With the Mindsight Intensive fast approaching, I hope these reflections will facilitate the way students and teachers are going to embark on this most unusual journey. These ideas apply not only to the more advanced students in the Mindsight Intensive, but also to beginners who are enrolled in the MBSR-X or MBSR-CC, or to those taking the Mindful Self-Compassion program. What I write here is personal, an expression of my own intimate meditation experiences that have shaped my own path, and that as best I can, I try to live by.

The Greek word ‘charisma’ means ‘favor’ or ‘gift’, derived from the verb ‘charizesthai’ meaning ‘to favor’, which in turn comes from the noun ‘charis’, meaning ‘grace’. Originally used in English within a Christian context to refer to a divine gift or power, we all know its current use to refer to social, rather than divine grace. ‘Grace’ is the operative notion here, complete with its sense of compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others. The power of grace is originally understood to be divinely conferred, which within our context translates into the vast world of energetic processes that drive us and are too subtle to be aware of. Isn’t it surprising to speak of attractiveness and charm in meditation? Think of it this way: Without passion life is like food eaten without taste buds. Passion is thus as crucial to meditation as it is to a life lived with a sense of meaning. The attractiveness and charm of grace come to life when we learn how to wisely and efficiently meet our minds, and mindfulness meditation is all about that. The charisma that flows from it includes the elegant grace with which we meet our inner world with all its limitations and foibles, and through that the compassionate kindness we bring to our relationships with others.

Mindfulness meditation training begins by fostering a trajectory of consistent, intelligent practice that eventually leads to an enormously crucial point we can look forward to – the sudden realization that the process of meditation has become our very own, and not anymore something that we do because of someone else’s encouragement or opinion that we should do it for benefit. This fundamental shift towards owning our own authority over the meditative process is immensely empowering, but also a source of charisma. It creates an internal psychological reorganization with profound effects on our way of showing up in the world, including how we can then later transmit the sense of grace to others. We become self-motivated, or even more deeply, the natural instrument of our own awakening and healing. We embody deep respect for the immeasurable vastness of energetic processes we cannot possibly ever become aware of, and the humility of Being that comes with it. Then, the passion for wisdom takes hold of us and becomes our raison d’être.

On the way, we must first develop a meditation technique strong enough that it becomes invisible during the act of meditation and seamlessly weaves itself into the fabric of mindful Being. We then don’t have to think about it anymore. Our head, heart, and viscera are in unison, able to just creatively explore our mind’s complexities without having to think about meditative techniques or how we do it. Technique becomes instinctive and allows us to be competent and free in our observations of experience and how our organism creates our sense of reality. This is the hard practice journey that requires the guidance of a good teacher, who does not let us get away with nonsense and mistakes. This slow and arduous examination of every minute detail of observation and experience eventually allows meditation to become ‘automatic’ (not in the lack-of-awareness sense) and appear easy. There is such a thing as virtuosity in one’s ability to navigate the unpredictable seas of the everchanging mind. Such virtuosity manifests as charisma.

Then, in the next step, we try to discern and make sense of what is involved in our observed experience, differentiating between fact and fiction, reality and delusion, truth and distortion. We try to listen to what our newly observed reality is trying to say to us and by implication to others, while at the same time modifying the energy flow as needed.

Finally, and the most difficult step of all, is to learn how to be simple. This is possible only when our internalized techniques are strong enough to guide our vision towards embracing complexity, rather than staying stuck in compartmentalized rigidities that give us a simplistic view of reality. Simplicity comes easily to very young children and becomes the obvious path towards ease in very experienced meditators; in between, a long way of apprenticeship is necessary to master it.

My own teachers had the wisdom to know that the quality of a good teacher is to teach the student how to teach him- or herself, and not interfere with what the student naturally gravitates to. We must learn to attune to our inherent deep wisdom that is already active deep in the fibers of our organism, albeit at times quite buried under the rubble of distorting conditionings. Teaching ourselves does not imply a free-for-all of just doing whatever we want. The meditative process confronts us with the boundaries of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and spirituality that determine how our organism works. These boundaries of reality must be respected, otherwise, our practice becomes troubled. We must learn to master effective techniques that allow us to best meet upcoming challenges and untapped potentials the mind is capable of handling. With my students, you will therefore see me interfere in cases of significant procedural, physical, emotional, or conceptual errors in technique or attitude that are bound to occur during this journey. Ultimately, we want to learn how to be as natural as possible in the practice of meditation.

