoid of life. To see something clearly is to know it only partially, not as it really is, largely devoid of embodied experience and presence.
To really know something deeply as it really is, to honor its depth, in other words, the clear attentional focus function of the left brain needs to be married to the contextual awareness function of the right brain that provides access to depth. The context that the right hemisphere provides allows for a holistic apprehension of what is in clear focus, resulting in a complete vision of real reality that combines the experience of knowledge with embodied presence and wisdom. Clarity is married to depth, left- and right-brain functions are finely coordinated like a finely attuned Tango dance. Only then do we see reality as it really is, which paradoxically is not at all what we believe to be objective reality.
My programs are an invitation to explore these depths of the human mind, the most complex phenomenon of the known universe.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
The ego is an esteemed member of a person's life adventure.
On May 12, 1797, with Napoleon’s troops lined up for an attack on the shores of the lagoon, the great Council of Venice met for the last time and abdicated in favour of a revolutionary government controlled by the French military command. On May 15, 1797, the last doge Ludovico Manin left the Palazzo Ducale forever. That was how the thousand-year-old history of the Republic of Venice ended.
last doge of Venice
In this painting from 1887 by Vittorio Bressanin, the elderly senator descends the Giants’ Staircase of the Palazzo Ducale. Far from reading decadence, we can sense a reflection on the intimate drama historically experienced by the magistrate. Dressed in full majestic attire with the old-fashioned wig and the famous red gown of Venetian Senate members he becomes a symbol of the entire city and its thousand-year history. His heavy steps and lowered gaze show both dignity and resignation as we can feel the agony of a grand era meeting its demise.
The thousand little deaths we encounter in meditation in preparation for the final transition of this life’s journey came to mind as I stopped dead in my tracks in front of this painting. Our lives have a similar grandeur replete with a mosaic of tradition and new discoveries, arguments and agreements, accomplishments and failures, satisfactions and disappointments, celebrations and funerals, gains and losses. The drama takes several intermingling shapes like tragedy, comedy, romance and satire brought forth by the dance between our left and right brain. Reality and all human experience, no matter of what ilk, is always complex, never simplistic, a rich tapestry of contradictory and complementary energy flows vying for harmony between the extremes of chaos and rigidity.
There always comes the time, sooner or later, smaller or bigger, more subtly or fiercely, when the drama finds its demise. Can we sail off into the sunset with dignified rather than defeated resignation? Can we slowly develop over the course of the many mini-deaths of our practice the majestic elegance of a passing storm that allows us to dance with the flow of destiny no matter what pleasant or unpleasant currents move us? That is what I might view as the grand undertaking of mindfulness and meditation. The person that we are is a dynamic exchange between the executive ego, the integrating self and the mysterious vastness of the mostly non-conscious organism, partaking in a life that for better or for worse must be lived. And lived it is, more or less skillfully, with more or less suffering, never perfect, always sloppily meandering across the landscape of necessities, seeking an elusive freedom that tends to recede behind the many conditionings that unawares imprison us. When lived fully, which means with a minimal amount of hesitations and regrets, the full catastrophe of life is well worth its tribulations, unapologetically splendid and impressive, and deserving of a dignified nod to impermanence as we learn through mindfulness how to let go, how to get out of our own way, living freely and easily in the market place, and rejoicing in our internal resurrection from the ashes of ignorance.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
I am looking to circumambulate two propositions: That impatience stems from a skewed relationship with time, while nothingness and the serious engagement with death are profoundly integrating and healing.
I am looking to circumambulate two propositions: That impatience stems from a skewed relationship with time, while nothingness and the serious engagement with death are profoundly integrating and healing.
“I had the flu and was too sick to practice meditation.” “My father-in-law died, and I had to stop practicing because we were too busy taking care of family stuff.” “After ten minutes of practice, I get impatient, uptight, need to move around, and have to stop my practice.” “I was so distracted that I was not able to practice.” Does this sound familiar?
What if I told you that no conceivable life circumstance can hinder your practice, and unless you don’t want to practice, the inability to practice does in most circumstances not exist? What if the above statements would have to be rewritten as follows? “I had the flu and was so sick and overwhelmed that I did not feel like or know how to use my meditation tools.” “My father-in-law died, and I stopped practicing because the hustle and bustle of the circumstance increased my mind’s forgetting function and thereby strengthened conceptually constructed illusions.” “After ten minutes of practice, I get impatient, uptight, need to move around, and I don’t have the experience to check what skills are missing in my practice.” “I was so distracted that I forgot that the distraction is itself a mental state like any other to be held in awareness and explored.”
