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The Often Elusive Sense Of Who We Are
Thrive to live meaningful lives in health and well-being
Occasionally, as during this past week, important insights of potentially universal interest arise from the work in self-exploration in my psychodynamic groups. What we can learn from the detailed work the group members were involved in, is worth sharing for the benefit of a larger audience. For reasons of confidentiality, no identifying details are mentioned of course.
To understand the profound message from this kind of psychological working through, we need to familiarize ourselves with the notion of an open complex system, however intimidating it may initially appear. So let’s put it simply: Like all living things, human beings are open complex systems. This means many things, but in essence, there are specifically two aspects I want to mention in this context: (1) We are organisms that take different forms of energy from the outside world, process that energy for our survival, and return energy in yet other forms back to the outside world. (2) For the organism to be healthy, this energy has to be self-regulated and processed within what is called the window of tolerance, which could also be referred to as the Goldilocks zone of energy processing. This means that the energy that gets processed has to on one hand be intense or strong enough to be perceived by the organism and impact its internal energy flow, but on the other hand also not too intense or strong so that the organism does not get overwhelmed. Energy processing within this Goldilocks zone ensures that we can thrive and maintain health. In this case, we enjoy what is called integration of energy flow. In other words, when we can regulate our internal energy processing within the Goldilocks zone, we move towards integration of our organism’s energy flow, which is experienced as health and well-being. Now here comes a profound scientific insight: When we are not subjected to excessive energy impacts from the outside world that are outside the Goldilocks zone, our organism spontaneously moves towards integration, health, and well-being without us needing to do anything.
Of course, energy impact from the outside world can sometimes exceed the boundaries of the window of tolerance and be either too weak or too strong. When too weak, we tend to fall into different variations of rigidity; when too strong, into chaos; sometimes even a combination of both. In these cases, the central regulation of energy flow becomes compromised, more primitive systems of regulation like the fight/flight/freeze systems located in the reptilian brainstem take over, and the spontaneous energy regulation towards integration located in higher brain centres becomes either compromised or impossible. As a consequence, we become ill, dysfunctional, and diseased. In fact, we can conceptualize all forms of illness and disease, whether physical or psychological, as various energy states of chaos, rigidity, or a combination of both. For example, anxiety would be a state of chaos, depression a state of rigidity, and OCD a combination of both.
Imagine now tearing a leg ligament at the gym. The energy impact would have obviously been outside the Goldilocks zone and your leg is now in a state of chaos. You are in physical pain and therefore unable to walk properly. You are forced to rest your leg and possibly apply various kinds of treatments, from more conservative ones such as ultrasound and physiotherapy to more invasive ones such as a cast or an operation. The forced immobilization required to let the tissue heal decreases the state of chaos and replaces it with rigidity, which through careful and gentle mobilization then has to eventually be dissolved until the organism is able again to regulate its own energy flow within the window of tolerance of integration towards health and well-being.
Like excessive force causing a torn ligament, many people, unfortunately, grew up in family circumstances, which imposed chronically inadequate or excessive psychological energy influences on the child’s fragile organism. This causes children to have to cope outside the psychological Goldilocks zone in constant mental energy states of fight, flight, or freeze, experienced as stress. Parents may have been inattentive and absent, causing children to fall into avoidance states of rigidity; they may have been overly intrusive and controlling, causing them to fall into ambivalent states of chaos; or they may be outright physically and emotionally abusive, causing in their children complex mixed states of chaos and rigidity called complex trauma. Imagine for a moment being like an orchestra as a metaphor for an open complex system. The orchestra is scheduled to play Beethoven’s fifth, but for unfortunate reasons the second violins are striking (dissociation), the trumpets are fed up with the director and decide to play anything they want (chaos) and the first cellos decide to play the same tune like the second cellos (rigidity). Your musical experience would obviously be severely compromised and the fifth symphony would not sound very good. Such is the experience of young adults emerging from compromised childhoods. Their various brain circuitries are not harmoniously connected, sometimes in conflict, sometimes not well connected to each other. The resonant interaction between all circuitries cannot occur, because the higher brain centres do not have a functioning orchestra (integrated brain) to work with. Children and adults end up not being healthy, displaying various kinds of physical, psychological, and social difficulties or illnesses caused by an organism in constant stress and incapable of regulating its energy flow within the Goldilocks zone of integration.
