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The Intuition Challenge
A question posed by one of my students triggered this article. In one of the sessions of the Mindsight Intensive I talked about the importance of intuition and introduced the topic with a story about the famous Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani, whose specialty was to report on the Far East, where he lived most of his adult life.
During the seventies a psychic told him not to ever fly during the year 1993. If he did, he would put himself in grave danger. Left-brain, successful political journalist as he was, divination and psychic abilities were certainly not topics he would have ever concerned himself with. The years passed and he forgot about the episode. But as 1993 approached, the memory came back to mind and he began to think about it. Although not into divination, he was an intuitive man, and curiously the psychic’s suggestion began to resonate with him. Although the prediction of catastrophe intrigued him, what really captured his imagination was to contemplate how different his life would become if he, as a journalist who has to fly for professional reasons all over the place, did not fly for one year, and what unexpected experiences and opportunities may arise from implementing this idea. To make a long story short, he did follow through with it. The experience profoundly transformed his life and he wrote a book about it. During that year, the World Health Organization finished an important project in the Far East, and invited 15 or so journalists from several major world-renouned newspapers and magazines to board a helicopter and go see this project and report about it. He would have been among them, but because he did not fly that year, with his consent somebody else was assigned to the mission in his stead. The helicopter crashed shortly after take-off or before landing (I don’t remember which) and everybody was of course wounded to differing degrees of severity.
My student argued that statistical probability amply explains the possibility of such a string of events without having to invoke some kind of extraordinary predictive powers psychics claim to have. From a scientific point of view, he added, there is no obvious causal link between his decision not to fly because a psychic told him so, and the fact that he was not on this ill-fated helicopter.
My student is entirely right, but also misses the whole point of what this story teaches us. Intuition is one of the nine functions of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) and as such absolutely vital for health and wellbeing. The subjective experience of intuition is profoundly a right-brain function and its truths are not scientifically accessible. In fact, something very different and deeply meaningful is at stake here.
Let me try to unpack Terzani’s experiences first. It is a fact that 15 years prior a psychic ‘predicted’ (whatever that means) that he would be in grave danger should he fly during the year 1993. It is a fact that for whatever personal reason Terzani, an otherwise rational man, was deeply touched by the psychic’s advice not to fly, and that he chose to follow the advice. It is interesting to note that in his decision to follow through with this, Terzani was much less impressed by the prediction of doom than he was by the thought that such a decision may profoundly alter his life in meaningful ways. It is a fact that because of his decision he was not invited to take the helicopter and someone else replaced him, and it is also a fact that this very helicopter happened to crash during that same year he was not flying.
Now here is the crucial idea: This sequence of facts and events makes for a good, even profound story that is healing for the soul. The narrative function of the brain develops a compelling story that is subjectively deeply meaningful. The story is not a scientific fact, but more like a Shakespearean play. Humans create meaningful stories to make sense of their lives and be connected to their context. This is the reason we go to movies and theatres. The question whether the psychic really had predictive powers or whether it is just chance is irrelevant. What is relevant here is that Terzani engaged his MPC’s intuitive function and put it to good use to direct his life. There is a compelling sense of being attuned to the cosmos that arises when we know how to follow our intuition and weave meaningful life narratives, despite the fact that none of it is scientifically provable. The art is to be able to live the stories fully, knowing that they are not scientifically true, but subjectively meaningful. In his situation I would personally have felt blessed that I was not on the helicopter because I had decided not to fly that year, not because there actually exists a scientifically proven causality between the two, or because God actually blessed me to avoid the crash (maybe he/she did, maybe not!), but because my brain’s construction of an assumed causality feels deeply meaningful. This is a crucial difference, the one between an actual and an assumed causality. The first is scientific and gives us objective information about how the material world works, but rarely feeds the soul; the second belongs to the brain’s narrative function, to the story-telling function that is so important for physical, psychological and spiritual health. It feeds the soul, because the narrative function, if integrated, is a manifestation of our fully embodied psychological and existential reality expressing our subjective truth. It is this reality, and not the scientific one, that makes for the experience of having lived a meaningful life, and it is this reality we learn to explore through mindsight.
