The Many Faces Of Aloneness

Like the weather shaping landscapes, aloneness pervades our psyche in ways that continually modulate its character. This topic recently came to be worked through in one of my psychotherapy groups, and as if by synchronicity, it also surfaced in the Mindsight Intensive during our explorations of unfamiliar modes of awareness we can access through meditation. I took this as an opportunity to try to put some order in this complex topic that elicited many questions from patients and students alike.

Etymology

‘Alone’ (= al-one) is originally made up of the two words ‘all’, meaning ‘wholly, entirely, without limit’, and ‘one, only one of me, oneself’. Combined, these two notions mean ‘limitlessly just oneself’, or ‘unaccompanied, solitary, without companions, all by oneself, wholly oneself’, which by implication also includes ‘… and nothing or nobody else’. By the same token, ‘all, entirely’ also implies ‘all that is, everything’, meaning that when one is alone, one is also everything or with everything. The fact that the word ‘alone’ combines these two clusters of meaning, ‘all one and nothing else’, which implies an endless void around it, and ‘all that is, everything’, which implies an endless fullness of everything, suggests that the meaning of aloneness can correlate with several possible human experiences.

The resonant dance of feeling felt

Aloneness is both, an inescapable psychological reality that can be either painful or pleasurable, and an acquired capacity necessary for growth, health, and wisdom.

To begin with our psychological development, as infants we are dependent on adults to take care of us. Nature has made sure to wire our brains and bodies so that for the most part there is no escaping the development of a strong nurturing bond flowing both ways between child and caregiver. I am referring to the mammalian attachment system that in humans is based on a special neurocircuitry called the resonance circuitry or social engagement system. In brief, physiological and mental states in both child and caregiver resonate deeply with each other like two well-tuned musical instruments. This resonance causes both organisms to attune to each other and respond empathically to the other’s expressed needs. In this dance, each partner receives, registers, and interprets the verbal and non-verbal information coming from the other person in a way that ensures that the responsive action meets the other person’s needs. Like in a good dance, each partner feels heard and seen by the other as needs are being felt, shared, interpreted, and responded to in a timely manner that fully meets the relational requirements of that moment.

Our social engagement system that sings through the vibrations of our resonance circuitry is responsible for both, our relationships with others as well as our relationship with ourselves. That is the reason why in attuned relationships both partners can see themselves through the other person’s eyes, and learn to feel felt and be seen and heard. When we feel heard by the other person, we can hear ourselves, and vice versa. We enjoy access to the many layers of neuroprocessing in the body, from being somatically attuned to our body, to recognizing and regulating our emotions, all the way to being able to make sense of our life stories. The attuned relationships that shaped us become internalized, so that when we are alone, we are also with all these people who have shaped us in a healthy way – they are always with us in our minds. Applied to the child’s relationship with her parents, when a young child enjoys attuned relationships and therefore develops a secure attachment to the parents, after a heartfelt goodbye the parents can leave the room for a while, and the child will not only be happy and able to concentrate on playing by herself, but greet the parents with warmth and joy when they come back. At most, the child may be a little upset when the parent leaves, but calms down quickly.

With a well-developed capacity to be alone, we are present with ourselves the way we were able to be present in our relationships with our loved ones, and the whole world is with us. We don’t feel lonely, but deeply connected. Given the double function of the social engagement system responsible for one’s relationship with both others and oneself, when children have the opportunity to develop attuned relationships with their caregivers, or when adults later take the opportunity to do the same with their therapists, teachers, or mentors, they also develop attuned relationships with themselves. In other words, through attuned relationships, we internalize those healthy external relationships into the ways our own psyche manages our internal relationships with ourselves. In this way, even when we are alone with ourselves and nobody is around, we are in the company of these remembered internalized attuned relationships. This represents the capacity to be successfully and pleasurably alone without feeling lonely, restless, or stressed.

Of course, as nothing in life is perfect, that attachment dance is not perfect either. Occasionally the attunement process does not work properly, and we stumble. As long as that is the exception, and in those moments of stumbling we can apologize and repair the broken link, assuring one another that nothing fundamental is broken in the love bond, we continue to thrive. Such empathic failures of attunement are an inevitable part of healthy intimacy and ensure our capacity to be resilient in the face of inevitable disturbances life circumstances throw our way. This is the healthy situation of a ‘good-enough’ relationship, implying that attempts at having a ‘perfect’ relationship are not only impossible, but will inevitably fail and cause a lot of stress and disruption.

From the brain’s wiring perspective, attuned relationships result in increased connectivity between different brain regions, thereby maximizing the brain’s resilience and capacity for processing new and challenging life situations in creative and efficient ways.