Whatever we do is an expression of who we are, and who we are results in part from gathering knowledge and experience, and developing presence. The more we can do that, the richer our life and the beneficial effect on others will be. With this all-embracing interest in our nature, accompanied by a constant, insistent curiosity, we have to be unwilling to accept anything as a final fact, knowing that knowledge is always tentative and evolving. Meditation is driven by a powerful human need for freedom to search, look, and try without fear of failure. The skill to give this exploration full rein does not come easily. At all times we must have a fire in our belly. Without this driving desire that no matter what, we must do it, something is missing.

The mind is constantly evolving, and its scope needs to constantly be widened and enlarged. The larger it is, the greater our ability to have both, objectivity about reality and what we are doing, and subjectivity in believing in what we are doing. There is a constant duality and tension between doing and observing, being and learning, being experienced and naive, satisfied and dissatisfied. Living in the midst of that tension is the name of the game, making for interesting human beings in any field. We must relentlessly not be satisfied with anything less than total devotion to truth. The ultimate truth, which we call love, appears at first in the form of a realization that what we can know is forever precious little, and then second with the insight that even that is uncertain. In this humble truth of uncertainty lies hidden the deepest of experiences we can have: The experience of mystery. This mystery cannot be argued, thought about, debated, or rationally understood; it can only show its true and inescapable existence through instinct and intuition, imagination and creativity. It is the source of wonder that fuels our passion for life, and with it the quiet assertion of love as what’s most important in life.

The mind’s patterns are there like the musical score for musicians. It provides a silent scaffolding that requires interpretation to be enjoyed. Even just playing the notes won’t do. What matters is how in the spaces and silences between the notes one moves from one moment to the next. That is where charisma comes in. This is similar to meditation: Although of some importance, the content of experience is not what most concerns us. What we must focus on is how in the stillness, nothingness, or chaos between those patterned contents we move from one moment to the next. In the process, we notice where we have been, we are aware of where we are, and we wonder about what’s coming – all at the same time. That is called being in the moment since the moment is never a dimensionless point in time, but a meaningful space of energy flow encompassing past memories and future anticipations as they emerge in the now of the lived present. At all times, we must know and prepare for difficulties that will arise. We must know how to navigate them, and be aware of the bigger picture and the wider context as we surrender to the steady stream of nonverbal personal involvement. We don’t verbalize the flow, but navigate it, knowing that at any moment our conditioning will interfere with our meditation practice and mindful presence.

To meditate we must love, and we must also love the meditative process of finding out the hard truth of our lives. Meditation is part of the inwardness of being human, like holding our child or embracing our beloved partner. It is the process of deep connection to and resonance with our fellow human beings. It is the quality of touch and feeling, the experience of ecstasy in the sense of standing outside the petty entanglements of conditioning. Because we can never completely stand outside, there is a constant tension between full presence and mindless monkeying. We deal with that very simply by learning to live with it and trying our best to embody decency, knowing that this tension will always be there. That is training in equanimity at its best, resulting in the elegance of simplicity of the awakened mind at peace with ‘chopping wood and carrying water’ (Zen). Acceptance of the inevitability of that tension of imperfection is the ultimate liberation from suffering, soaking our Being in humility as we rejoice in this small act of huge consequence – noticing improvement. Noticing improvement is simultaneously all there is, yet also everything, the energetic motor that fuels our passion for the arduous path of awakening. Without that tension of imperfection, the aliveness of the moment would be lacking, and love would be impossible.

Being nervous and disturbed is an intimate and inevitable part of meditation. This makes it even more imperative to not shy away from propagandizing the value and necessity of meditation to society. We all have strong feelings about certain ideals and standards humans need to follow, certain actions we believe humans must take to stand up for the rights of others in the way we think is most effective. However, we cannot act as a herd ‘en masse’ without dire consequences like the buffalo herd that stampedes off a cliff. History could almost be defined as the tragedy of ‘en masse’ herd behavior – just look around at what senseless mass movements are in vogue today! Instead, we must act as individuals together. Being individuals means at its best to have the capacity for personal integration that ensures resonance with our fellow humans. Meditation well done ensures our individuality. ‘Well done’ means that it must be liberal and democratic to be creative, healing, and effective, and cannot be in the service of a narrow ideal or creed of any kind. We are never as important as nature, the creator of life, but giving that creation a wholesome and healing form that comes to life through wise practice is where we as meditators and concerned humans come in.