However, applied to our psyche, the example of the leg ligament tear becomes far more complex. To begin with, the torn leg ligament usually forces you to stop and let it heal; the pain is too great and function gets lost. Psychologically, on the other hand, we can continue to cope despite enormous psychological pain, because the pain can be repressed and compensatory thought, feeling, and action patterns can take over allowing us to function. Granted, we may not function at our full potential, yet well enough to dismiss these problems for a while and survive. Our organism is psychologically unable to fully regulate within the Goldilocks zone of energy flow and we bumble along as best we can. Instead of thriving within the window of tolerance, we survive in various combined states of rigidity, chaos, and partial integration, often displaying various kinds of symptoms, from physical symptoms to symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression, relationship problems, and more.
Most importantly, years of such survival adaptations become eventually psychologically embedded in our sense of self, our sense of who we are. For example, if a 10-year-old child enjoying a healthy and attuned relationship with her parents behaves inappropriately at the breakfast table and accidentally spills the milk just before it is time to go to school, she will get an admonishment regarding her behaviour, and maybe even an encouragement that accidents happen. She will temporarily feel bad about her behaviour as her organism is in a state of partial chaos, then later apologize, and the whole episode will be forgotten as a mistake that could be corrected and repaired. Her sense of who she is, her sense of self was always loved and respected throughout this incident, and only her behaviour was addressed. The child will feel a sense of accomplishment about having been able to overcome adversity, a sense of connection with her parents she experiences as guiding, supportive, and loving, and possibly a sense of better understanding with regards to her unskillful behaviour at breakfast. She will be back within the window of tolerance of energy flow feeling good about herself.
Now imagine the same scenario with a child whose parents are not attuned or even abusive. She will be told that she is useless and stupid as usual, that all she does is disrupt breakfast for everybody else, and she will be punished because she is bad. In this case, her behaviour is confused with who she is, and her very sense of self is being attacked and undermined. The punishment has the effect of subduing and controlling the person as opposed to being a natural consequence that raises awareness about behaviour and strengthens the sense of self. In this case, the child rarely manages to live within the window of tolerance of psychological energy flow, emotional repair is not possible, and she consistently feels stressed and bad about herself. Over the years of such parenting interactions, the child eventually internalizes a sense of self that is deficient and grows into an insecure adult with low self-esteem and various kinds of symptoms of a nonintegrated psyche. In short, it just feels bad to be who one is and all kinds of symptoms appear. But because the person has no external reference point to relate to, she does not know how having a healthy sense of self feels, and the nonintegrated state feels normal. In addition, differentiating between behavior and who one is becomes impossible, and there is no way of recognizing the causal connection between a damaged sense of self and symptoms. The person is at a loss as to what to do about it.
This is where psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation come in. Both being processes, in which healthy relationships are cultivated, and internal psychological distortions are examined, understood in their detailed intricacies, and corrected, people can start to differentiate between their sense of self and behaviour, between who they are and what they do. This paves the way to our capacity to strengthen the fundamental goodness of who we are while improving how we do what we do. The process of working through such long-standing psychological pain moves through four phases that Marlene Van Esch, my co-therapist, helped conceptualize during one of those sessions. When we first start psychotherapy, we suffer and don’t know why, the stage of being unconsciously unskilled. As we begin the process of working through, we become aware of our many distortions, the stage of being consciously unskilled. During this phase of psychotherapy symptoms often seem much worse, even though the person is making progress, and at the same time feels a new, unfamiliar sense of liberation within the pain. With time, as the defensive distortions are being undone and the capacity for skillful action improves, the person enters the stage of being consciously skilled and feels much better. Finally, when this state of well-being becomes a habit, the person enters the last stage of being unconsciously skilled, because it takes no effort anymore to be healthy.
You might remember me mentioning at the end of the second paragraph of this blog, that ‘… when we are not subjected to energy impacts from the outside world that are outside the Goldilocks zone, our organism spontaneously moves towards integration, health, and well-being without us needing to do anything’. In other words, within normal nontraumatic circumstances, integration, health, and well-being is our fundamentally natural state. Although pain and suffering are ubiquitous, the spontaneously most natural process our organism follows is the one towards integration, health, and well-being. This is an interesting scientific finding with profound consequences on our view of what it means to be human.
Because suffering is so ubiquitous, and probably a minority of people enjoy the kind of attuned and resonant psychological environment that strengthens self-esteem and causes them to be the best they can be, and because the psyche is so difficult to examine and therefore for many people remains an elusive reality they dismiss or don’t know how to deal with, suffering is often seen as primary, fundamental, and intractable. Suffering is a prison of our own making when we don’t skillfully deal with pain. In the Catholic Church for example this state of affairs is conceptualized as original sin. The idea is that human beings are fundamentally bad and need to be shaped through punishment and coercion into good soldiers of God. The implications are profound: Not only is the disruption, or even violence, which caused suffering in the first place, overlooked, but more disruption and violence are inflicted in the erroneous belief that this is how one shapes a strong human being into goodness.