The dance of attunement in the construction of a useful illusion

With healthy attunements in our relationships we are able to be fully creative and use time alone as an opportunity to fine-tune internal attunement and groundedness in one’s healthy sense of self. Through the cultivation of attuned relationships, we develop a healthy sense of self. Unable to elaborate on it without going beyond the scope of this article, be it just said that this sense of self is a construction by the brain that gives us a psychological centre of gravity from which to organize how we conduct our lives. As useful as this sense of self is to ensure our survival, it is nonetheless an illusion. Experientially established at least a couple of thousand years ago in Buddhist psychology, this has relatively recently also been scientifically confirmed.

To be precise, the successful construction of our sense of self occurs within the scope of our ordinary waking consciousness. Its hallmark is our experience of life as a duality between our ego-self ‘inside’, which we deem to be the observing subject, and an objective world ‘outside’, observed and experienced by this ego-self. To be sure, the successfully developed ego-self that marks the subjective pole of our dual world, is at the same time the healthy sense of self that makes us into a ‘somebody’ who allows us to live life competently in accordance with society’s norms of success. Once we have achieved the developmental milestone of having become a ‘somebody’, we can use it as the springboard for a transition toward existentially more evolved modes of awareness we will discuss below, through which we discover the illusory nature of our sense of self. Like the wizard of Oz, upon close scrutiny, our sense of self reveals its essential emptiness. Armed with an initially strong and well-grounded illusion we called our ‘self’, we can then embark on the journey of deconstruction and allow ourselves to discover its inherent emptiness and the surprising fact that at our core we are a ‘nobody’.

Imperfections of the dance of attunement

Life circumstances are not always very forgiving, and children often grow up without the experience of optimal attunement from their parents. We can therefore also internalize unhealthy relationships, and when we are alone having been shaped by relationships that cause pain, we are in pain. The painful quality of a dysfunctional relationship to parents becomes the painful experience of relating to ourselves.

The pain can be very different, depending on what went wrong in our formative relationships. We may have experienced absence and unavailability, leaving us with an incessant yearning for a connection we can never have or fulfill, combined with a deep withdrawal and disconnection from ourselves that mirrors the disconnection with the absent parent we yearned for. Such a child does not even acknowledge or feel the need to say goodbye to the parent who leaves the room in the clinical experiment. The child gets easily bored and restless when alone, and does not respond upon the parent’s return. The style of relating to others and ourselves becomes avoidant, rigidly cut off from our and other people’s internal world, body and emotions. We may also have experienced ambivalence and inconsistency, intrusiveness and control, leaving us conflicted with regard to closeness; we yearn for closeness, but closeness is disorienting, suffocating, or conflicted. This applies to both the external relationship and the relationship with ourselves. Such a child is clingy and gets very anxious when the parent leaves the room, and it has a hard time letting go. While the parent is away, the child is anxious and distraught, and when the parent comes back, the child can’t easily calm down, remaining anxious and angry. The style of relating to others and ourselves becomes ambivalent, as we experience our own and other people’s internal world as chaotic and overheated.

In all these cases, being alone is a painful situation, because we are unable to successfully feel at peace and content in our own skin. Our relationship with ourselves is fraught with disruption of one kind or another, avoidant or ambivalent, shut down or nervously restless, and we cannot see ourselves clearly. We, therefore, end up struggling to properly regulate our emotions and mental states, experiencing stress and restlessness, or a sense of scarcity and lack in life. When alone we experience loneliness and remain dissatisfied. Being alone feels stressful in different ways, either like being in an overcrowded market one cannot find a quiet place, or in a boring abandoned factory, one cannot find anyone to meaningfully connect with. Our sense of self does not feel secure, but insecure, always on edge or shut down.
From the brain’s wiring perspective, such unattuned and insecure relationships result in less efficient connectivity between different brain regions, thereby compromising the brain’s resilience and capacity for processing new and challenging life situations in creative and efficient ways. Life’s challenges are not met with ease and we are prone to developing symptoms of all kinds, from psychological symptoms of dysregulation, relationship problems, and addictions, to physical illnesses.

When catastrophe hits

Our attachments can be even more disrupted when we have experienced trauma. This is different from the less-than-optimal attachment patterns we just discussed that cause lesser efficiency in our brains’ connectivity. Trauma is defined by the relationship between an overwhelming event, series of events, or persistently overwhelming life circumstances, and the way a person responds to such overwhelming events, causing the brain to become completely ‘paralyzed’ or so overwhelmed that normal functioning becomes impossible. The need for loving connection and the reality of dangerous toxic assaults on the child are completely at odds with each other, creating an inescapable situation of toxic love without solution. In these cases, the brain’s wiring becomes not just less efficient, but literally broken to use a metaphor, to the point that different brain regions become completely severed from each other, incapable of communicating and cooperating. This is called dissociation. The likelihood of developing symptoms of all kinds as mentioned above becomes much higher and more severe.

