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The Core Secret Of Mindsight – Get Out Of Your Own Way
Consciousness and Mindsight
Does this sound familiar? You consciously decide to have a snack and you go ahead and have one. You then decide to put on laundry, and you go down to the laundry room to do it. It then occurs to you that it’s a good idea to get married to your partner, and you arrange to do so. And by the way, it’s time to buy a house, and off you go and look for houses. Finally, you decide to watch some TV and there you go, watching it. This is more or less how your day unfolds, just with many more decisions you believe having consciously made. But is that really what goes on?
Far from it. Here is the real story: The complex organism that you unconsciously decide somehow that its time to have a snack. That unconscious decision is made ‘without you’ on the basis of complex previous conditionings your organism developed over your life time to ensure survival, and it is made before you even have the faintest idea that you want to have a snack. Your organism then creates the conscious illusion that it is you who decided it is snack time, and you proceed going to the kitchen. By the way, after you had your snack you erroneously think you wanted, you feel bad because you ate some junk food and are trying to lose weight. The same process unfolds with the laundry, your decision to get married, to buy a house, watch TV and all the other decisions you make that day. In short, you are more of a zombie than you ever thought and your autopilot is having a field day.
Every living creature is an energy processing mechanism, whose biological processes and functions are highly sophisticated calculations that ensure it creates copies of itself and survives. This is called an algorithm. An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. A cooking recipe is such an example: You follow the instructions and always get the same result. Biological algorithms (animals) calculate probabilities and undergo constant quality control by natural selection (evolution). Humans are no exception. They are algorithms ensuring propagation and survival. Sensations, emotions and thoughts are the calculations that ensure the organism produces copies of itself. Over 90% of our decisions, big and small, are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions and desires. For most of what you need to survive and have kids, you don’t need to be there. Your organism draws on millions of years of evolutionary experience to get you through this life just fine without you. What you believe to be ‘your self’ making conscious decisions like a CEO of a corporation, is mostly a constructed illusion that for the most part is as controlled by the algorithm as anything else. By the time you believe you are making a decision, your organism has already made it for you, long before the illusion that you consciously made it is created.
The problem is that life is not easy, and many of us have gone through rough childhoods and other life traumas. All our organism is concerned about is survival, not the good life. The decisions it therefore makes are based on whatever ways it has learned to survive as best it can. The mechanisms used to survive become entrenched as energy and information flow patterns that define the organism’s decision-making, and although they were adequate to survive, most of the time they fall short when it comes to making attuned, contextual and wise decisions. Because the experience of making conscious decisions is largely illusory, and therefore our ability to modify the decision-making process when necessary inaccessible, we live lives that often flow in the exact opposite direction than we would wish for. This state of affairs can take the form of the following question: “Why do I wish so badly to get married and have children, yet keep engaging in destructive relationships that go nowhere?”
Give yourself the gift of close observation during a typical day of your choice, and each time you decide to do something, ask yourself who made the decision. You will soon realize that by the time you believe you had the thought of doing whatever you think you decided to do, the thought was already there a split second before you consciously became aware of it and decided to act on it. And even closer observation will reveal after the fact that you had already sensed complex somatic and emotional experiences in your body you were utterly unaware of. In other words, the decision to act was made by your organism, not you, prior to you having the illusion of making it. The brain cleverly attributes an organismic decision it has already made to you, but after the fact! We can go so far as to discover that you, the self, is a construction after the fact that occurs as part of the organism’s attempt at making sense of life.
If you now panic or fall into disbelief, questioning what you thought was your free will, I can confirm that as far as we can tell, free will is overrated. We are more autopilot automatons, deluded about being conscious, than you would ever believe, and that is the bad news. Sorry, I should say this is in many ways good news, in that evolution made sure our mechanisms for survival and decision-making are out of our hands, because if they were, we would make a terrible mess of them and would not have survived past the ape stage. But yes, it is also bad news, because like the civilization of the Easter Island, we are heading straight towards the cliff of extinction, both individually in our lives and collectively on our planet, without the ability of doing anything about it. Evolution, as you can see, has its limitations. Longterm, our species is likely to fail to adapt to its own genius, like the apprentice sorcerer and many other species before us. I sound like a prophet of doom – or am I wrong?