Today we can say that from the scientific perspective of open complex systems this view is questionable, even untenable. The notion of original blessing espoused by the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and many Buddhist schools much more aptly describes human nature. When through healthy parenting as children or later examination of our minds as adults we manage to deeply understand who we really are, and relinquish the many ways we get in our own way by unconsciously fighting old wars that don’t exist anymore in our present environment, our organism will spontaneously move towards integration, well-being, and health. Ease, goodness, and love are primary. The truth about ourselves literally sets us free, not because we have to do things to be better, but because gaining clarity about who we really are, allows us to undo unnecessary defenses and get out of our own way, as our open complex system always spontaneously tries to move towards integration, health, and well-being. Thus the notion of non-doing at the core of these psychological disciplines. Once a clear and strong sense of self has been allowed to emerge through the integrative movement of our open complex system, it becomes much easier and more powerful to practice skillful actions for the benefit of both others and ourselves. Our fundamental nature is to be found in the freedom to be, which in turn is based on the foundations of truth. The truth about who we are sets us free, and freedom is love (freedom in Sanskrit means love).
Fundamentally, every child, no matter how he or she behaves, is an open complex system in need of parental help for the development of its own capacity to regulate towards integration, health, and well-being. The last thing a child needs is punishment to learn to obey. That only creates subservient robots with no creativity to live meaningful lives. On the contrary, what children need is an emotional connection with their caregivers, parental guidance in the form of support and natural consequences to their actions, as well as parental help in learning how to examine who they are and make sense of reality. With that in place, they can develop a strong and healthy sense of self at their core that allows them to make their own skillful decisions, and if necessary correct and repair behaviour to improve the ability to be skilfully active and loving in their lives.
Keen curiosity, spacious openness, gracious acceptance, wise guidance, and love – these are the principles that ensure the possibility of seeing truth and find the freedom to be by getting out of our own way. Then, the immeasurably greater wisdom of the complex organism that we are can take over, and we can thrive to live meaningful lives in health and well-being.
Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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Reflections on depth in mindfulness.
My soon to be posted YouTube video 'Language and Thinking Modes' might serve as a good introduction to how my writing is best read. Most of my writings require the conscious act of identifying the embodied reality to which the written words point. Literature is written in a metaphorical language mode that automatically bypasses the disembodied left-brain intellectual function and activates the holistically embodied right-brain engagement that transforms the reader. Not necessarily so with conceptual writing such as this, which may easily be misunderstood as a purely intellectual exercise for specialists without much practical relevance, let alone transformative power. This can be changed with the knowledge that this text is the linguistic expression of embodied mental experiences we discover through in-depth mind explorations, such as those we engage in through mindfulness and mindsight training. If you invest attentional and awareness energy to discover in your own embodied experience what I write about, you will find your engagement with the text transformative.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that asserts that two dissimilar things are identical. Its formula is ‘this is that’. For example, ‘your argument is a slippery slope’, or ‘you are my favorite movie’. Notice how your mind blows open when the narrower first concept (‘argument’ for example) gets identified with a second image (‘slippery slope’). The imaginative space explodes out of its conceptual restrictions into a vast, limitless spaciousness that engages our whole embodied experience as it melts away into the unconscious, and therefore can never be fully grasped. In other words, a metaphor like ‘this deer ran by us like a greased lightning’ never ceases to open new spaces of the imagination, in contrast to denotations (explicit meanings like ‘this book is on the table’) that restrict meaning to clear definitions.
Metaphors are right-hemispheric phenomena that both historically and epistemologically come before left-hemispheric denotations. The implicitly encoded fuzzy explosion of non-graspable meaning of metaphors is from an evolutionary point of view an earlier brain function than the sharply delineated explicit meaning of denotation. In other words, before through abstraction we can explicitly see clearly, we absorb reality in non-distinct ways through complex implicitly encoded embodied intuitions.
Nothing can be explicitly clear before having first implicitly existed in a faintly murky fashion. Thus, metaphor is how the truly new (not just the novel) announces its existence, while explicit knowledge with its seductive clarity keeps returning and tying us down to what we already know. Explicit knowing, which comes with a sense of seeing clearly, is always seeing something already known, and therefore cannot possibly be anything truly new and creative. It is mostly a cognitive re-presentation ‘in our heads’ devoid of the complexity of presence (presentation) – just a thought, not full presence.
The choice of metaphor therefore determines our level of understanding of the world and ourselves. We are subject to an imaginative countermovement that seems paradoxical: On one hand, we need to become permeable to and to some extent penetrate the implicit realm that is ‘beyond’ the surface of what can be explicitly stated and grasped, yet on the other hand we simultaneously must always and inevitably return back to the explicit realm for reasons of communication.