Aloneness after trauma is a different experience from the one described in the first two instances of attachment disruption. This one is not just unpleasant, but it is a terrible aloneness based on a complete fracturing of our relationship with ourselves and with certain other people, rendering relationships not just more difficult, but variably impossible. Our sense of self never had a chance to be constructed in the first place and is so shattered that there is no real center, not even a constructed one to be found. Reaching inside means finding broken pieces of ourselves and others littered all over the place without hope of ever putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Internally, instead of a sense of self, there is literally nobody to be found, a gaping void and abyss of nothingness with nobody around. From moment to moment, one never knows which fragment will predominantly respond to life’s circumstances and react to life’s demands by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. If one is lucky, one has compensated for this inner void by developing a false sense of self as a person that can more or less function in the world, but that false self, that mask feels very brittle and fragile, unable to contain the horrible internal reality of complete fragmentation.

The vision of a future destiny

Having reviewed various experiences of aloneness that depend on our history and attachment development, we now must also look into the future and the growth potential of every human life. Everything described so far belongs to an awareness mode we call the field of consciousness, which I briefly described above as the kind of ordinary waking consciousness we are intimately familiar with, and that creates a view of reality steeped in duality; we see ourselves as a separate subject in the form of our ego-self experiencing a separate world of objects. Within this field of consciousness, we engage in scientific research, psychological explorations, and philosophical musings, all in an attempt at improving our lives from its perspective. Many people live and die within this mode of awareness, without ever transcending it and embracing a larger contextual apprehension of reality by developing access to two further awareness modes, the fields of nihility (nothingness – from Latin ‘nihil’ = ‘nothing’) and the field of emptiness (which paradoxically is fullness). These latter two modes of awareness humans are capable of require at least special attention, if not outright training to be accessed.

It would be beyond the scope of this article to pursue an in-depth exploration of these three modes of awareness with their fields, and their importance for decreasing suffering in our lives. Instead, we will touch upon certain aspects pertaining to the fields of nothingness and emptiness that bring us face to face with one more version of aloneness we need to be able to recognize and distinguish from the previous versions we already discussed.

Busy singing and dancing on the sinking Titanic

The field of nihility beckons for example when we are faced with extreme situations that render everything we have so far known in life meaningless, such as the loss of a child, a terminal diagnosis, etc. It goes without saying that meeting nihility is one of the aims of mindfulness meditation – to die before we die, so that we don’t die when we die. When nihility raises its ‘ugly’ head, we are called to answer existential questions such as what the purpose of our lives is, why we exist, where we come from, and where we are going both within and beyond the boundaries of birth and death. This is when we leave the domains of science or psychology and enter the existential realm defined by the juxtaposition of life and death, existence and non-existence, things and nothingness. The moment we are born, death is closely afoot, ready to tap our shoulders as an inescapable reality – like the backside of the moon we never see and yet always exists as an inextricable aspect of the moon. This ‘backside’, or rather underbelly of existence, called nothingness or nihility, is the absolute negation of existence we are perpetually, unconsciously, and frantically trying to ignore by staying busy within the field of consciousness of our ordinarily lived lives. This effort of repression is not only costly wasting a lot of energy, but creates in itself a significant amount of suffering. We are busy making music, dancing, and sharing drinks on the sinking Titanic.

The moment we open ourselves up to the underbelly of existence, we first encounter the unsettling experiences of meaninglessness, absurdity, forsakenness, and aloneness that open within the awareness field of nihility. To make sure we understand this correctly: The field of nihility is an awareness mode we are customarily not familiar with, and usually avoid entering and developing, because it is unsettling and even scary, the way freedom is scary to a prisoner who is released after decades of imprisonment. This being said, it is precisely through a full surrender to the inescapable character of nihility that makes no sense from our field of consciousness perspective, that we break through the most profound illusions of our lives and find liberation beyond them. As the physicist Lawrence Krauss remarks in his book ‘A Universe From Nothing’, nothing is the fullness of pure potential, unstable, generative, and creative. The field of nothingness is quite similar that way, something you immediately discover and experience when you are trained to access that awareness mode.

Freedom beyond illusions

The existential sense of aloneness within nihility is very different from the horrible sense of aloneness after trauma. They echo off each other and can be used to inform each other, as long as we know how to distinguish them and ‘treat’ them differently and appropriately. Existential aloneness of nihility is not horrible, because the internal search for the self does not reveal traumatic fragmentation as such, but the illusory nature of the self’s construction instead. That is a big difference!

