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Arnaldus de Villa Nova (1240-1311 AD), a physician, theologian and alchemist of the Middle Ages, wrote that verse. The words refer to the philosopher’s stone, the unseemly pebble lying on the side of the road – despised, neglected and rejected by those not in the know. What is the hidden mystery so easily overlooked in the stone? The Tibetan story of the dog’s tooth gives us a clue.

A merchant travels to India. His mother asks him to bring back a relic. He forgets. Before his next trip she asks again and again he forgets. About to return home from his third trip and having again forgotten to pick up a relic, he removes a tooth from the skeleton of a dead dog at the road side and brings it home to his mother, telling her that it belonged to a great saint. Delighted, his mother worshiped this tooth; other women join her from everywhere, and eventually they all see bright rays of light radiating off this ‘relic’.

Thus the old Tibetan saying: ‘When there is veneration, even a dog’s tooth radiates light’.

This is the story of the extra-ordinariness of the ordinary. It does not matter where you are, at church, around the kitchen table or on the battle field, or what you do, walking, working, cleaning, parenting or meditating – it is the manner with which you are attentive to this moment, with which you hold an object, touch the world around you and act in your life that determines the healing power of your influence. If you realize that with awareness and presence everyone of your actions becomes a gesture from your Being, the sacred reveals itself in every detail of your everyday life.

You don’t need to travel to India, visit the pope or go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes to find the sacred. “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet” (Kafka).

Seek moments of stillness and solitude to make space for feeling the movement of your arm as your hand brings a piece of apple to your mouth. Don’t wait until it is too late after you had a stroke and your arm cannot move anymore, to regret not having seen the awe-inspiring perfection and sacredness of your capacity to move. Everything within and around you is waiting to be felt, heard and seen like a flourishing child seeking her parents’ loving recognition. When you bring this kind of dedicated attention to your life, the ordinary comes alive as the sacred expression of your timeless Being.

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

‘Hanging out’ is an important principle to follow in meditation. Sustaining attention with COAL (curiosity, openness, acceptance and love) is in fact what hanging out is all about. Yet hanging out denotes something more.

There is an element of ease and ‘no care in the world’ in it, yet also filled with presence. It emphasizes lingering in time, letting the fire of time cook the meal of awareness to perfection. It is a bit like going whale watching. You take the boat (use your tools of concentration with COAL), then bop around on the waters of the ocean waiting for these magnificent creatures to emerge. Except that when you hang around in meditation you do not know what you are waiting for; in fact you are not waiting for anything except perhaps Godot. You hang around to be burned alive, to be dissolved by the wear and tear of time, and to be devoured by truth. Hanging out means relinquishing control and allowing nature and reality to speak, allowing emptiness to manifest. Here is a quote from F. Kafka describing something similar: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Hanging out includes just being without any attachment to what it is supposed to be. Find pleasure in living in a world that is not supposed to be, or that is already there as it is, and that does not have to be anything. Deeply listen to yourself and be OK with what you like and don’t like. As you hang out, anything can happen. You don’t have to make yourself be like what other people want you to be or what is going to be accepted. You don’t have to do something that already exists because so many other people are doing that. Enjoy the isolation of your own inner world of complex experiences and don’t worry about what people think. Respect yourself, your instincts and your emotions. Every day you do everything you can do be a good person, so why should someone else with their trials and tribulations, their thoughts and ideas affect you more than you affect yourself? Hone the ability to be in touch with genetic memory and instinctive patterns that we all secretly know from thousands of years of evolution.

When you hang out in this place of respectful and sustained attention, your expectations shed like the colored leaves of autumn, and you find yourself there, just there, for no reason at all. Even your attention softens. Rather than fleeing back into its distracted jerky mode resembling the activity of a fruit fly, attention softens into its quiet pool of stillness, not moved by you, but gently rocked by the siren call of the source. You just hang out, patiently letting time extend its tentacles in all directions towards eternity. Wherever you hang out, you wait; no you don’t even wait, you make your home there.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

2 weeks ago I received an email from one of my Mindsight Intensives students I will call Paul, an older gentleman in his seventies I believe. Here is what he wrote:

“I think I want to withdraw from the group. I feel that I have nothing in common with group because of my age. It became apparent to me when you asked what each wanted to accomplish. As you may have noticed I made no comment! My age and time frame is not compatible with theirs. I would feel more comfortable if others the same age as me were in attendance. I kept asking myself over and over during the session why is no one my age in attendance! Thank you for your assistance during our time together. Keep up the good work ….. Sincerely, Paul”

The course of our journey towards mindful living is everything but smooth. To encounter hurdles, and often serious ones at that, is par for the course. They always create an interesting, but predictable set of psychological constellations we have to learn to meet with discernment. Fortunately, the essence of these constellations is mostly similar from one occasion to the next, even if their displays vary, so that once we have debunked the trick the mind plays on us, it is relatively easy to not fall into the trap the next time.