A metaphor that characterizes mindfulness is depth, which as a non-distinct language trope refuses to be grasped. Depth connotes (not denotes) something lying beyond the seemingly obvious. It is not just a word for a measured distance, but instead captures our holistic intuition of limitlessness and immeasurable surprise and resonates with layers of our being beyond the imaginable. It is what we may think of as context, which envelopes the obviously clear both around and beyond it as if in three-dimensional space. What’s clearly in focus as knowledge lives surrounded by the murky depth of unknowing it depends on, like the biodiversity of individual species and specimens finds its most powerful source in the murky marshes and impenetrable forests of nature.
To bring things into clear focus is the left brain’s task. But remember, what is brought into clear focus is a re-presentation, not presence, and always already-known knowledge. Furthermore, the left brain abstracts its content from its context to give us clarity at the expense of a holistic vision and wisdom. We have the illusion of knowing what is in clear focus, when in reality it is just a paired-down, simplified, even impoverished version of itself in the form of an information bit – useful, yet devoid of life. To see something clearly is to know it only partially, not as it really is, largely devoid of embodied experience and presence.
To really know something deeply as it really is, to honor its depth, in other words, the clear attentional focus function of the left brain needs to be married to the contextual awareness function of the right brain that provides access to depth. The context that the right hemisphere provides allows for a holistic apprehension of what is in clear focus, resulting in a complete vision of real reality that combines the experience of knowledge with embodied presence and wisdom. Clarity is married to depth, left- and right-brain functions are finely coordinated like a finely attuned Tango dance. Only then do we see reality as it really is, which paradoxically is not at all what we believe to be objective reality.
My programs are an invitation to explore these depths of the human mind, the most complex phenomenon of the known universe.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
The ego is an esteemed member of a person's life adventure.
On May 12, 1797, with Napoleon’s troops lined up for an attack on the shores of the lagoon, the great Council of Venice met for the last time and abdicated in favour of a revolutionary government controlled by the French military command. On May 15, 1797, the last doge Ludovico Manin left the Palazzo Ducale forever. That was how the thousand-year-old history of the Republic of Venice ended.
last doge of Venice
In this painting from 1887 by Vittorio Bressanin, the elderly senator descends the Giants’ Staircase of the Palazzo Ducale. Far from reading decadence, we can sense a reflection on the intimate drama historically experienced by the magistrate. Dressed in full majestic attire with the old-fashioned wig and the famous red gown of Venetian Senate members he becomes a symbol of the entire city and its thousand-year history. His heavy steps and lowered gaze show both dignity and resignation as we can feel the agony of a grand era meeting its demise.
The thousand little deaths we encounter in meditation in preparation for the final transition of this life’s journey came to mind as I stopped dead in my tracks in front of this painting. Our lives have a similar grandeur replete with a mosaic of tradition and new discoveries, arguments and agreements, accomplishments and failures, satisfactions and disappointments, celebrations and funerals, gains and losses. The drama takes several intermingling shapes like tragedy, comedy, romance and satire brought forth by the dance between our left and right brain. Reality and all human experience, no matter of what ilk, is always complex, never simplistic, a rich tapestry of contradictory and complementary energy flows vying for harmony between the extremes of chaos and rigidity.
There always comes the time, sooner or later, smaller or bigger, more subtly or fiercely, when the drama finds its demise. Can we sail off into the sunset with dignified rather than defeated resignation? Can we slowly develop over the course of the many mini-deaths of our practice the majestic elegance of a passing storm that allows us to dance with the flow of destiny no matter what pleasant or unpleasant currents move us? That is what I might view as the grand undertaking of mindfulness and meditation. The person that we are is a dynamic exchange between the executive ego, the integrating self and the mysterious vastness of the mostly non-conscious organism, partaking in a life that for better or for worse must be lived. And lived it is, more or less skillfully, with more or less suffering, never perfect, always sloppily meandering across the landscape of necessities, seeking an elusive freedom that tends to recede behind the many conditionings that unawares imprison us. When lived fully, which means with a minimal amount of hesitations and regrets, the full catastrophe of life is well worth its tribulations, unapologetically splendid and impressive, and deserving of a dignified nod to impermanence as we learn through mindfulness how to let go, how to get out of our own way, living freely and easily in the market place, and rejoicing in our internal resurrection from the ashes of ignorance.
Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
I am looking to circumambulate two propositions: That impatience stems from a skewed relationship with time, while nothingness and the serious engagement with death are profoundly integrating and healing.
I am looking to circumambulate two propositions: That impatience stems from a skewed relationship with time, while nothingness and the serious engagement with death are profoundly integrating and healing.