Again, closer observation, both scientifically and through meditation, reveals an interesting escape hatch. We may have precious little free will, but once the decision to act made by the algorithm has become conscious, we can decide how to proceed, or even whether to proceed or not. The moment we become conscious, we can participate in the modification of energy and information flow (EIF), and we have free won’t. For example, once we become conscious of the decision the organism has already made to have a snack, we can participate in how we go about it, in deciding what we might want to snack on, or whether we should have one in the first place. Thing is that by the time we become conscious of snack time, so much unconscious reality processing has already taken place, that we don’t have access anymore to where the decision comes from, and whether it is really snack time, or more appropriately grieving time displaced onto physical hunger and the illusion of hunger for food. By being so deeply unconscious and disconnected from the very energy and information flow processes that inform our decisions, we have already profoundly gotten in our own way! Why? Because in its unconscious EIF processing the organism uses old, well-worn decision paths that include old ways by which we used to participate in the regulation of EIF not relevant anymore today – we live in the present with irrelevant decision-making patterns from the past that cannot possibly do justice to the new demands of present circumstances.
But how do we get out of our own way and access free won’t, when everything moves so fast, and actions follow our decisions within split seconds? Evolution also gave us the gift of the middle prefrontal cortex (MPC), with which we can train ourselves to observe the very processes, by which we construct reality in the first place. Not only can we see the world as it appears to us, but with the MPC’s help we can learn to examine how we construct our experience of the world such as to make it appear to us the way it does, and thereby learn to use our access to consciousness and capacity for free won’t to its fullest. In other words, we can learn to examine our very mind, with which we create our experience of living. That kind of mind training is admittedly very hard and not for the fainthearted, but it leads to mindsight, the capacity to see more clearly how our mind works, and how we construct our reality.
What are the secret ingredients of this ‘getting-out-of-our-own-way’ skill and what kind of training does it entail? What is the core essence of what we need to learn as we tap into the dormant power of the MPC? Now that we understand the mechanism by which we become automatons, we can find the remedy to mitigate the zombie effect. We gain the power of choice the moment we become conscious. Even though our organism will (fortunately) continue its algorithmic task of keeping us alive come hell or high water, and use every available trick of the brain trade to create useful illusions for the purpose of survival, and even though we will always come relatively late to the unconscious neuroprocessing party pushing us to automatic decision-making, the moment we become conscious of what the algorithm is serving us, we can intervene.
We can STOP (Stop, Take a breath, Observe, only then Proceed) and start monitoring EIF more closely without giving into the impulse for immediate action, a technique for which Daniel Siegel uses the acronym YODA (You Observe And Decouple Automaticity). This is the first step in getting out of our own way! Through such monitoring of EIF we see more clearly what goes on inside the black box of automaticity, and we begin to disentangle the processes, by which our organism tries to make sense of reality and put useful mechanisms for living successfully in place. We begin to get wind of the upcoming party way before it has started and are able to join the planning committee. We can then participate in novel and creative ways in the modification of the EIF we have begun to monitor and gotten to know more deeply, thereby doing justice to the new demands of present circumstances, all the while respecting the wisdom of old patterns for their time, yet accepting their present obsoleteness. This is the second step in getting out of our own way, as you modify the EIF you have monitored and cease to perpetuate old conditionings that have lost their usefulness! Last but not least, with such deep knowledge and awareness of who and what we really are, with such deep respect for the limitations of our consciousness while simultaneously harnessing its immense untapped potential, we come to realize that we cannot possibly ever have or be in control of our organism, that we will never be able to push the river. Instead, with wisdom and humility we come to realize that by simply monitoring and modifying EIF as described, we can exert control in the way we surf the waves of life’s ocean. The open complex system that we are then spontaneously liberates itself from the grip of chronic chaos and rigidity, moving towards greater integration instead. This is the third step in getting out of our own way, when you relax in the realization that you cannot control the weather and the ocean’s moods, and begin to invest your precious energies into the training to become a skilled surfer instead. With experience you then learn to do less to gain more, until eventually technique becomes inbred in you, a way of being without effort. Monitoring, modifying and creating new EIF become second nature, and you can then surrender to the SAP of consciousness that integratively transforms without effort: Stillness, Alertness and Pleasure. This fourth step is the quintessence of virtuosity on your journey through the unbearable lightness of Being.