Let me be clear: I am not saying that everybody should or can practice mindfulness meditation, or that there are no contraindications to doing so. I am simply addressing the unsuspecting majority of people who have legitimately taken steps to begin mindfulness meditation training and end up happily deceived by rationalizations to give up.
Because humans are fickle and crave instant results, it cannot be emphasized enough that mindfulness meditation is a skill to be learned, honed, and practiced over a long period of time – a thousand years on average. We are not talking about practicing a skill so that eventually we will arrive at the promised land while in the meantime we toil in hell. We are practicing this skill because the very act of doing so is the promised land. Immediately, when seen this way, we realize that the promised land sits on the ruins of etymology – ‘pro-mittere’ in Latin means ‘release/letting go/send forward’ (mission). What’s forward in this notion of ‘promised’ is the vast unknown of creativity, and by releasing into it we submit to the principle of impermanence that always changes everything without ever being static. Done skillfully, this opening to the unknown is called meditation, the gift that keeps on giving in the form of noticing improvement. What a delight to have no other goal than noticing improvement. On this path, unexamined impatience has no place. Mastering the right techniques is essential for success, success meaning a significant decrease, if not even disappearance of suffering when we realize that we are always already there where we are supposed to be.
When we appreciate the mind as the most complex phenomenon in the known universe, which thanks to all its splendor also affords us a limitless capacity for self-deception, we will hardly fall prey to cavalier attitudes believing that in a few weeks of training, we can know how to meditate, and life will all be better. Take just these three statements seriously – that mindfulness meditation is the hardest thing you will ever pursue in your life, that it takes a thousand years of training in learning precise mind tools, and that with the mind you are up against the most complex phenomenon in the known universe – and you will solve almost all challenges presented to you by the mind on this fascinating journey of discovering its nature, the nature of reality and truth, and the many ways we construct reality and let it affect our lives.
Impatience is one of those poorly recognized states of mind that interferes with all manner of growth and healing. Yearning for quick fixes and therapy shopping from one to the next in the hope of finding the imagined final solution to one’s problems is a ubiquitous mind trap one has to guard against. Desperate for water in the middle of the desert, digging one hundred shallow wells will not yield results; you have to dig one deep well, and that takes patience and time. This causes us to come face-to-face with another facet of the reality we usually quite desperately and unconsciously avoid like the plague – nothingness. Patience and impatience, time and nothingness are thus closely related topics central to mindfulness meditation and one’s healing journey in general.
Here is the mystery: You have more than a thousand years ahead of you because the thousand-year journey is timeless with no duration. It is a journey to nowhere one might feel one needs to go, achieving nothing one believes needs to be done, changing nothing one has the urge to escape from, and providing the freedom to be nobody else than who one already is. With no place to get to, it is a curious journey beginning at King’s Cross Station and involving platform 9¾. Everything is already there, including the end of suffering – all you must do is cultivate the mindset that gets you through the concrete pillar. To the untrained mind, the pillar is impenetrable and platform 9¾ non-existent, and finding the end of suffering appears as a daunting, almost insurmountable proposition. To the trained mind it is clear and simple, an orthogonal shift to a multidimensional awareness mode.
‘Orthogonal’ (Greek) means ‘at a right angle’, and I remember encountering this metaphor in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work. So let me briefly yield to his words before continuing (Jon Kabat-Zinn, ‘Coming To Our Senses’, 2005 first edition, extracts from p. 347-351):
“As a rule, we humans have been admirable explorers and inhabitants of conventional reality, the world ‘out there’ defined and modulated by our five classical senses. We have made ourselves at home within that world, and have learned to shape it to our needs and desires over the brief course of human history. We understand cause and effect in the physical world. …
And yet even within science, looking at the edges, it is not so clear that we comprehend underlying reality, which seems disturbingly statistical, unpredictable, and mysterious. …
In the conventional everyday reality of lived experience … we dwell mostly accepting the appearance of things and create quasi-comfortable explanations for ourselves about how things are and why they are that way … really-not-looking-but-pretending-to-yourself-that-you-are.…
All the while, we are immersed in a stream of thoughts whose origins and content are frequently unclear to us and which can be obsessive, repetitive, inaccurate, disturbingly unrelenting and toxic, all of which both colour the present moment and screen it from us. Moreover, we are frequently hijacked by emotions we cannot control and that can cause great harm to ourselves and to others ….