The aloneness of a non-existent self because of fragmentation is far more ominous and dangerous than the aloneness of a non-existent self because of the revelation of its illusory nature. In the first instance, one mourns the absence of something real and important that should have been there, but never came about – in other words not a loss, but the abortion of something real and necessary. In the second instance, one mourns the loss of a useful illusion, which as illusion appeared to be real and necessary for a certain developmental stage in our lives – in other words, the compelling awakening from an imprisoning mindset that unwittingly causes suffering like the illusory power of the wizard of Oz. Trauma aloneness feels like senseless nothingness without existence, while, no less vast and abyss-like than the aloneness of trauma, this latter aloneness of nihility is imbued with a hopeful, liberating sense of being shared with all that exists.

Obstacles on the path

The main gate to the Zen ideal of ‘being free and easy in the market place’ first opens into hell. Make no mistake, before we reach the promised land, we first have to endure the forty years lost wandering through the desert, the forty days fasting in the same desert, or the night sitting without moving under the Bodhi tree, and so on. The path to enlightenment does not consist in pursuing sources of light, but in bringing the darkness into awareness. The first order of business is to include the underbelly of existence in existence, which means integrating the field of nihility into our lives.

As mentioned above, that is easier said than done, thus the Christian metaphor that ‘many are called, but few are chosen’, or the Buddhist metaphor that ‘one has to want liberation more passionately than a drowning person wants air’. Metaphors always sound more heroic than the reality they highlight, but it is an honest question that needs to be asked – how we can withstand the deconstruction of illusions all the way down to the bottom of the ocean of suffering. There are no easy answers to these questions, which is why I have designed a whole intensive mindfulness meditation course called the Mindsight Intensive around these questions. Here, I just want to highlight issues to be considered around the challenge of aloneness.

We all start from the basis of the field of ordinary waking consciousness. After all, that is the awareness mode we grow into from childhood and consolidate during adulthood. Within that field, we have seen that we may have any of the three main attachment patterns and senses of self: The secure, insecure and disorganized/traumatic sense of self. Accordingly, someone with a secure sense of self will experience secure aloneness, someone with an insecure sense of self insecure aloneness, and someone with trauma traumatic or disorganized aloneness. Of course, these categories are not absolute and should rather be seen as signposts on a spectrum of experiences. Meanwhile, each category of aloneness has its advantages and disadvantages.

At first blush, secure aloneness is the ideal springboard into nihility, as the secure sense of self is the most resilient one capable of withstanding the challenges of deconstruction. Its main disadvantage, though, is the fact that people with secure attachments are the happiest ones that are most comfortable with life as it is, and they may have the least amount of motivation to seek greater wisdom beyond the field of consciousness.

Less comfortable is a life with insecure attachments and an insecure sense of self. Granted, these people are more fragile and often busy enough trying to be as happy as they feel they could be, which leaves less excess energy available for growth beyond the field of consciousness. By the same token, the motivation to explore life’s mysteries more deeply might be enhanced by this impulse towards greater health, making them often excellent candidates for the exploration of nihility and emptiness. In any case, what these people have to be particularly attentive to is the differentiation between psychological suffering within the field of consciousness and existential suffering that beckons to grow beyond it, because those two kinds of suffering require different treatment approaches. If they get confused, the outcome is not good and will almost unfailingly lead to more suffering, more symptoms, and more decompensation. Before they can have free rein to pursue transcendence, making sure that they develop a more secure sense of self is paramount. “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody”, Jack Engler wrote back in the 1970s.

When it comes to traumatic aloneness, the issues discussed in the previous paragraph are even more extreme. Plunging into the abyss of aloneness in nihility for someone with trauma, who has not done any psychotherapy, will almost certainly trigger massive, overwhelming anxiety and decompensation that is tantamount to a re-traumatization. The principle of focusing first on the development of a more secure sense of self is even more important here. With time, when substantial healing of the trauma has been achieved, the depth of the traumatic abyss of aloneness these people used to experience and may still have access to, can indeed become a boon as it echoes the abyss of nihility. No stranger to that depth of deconstruction, these people may sometimes have an easier time recognizing the daily calls of nihility most people routinely ignore. The trick, then, is to embrace nihility without falling into traumatic annihilation.

Coda

What this article tries to address are no doubt complex matters that require years of patient study, exploration and practice. Even though this text uses the path and journey metaphor that suggests a destination, this work is indeed the thousand-year human journey with no end nor destination. That is the mysterious paradox of the present moment, where the finiteness of time intersects with the vast eternity of timelessness. The being of the world is the time (becoming) that devours it. As we put one foot in front of the other, walking on the path to nowhere from moment to moment, let’s always remember the futility of lofty goals as we surrender to the one and only aspiration we may be granted to relish as we proceed – the joy of noticing improvement.

When we get used to embracing the inevitable reality of death as part of life and life as part of death, a deep sense of relief arises that soothes our suffering. Being existentially alone eventually leads to the realization of our home ground in the Great Life of real Being, our true identity as the being, vanishing, and becoming of everything. As we anticipated at the beginning of this article from the etymology of the word ‘aloneness’, while trauma aloneness has ‘nothing else’, existential aloneness entails ‘everything’.