Even though I am admittedly quite skeptical regarding humanity’s capacity to survive in the long run, whether mindsight will ever save us from our own engendered demise, I shall not know. But what I do know, is that in the meantime, we can place ourselves on the right side of history, and do what we can to cultivate this precious mindsight skill for the benefit of as many fellow human beings as possible. For that, dear reader, please GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY!
Copyright © 2019 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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More Blog Posts
Forgetting that we have a mind.
Before you worry about symptoms such as depression and anxiety and how to improve or get rid of them, before you get your blood boiling arguing with people who can't deal with anything beyond their own viewpoint, before you develop and become ensconced in your own opinions, before you vilify who disagrees with you, before you shake your head wondering how seemingly obvious facts cannot be agreed upon, before you assume you have no blind spots, before you despair that crowds never learn from history, before you become bitter at humanity's collective stupidity, before you get passionate about religion, mythology, and archetypes, before all that, wouldn't it make sense to inquire into the source of all of it - these symptoms, views, opinions, thoughts, actions, distortions and, frankly, miseries?
While it does not take rocket science to realize that the source of it all is the embodied human mind, for most, embarking on its exploration is at best a big challenge, at worst insurmountable, non-sensical or incomprehensible. How many times have you heard nonsense like “I don’t believe in psychology”, as if the existence of the moon were a matter of belief? How often do patients enter their physician’s office complaining of being anxious or depressed, and are sent home with a prescription without one question that would try to understand how their mind creates such suffering? Many people, including professionals who should know better, live and act as if they had no mind.
The mind is the source of all subjective phenomena and experiences, and we are astoundingly unaware of it. Our mind’s task is to ensure survival and the propagation of our species, not to ensure we live our best life. To this end, it needs to be efficient, rather than concerned about maximizing its potential. Efficiency results by pairing down information processing to the bare minimum. Embedded in the way mind functions are mechanisms that cause reality distortions, delusions, wild beliefs, and a profound obliviousness of one’s own ignorance. Whether we like it or not, our mind drives our lives like our heart pumps blood through our veins. The universe's natural processes have caused us to evolve that way, and for better or worse, we are stuck with a mind that functions sub-optimally as it creates profound reality distortions that seem at first blush to have successfully allowed us to multiply and propagate towards earth dominance. In the long run, however, it turns out that humanity may end up stampeding dangerously close to extinction. To thrive both individually and as a species we must come to terms with our rather dangerous mind and train ourselves to use it beyond its basic survival mode by accessing its inherent potential evolution has graciously also built into it. That takes work, training, effort and patience.
Our human mind provides the capacity for reflection. The mirror reflects what’s in front of it, meaning that as reality beams itself onto the mirror’s surface, the mirror beams it back to us as an image we can then examine from the outside. Notice how what gets examined by looking at the mirror is not reality itself, but an image of it. Our brain provides a similar process in the form of consciousness, whereby it maps reality in a virtual form we then can observe and manipulate. However, while the mirror reflects reality exactly as it is, the virtual reality consciousness creates is not only a map of reality, but that map is modified into a new creation. The brain as mapper functions as our central relationship organ that enables us to reflexively develop a relationship to reality and ourselves by having access to a virtual, mapped and modified reality we can ponder and manipulate. This is how we are self-aware.
As an aside, the mind is more than the creator of a virtual adaptation of reality we can reflexively relate to and have a relationship with. It can transcend self-awareness, and knowingly experience reality and awareness without the detour of mapped mirroring duality. That is the shift from observation to being, from knowing we exist in a universe to realizing we are the universe. More about that in another context.
The eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the retina, but you don’t see it. You have the impression of enjoying a seamless field of vision without two black holes in the middle, even though the holes are there. The brain manages to fill in the missing information to make the field seem seamless. Extrapolate that to the whole brain to realize that to function effectively for everyday survival our brain adapts our field of consciousness in two ways: It fills what’s missing to provide a sense of continuity and simplifies available information to not overwhelm you. It hides blind spots from you to provide continuity and withholds information to ensure efficiency. Both these mechanisms distort reality to ensure survival, while simultaneously laying the foundations for ignorance and suffering.
We each have many blind spots, but the core blind spot affecting us all is the proclivity to live as if we had no mind. We use our minds without realizing the extent to which our experience of reality is created by our mind. Without our conscious knowledge our brain creates the reality we experience. We don’t notice that the reality we experience is our brain’s creation. We mistake our brain’s constructions for reality. This results in a dangerous situation, in which we ignore the fact that our experience is subjectively constructed. We mistakenly believe that what we see and experience is automatically true, and because it seems true it seems real, and because it seems real it cannot be changed. Our primordial blind spot towards the brain’s constructions robs us of freedom of choice, of the power of clear view, wise discernment, and respectfully compassionate mutual understanding.
Our mind’s constructions seem so real that we hold on to them for dear life and want to shove them down other people’s throats without exploring their veracity. We get strongly identified with what we believe we know, emotions take over, and the capacity to hear each other vanishes. Identification with mind processes is the single most destructive problem in the way humans use their minds. Emotions suffocate the mind’s spaciousness to freely consider, question, doubt and explore, and before we know it, we are in conflict. If we cannot agree on facts, emotions drive us to use force to impose our views instead of inquiring more deeply into the divergent realities, and if necessary, compromising to try to resolve complexities. Force can take the form of yelling and screaming at each other, or legal and physical action.
The reality our mind constructs and we can have a relationship with, is in fact threefold. We first have objective reality, which is what happens in the universe independent of whether we know about it or there is anyone around to witness it. This reality consists of energy flow that is independent of how our brains and minds construct reality, and therefore as far from information as energy flow can get. The black death virus killed thousands of people without them knowing what viruses are or being able to see them. Although this is the easiest reality to agree upon, like in the case of flat-earthers, emotions still manage to cause distortions of objective facts.
Subjective reality is our own private experience nobody else has access to. This energy flow is entirely within as a construction by our own brain and mind. Although it is largely independent of objective reality, it is profoundly shaped by interactions with others. Even if everyone denies that I am in pain, if I experience pain, it is totally real for me. That is a difficult reality to agree upon, because seeing it from the outside requires trust and our capacity for empathy.
Then there is intersubjective reality, which is the reality of stories. This energy flow is deeply symbolic in the sense that language and stories are symbolic, therefore experienced as information flow, and a mutual co-creation with others. It is the reality that emerges through mutual narrative construction and is neither objective, nor subjective. It only exists in the interpersonal realm containing people who are willing to participate in it by accepting the shared reality. One such reality is money, but there are many others such as all collective ideas we can share. Money means nothing and has no reality unless it is shared in the interpersonal space. This is also a difficult reality to deal with, because it depends on the mutual capacity to regulate the multilayered energy flow between our intuition, our emotions and our intellect. When that occurs, empathy and clear insight become possible, allowing a degree of harmony within the intersubjective dance of energy and information flow to emerge. Any dance couple may dance a Tango, but those in conflict will not be able to present a harmonious dance.
To manage these three realities we each have a relationship with, requires a good deal of self-awareness and emotional regulation many people don’t have. Much of the time, the mind remains transparent like air to our eyes, invisible or not known, yet profoundly determining how we relate to real reality and live our lives. Like children playing in a house on fire, we remain oblivious to the many ways our ignorance of mind causes suffering and destruction all around.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
Silence and stupidity are the foundations of mental health.