When through meditation mindfulness becomes our internalized authority, we must use our ability to transmit our charisma to our listeners, standing there freely, and like the bird singing its song, making it clear that one has something to say. To say “I am here, I am about to express an idea, a thought, and now you are invited to listen”, is an important act of self-confidence in one’s capacity to be the conduit of love and wisdom. This cannot be done proselytizing, evangelizing, intellectually or self-consciously, as it would appear fake. It has to be steeped in the humility of awe of the present moment, instinctive, natural, and unabashedly creative – which we have called charisma.

Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

These days in Basel streetcars you can see an ad that says something like: “Get closer to your enlightenment this coming weekend! Participate in our Yoga and meditation sessions, and come to enjoy peace, tranquility, and happiness.” What does everybody want when the idea of meditation comes up in one’s mind? Peace, tranquility, and happiness! And so, like flies swarming around a bright light, people flock to meditation venues, not realizing that they swarm around an idea, the idea of promised peace, tranquility, and happiness, hoping one day to fall into the honeypot of the promised Land of Cockaigne. Masses of people are deluded that way as they get involved in meditation with the meager promise of McMindfulness.

Granted, one has to start somewhere, and if an ad can get you in the door of the mindfulness journey, why not? And if in addition you can enjoy a weekend of bliss, all the power to you – except that it has nothing to do with mindfulness, let alone enlightenment. The problem is not so much how you get in the door, but how stubborn misunderstandings and distortions shape your journey once your interest is piqued. The way this particular ad is formulated lays the fertile ground for the activation of unconscious expectations that are bound to derail the mindfulness journey.

The foolish proposition encapsulated in this ad creates a striving and expectant state of mind that is sure to set one up for failure. Like Godot, the promised land is a mirage that endlessly retreats ahead of our advances, and is sure to never materialize wherever we are. I encounter such counterproductive psychological constellations in the mental microcosm of each student of mine, who complains of not being able to meditate or keep up a fruitful practice. There is no such thing as not being able to meditate, I like to say; there is only the lack of interest and unwillingness to meditate or the fact that one does something wrong in one’s attempt at meditating. There can be many things one does wrong during meditation practice, one of them being the unconscious pursuit of Godot inhabiting the Land of Cockaigne.

Imagine now taking up meditation without a shred of expectations, especially expectations of peace, tranquility, and happiness. Why would one want to do that? What would then be the point of meditating? This question is similar to why one would want to have children. Any answer you come up with falls short of the question’s essence. The best I can come up with is the word ‘rich’ – not as an answer, but as a suggestion illuminating the question. Children enrich our lives, a notion that includes pain and pleasure, delight and worry, feast and famine, tears and laughter, reward and sacrifice, and love and loss. So does meditation, and when it does, it is because we have learned the art of non-meditation, characterized by a process of consistently stripping experience of its associated notions that are over-saturated with connotations of perfection. We get, then, a conception of meditation as a purely procedural clothing worn over the indecent nakedness of something quite unsettling called reality, so as to allow it to appear in our consciousness with greater clarity. It is this retreating nude with its perplexing, dark qualities of truth that non-meditation or true meditation is trying to study and illuminate with relentless fervor and commitment. The glory of non-meditation lies in its simplicity, expressed in Zen by the idea of enlightenment as being able to be fully present and equanimous ‘chopping wood and carrying water’ – exalting the extraordinariness of the ordinary.

Take your daily life. It just unfolds – things you like and don’t like to do, tasks you must and choose to do, events you seek and endure, moments of peace and upheaval – in short, the full catastrophe. There is no escaping the full catastrophe – there is only the opportunity to embrace it with as much elegance, skill, and equanimity as possible. Chaos and rigidity are life-long companions we can never shake, but instead learn to meet with greater flexibility and humor, dynamically riding through those energy waves rather than getting stuck in them.