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Depth in Mindfulness

Reflections on depth in mindfulness.

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June 16, 2023

“I had the flu and was too sick to practice meditation.” “My father-in-law died, and I had to stop practicing because we were too busy taking care of family stuff.” “After ten minutes of practice, I get impatient, uptight, need to move around, and have to stop my practice.” “I was so distracted that I was not able to practice.” Does this sound familiar?

What if I told you that no conceivable life circumstance can hinder your practice, and unless you don’t want to practice, the inability to practice does in most circumstances not exist? What if the above statements would have to be rewritten as follows? “I had the flu and was so sick and overwhelmed that I did not feel like or know how to use my meditation tools.” “My father-in-law died, and I stopped practicing because the hustle and bustle of the circumstance increased my mind’s forgetting function and thereby strengthened conceptually constructed illusions.” “After ten minutes of practice, I get impatient, uptight, need to move around, and I don’t have the experience to check what skills are missing in my practice.” “I was so distracted that I forgot that the distraction is itself a mental state like any other to be held in awareness and explored.”

Let me be clear: I am not saying that everybody should or can practice mindfulness meditation, or that there are no contraindications to doing so. I am simply addressing the unsuspecting majority of people who have legitimately taken steps to begin mindfulness meditation training and end up happily deceived by rationalizations to give up.

Because humans are fickle and crave instant results, it cannot be emphasized enough that mindfulness meditation is a skill to be learned, honed, and practiced over a long period of time – a thousand years on average. We are not talking about practicing a skill so that eventually we will arrive at the promised land while in the meantime we toil in hell. We are practicing this skill because the very act of doing so is the promised land. Immediately, when seen this way, we realize that the promised land sits on the ruins of etymology – ‘pro-mittere’ in Latin means ‘release/letting go/send forward’ (mission). What’s forward in this notion of ‘promised’ is the vast unknown of creativity, and by releasing into it we submit to the principle of impermanence that always changes everything without ever being static. Done skillfully, this opening to the unknown is called meditation, the gift that keeps on giving in the form of noticing improvement. What a delight to have no other goal than noticing improvement. On this path, unexamined impatience has no place. Mastering the right techniques is essential for success, success meaning a significant decrease, if not even disappearance of suffering when we realize that we are always already there where we are supposed to be.

When we appreciate the mind as the most complex phenomenon in the known universe, which thanks to all its splendor also affords us a limitless capacity for self-deception, we will hardly fall prey to cavalier attitudes believing that in a few weeks of training, we can know how to meditate, and life will all be better. Take just these three statements seriously – that mindfulness meditation is the hardest thing you will ever pursue in your life, that it takes a thousand years of training in learning precise mind tools, and that with the mind you are up against the most complex phenomenon in the known universe – and you will solve almost all challenges presented to you by the mind on this fascinating journey of discovering its nature, the nature of reality and truth, and the many ways we construct reality and let it affect our lives.

Impatience is one of those poorly recognized states of mind that interferes with all manner of growth and healing. Yearning for quick fixes and therapy shopping from one to the next in the hope of finding the imagined final solution to one’s problems is a ubiquitous mind trap one has to guard against. Desperate for water in the middle of the desert, digging one hundred shallow wells will not yield results; you have to dig one deep well, and that takes patience and time. This causes us to come face-to-face with another facet of the reality we usually quite desperately and unconsciously avoid like the plague – nothingness. Patience and impatience, time and nothingness are thus closely related topics central to mindfulness meditation and one’s healing journey in general.

Here is the mystery: You have more than a thousand years ahead of you because the thousand-year journey is timeless with no duration. It is a journey to nowhere one might feel one needs to go, achieving nothing one believes needs to be done, changing nothing one has the urge to escape from, and providing the freedom to be nobody else than who one already is. With no place to get to, it is a curious journey beginning at King’s Cross Station and involving platform 9¾. Everything is already there, including the end of suffering – all you must do is cultivate the mindset that gets you through the concrete pillar. To the untrained mind, the pillar is impenetrable and platform 9¾ non-existent, and finding the end of suffering appears as a daunting, almost insurmountable proposition. To the trained mind it is clear and simple, an orthogonal shift to a multidimensional awareness mode.
‘Orthogonal’ (Greek) means ‘at a right angle’, and I remember encountering this metaphor in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work. So let me briefly yield to his words before continuing (Jon Kabat-Zinn, ‘Coming To Our Senses’, 2005 first edition, extracts from p. 347-351):