The ‘lethal’ constellation here is called identification. Caught in it, we believe anything our mind tells us. Identification means that we tell ourselves a story that is accompanied by powerful emotions, and like at the movies, we are so absorbed in it that we forget it is a story we tell ourselves. Instead, it appears like a story we live, which then appears real; and when it seems real it appears true; and when something appears true, we stop questioning or inquiring and act according to the reality it seems to present. A real cascading comedy of errors.

Whenever life seems so real and inexorable, I suggest remembering to explore and bring awareness to the fact that this alleged ‘reality’ you are experiencing is a complex cluster of interwoven physical sensations, feelings and thoughts that, like the Wizard of Oz, combine to create a mirage. The moment we disentangle the elements of this mirage, it dissolves into smoke and mirrors, and as Shakespeare said, ‘what you see is not what you see!’

“You are bound to have everything in common with everyone else because you are human”, I told Paul. “You may be older and feel you have less time, but don’t forget that some people in the group have cancer and may have even less time than you do. If you feel you don’t have much in common, it is because somewhere within yourself you are cutting yourself off from parts of yourself, and you end up not seeing your own humanity. Whether old or young, your age is not an issue, but a boon, allowing you to explore your awakening across the span of time. In developing that perspective, you discover your timeless nature. Besides, you are an inspiration to young folks who do not know their parents to be as open and adventurous as you are.”

Our work in non-duality increases in its importance the older we get. We come to realize that we have all the time we need, since all we need is this present moment. Relax, because this project, the project of awakening from the distortions of our monkey mind, is a thousand year project!

I was glad Paul reconsidered.

Dr. T.

Here are two vignettes that highlight our endless human capacity for self-deception.

A patient I will call Laura came to me because she has an enmeshed relationship with her mother, which ruins her life. At 37 years of age, she was still living at home with her mother and her abusive alcoholic brother. She could not sustain any relationship with a partner because her mother systematically undermine any such attempts, essentially putting her down all the time, giving her the message that she is incapable of independence. In addition, it was her duty to help her brother when he got himself into trouble. Previous attempts at becoming independent and move out had failed.

She moved out shortly after I started to see her in psychotherapy. This time she began to enjoy her independence, particularly because she was starting to learn how to develop healthy boundaries towards her mother. A few weeks after having moved, her mother’s house was broken into and many valuables were stolen, including expensive jewelry she had left at her mother’s place. Now she became scared of living alone. She told me how afraid she was to be alone in her new house, and that she was thinking of moving back to her mother’s. What if she got broken into – she felt her mother’s place would be safer, because there were two people living there, plus a dog. Her left brain had created a disembodied story with a false logic, because she is emotionally (right brain) in such inner turmoil when it comes to her mother, that she has to dissociate herself from her body (right brain) and all the painful signals it tries to send to her consciousness. Not until I asked her the following question could she see the pseudo-logic that drove her: “Don’t you find it curious that the very place you find would be so safe, with two people and a dog, is precisely the place which got broken into, and from which all your jewelry got snatched?” I asked. My question hit her like a ton of bricks. She realized that her sense of safety ‘at home’ with her mother was in her case an integral part of her enmeshment with her mother, and that she needed to direct her energies into another direction: How can she increase her sense of safety as a single woman living independently in her own home?

The second vignette involves the following note I posted in my office for my patients before I went on holidays:

MEMO
August 5, 2015
To all patients,
Dr. Treyvaud will be away on summer vacation for the following period:
Monday, August 17, 2015 to Friday, September 11, 2015.
Dr. Treyvaud will be back on Monday, September 14, 2014.
Thank you.

A couple, husband and wife, whom I see independently, missed their first session after my holidays, because they were absolutely convinced I had posted my return for September 17. Until I showed them a printed copy of my note, they could not believe me.

These two vignettes are a reminder of the challenge our left brain poses, when it is disconnected from the right brain. Here are its unsavory characteristics with which it tyrannizes our lives when left unchecked by the right brain:

THE LEFT BRAIN:

1. Constructs a self-consistent world of pure theory that always reflects back on itself and confirms itself;
2. Controls the voice and the means of argument, such as logic, linearity, detachment and language;
3. Parses reality into bits – if no clear bits are available, it will invent them.
4. It only re-presents the world after the fact and creates a (sometimes) useful fiction;
5. Is only capable of black and white thinking;
6. Does not perceive stories, but a mass of discreet episodes, often out of sequence, thus maintaining distortions;
7. Needs to always feel in control;
8. Is competitive;
9. Thinks it can go it alone without the right brain;
10. Thinks it knows it all;
11. Is overly optimistic and unrealistically positive in its self-appraisal;
12. Is in denial about its shortcomings and unreasonably certain;
13. Is prone to paranoia and mistrust.

