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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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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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