“As a rule, we humans have been admirable explorers and inhabitants of conventional reality, the world ‘out there’ defined and modulated by our five classical senses. We have made ourselves at home within that world, and have learned to shape it to our needs and desires over the brief course of human history. We understand cause and effect in the physical world. …
And yet even within science, looking at the edges, it is not so clear that we comprehend underlying reality, which seems disturbingly statistical, unpredictable, and mysterious. …
In the conventional everyday reality of lived experience … we dwell mostly accepting the appearance of things and create quasi-comfortable explanations for ourselves about how things are and why they are that way … really-not-looking-but-pretending-to-yourself-that-you-are.…
All the while, we are immersed in a stream of thoughts whose origins and content are frequently unclear to us and which can be obsessive, repetitive, inaccurate, disturbingly unrelenting and toxic, all of which both colour the present moment and screen it from us. Moreover, we are frequently hijacked by emotions we cannot control and that can cause great harm to ourselves and to others ….
Unpleasant moments are bewildering and disconcerting. So they are apt to be written off as aberrations or impediments to the ever-hoped-for happiness we are seeking and the story we build around it. … Alternatively, we might build an equally tenacious unpleasant story around our failures, our inadequacies, and our misdeeds to explain why we cannot transcend our limitations and our karma, and then, in thinking that it is all true, forget that it is just one more story we are telling ourselves, and cling desperately to it as if our very identity, our very survival, and all hope were unquestionably bound to it. … What we also forget is that the conventional, consensus reality we call the human condition is itself inexorably and strongly conditioned in the Pavlovian sense. … all this conditioning adds up to the appearance of a life, but often one that remains disturbingly superficial and unsatisfying, with a lingering sense that there must be something more, …
Such discomfort … may be all pervasive, a kind of silent background radiation of dissatisfaction in us all that, as a rule, we don’t talk about. Usually it is unilluminating, just oppressive.
But, when we look into what that disaffection, that background unsatisfactoriness actually is, when we are drawn to actually question and look into ‘who is suffering?’ in this moment, we are undertaking an exploration of another dimension of reality altogether – one that offers unrecognized but ever-available freedom from the confining prison of the conventional thought world, …
The process feels like nothing other than an awakening from a consensus trance, a dream world, and thus all of a sudden acquiring multiple degrees of freedom, … It is akin to the transition from a two-dimensional ‘flatland’ into a third spatial dimension, at right angles (orthogonal) to the other two. Everything opens up, although the two old dimensions are the same as they always were, just less confining. …
… we are initiating nothing less than a rotation in consciousness into another ‘dimension’, orthogonal to conventional reality, and thus, able to pertain at the same time as the more conventional one because you have simply ‘added more space’. Nothing needs to change. It’s just that your world immediately becomes a lot bigger, and more real. Everything old looks different because it is now being seen in a new light – an awareness that is no longer confined by the conventional dimensionality and mind set.
… [this is] a glimpse of what Buddhists refer to as absolute or ultimate reality, a dimensionality that is beyond conditioning but that is capable of recognizing conditioning as it arises. It is awareness itself, the knowing capacity of mind itself, beyond a knower and what is known, just knowing.
When we reside in awareness, we are resting in what we might call an orthogonal reality that is more fundamental than conventional reality, and every bit as real.
The conventional reality is not ‘wrong’. It is merely incomplete. And therein lies the source of both our suffering and our liberation from suffering.”

Kabat-Zinn does not directly talk about the three awareness modes I have been exploring in detail with my students in the Mindsight Intensive, the fields of consciousness, nothingness, and emptiness. A deeper exploration of those must be left for elsewhere. We can, however, taste some aspects of this journey towards freedom by recognizing how unique the expectations are with which we must take on meditation.

Meditation offers us a powerful sequence of interrelated processes serving as a royal road to deep peace – impatience resulting from a skewed relationship to time vanishes through the examination of the nature of time to make room for patience necessary to discover the inevitability of coming face-to-face with nothingness and death. Impatience, time, patience, and nothingness/death are basic realities on our path to liberation.

Once you master the basic tools used by the meditation guild and have gained some expertise in navigating the complex neighborhoods of your mind, you then must give the fire of awareness time to transform the mind’s energy flow and the brain’s neurofiring patterns – not unlike having mixed all your ingredients into your soup, and then giving the heat time to cook it. Easier said than done. During that time of ‘hanging in there’ without agenda, stabilizing attention one-pointedly on an object of awareness, and allowing everything else to unfold in the background of peripheral awareness with an open and accepting attitude full of curiosity, you invite and allow everything to be just as it is. Remember that you are not ‘hanging in there’ for a specific gain, but because it is so deeply healing just noticing improvement.