The promised land then is the experience of steadily improving skills in facing the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, without having to ‘take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them’, for such resistance is ultimately foolish and counterproductive. By chasing peace, tranquility, and happiness, we burn to death like the moth in a flame, because none of those mental states ever endure. We can only find wholeness by bringing the darkness into consciousness, not by chasing metaphors of light or perfection. ‘Wholeness’ is to my mind this bittersweet verb hiding behind a fictitious noun that can never become real as an accomplished goal. Wholeness is the process of forever and delightfully noticing improvement without ever worrying about a non-existent goal. That’s what wholeness is all about – forever and delightfully noticing improvement, knowing that that is the goal. Then, we have woken up to the world of non-meditation: Expertly guiding our minds to uncover the unsettling truth of reality for the purpose of clarity. Surprisingly, that clarity that illuminates everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly, comes with a sense of peace, serenity, and equanimity independent of circumstance – and even that ebbs and flows according to the law of impermanence.

To develop the art of non-meditation we begin by illuminating the unconscious misconceptions and false expectations attached to the wish to meditate and the notion of meditation. To this end, we learn the simple techniques that our mind has to offer for the development of clarity about itself and reality. Then, with proper guidance, the rest takes care of itself, as we improve our skills in seeing the unfathomable complexity of mind and reality, including the limitless human capacity for self-deception. As we thus fall into non-meditation as true meditation, we are engaged in the most radical act of love, which provides space for even this to be uncertain.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

The hidden power of awareness.

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Why Golgi?

The Golgi body is an organelle, a subcellular structure that is part of each cell like organs are part of each body. It was named in 1898 after its discoverer, the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi. Its function is to package proteins inside the cell so that they are transportable outside the cell as they are sent to their destination. As an alliteration to ‘God’, ‘Golgi’ creates a verbal resonance across the vast spectrum of seemingly separate domains of knowledge, from the most intricately physical to the numinous. Those domains are not separate at all, and similar to the Golgi body’s function, I try to package this knowledge in such a way as to make it transportable across such seemingly opposed and distant ways of knowing – science, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality.

Resistance to religion

A student in the Mindsight Intensive program sent me this eloquent email:

“I feel the urge to tell you that this week’s lecture touched me profoundly as it summarized at different points what is happening in my life. I will not pretend to understand everything you said, and will not try to use your language because I wouldn’t know how to. But most of the lecture resonated with me because it reflected what I am feeling in my day-to-day, in this journey of discovery I am in.

Since I am (finally) internalizing that there is no use in trying to control anything, I have now space to experience the order/energy/algorithm, which is beyond my understanding, but is making things move (don’t ask for an explanation, please). I just need to provide life with a nudge and the rest is taken care of … The Symphony of Life … I am in awe at the synchronicity and multidimensionality of events and the web of interactions. The examples in my life are too many, and maybe too menial, to list. I see the algorithm in action every day and am so proud to see myself watching life unfold, the good and the bad, welcoming the visits of my different parts, entertaining them, and sending them back home if needed. Spending more time with my Wise Self. So wonderful to witness my own life, eyes wide open, and experience it with a belly full of warrior strength, with joy and gratitude. I recognized during the lecture how I was living my life so diachronically and so unidimensionally, blinders on.

Now that I am more in touch with nature, with my body, my roots, I question (not too deeply, to tell you the truth) where I come from and the reason why I am here on this plane (feeling that there are other planes that I cannot grasp), I do feel that the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. I also notice that there are many small things that capture my attention intensely and I can feel their effect in my body (at a recent meditation retreat in the mountain, I saw myself in an ant carrying a big leaf, and I saw my need to ‘look up to the sky’ in a group of fireflies up in a tree). I feel how nature gives me answers in a different dimension. Wondering if I am resisting that I am opening my eyes to ‘God’s world’, just because of the word ‘God’ (my underline).

This Mindsight Intensive session has been the best I have taken so far. Or it just happened when I needed it most … speaking of Symphony of Life…”.

The numinous

We will address the meaning of ‘numinous’ in more detail below. Rudolf Otto coined this term to denote a complex psychological set of experiences that arise when we are faced with the sacred. This email contains a reference (‘God’s world’) to a numinous experience described by Dostoevski in ‘The House of the Dead’: Dostoevski records how one summer day during his term of imprisonment, while he was at work carrying bricks by the banks of the river, he was suddenly struck by the surrounding landscape and overcome with profound emotion:

“Sometimes I would fix my sight for a long while upon the poor smokey cabin of some baigouch; I would study the bluish smoke as it curled in the air, the Kirghiz woman busy with her sheep. … The things I saw were wild, savage, poverty-stricken; but they were free. I would follow the flight of a bird threading its way in the pure transparent air; now it skims the water, now disappears in the azure sky, now suddenly comes to view again, a mere point in space. Even the poor wee floweret fading in the cleft of the bank, which would show itself when spring began, fixed my attention and would draw my tears.“ Dostoevski then remarks that this was the only spot at which he saw “God’s world, a pure and bright horizon, the free desert steppes”; and in casting his gaze across the immense desert space, he found he was able to forget his “wretched self”.