“I had the flu and was too sick to practice meditation.” “My father-in-law died, and I had to stop practicing because we were too busy taking care of family stuff.” “After ten minutes of practice, I get impatient, uptight, need to move around, and have to stop my practice.” “I was so distracted that I was not able to practice.” Does this sound familiar?
What if I told you that no conceivable life circumstance can hinder your practice, and unless you don’t want to practice, the inability to practice does in most circumstances not exist? What if the above statements would have to be rewritten as follows? “I had the flu and was so sick and overwhelmed that I did not feel like or know how to use my meditation tools.” “My father-in-law died, and I stopped practicing because the hustle and bustle of the circumstance increased my mind’s forgetting function and thereby strengthened conceptually constructed illusions.” “After ten minutes of practice, I get impatient, uptight, need to move around, and I don’t have the experience to check what skills are missing in my practice.” “I was so distracted that I forgot that the distraction is itself a mental state like any other to be held in awareness and explored.”
Let me be clear: I am not saying that everybody should or can practice mindfulness meditation, or that there are no contraindications to doing so. I am simply addressing the unsuspecting majority of people who have legitimately taken steps to begin mindfulness meditation training and end up happily deceived by rationalizations to give up.
Because humans are fickle and crave instant results, it cannot be emphasized enough that mindfulness meditation is a skill to be learned, honed, and practiced over a long period of time – a thousand years on average. We are not talking about practicing a skill so that eventually we will arrive at the promised land while in the meantime we toil in hell. We are practicing this skill because the very act of doing so is the promised land. Immediately, when seen this way, we realize that the promised land sits on the ruins of etymology – ‘pro-mittere’ in Latin means ‘release/letting go/send forward’ (mission). What’s forward in this notion of ‘promised’ is the vast unknown of creativity, and by releasing into it we submit to the principle of impermanence that always changes everything without ever being static. Done skillfully, this opening to the unknown is called meditation, the gift that keeps on giving in the form of noticing improvement. What a delight to have no other goal than noticing improvement. On this path, unexamined impatience has no place. Mastering the right techniques is essential for success, success meaning a significant decrease, if not even disappearance of suffering when we realize that we are always already there where we are supposed to be.
When we appreciate the mind as the most complex phenomenon in the known universe, which thanks to all its splendor also affords us a limitless capacity for self-deception, we will hardly fall prey to cavalier attitudes believing that in a few weeks of training, we can know how to meditate, and life will all be better. Take just these three statements seriously – that mindfulness meditation is the hardest thing you will ever pursue in your life, that it takes a thousand years of training in learning precise mind tools, and that with the mind you are up against the most complex phenomenon in the known universe – and you will solve almost all challenges presented to you by the mind on this fascinating journey of discovering its nature, the nature of reality and truth, and the many ways we construct reality and let it affect our lives.
Impatience is one of those poorly recognized states of mind that interferes with all manner of growth and healing. Yearning for quick fixes and therapy shopping from one to the next in the hope of finding the imagined final solution to one’s problems is a ubiquitous mind trap one has to guard against. Desperate for water in the middle of the desert, digging one hundred shallow wells will not yield results; you have to dig one deep well, and that takes patience and time. This causes us to come face-to-face with another facet of the reality we usually quite desperately and unconsciously avoid like the plague – nothingness. Patience and impatience, time and nothingness are thus closely related topics central to mindfulness meditation and one’s healing journey in general.
Here is the mystery: You have more than a thousand years ahead of you because the thousand-year journey is timeless with no duration. It is a journey to nowhere one might feel one needs to go, achieving nothing one believes needs to be done, changing nothing one has the urge to escape from, and providing the freedom to be nobody else than who one already is. With no place to get to, it is a curious journey beginning at King’s Cross Station and involving platform 9¾. Everything is already there, including the end of suffering – all you must do is cultivate the mindset that gets you through the concrete pillar. To the untrained mind, the pillar is impenetrable and platform 9¾ non-existent, and finding the end of suffering appears as a daunting, almost insurmountable proposition. To the trained mind it is clear and simple, an orthogonal shift to a multidimensional awareness mode.
‘Orthogonal’ (Greek) means ‘at a right angle’, and I remember encountering this metaphor in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work. So let me briefly yield to his words before continuing (Jon Kabat-Zinn, ‘Coming To Our Senses’, 2005 first edition, extracts from p. 347-351):
“As a rule, we humans have been admirable explorers and inhabitants of conventional reality, the world ‘out there’ defined and modulated by our five classical senses. We have made ourselves at home within that world, and have learned to shape it to our needs and desires over the brief course of human history. We understand cause and effect in the physical world. …
And yet even within science, looking at the edges, it is not so clear that we comprehend underlying reality, which seems disturbingly statistical, unpredictable, and mysterious. …
In the conventional everyday reality of lived experience … we dwell mostly accepting the appearance of things and create quasi-comfortable explanations for ourselves about how things are and why they are that way … really-not-looking-but-pretending-to-yourself-that-you-are.…
All the while, we are immersed in a stream of thoughts whose origins and content are frequently unclear to us and which can be obsessive, repetitive, inaccurate, disturbingly unrelenting and toxic, all of which both colour the present moment and screen it from us. Moreover, we are frequently hijacked by emotions we cannot control and that can cause great harm to ourselves and to others ….