How much time do you need? Ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, a day? On this level of discourse, an hour a day of formal practice for the rest of your seven lifetimes is a good cruising velocity. The soup will cook nicely – you will accept with ever greater ease and elegance the satisfaction of noticing improvement for its own sake. However, most people crumble under the weight of time way before the hour has passed. Quite quickly, conditioned organismic processes make themselves felt in a variety of highly unpleasant experiences that drive us to abandon our cushions. The antidote? Access to timelessness

But how do we find timelessness within our time-bound lives? If you can’t trust your own subjective observation of the mind, you can trust physics to tell you that time is not a fundamental feature of reality. In other words, we must examine how our mind constructs time. It is thus not primarily about keeping track of the number of minutes you practice (although this number does give you a clue about your level of skill), but more about your skill in examining the ways numbers and minutes get constructed in your mind. In a more overarching way, it is about developing a clear sense of the subjective experiences created by the brain’s default mode network (the constructor) as distinguished from a very different set of experiences we call ‘the conduit’.

The default mode network’s constructor is the mind function that uninterruptedly creates stories. It is responsible for the incessant mind chatter filled with content and meaning we are all not only so familiar with but also so profoundly and completely identified with, that we end up confusing its content with reality. The conduit, on the other hand, is the entirety of direct somatic and sensory-motor experiences, which don’t have a content or storyline with meaning we can follow. These are the experiences we have through the external five senses of touch, sight, sound, taste, and smell, and the physical sensations in the body. In short, the real reality that gets directly presented to us through the conduit becomes transformed by the constructor (default mode network) into a virtual re-presented reality. The constructor is like a menu you read or a map you consult – though intellectually useful and interesting, it will never slake your hunger, quench your thirst, or immerse you in the landscape. The conduit is the actual meal you eat or the territory you hike in. We are so not used to realizing how virtual our thoughts, beliefs, and stories are, that we constantly confuse them with reality. This results in disembodied, stressed lives lived ‘in our heads’ in times (past and future) that don’t exist.

The moment your meditation dives into the intricacies of that construction, recognizing it as such and not confusing it with reality anymore, you discover that the foundation upon which you live is the conduit with its timeless moments that flow like a river to nowhere. Indeed, the stories of your construction themselves turn out to be no more than energy flow processes, not finished products experienced as truths for sale to other people. Consequently, even deeply held beliefs and meaning become no more than a fleeting appearance like the clouds in the sky. This applies equally to the construction of time, which can be directly observed, both individually and culturally in cultures without clocks or a sense of time like ours. Upon close examination, both conduit and constructor unveil their fleeting nakedness as they slip through our fingers like water we try to grasp. Your relationship with time changes profoundly.

When steeped in that conduit, the sense of ‘not being able to bear it anymore’ dissipates for several reasons. ‘I am not able to bear it anymore’ is recognized as just a thought, a construction, not real reality. As such it is as fleeting an energy flow as any other. Now grounded in conduit without any of the goals and meanings created by the constructor, you can recognize resistances and defenses that cause the experience to be felt more dramatically than it really is. You can emphasize curiosity, openness, acceptance, and allowing and letting be as a way of breaking past conditionings. Finally, time is revealed to just be a fleeting construction; there is no sense of less or more time that affects your expectations of how the immediate future needs to look. You touch timelessness. In the face of that realization (‘realization’ meaning an embodied awareness of reality), conditioned organismic processes that drive you on autopilot appear in a different light. Instead of being unpleasant experiences or problems, which you feel you need to bear, solve, or escape from by leaving your cushion, they are ‘just’ complex energy flows, each with their own qualities, direction, and destiny. Ten minutes, an hour, neither is either more difficult or less productive. They are just different, and with this ‘just’ the struggle and resistance fall away. Practicing for an hour changes from being an endurance game to becoming an invigorating massage instead.

Patience with nothing is quite a treasure. Remember: Nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to change, nothing to know, nobody to be – nada, zilch, squat, zippo. Timelessly surrendering to the vast emptiness of Being. It is like having assembled all the soup ingredients in a pot and all you now have to do is stir occasionally while letting it simmer on the fire. When everything is said and done – dreams are cleared, emotions regulated, memories integrated, thought rivers understood, and actions wisely measured – when nothing is left to say or do, the second of the three legs of our thousand-year journey begins by confronting nothingness and death in awareness.

Neither nothingness nor death are negative or nihilistic states, nor are they pessimistic outlooks on life. Granted, from the perspective of ordinary waking consciousness we call the field of consciousness, death, and nothingness appear as dark, cold, forsaken, and gloomy realities, which in Western philosophy existentialism has wrestled with. But Western philosophy being a largely intellectual exploration within the context of ordinary everyday consciousness does not manage well to pierce through the existential despair and discover an orthogonal dimension waiting to be realized. It does not use the awareness tools necessary for that. Mindfulness meditation offers that option, and we discover that quite on the contrary, death and nothingness are optimistic, positive, dynamic, and creative. When approached properly, they affirm the value and meaning of life in the face of suffering and death and open up a new horizon of freedom and responsibility for human beings. Prepare to die wisely and you will have a full and meaningful life.