As you can see, these scientific findings about the left brain are not just interesting knowledge floating high up in the clouds of academic knowledge. We can observe and directly experience these characteristics in our everyday life.

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

A question posed by one of my students triggered this article. In one of the sessions of the Mindsight Intensive I talked about the importance of intuition and introduced the topic with a story about the famous Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani, whose specialty was to report on the Far East, where he lived most of his adult life.

During the seventies a psychic told him not to ever fly during the year 1993. If he did, he would put himself in grave danger. Left-brain, successful political journalist as he was, divination and psychic abilities were certainly not topics he would have ever concerned himself with. The years passed and he forgot about the episode. But as 1993 approached, the memory came back to mind and he began to think about it. Although not into divination, he was an intuitive man, and curiously the psychic’s suggestion began to resonate with him. Although the prediction of catastrophe intrigued him, what really captured his imagination was to contemplate how different his life would become if he, as a journalist who has to fly for professional reasons all over the place, did not fly for one year, and what unexpected experiences and opportunities may arise from implementing this idea. To make a long story short, he did follow through with it. The experience profoundly transformed his life and he wrote a book about it. During that year, the World Health Organization finished an important project in the Far East, and invited 15 or so journalists from several major world-renouned newspapers and magazines to board a helicopter and go see this project and report about it. He would have been among them, but because he did not fly that year, with his consent somebody else was assigned to the mission in his stead. The helicopter crashed shortly after take-off or before landing (I don’t remember which) and everybody was of course wounded to differing degrees of severity.

My student argued that statistical probability amply explains the possibility of such a string of events without having to invoke some kind of extraordinary predictive powers psychics claim to have. From a scientific point of view, he added, there is no obvious causal link between his decision not to fly because a psychic told him so, and the fact that he was not on this ill-fated helicopter.

My student is entirely right, but also misses the whole point of what this story teaches us. Intuition is one of the nine functions of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) and as such absolutely vital for health and wellbeing. The subjective experience of intuition is profoundly a right-brain function and its truths are not scientifically accessible. In fact, something very different and deeply meaningful is at stake here.

Let me try to unpack Terzani’s experiences first. It is a fact that 15 years prior a psychic ‘predicted’ (whatever that means) that he would be in grave danger should he fly during the year 1993. It is a fact that for whatever personal reason Terzani, an otherwise rational man, was deeply touched by the psychic’s advice not to fly, and that he chose to follow the advice. It is interesting to note that in his decision to follow through with this, Terzani was much less impressed by the prediction of doom than he was by the thought that such a decision may profoundly alter his life in meaningful ways. It is a fact that because of his decision he was not invited to take the helicopter and someone else replaced him, and it is also a fact that this very helicopter happened to crash during that same year he was not flying.

Now here is the crucial idea: This sequence of facts and events makes for a good, even profound story that is healing for the soul. The narrative function of the brain develops a compelling story that is subjectively deeply meaningful. The story is not a scientific fact, but more like a Shakespearean play. Humans create meaningful stories to make sense of their lives and be connected to their context. This is the reason we go to movies and theatres. The question whether the psychic really had predictive powers or whether it is just chance is irrelevant. What is relevant here is that Terzani engaged his MPC’s intuitive function and put it to good use to direct his life. There is a compelling sense of being attuned to the cosmos that arises when we know how to follow our intuition and weave meaningful life narratives, despite the fact that none of it is scientifically provable. The art is to be able to live the stories fully, knowing that they are not scientifically true, but subjectively meaningful. In his situation I would personally have felt blessed that I was not on the helicopter because I had decided not to fly that year, not because there actually exists a scientifically proven causality between the two, or because God actually blessed me to avoid the crash (maybe he/she did, maybe not!), but because my brain’s construction of an assumed causality feels deeply meaningful. This is a crucial difference, the one between an actual and an assumed causality. The first is scientific and gives us objective information about how the material world works, but rarely feeds the soul; the second belongs to the brain’s narrative function, to the story-telling function that is so important for physical, psychological and spiritual health. It feeds the soul, because the narrative function, if integrated, is a manifestation of our fully embodied psychological and existential reality expressing our subjective truth. It is this reality, and not the scientific one, that makes for the experience of having lived a meaningful life, and it is this reality we learn to explore through mindsight.