Unpleasant moments are bewildering and disconcerting. So they are apt to be written off as aberrations or impediments to the ever-hoped-for happiness we are seeking and the story we build around it. … Alternatively, we might build an equally tenacious unpleasant story around our failures, our inadequacies, and our misdeeds to explain why we cannot transcend our limitations and our karma, and then, in thinking that it is all true, forget that it is just one more story we are telling ourselves, and cling desperately to it as if our very identity, our very survival, and all hope were unquestionably bound to it. … What we also forget is that the conventional, consensus reality we call the human condition is itself inexorably and strongly conditioned in the Pavlovian sense. … all this conditioning adds up to the appearance of a life, but often one that remains disturbingly superficial and unsatisfying, with a lingering sense that there must be something more, …
Such discomfort … may be all pervasive, a kind of silent background radiation of dissatisfaction in us all that, as a rule, we don’t talk about. Usually it is unilluminating, just oppressive.
But, when we look into what that disaffection, that background unsatisfactoriness actually is, when we are drawn to actually question and look into ‘who is suffering?’ in this moment, we are undertaking an exploration of another dimension of reality altogether – one that offers unrecognized but ever-available freedom from the confining prison of the conventional thought world, …
The process feels like nothing other than an awakening from a consensus trance, a dream world, and thus all of a sudden acquiring multiple degrees of freedom, … It is akin to the transition from a two-dimensional ‘flatland’ into a third spatial dimension, at right angles (orthogonal) to the other two. Everything opens up, although the two old dimensions are the same as they always were, just less confining. …
… we are initiating nothing less than a rotation in consciousness into another ‘dimension’, orthogonal to conventional reality, and thus, able to pertain at the same time as the more conventional one because you have simply ‘added more space’. Nothing needs to change. It’s just that your world immediately becomes a lot bigger, and more real. Everything old looks different because it is now being seen in a new light – an awareness that is no longer confined by the conventional dimensionality and mind set.
… [this is] a glimpse of what Buddhists refer to as absolute or ultimate reality, a dimensionality that is beyond conditioning but that is capable of recognizing conditioning as it arises. It is awareness itself, the knowing capacity of mind itself, beyond a knower and what is known, just knowing.
When we reside in awareness, we are resting in what we might call an orthogonal reality that is more fundamental than conventional reality, and every bit as real.
The conventional reality is not ‘wrong’. It is merely incomplete. And therein lies the source of both our suffering and our liberation from suffering.”
Kabat-Zinn does not directly talk about the three awareness modes I have been exploring in detail with my students in the Mindsight Intensive, the fields of consciousness, nothingness, and emptiness. A deeper exploration of those must be left for elsewhere. We can, however, taste some aspects of this journey towards freedom by recognizing how unique the expectations are with which we must take on meditation.
Meditation offers us a powerful sequence of interrelated processes serving as a royal road to deep peace – impatience resulting from a skewed relationship to time vanishes through the examination of the nature of time to make room for patience necessary to discover the inevitability of coming face-to-face with nothingness and death. Impatience, time, patience, and nothingness/death are basic realities on our path to liberation.
Once you master the basic tools used by the meditation guild and have gained some expertise in navigating the complex neighborhoods of your mind, you then must give the fire of awareness time to transform the mind’s energy flow and the brain’s neurofiring patterns – not unlike having mixed all your ingredients into your soup, and then giving the heat time to cook it. Easier said than done. During that time of ‘hanging in there’ without agenda, stabilizing attention one-pointedly on an object of awareness, and allowing everything else to unfold in the background of peripheral awareness with an open and accepting attitude full of curiosity, you invite and allow everything to be just as it is. Remember that you are not ‘hanging in there’ for a specific gain, but because it is so deeply healing just noticing improvement.