Keiji Nishitani, the leading representative of the Kyoto School of Philosophy, whose work bridges Eastern and Western thought, comments on Dostoevski’s passage as follows:

“The things that Dostoevski draws attention to are all things we come in touch with in our everyday lives. We speak of them as real in the everyday sense of the word, and from there go on to our scientific and philosophical theories. But for such commonplace things to become the focus of so intense a concentration, to capture one’s attention to that almost abnormal degree, is by no means an everyday occurrence. Nor does it spring from scientific or metaphysical reflection. Things that we are accustomed to speaking of as real forced their reality upon him in a completely different dimension. He saw the same real things we all see, but the significance of the realness and the sense of the real in them that he experienced in perceiving them as real are something altogether qualitatively different. Thus was he able to forget his ‘wretched self’ and to open his eyes to ‘God’s world’.”

My student’s sentence encapsulates a thorny topic: “Wondering if I am resisting that I am opening my eyes to ‘God’s world’, just because of the word ‘God’.” The separation of what we deem to be secular (from Latin ‘saecularis’ = ‘worldly’) from the sacred (holy, connected to spirituality, religion, or God) is by no means a reflection of reality, but a mind construct. It is the result of a particular awareness mode we automatically ‘slide into’ as we leave childhood to grow into adulthood. This mode is our ordinary waking consciousness (including nighttime dreams), also called the field of consciousness, which envelops us like water envelops fish. We assume that this is the only available awareness mode we have and that the world revealed to us when we wake up in the morning is reality. Neither is accurate. The way we ordinarily experience life and interpret reality is a mental construct, a controlled, albeit useful illusion, created by the brain’s energy processing. The brain pares down energy flow absorbed through the senses from its environment to a bare minimum, in order to create in our central nervous system manageable information flow our organism can then efficiently use to ensure survival. As rich as this tapestry of day-to-day lived reality seems, it is just a construct or representation of reality based on this measly trickle of processed energy and information flow. This reality construct of the field of consciousness is furthermore only based on existence, ignoring that all existence arises from and disappears into non-existence. If we train our minds to open to a vast hidden potential lying in wait to be discovered and activated, more profound awareness modes are available to us and deeper healing becomes possible. Tapping into this potential allows us to see ordinary waking consciousness and its reality constructs from a far larger context and perspective, which significantly contributes to diminishing our suffering.

The field of consciousness and its maps and menus

The structure of this field of consciousness is characterized by concepts connected to emotions. The organism’s overall energy flow gets processed by the brain in extremely complex ways. This results in thoughts and concepts, which then get woven into clusters and associations in the form of narratives after having been imbued by emotions. We call this information flow. What is unique about information flow is that it is energy pointing beyond itself like a map pointing to a territory or a menu pointing to a meal. This very act of pointing contributes to a deeply engrained conceptual split between subject and object we call duality, which is a hallmark of the field of consciousness. After all, if something points, it starts somewhere and points to somewhere else. In our case, the pointing starts with the subject which points to something else, the object: ‘I’ (the subject) own a ‘house’ (object), ‘I’ see a ‘flower’, and so on – perceiving our very existence from the standpoint of ‘me’ the subject, immersed in a world of objects.

In this world of duality, even the ‘subject’ ‘I’ or ‘me’ becomes an object I can describe and comment on. If you were asked who you are, you would come up with a list of ‘things’ such as ‘man, woman, body, teacher, dancer, husband, wife, son, daughter, responsible, free spirit’, etc. In other words, you would come up yet again with a whole list of objects, unable to name the subject who names it all. Thus, the subject pointing to itself turns itself into an object of its own pointing. So even the ‘I’ in the sentence ‘I own a house’ is experienced as an object that is observable to me. The real me as the pure subject remains forever elusive. This split of reality into a world of duality often takes us so far as to almost completely erase any awareness of a connection between me the subject, and the world of objects around me. This is how, for example, the emotionally abusive husband of a recent patient of mine, can tell her with full conviction that her unhappiness in the marriage has nothing to do with him, that he is perfectly normal, and that she is the one who needs help.