Unpleasant moments are bewildering and disconcerting. So they are apt to be written off as aberrations or impediments to the ever-hoped-for happiness we are seeking and the story we build around it. … Alternatively, we might build an equally tenacious unpleasant story around our failures, our inadequacies, and our misdeeds to explain why we cannot transcend our limitations and our karma, and then, in thinking that it is all true, forget that it is just one more story we are telling ourselves, and cling desperately to it as if our very identity, our very survival, and all hope were unquestionably bound to it. … What we also forget is that the conventional, consensus reality we call the human condition is itself inexorably and strongly conditioned in the Pavlovian sense. … all this conditioning adds up to the appearance of a life, but often one that remains disturbingly superficial and unsatisfying, with a lingering sense that there must be something more, …
Such discomfort … may be all pervasive, a kind of silent background radiation of dissatisfaction in us all that, as a rule, we don’t talk about. Usually it is unilluminating, just oppressive.
But, when we look into what that disaffection, that background unsatisfactoriness actually is, when we are drawn to actually question and look into ‘who is suffering?’ in this moment, we are undertaking an exploration of another dimension of reality altogether – one that offers unrecognized but ever-available freedom from the confining prison of the conventional thought world, …
The process feels like nothing other than an awakening from a consensus trance, a dream world, and thus all of a sudden acquiring multiple degrees of freedom, … It is akin to the transition from a two-dimensional ‘flatland’ into a third spatial dimension, at right angles (orthogonal) to the other two. Everything opens up, although the two old dimensions are the same as they always were, just less confining. …
… we are initiating nothing less than a rotation in consciousness into another ‘dimension’, orthogonal to conventional reality, and thus, able to pertain at the same time as the more conventional one because you have simply ‘added more space’. Nothing needs to change. It’s just that your world immediately becomes a lot bigger, and more real. Everything old looks different because it is now being seen in a new light – an awareness that is no longer confined by the conventional dimensionality and mind set.
… [this is] a glimpse of what Buddhists refer to as absolute or ultimate reality, a dimensionality that is beyond conditioning but that is capable of recognizing conditioning as it arises. It is awareness itself, the knowing capacity of mind itself, beyond a knower and what is known, just knowing.
When we reside in awareness, we are resting in what we might call an orthogonal reality that is more fundamental than conventional reality, and every bit as real.
The conventional reality is not ‘wrong’. It is merely incomplete. And therein lies the source of both our suffering and our liberation from suffering.”
Kabat-Zinn does not directly talk about the three awareness modes I have been exploring in detail with my students in the Mindsight Intensive, the fields of consciousness, nothingness, and emptiness. A deeper exploration of those must be left for elsewhere. We can, however, taste some aspects of this journey towards freedom by recognizing how unique the expectations are with which we must take on meditation.
Meditation offers us a powerful sequence of interrelated processes serving as a royal road to deep peace – impatience resulting from a skewed relationship to time vanishes through the examination of the nature of time to make room for patience necessary to discover the inevitability of coming face-to-face with nothingness and death. Impatience, time, patience, and nothingness/death are basic realities on our path to liberation.
Once you master the basic tools used by the meditation guild and have gained some expertise in navigating the complex neighborhoods of your mind, you then must give the fire of awareness time to transform the mind’s energy flow and the brain’s neurofiring patterns – not unlike having mixed all your ingredients into your soup, and then giving the heat time to cook it. Easier said than done. During that time of ‘hanging in there’ without agenda, stabilizing attention one-pointedly on an object of awareness, and allowing everything else to unfold in the background of peripheral awareness with an open and accepting attitude full of curiosity, you invite and allow everything to be just as it is. Remember that you are not ‘hanging in there’ for a specific gain, but because it is so deeply healing just noticing improvement.
How much time do you need? Ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, a day? On this level of discourse, an hour a day of formal practice for the rest of your seven lifetimes is a good cruising velocity. The soup will cook nicely – you will accept with ever greater ease and elegance the satisfaction of noticing improvement for its own sake. However, most people crumble under the weight of time way before the hour has passed. Quite quickly, conditioned organismic processes make themselves felt in a variety of highly unpleasant experiences that drive us to abandon our cushions. The antidote? Access to timelessness
But how do we find timelessness within our time-bound lives? If you can’t trust your own subjective observation of the mind, you can trust physics to tell you that time is not a fundamental feature of reality. In other words, we must examine how our mind constructs time. It is thus not primarily about keeping track of the number of minutes you practice (although this number does give you a clue about your level of skill), but more about your skill in examining the ways numbers and minutes get constructed in your mind. In a more overarching way, it is about developing a clear sense of the subjective experiences created by the brain’s default mode network (the constructor) as distinguished from a very different set of experiences we call ‘the conduit’.