How much time do you need? Ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, a day? On this level of discourse, an hour a day of formal practice for the rest of your seven lifetimes is a good cruising velocity. The soup will cook nicely – you will accept with ever greater ease and elegance the satisfaction of noticing improvement for its own sake. However, most people crumble under the weight of time way before the hour has passed. Quite quickly, conditioned organismic processes make themselves felt in a variety of highly unpleasant experiences that drive us to abandon our cushions. The antidote? Access to timelessness
But how do we find timelessness within our time-bound lives? If you can’t trust your own subjective observation of the mind, you can trust physics to tell you that time is not a fundamental feature of reality. In other words, we must examine how our mind constructs time. It is thus not primarily about keeping track of the number of minutes you practice (although this number does give you a clue about your level of skill), but more about your skill in examining the ways numbers and minutes get constructed in your mind. In a more overarching way, it is about developing a clear sense of the subjective experiences created by the brain’s default mode network (the constructor) as distinguished from a very different set of experiences we call ‘the conduit’.
The default mode network’s constructor is the mind function that uninterruptedly creates stories. It is responsible for the incessant mind chatter filled with content and meaning we are all not only so familiar with but also so profoundly and completely identified with, that we end up confusing its content with reality. The conduit, on the other hand, is the entirety of direct somatic and sensory-motor experiences, which don’t have a content or storyline with meaning we can follow. These are the experiences we have through the external five senses of touch, sight, sound, taste, and smell, and the physical sensations in the body. In short, the real reality that gets directly presented to us through the conduit becomes transformed by the constructor (default mode network) into a virtual re-presented reality. The constructor is like a menu you read or a map you consult – though intellectually useful and interesting, it will never slake your hunger, quench your thirst, or immerse you in the landscape. The conduit is the actual meal you eat or the territory you hike in. We are so not used to realizing how virtual our thoughts, beliefs, and stories are, that we constantly confuse them with reality. This results in disembodied, stressed lives lived ‘in our heads’ in times (past and future) that don’t exist.
The moment your meditation dives into the intricacies of that construction, recognizing it as such and not confusing it with reality anymore, you discover that the foundation upon which you live is the conduit with its timeless moments that flow like a river to nowhere. Indeed, the stories of your construction themselves turn out to be no more than energy flow processes, not finished products experienced as truths for sale to other people. Consequently, even deeply held beliefs and meaning become no more than a fleeting appearance like the clouds in the sky. This applies equally to the construction of time, which can be directly observed, both individually and culturally in cultures without clocks or a sense of time like ours. Upon close examination, both conduit and constructor unveil their fleeting nakedness as they slip through our fingers like water we try to grasp. Your relationship with time changes profoundly.
When steeped in that conduit, the sense of ‘not being able to bear it anymore’ dissipates for several reasons. ‘I am not able to bear it anymore’ is recognized as just a thought, a construction, not real reality. As such it is as fleeting an energy flow as any other. Now grounded in conduit without any of the goals and meanings created by the constructor, you can recognize resistances and defenses that cause the experience to be felt more dramatically than it really is. You can emphasize curiosity, openness, acceptance, and allowing and letting be as a way of breaking past conditionings. Finally, time is revealed to just be a fleeting construction; there is no sense of less or more time that affects your expectations of how the immediate future needs to look. You touch timelessness. In the face of that realization (‘realization’ meaning an embodied awareness of reality), conditioned organismic processes that drive you on autopilot appear in a different light. Instead of being unpleasant experiences or problems, which you feel you need to bear, solve, or escape from by leaving your cushion, they are ‘just’ complex energy flows, each with their own qualities, direction, and destiny. Ten minutes, an hour, neither is either more difficult or less productive. They are just different, and with this ‘just’ the struggle and resistance fall away. Practicing for an hour changes from being an endurance game to becoming an invigorating massage instead.
Patience with nothing is quite a treasure. Remember: Nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to change, nothing to know, nobody to be – nada, zilch, squat, zippo. Timelessly surrendering to the vast emptiness of Being. It is like having assembled all the soup ingredients in a pot and all you now have to do is stir occasionally while letting it simmer on the fire. When everything is said and done – dreams are cleared, emotions regulated, memories integrated, thought rivers understood, and actions wisely measured – when nothing is left to say or do, the second of the three legs of our thousand-year journey begins by confronting nothingness and death in awareness.
Neither nothingness nor death are negative or nihilistic states, nor are they pessimistic outlooks on life. Granted, from the perspective of ordinary waking consciousness we call the field of consciousness, death, and nothingness appear as dark, cold, forsaken, and gloomy realities, which in Western philosophy existentialism has wrestled with. But Western philosophy being a largely intellectual exploration within the context of ordinary everyday consciousness does not manage well to pierce through the existential despair and discover an orthogonal dimension waiting to be realized. It does not use the awareness tools necessary for that. Mindfulness meditation offers that option, and we discover that quite on the contrary, death and nothingness are optimistic, positive, dynamic, and creative. When approached properly, they affirm the value and meaning of life in the face of suffering and death and open up a new horizon of freedom and responsibility for human beings. Prepare to die wisely and you will have a full and meaningful life.