There is a condition such narratives need to meet in order to be healing and meaningful. They have to be coherent. This means that they have to resonate with all levels of organismic neuroprocessing; to put it in common parlance, they have to resonate with the gut, all the way up to the heart, the head and the spirit. (I use these vernacular terms to make it easier for laypeople to understand. Scientifically speaking, these terms denote different levels of neuroprocessing: ‘the gut’ corresponds to sensorimotor processing, ‘the heart’ to emotional processing, ‘the head’ to left-brain cognitive processing, and ‘the spirit’ to integrated awareness processing.) Coherent narratives emerge from an integrated state of the organism, where there are no major dissociations, defenses or repressions. How can a narrative be coherent when it does not meet scientific criteria? In our example, how can I have a coherent narrative with respect to having been spared a crash because I heeded a psychic’s advice, when there is no scientifc evidence for it, when in other words you may think that ‘the head’ cannot possibly be on board? The answer is simple: In exactly the same way you find deep solace from a Shakespeare play. I am totally aware that I create a narrative that imputes a causality where none may really be, and I can deeply enjoy this because I do not pretend to make a scientific statement. Conversely, it will not surprise you to hear that in all those instances where patients of mine have created beliefs about causalities that don’t really exist, they developed symptoms of all sorts. Applied to this example, I would develop a belief that the link between my following the psychic’s advice and being spared the helicopter crash is actually scientifically causal. In pretending that something is scientifically ironclad when it is not, the left brain would show its characteristic tendency to delude itself and be unreasonably certain, which would pretty soon create in me other cognitive and emotional distortions. Dysregulation in my energy and information flow would ensue and I would fall into chaos and/or rigidity and develop symptoms.
Coherent narratives require resonance between all levels of neuroprocessing, the gut, the heart, the head and the spirit. This equally applies to intuition, such as the one that told Terzani that no matter what, the idea of not flying for one year may turn out to be life-changing. How do we know the difference between integrated intuition and other experiences that come from old conditionings or unresolved internal conflicts? Have you ever ‘followed your head’, gotten it wrong and then realized that you should have ‘followed your heart or your gut’ instead? Or you followed your gut, only to later realize you should have listened to your head? As I see it, true intuition is an integrated process, in which gut, heart, head and spirit are all involved and either in resonance with each other, or if not, the MPC is aware of the reason for the discrepancy and can clearly decide which level of neuroprocessing is the accurate one. Let’s keep in mind that intuition seems to involve the neural plexi around the inner organs of the torso, in particular the intestines, the heart and the lungs. The impulses from those regions are then sent up the spine all the way to the MPC, where they reach consciousness in an integrated fashion. It is not easy to distinguish true (integrated) intuition from false intuition.
The best advice I can give with regards to intuition is to pay attention to the signals and messages coming from all four levels of processing, the gut, the heart, the head and the spirit, and observe how they relate to each other. If they are in conflict, the conflict needs to be understood. It can mean many different things. The gut may be right, but our parents’ influence on us was to ignore the body and we end up defaulting into the head, even when it is wrong. The heart may be wrong because as children we learned to accept our parents’ dysfunctional marriage as normal, but we don’t listen to the head because we are in love. I could go on with many more examples. If all four are in sync, chances are you are on the right track. If there is a conflict between two or more of them, you need the wisdom from the MPC to discern which one is right. That is not always an easy or clear decision. At the end of the day, the more complete your capacity to be consciously embodied, the greater your intuition’s power to guide you.
To come back to our story, what applies to intuition also applies to the stories we create. To be coherent, they require accurate processing on all four levels of the gut, the heart, the head and the spirit. In addition, we also need to be clear on what type of story we create. If it is a scientific one, it requires scientific rigour. If it is an intuitive one, it needs to be meaningful and compelling in a complete embodied and intuitive fashion, the same way Hamlet is the expression of timeless truths about human existence without them being scientifically true. So if in Terzani’s shoes I felt that the psychic protected me and guided me in the right direction, it wouldn’t be because I believed the events were linked by a scientifically causal connection (although there theoretically could be one and science has just not progressed to the point yet of being able to explain our ability to predict the future), but because with these events I created a psychologically and existentially meaningful story my left brain can accept as such.
Copyright © 2015 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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