As biological beings we function in analog mode, shifting from one physical and mental state to another, using intelligence to solve problems and consciousness to guide our intuition to make the best possible choices. In contrast to intelligence, which we also find in AI (artificial intelligence), consciousness involves both feelings and the capacity to self-reflect, resulting in the ability to resist reality and by extension suffer. Our biological organism functions naturally as a continuous energy and information flow changing with time through an infinite number of states (like the grandfather clock that shows the whole flow of time), while AI is digital, based only on two discreet states, 0 and 1, from which it organizes information (like your digital watch that only shows the exact time it is now). AI as an information processing system is completely alien to our organic nature. AI is an algorithm that like a table has no feelings and never sleeps, never needs a rest, never feels anything, and is incapable of ethical consideration (if it seems to have ethical reflections it is because it has been programmed to imitate ethical views, not because it feels anything). In social media it is programmed to make money by eliciting user engagement through emphasis on information that activates feelings in human beings, such as anger, awe, attraction, joy etc. The AI algorithm just chugs along as a soulless, emotionless information process like robots or zombies if you prefer the world of fantasy.
Humans, in turn, need rest, sleep, and the cultivation of various mental states through play, intimacy, physical activity, problem-solving, daydreaming and meditation. Within that richness of mental states lies creativity, and at the core of creativity is silence and stupidity. The cultivation of silence, and by extension unknowing, is paramount for the discovery of contexts within which all knowing is embedded. Stupidity relates to the fact that a majority of thoughts we have are crazy, non-sensical, false, deluded, unintelligible, and mysterious. Like a tree spreading millions of seeds, only a few of which will thrive into a new tree, our mind spews out millions of thoughts and fantasies, only a few of which are reflective of truth and conducive to living the good life. Nevertheless, that prolific productivity is the bedrock of creativity and requires skillful management. If we want to be healthy, we need to create a safe, private space for those thoughts to live, evolve, and be processed within the entirety of the mind. That space is the silence of contemplation and the safety of intimacy. Under the incessant barrage of the AI algorithm through social media we have been robbed of such a space, because we are swept away into the algorithmic stream of likes, dislikes, approvals, disapprovals, comparisons, competitions etc. The energy of stupidity then, is used to feed our narcissistic nature and flow unchecked into the public domain of the internet, with really nefarious results.
We are far from having developed the full potential of mind. More often than not we succumb to our internal algorithm of conditioned reflexes, behaviors, reactions and mindless activities that cause untold suffering. If mind has a choice between easy and difficult, it will always choose easy. Easy is what can be manipulated in the concrete world; it is easier to control the body and fast, for example, than to practice mind concentration. We have a certain command over the body and the external world, but not over our mind. Faced with the challenge of mind exploration, we must engage in a rigorous mind training and learn to observe it without judgment.
Most importantly, non-judgmental inquiry requires the privacy of our own intimate space with ourselves and a few chosen people we trust, where stupidity can have full latitude of manifestation. Caring for stupidity requires free private and intimate time, which should be a basic human right. Stupidity and silence are gold mines guaranteeing mental integration and expansion of awareness towards larger contexts. Once we have incorporated such mind hygiene into our lives, we are better equipped to meet the demands and responsibilities of reality, including social reality, and wisely chose what we responsibly allow into the public domain. The non-judgmental attitude of intimate and private investigation needs to give way to the discerning attitude of social manifestation and public expression. In the public domain it has catastrophic social consequences if anything goes and the first thought that enters one's mind is spewed out. Social authenticity in the public domain has nothing to do with spontaneously spewing out whatever stupidities and unformed thoughts fly through one’s mind. It is rather based on one’s capacity to cogently and responsibly express what is relevant to the demands of any life situation after having sifted through the chaos of one's thoughts. In that sense, opinions must be carefully crafted if we want a society that functions wisely.