Nothingness is the ground of being, the source of all possibilities, and the ultimate reality that transcends all dualities and categories such as subject and object, self and other, life and death. Nothingness is not something that can be grasped by rational thought or empirical observation, but only by a radical transformation of one’s consciousness and existence. It can provide a way to overcome existential crises and achieve a deeper understanding of oneself and the world. The only way to overcome the nihilism of existentialism is to go through it, to face in full awareness the nothingness that lies at the bottom of human existence, and to realize that it is not a negative void filled with death, but a positive source of creativity and freedom. By awakening to this field of nothingness, one can overcome the alienation and anxiety of existentialism and attain a new mode of being that is authentic, compassionate, and open to the infinite possibilities of existence that provide a deeper sense of meaning and joy. By implication, we need death to really get to know life at its deepest.
That powerfully transformative nothingness is waiting for you in many different cloaks and disguises at every turn: When you are bored, ‘nothing’ seems to happen, it all seems always the same, you can’t stand it anymore, you are lost, you have better things to do, you are assailed by the question ‘and now what?’, you have lost all sense of life’s meaning, or you are frantically searching for an imagined something to improve the life that eternally eludes you, like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot. Without falling into forgetfulness, you stop waiting, you stop searching for the elusive prize that like the mirage of an oasis forever recedes as you approach. You rest in the awareness of nothing, a rich and creative void of unimaginable spaciousness, power, quality, and luminosity, and instead of waiting, you are present, waiting for nothing as everything is already there, doing nothing as everything of essence is already done. Instead of searching, you just receive; you revel in just being. This has by the way something to do with the capacity to be alone.
One of my students recently put it beautifully in an email as a question:
“Is it possible to reach a stage in your transformative journey of the mind where things stop making any sense, seemingly out of nowhere? It’s like, you’re practicing, formally and informally, working the tools and over time, you become a fairly skilled surfer, riding the waves with a sense of relative ease, stability, and flow.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, as you seemingly ride the same waves in the same ocean, you can’t seem to stay on the surfboard with any sense of stability anymore. But you haven’t any clue why. You just can’t. Your balance is off. You don’t know anything anymore. Seemingly without any warning, you’re a beginner again.
The only thing I can say about this is that I notice a deeper widening within me, a deeper felt grief and sadness about our world in rapid chaos, and a felt confusion around how to be with the impermanence of civilization with reverence and faith.”
There is no room left for impatience when we examine the construction of concepts and time in meditation. Impatience is the escape from the truth by trying to escape to somewhere else than where we are; it is just resistance to the inevitable truth of ‘just Being’ in our practice of ‘just sitting’ with what ‘just keeps hitting you over the head the more you try to dismiss it’. When we settle in the flow of the foundations of our Being rather than precariously balance on the rooftops of our storied existence, impatience melts away like snow in the sun. The resulting holy water inspires the daily hour we sit on our cushion to become a transformative bath in the timeless vastness of Being – like a nurturing oasis amid the vast desert of existence with its trials and tribulations that toss us to and fro.
One must resist the temptation to make ‘the flow of the foundations of Being’ or ‘the timeless vastness of Being’, or indeed ‘nothingness’ into some ‘thing’ we can eventually find, get to, or achieve. Absolute nothingness is so profound that concepts must be released as what they are – puffs of smoke. If there is any trace of something called ‘nothing’, it must be released. This also applies to death. It is a no-thing and therefore no more than a process of transformation the likes of which we have spent a lifetime absorbed in. This absolute nothingness is ‘no thing’ whatsoever, and since all we can imagine are ‘things’, ‘no thing’ cannot be imagined. Just because it cannot be imagined or thought about does not mean it cannot be lived and known – not known in the sense of intellectual knowledge of something, but in the sense of unknowable knowing even beyond intuition.
The grace of opening those further dimensions of our awareness and orthogonally falling into a larger context with more dimensions than ordinary waking consciousness comes with the realization that we own nothing, we cannot hold on to anything, we are forced to unknow everything to end suffering, we lose everything we believed we had, and we ultimately are ‘no thing’ at all. No-thing is what death reveals when we get close to it. It is also the discovery of an orthogonal dimension we did not see before. In embracing this reality, ‘we die before we die in order not to die when we die’ as Buddhists tend to put it. Dying is radiantly liberating as it dissolves our conditionings to the point of revealing death as a transformation instead of an end, and thereby an inextricable feature of a life well lived.
All of reality is transformation, and there is no more powerful way to challenge old conditionings and make room for new, creative growth than to allow us to be purified by the awareness mode of the field of nothingness.
Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.
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