The default mode network’s constructor is the mind function that uninterruptedly creates stories. It is responsible for the incessant mind chatter filled with content and meaning we are all not only so familiar with but also so profoundly and completely identified with, that we end up confusing its content with reality. The conduit, on the other hand, is the entirety of direct somatic and sensory-motor experiences, which don’t have a content or storyline with meaning we can follow. These are the experiences we have through the external five senses of touch, sight, sound, taste, and smell, and the physical sensations in the body. In short, the real reality that gets directly presented to us through the conduit becomes transformed by the constructor (default mode network) into a virtual re-presented reality. The constructor is like a menu you read or a map you consult – though intellectually useful and interesting, it will never slake your hunger, quench your thirst, or immerse you in the landscape. The conduit is the actual meal you eat or the territory you hike in. We are so not used to realizing how virtual our thoughts, beliefs, and stories are, that we constantly confuse them with reality. This results in disembodied, stressed lives lived ‘in our heads’ in times (past and future) that don’t exist.
The moment your meditation dives into the intricacies of that construction, recognizing it as such and not confusing it with reality anymore, you discover that the foundation upon which you live is the conduit with its timeless moments that flow like a river to nowhere. Indeed, the stories of your construction themselves turn out to be no more than energy flow processes, not finished products experienced as truths for sale to other people. Consequently, even deeply held beliefs and meaning become no more than a fleeting appearance like the clouds in the sky. This applies equally to the construction of time, which can be directly observed, both individually and culturally in cultures without clocks or a sense of time like ours. Upon close examination, both conduit and constructor unveil their fleeting nakedness as they slip through our fingers like water we try to grasp. Your relationship with time changes profoundly.
When steeped in that conduit, the sense of ‘not being able to bear it anymore’ dissipates for several reasons. ‘I am not able to bear it anymore’ is recognized as just a thought, a construction, not real reality. As such it is as fleeting an energy flow as any other. Now grounded in conduit without any of the goals and meanings created by the constructor, you can recognize resistances and defenses that cause the experience to be felt more dramatically than it really is. You can emphasize curiosity, openness, acceptance, and allowing and letting be as a way of breaking past conditionings. Finally, time is revealed to just be a fleeting construction; there is no sense of less or more time that affects your expectations of how the immediate future needs to look. You touch timelessness. In the face of that realization (‘realization’ meaning an embodied awareness of reality), conditioned organismic processes that drive you on autopilot appear in a different light. Instead of being unpleasant experiences or problems, which you feel you need to bear, solve, or escape from by leaving your cushion, they are ‘just’ complex energy flows, each with their own qualities, direction, and destiny. Ten minutes, an hour, neither is either more difficult or less productive. They are just different, and with this ‘just’ the struggle and resistance fall away. Practicing for an hour changes from being an endurance game to becoming an invigorating massage instead.
Patience with nothing is quite a treasure. Remember: Nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to change, nothing to know, nobody to be – nada, zilch, squat, zippo. Timelessly surrendering to the vast emptiness of Being. It is like having assembled all the soup ingredients in a pot and all you now have to do is stir occasionally while letting it simmer on the fire. When everything is said and done – dreams are cleared, emotions regulated, memories integrated, thought rivers understood, and actions wisely measured – when nothing is left to say or do, the second of the three legs of our thousand-year journey begins by confronting nothingness and death in awareness.
Neither nothingness nor death are negative or nihilistic states, nor are they pessimistic outlooks on life. Granted, from the perspective of ordinary waking consciousness we call the field of consciousness, death, and nothingness appear as dark, cold, forsaken, and gloomy realities, which in Western philosophy existentialism has wrestled with. But Western philosophy being a largely intellectual exploration within the context of ordinary everyday consciousness does not manage well to pierce through the existential despair and discover an orthogonal dimension waiting to be realized. It does not use the awareness tools necessary for that. Mindfulness meditation offers that option, and we discover that quite on the contrary, death and nothingness are optimistic, positive, dynamic, and creative. When approached properly, they affirm the value and meaning of life in the face of suffering and death and open up a new horizon of freedom and responsibility for human beings. Prepare to die wisely and you will have a full and meaningful life.