To be clear, the thought, concept, or word ‘table’ is not the wooden 4-legged object it points to. Like the map or the menu, it is a pure construction in our mind. Thoughts and narratives are not reality presenting itself, but re-presented reality. They are not the territory of life experience we live in, the meal of fully embodied living, but only the map of the territory of reality we use in order to orient ourselves, the menu of the meal of lived life. Take any thought, any concept, any name, or any story, they are all about reality, like the finger pointing to the moon as they say in Zen, not reality or the moon itself. In other words, the conceptual world we live in and project onto reality is a virtual world of aboutness, an energy flow in our organism that has been processed by the brain to such complexity that it ends up pointing beyond itself.

As we have seen, the field of consciousness is one encompassing construction of energy flow that manifests as cognition connected to emotions, like the map of a territory or the menu of a meal. Both map and menu ‘point beyond themselves’ to the territory or meal respectively. Nowadays in the age of augmented and virtual reality, our maps have evolved to an extreme degree as we can populate our maps with photos and videos of the mapped regions, or even visit virtually in the comfort of our sofa. However, no matter how you slice it, no matter how augmented our maps may be, they will never be the territory we map. Going to visit Paris will always be a fundamentally different experience than virtual visits. Reading the item ‘moules frites a la marinière’ on the menu will never satisfy your hunger, no matter how succulent it sounds! Unwittingly, this is exactly the world we live in: A constructed map of reality, a menu of real experience, without much access to real reality. I recall the mind-bogglingly sad comment of a resident of Las Vegas, who in all earnest commented on how lucky they are in Las Vegas because they have all of Europe right there and don’t need to fly all the way to Europe to see the Eiffel tower or Venice.

Everything within that mapped world, even the subject ‘me’ who allegedly observes everything, including myself, get mapped as an object of our observation ‘out there’. This is called the far side of being. Within the inescapable field of consciousness, in which everything is named, through the naming process itself everything becomes part of the far side of being. I am here and the table is there, on the far side of me. Even when I look at myself, the elusive ‘I’ is somewhere not to be found, while the ‘myself’ is there on the far side. And so it is with God; whatever you may ever say about God, it is always and inescapably a map of a reality we cannot access from the vantage point of the field of consciousness. God is always on the far side, as we well know from the way we live and speak about it. God is in church, but not in a casino; the spiritual realm is over there where I am not, never right here where I am; spiritual life is in the afterlife, never right here in this life; God is in a monastery, not in a science lab; despite Jesus’ well-known invitations to all of humanity, non-Catholics are frowned upon when they take communion, maybe because the catholic God is head of a more exclusive club than the infidel pagan club. If I write about physiological processes in the body, I allegedly don’t write about spirituality – in short, God is sacred, yet forever intangible; Golgi is not sacred, and unfortunately for most people, the sacred is never here, but always on the far side somewhere else.

For my student, whom I would characterize as, shall we say, a rational humanist (I don’t know whether she would see herself that way), using the word ‘God’ entails too many distorting connotations for comfort, causing resistance to using it. With religion, some people associate belief, dogma, doctrine, the irrational, and even magical thinking, which is for them not a particularly appealing way of using their minds and coming to terms with existential concerns. Does it have to be like that? Are God and Golgi possibly much closer related than one might think?

The invisible cage

Coming back to our field of consciousness, here is the rub as Hamlet would say: We have this unconscious habit of confusing the map with the territory, the stories we live by with the reality we live in. Within this awareness mode, the only one most people are ever familiar with, everything is named, and we erroneously come to believe that what is named, is known. We were conditioned to that from a very young age when we began to develop language. Remember as a young parent your little munchkin, age two or so, pointing to something and you responding with “flower, dog, sky, etc.!” Or at a slightly older age being asked “what is that?” and your response “a bird, a car, a book, etc.” And then later “what is this man doing?” and you say “he is eating an apple”. And lastly the oh so annoying ‘why?’ stage, annoying because most of the time you did not have an answer: “Why don’t dogs have feathers?” “(God knows! ….)”. Anyway, you named the whole world for the child, and with these names, you wove whole narratives, in the end proudly gloating to other parents about this little genius you now have in your household, who knows how to read ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ at the age of four.