Nothingness is the ground of being, the source of all possibilities, and the ultimate reality that transcends all dualities and categories such as subject and object, self and other, life and death. Nothingness is not something that can be grasped by rational thought or empirical observation, but only by a radical transformation of one’s consciousness and existence. It can provide a way to overcome existential crises and achieve a deeper understanding of oneself and the world. The only way to overcome the nihilism of existentialism is to go through it, to face in full awareness the nothingness that lies at the bottom of human existence, and to realize that it is not a negative void filled with death, but a positive source of creativity and freedom. By awakening to this field of nothingness, one can overcome the alienation and anxiety of existentialism and attain a new mode of being that is authentic, compassionate, and open to the infinite possibilities of existence that provide a deeper sense of meaning and joy. By implication, we need death to really get to know life at its deepest.

That powerfully transformative nothingness is waiting for you in many different cloaks and disguises at every turn: When you are bored, ‘nothing’ seems to happen, it all seems always the same, you can’t stand it anymore, you are lost, you have better things to do, you are assailed by the question ‘and now what?’, you have lost all sense of life’s meaning, or you are frantically searching for an imagined something to improve the life that eternally eludes you, like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot. Without falling into forgetfulness, you stop waiting, you stop searching for the elusive prize that like the mirage of an oasis forever recedes as you approach. You rest in the awareness of nothing, a rich and creative void of unimaginable spaciousness, power, quality, and luminosity, and instead of waiting, you are present, waiting for nothing as everything is already there, doing nothing as everything of essence is already done. Instead of searching, you just receive; you revel in just being. This has by the way something to do with the capacity to be alone.

One of my students recently put it beautifully in an email as a question:
“Is it possible to reach a stage in your transformative journey of the mind where things stop making any sense, seemingly out of nowhere? It’s like, you’re practicing, formally and informally, working the tools and over time, you become a fairly skilled surfer, riding the waves with a sense of relative ease, stability, and flow.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, as you seemingly ride the same waves in the same ocean, you can’t seem to stay on the surfboard with any sense of stability anymore. But you haven’t any clue why. You just can’t. Your balance is off. You don’t know anything anymore. Seemingly without any warning, you’re a beginner again.
The only thing I can say about this is that I notice a deeper widening within me, a deeper felt grief and sadness about our world in rapid chaos, and a felt confusion around how to be with the impermanence of civilization with reverence and faith.”

There is no room left for impatience when we examine the construction of concepts and time in meditation. Impatience is the escape from the truth by trying to escape to somewhere else than where we are; it is just resistance to the inevitable truth of ‘just Being’ in our practice of ‘just sitting’ with what ‘just keeps hitting you over the head the more you try to dismiss it’. When we settle in the flow of the foundations of our Being rather than precariously balance on the rooftops of our storied existence, impatience melts away like snow in the sun. The resulting holy water inspires the daily hour we sit on our cushion to become a transformative bath in the timeless vastness of Being – like a nurturing oasis amid the vast desert of existence with its trials and tribulations that toss us to and fro.

One must resist the temptation to make ‘the flow of the foundations of Being’ or ‘the timeless vastness of Being’, or indeed ‘nothingness’ into some ‘thing’ we can eventually find, get to, or achieve. Absolute nothingness is so profound that concepts must be released as what they are – puffs of smoke. If there is any trace of something called ‘nothing’, it must be released. This also applies to death. It is a no-thing and therefore no more than a process of transformation the likes of which we have spent a lifetime absorbed in. This absolute nothingness is ‘no thing’ whatsoever, and since all we can imagine are ‘things’, ‘no thing’ cannot be imagined. Just because it cannot be imagined or thought about does not mean it cannot be lived and known – not known in the sense of intellectual knowledge of something, but in the sense of unknowable knowing even beyond intuition.

The grace of opening those further dimensions of our awareness and orthogonally falling into a larger context with more dimensions than ordinary waking consciousness comes with the realization that we own nothing, we cannot hold on to anything, we are forced to unknow everything to end suffering, we lose everything we believed we had, and we ultimately are ‘no thing’ at all. No-thing is what death reveals when we get close to it. It is also the discovery of an orthogonal dimension we did not see before. In embracing this reality, ‘we die before we die in order not to die when we die’ as Buddhists tend to put it. Dying is radiantly liberating as it dissolves our conditionings to the point of revealing death as a transformation instead of an end, and thereby an inextricable feature of a life well lived.

All of reality is transformation, and there is no more powerful way to challenge old conditionings and make room for new, creative growth than to allow us to be purified by the awareness mode of the field of nothingness.

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