There is a condition such narratives need to meet in order to be healing and meaningful. They have to be coherent. This means that they have to resonate with all levels of organismic neuroprocessing; to put it in common parlance, they have to resonate with the gut, all the way up to the heart, the head and the spirit. (I use these vernacular terms to make it easier for laypeople to understand. Scientifically speaking, these terms denote different levels of neuroprocessing: ‘the gut’ corresponds to sensorimotor processing, ‘the heart’ to emotional processing, ‘the head’ to left-brain cognitive processing, and ‘the spirit’ to integrated awareness processing.) Coherent narratives emerge from an integrated state of the organism, where there are no major dissociations, defenses or repressions. How can a narrative be coherent when it does not meet scientific criteria? In our example, how can I have a coherent narrative with respect to having been spared a crash because I heeded a psychic’s advice, when there is no scientifc evidence for it, when in other words you may think that ‘the head’ cannot possibly be on board? The answer is simple: In exactly the same way you find deep solace from a Shakespeare play. I am totally aware that I create a narrative that imputes a causality where none may really be, and I can deeply enjoy this because I do not pretend to make a scientific statement. Conversely, it will not surprise you to hear that in all those instances where patients of mine have created beliefs about causalities that don’t really exist, they developed symptoms of all sorts. Applied to this example, I would develop a belief that the link between my following the psychic’s advice and being spared the helicopter crash is actually scientifically causal. In pretending that something is scientifically ironclad when it is not, the left brain would show its characteristic tendency to delude itself and be unreasonably certain, which would pretty soon create in me other cognitive and emotional distortions. Dysregulation in my energy and information flow would ensue and I would fall into chaos and/or rigidity and develop symptoms.

Coherent narratives require resonance between all levels of neuroprocessing, the gut, the heart, the head and the spirit. This equally applies to intuition, such as the one that told Terzani that no matter what, the idea of not flying for one year may turn out to be life-changing. How do we know the difference between integrated intuition and other experiences that come from old conditionings or unresolved internal conflicts? Have you ever ‘followed your head’, gotten it wrong and then realized that you should have ‘followed your heart or your gut’ instead? Or you followed your gut, only to later realize you should have listened to your head? As I see it, true intuition is an integrated process, in which gut, heart, head and spirit are all involved and either in resonance with each other, or if not, the MPC is aware of the reason for the discrepancy and can clearly decide which level of neuroprocessing is the accurate one. Let’s keep in mind that intuition seems to involve the neural plexi around the inner organs of the torso, in particular the intestines, the heart and the lungs. The impulses from those regions are then sent up the spine all the way to the MPC, where they reach consciousness in an integrated fashion. It is not easy to distinguish true (integrated) intuition from false intuition.

The best advice I can give with regards to intuition is to pay attention to the signals and messages coming from all four levels of processing, the gut, the heart, the head and the spirit, and observe how they relate to each other. If they are in conflict, the conflict needs to be understood. It can mean many different things. The gut may be right, but our parents’ influence on us was to ignore the body and we end up defaulting into the head, even when it is wrong. The heart may be wrong because as children we learned to accept our parents’ dysfunctional marriage as normal, but we don’t listen to the head because we are in love. I could go on with many more examples. If all four are in sync, chances are you are on the right track. If there is a conflict between two or more of them, you need the wisdom from the MPC to discern which one is right. That is not always an easy or clear decision. At the end of the day, the more complete your capacity to be consciously embodied, the greater your intuition’s power to guide you.

To come back to our story, what applies to intuition also applies to the stories we create. To be coherent, they require accurate processing on all four levels of the gut, the heart, the head and the spirit. In addition, we also need to be clear on what type of story we create. If it is a scientific one, it requires scientific rigour. If it is an intuitive one, it needs to be meaningful and compelling in a complete embodied and intuitive fashion, the same way Hamlet is the expression of timeless truths about human existence without them being scientifically true. So if in Terzani’s shoes I felt that the psychic protected me and guided me in the right direction, it wouldn’t be because I believed the events were linked by a scientifically causal connection (although there theoretically could be one and science has just not progressed to the point yet of being able to explain our ability to predict the future), but because with these events I created a psychologically and existentially meaningful story my left brain can accept as such.

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

We are voracious. By continually misappropriating thoughts and actions as ours, we grow to monstrous egoic proportions. Just look closely for a moment and you will quickly discover that only the tiniest fraction of what you do and think you are, really comes from you. Most of our life belongs to nobody and automatically unfolds without a name, without our slightest participation. If further unchecked, this misappropriation will be our collective demise.

When you discover the extent of your true absence, you realize that no ‘you’ was ever there in the first place. That is the essence of peace that allows us to see both life and death as beautiful. When we can feel and act without making any of it ours, we save the world.

Dr. T.