This process, as you can certainly recall, was invested with strong emotions of parental approval and child pride, reinforcing the message that having the menu will satisfy your hunger. Naming the objects of the world came to be synonymous with the belief that knowing the names means that we know what the names refer to. In addition, we came to presume that just because we have seen something before, we now know what it is, because it has the same name – yesterday’s flower in my backyard is the same as today’s flower at the store … just a flower. Our mind associates everything with names and every name with other names. When we see things again, we can then just use the old familiar names, and the more we converse with these names that we weave into stories, the more we mix with their content, get to know them and become more intimate with them. Before we know it, we have grown into an invisible, transparent virtual bubble of name and narrative associations, through which we see the world, believing that what we think and have associated with words, names and stories, is reality – and that, is one of the most profound illusions of human existence.

To be sure, naming to map is not a bad thing. It is what brains do in order to be able to turn amorphous energy flow into useful information bits we can own, manipulate, play with, and creatively combine in myriads ways. It becomes problematic when we (1) confuse named reality with real reality, (2) erroneously believe that knowledge coming from this naming process is knowledge of real reality, (3) allow the left brain to dominate our lives through this naming process, and (4) miss out on living the uniqueness of present-moment experience and real reality by being imprisoned by the constructed world of names that can only capture averaged experiences.

The structural limitations of our senses

Let’s get back to Golgi for a moment, my imaginative mascot for scientific, physical reality. Our external senses of touch, sight, sound, taste and smell receive different sections of the total spectrum of energy from the universe (called exteroception). Our organism receives the universe’s energy through our external senses in ways that are restricted by the specific human neural architecture. For example, a vulture has a different neural architecture, and therefore can receive olfactory energy to a much more sensitive degree than we can: It can smell carrion from a mile away, an impossible feat for us. The same applies to our eyes which are incapable of registering UV light or x-rays, and the energy we absorb through nutrition and air, or through our internal somatic senses when we ‘feel’ our body (called interoception). Whichever senses receive energy (exteroception or interoception), or processes absorb and release energy (nutrition, air, skin), the energy is fundamentally always the same: Mostly (to keep it simple) electromagnetic waves and electrochemical processes. Our senses, however, are architecturally limited in how large a chunk of the whole energy spectrum of the universe they are capable of registering.

Emergent properties

While our organism exchanges energy with its environment, another parallel exchange process unfolds simultaneously courtesy of our nervous system, which includes peripheral nerves, the autonomic nervous system, the spine, and the brain with its neurons and glia cells. The electrochemical energy received through our external and internal senses gets processed by the central nervous system in mindbogglingly complex ways. This energy processing is the construction of new energy patterns that emerge from the body. What is so extraordinary is that these resulting energy flow constructions we like to call ‘information’, and which we experience as thoughts, are a form of energy patterns that ‘mysteriously’ point beyond themselves. I say ‘mysteriously’, not because of some kind of hocus-pocus lurking in reality, but simply because we don’t yet know exactly how that happens. It happens though in the same way as a multitude of cars gives rise to traffic with its own laws; the complexity of energy flow processing gives rise to cognition with its own characteristic of pointing beyond itself. By ‘pointing beyond itself’ I mean quite simply that the word ‘dog’ is not the dog itself; it is merely a thought that points to something else than the thought itself, in this case, the dog. We summarily call these emergent energy constructions ‘mind’, but a closer look at them reveals what I have already described above: In ordinary, unexamined life, what we call ‘mind’ moves mostly within the field of consciousness, this invisible bubble of stories we mistake for reality. And mind, for that matter, obeys different laws and principles than the physical world, even though no other extraneous substances or notions about energy than the ones we know so far through physics, are required to make sense of it.