Nothingness is the ground of being, the source of all possibilities, and the ultimate reality that transcends all dualities and categories such as subject and object, self and other, life and death. Nothingness is not something that can be grasped by rational thought or empirical observation, but only by a radical transformation of one’s consciousness and existence. It can provide a way to overcome existential crises and achieve a deeper understanding of oneself and the world. The only way to overcome the nihilism of existentialism is to go through it, to face in full awareness the nothingness that lies at the bottom of human existence, and to realize that it is not a negative void filled with death, but a positive source of creativity and freedom. By awakening to this field of nothingness, one can overcome the alienation and anxiety of existentialism and attain a new mode of being that is authentic, compassionate, and open to the infinite possibilities of existence that provide a deeper sense of meaning and joy. By implication, we need death to really get to know life at its deepest.
That powerfully transformative nothingness is waiting for you in many different cloaks and disguises at every turn: When you are bored, ‘nothing’ seems to happen, it all seems always the same, you can’t stand it anymore, you are lost, you have better things to do, you are assailed by the question ‘and now what?’, you have lost all sense of life’s meaning, or you are frantically searching for an imagined something to improve the life that eternally eludes you, like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot. Without falling into forgetfulness, you stop waiting, you stop searching for the elusive prize that like the mirage of an oasis forever recedes as you approach. You rest in the awareness of nothing, a rich and creative void of unimaginable spaciousness, power, quality, and luminosity, and instead of waiting, you are present, waiting for nothing as everything is already there, doing nothing as everything of essence is already done. Instead of searching, you just receive; you revel in just being. This has by the way something to do with the capacity to be alone.
One of my students recently put it beautifully in an email as a question:
“Is it possible to reach a stage in your transformative journey of the mind where things stop making any sense, seemingly out of nowhere? It’s like, you’re practicing, formally and informally, working the tools and over time, you become a fairly skilled surfer, riding the waves with a sense of relative ease, stability, and flow.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, as you seemingly ride the same waves in the same ocean, you can’t seem to stay on the surfboard with any sense of stability anymore. But you haven’t any clue why. You just can’t. Your balance is off. You don’t know anything anymore. Seemingly without any warning, you’re a beginner again.
The only thing I can say about this is that I notice a deeper widening within me, a deeper felt grief and sadness about our world in rapid chaos, and a felt confusion around how to be with the impermanence of civilization with reverence and faith.”
There is no room left for impatience when we examine the construction of concepts and time in meditation. Impatience is the escape from the truth by trying to escape to somewhere else than where we are; it is just resistance to the inevitable truth of ‘just Being’ in our practice of ‘just sitting’ with what ‘just keeps hitting you over the head the more you try to dismiss it’. When we settle in the flow of the foundations of our Being rather than precariously balance on the rooftops of our storied existence, impatience melts away like snow in the sun. The resulting holy water inspires the daily hour we sit on our cushion to become a transformative bath in the timeless vastness of Being – like a nurturing oasis amid the vast desert of existence with its trials and tribulations that toss us to and fro.
One must resist the temptation to make ‘the flow of the foundations of Being’ or ‘the timeless vastness of Being’, or indeed ‘nothingness’ into some ‘thing’ we can eventually find, get to, or achieve. Absolute nothingness is so profound that concepts must be released as what they are – puffs of smoke. If there is any trace of something called ‘nothing’, it must be released. This also applies to death. It is a no-thing and therefore no more than a process of transformation the likes of which we have spent a lifetime absorbed in. This absolute nothingness is ‘no thing’ whatsoever, and since all we can imagine are ‘things’, ‘no thing’ cannot be imagined. Just because it cannot be imagined or thought about does not mean it cannot be lived and known – not known in the sense of intellectual knowledge of something, but in the sense of unknowable knowing even beyond intuition.
The grace of opening those further dimensions of our awareness and orthogonally falling into a larger context with more dimensions than ordinary waking consciousness comes with the realization that we own nothing, we cannot hold on to anything, we are forced to unknow everything to end suffering, we lose everything we believed we had, and we ultimately are ‘no thing’ at all. No-thing is what death reveals when we get close to it. It is also the discovery of an orthogonal dimension we did not see before. In embracing this reality, ‘we die before we die in order not to die when we die’ as Buddhists tend to put it. Dying is radiantly liberating as it dissolves our conditionings to the point of revealing death as a transformation instead of an end, and thereby an inextricable feature of a life well lived.
All of reality is transformation, and there is no more powerful way to challenge old conditionings and make room for new, creative growth than to allow us to be purified by the awareness mode of the field of nothingness.
Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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