This dialectic between internal freedom for stupidity and silence and external responsibility for wisdom and perspective requires a difficult ingredient – the capacity to face the truth. Information and truth are not the same, and most information is not truth. We are flooded daily with plenty of information, but truth is a rare and costly kind of information integration process that requires hard work and time to be discovered. Truth is costly because it demands research and investment. Fiction and fantasy (not as literary genres) are cheap and don't require any investment; they can be made as attractive as you would like them to be. They are simplistic, deluded and disconnected from reality. Truth on the other hand is complicated and complex, often painful and unattractive, and the hallmark of our mind’s connection with reality.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
Important changes to the Mindsight Intensive program 2024-25
1. Administrative introduction:
In order to accommodate divergent needs of individual students in the group, I am considering modifications in the group's process. After the first 10 weeks of the fall trimester, during which we lay foundations together as one group, we might explore the possibility of giving students the opportunity to continue through the winter and spring in one of two separate streams of their choice depending on their perceived needs. The decision to continue as one group or split into two will organically emerge from a process of discussion within the whole group when the time comes.
Here are the two streams:
- There are those who primarily feel the need to develop and consolidate the scaffolding of meditative technique as their main objective.
- Others feel generally quite confident in their mastery of meditative technique, and are therefore more focused on exploring the psychodynamic, socio-political, existential and spiritual implications of embodying the daily meditative attitude their mastery of technique affords. This includes the expansion of awareness into the modes of nothingness and emptiness.
These two interest streams are paradoxically both complementary and potentially conflicting. On one hand, mindfulness practice invites the student to cultivate beginner’s mind in a non-striving, non-hierarchical fashion. On the other hand, there is a sequential evolution of skill in one’s ability to apply meditative techniques, much like when one learns to play an instrument, creating a hierarchy of skills and stages the meditator walks through over time. Mixing students from both streams in one group is important as it allows for mutual fertilization of experience, expertise and wisdom. By the same token, this differentiation of needs sometimes requires different teaching approaches and emphases in the material that is taught. Naturally, I always endeavor to navigate those two streams within the group as a whole in a way that allows for integration of the two.
2. Long-term commitment:
Students who are interested in the Mindsight Intensive already have mindfulness experience. Therefore, they are all familiar with how challenging it is to embody mindfulness as a way of life. It is therefore assumed that everyone signing up seeks immersion into the hard work required to meet defenses and avoidances head on that can sometimes arise during practice. This can only be achieved through the long-term effort that facing our mind’s complexity deserves and demands. The program is thus structured to run through a whole academic year of thirty sessions, and students with different, more short-term needs who might want to leave after a trimester or two should not join. The work’s intensity requires group cohesion and safety, as well as a shared sense that we can count on each other to work through tough challenges and moments together.
3. Session structure:
Every session will have the following elements:
- A meditation guided by me of at least 1/2 hour.
- Time for processing individual students’ journey through the trials and tribulations of their practice. This is the difficult part, because it requires from each student to honestly take on and address difficulties, defenses and avoidances that may arise during their practice and their daily lives. Ignoring these challenges invariably causes the journey to falter and shrivel back into the automaticity of the monkey mind.
- Theoretical considerations necessary to make sense of our mind explorations presented by me, and sometimes elaborated through group exercises and processing.
4. Immersion at home:
- In every session I will suggest homework. By diligently following and practicing the homework, the student can enter a path of transformation that will automatically and effortlessly unfold.
- Before starting the program, please make sure to rearrange your schedule so that you can dedicate around an hour/day to formal mindfulness meditation practice. This may vary at times depending on both external circumstances and internal mental states, but aiming for that amount of time will ensure rewiring and transformation. Although formal practice time can occasionally be broken up throughout the day, what ensures penetration of depth (see my blog ‘Depth in Mindfulness’) is the long uninterrupted stretch of time that inevitably causes deeper conditionings and unconscious forces to emerge into the light of awareness.
- Throughout the duration of the program, students can request ad hoc individual sessions, should they feel that the available group time has not provided the opportunity to address important issues that arise. For this to be covered by OHIP, you must have been seen by me in consultation through your family physician’s referral within the last two years. If you are not a regular patient of mine, ask Reena whether you must first get your doctor’s referral to see me or not.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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