Re-connecting

Here is my potentially surprising claim: It is perfectly reasonable to see God and the sacred through science, and the secular physical through God. They are in fact one and the same. What differentiates the secular from the sacred is not content, but the degree to which we know the human mind. The same activity, let’s say carrying bricks on a construction site, can be secular or sacred depending on how we approach it and end up experiencing it. That difference is achieved not by slicing reality into secular and sacred parts as our naming mind likes to do, but by expanding our awareness beyond the field of consciousness. My student’s God then does not have to be resisted, because God does not have to remain a menu item, superficially mapped out by a name attached to associations that get projected onto an unknown reality ‘out there’ on the far side. Instead, it can be fully embraced as real reality manifesting itself directly, which we now know is beyond names, words, and stories – the nameless, timeless and unknowable. The notion of religion could become rehabilitated to its original Latin meaning, re-connection (from Latin ‘re-ligio’) with a depth of awareness not found in ordinary waking consciousness. Religion can evoke strong aversion if it is misunderstood as a socio-political organization responsible for providing a collection of dogmas designed to make people feel good and control their attitudes, behaviors, and morals. This is not to say that being part of a community that engages in shared rituals cannot be deeply inspiring. But when we explore the cracks and gaps of our ordinary waking consciousness and begin the journey beyond it towards the development of further awareness modes available to us, religion can move beyond being the depository of thoughts about deeper reality, and instead become a branch of the discipline of mindsight that can teach us how to let real reality be revealed to us, which is what the notion of ‘God’ ultimately points to.

The mirrored door

When we explore ordinary waking consciousness more closely, we quickly come to realize that it contains gaps and cracks. ‘There is something wrong in the state of Denmark’ (Shakespeare). Oedipus is blind to the fact that he is the cause of a plague ravaging Thebes, having unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. We tend to be blind to the fact that our endless suffering cannot be eradicated by improving the nightmare of ordinary waking consciousness. We must wake up from it and doing so is not easy.

The field of consciousness is like a mirrored door we do not recognize as a door. We strut in front of it, endlessly looking at the prison of constructed reality reflected back to us, narcissistically admiring the power of our own constructions without appreciating their limitations and destructive aspects. We do everything we can to push away and ignore the underbelly of existence, which amounts to nothing more than trying to improve the world of nightmares. Strikingly, this also applies to much of the Western mindfulness meditation industry, which for the most part exclusively focuses on aspects of the field of consciousness, depriving us of seeing the mirrored door as a passage that opens to the dormant potential of two further awareness modes we usually never tap into.

I am reminded of a cartoon I saw decades ago in my youth. It depicted the human condition. You saw three obviously unfriendly and disgruntled giants walking in single file, one behind the other, all three of them stooped forward holding their heads at about waist height. On top of them, along their horizontal backs ran an unsteady-looking train track, upon which a tiny passenger train was driving along. You clearly would not have wanted to be in that train, as one of these moody giants could have stood up straight at any moment and thrown the whole train into oblivion. The underbelly of existence is non-existence. We may occasionally touch upon it intellectually, but beyond that, we avoid it like the plague by staying within the ‘safe’ confines of the golden cage of existence, our ordinary waking consciousness.

Everything that exists appears to be coming into existence at some point in time and disappearing out of existence at another point in time. From the perspective of the field of consciousness, everything – and I mean everything – comes and goes, is born and dies, appears and disappears. Even the eternal God of religious institutions imagined to be beyond the cycle of birth and death, exists in endless time, and since time is something that exists, endless or not, it is bound to arise and disappear. In short, from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, death is inevitable, and we mean here the decomposition of our embodied existence. But death is so distasteful that ordinary waking consciousness cleverly designs stories of survival in the form of thoughts we believe in and that seems to make us feel better: The rainbow bridge, paradisiacal places we will rejoin our loved ones, notions of eternal souls, or seeing our loved ones all around us wherever we go in their decomposed chemical form of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, potassium, sodium, etc. as it gets recycled into the natural world. There is nothing wrong with these stories of survival, except that for many people they do not suffice and lead to limited results with regards to their attempts at decreasing suffering in their lives. They miss recognizing the mirrored door as a passage and limit access to the full awareness potential we all have.

Nothingness

The necessary awareness jump we need to take to open the mirrored door is to surrender to annihilation, nullification, or nothingness – arriving at a dead end and falling off the cliff. That is not easy and can create a lot of fear. It is therefore imperative to have the appropriate mind training to take that step without causing harm. In opening that door, we enter the mystery of the numinous introduced above. This mystery is not understood as something otherworldly but in the sense of its Latin roots meaning ‘obscure’. It is about meeting a wholly other aspect of reality never seen before, typically experienced with blank wonder and stupor. It is entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life and evokes a reaction of silence. We begin enlarging our awareness to include the awareness mode of the field of nothingness.

At first, we meet the nullification of the world, during which process we learn to surrender to nothingness. However, for a time nothingness is still seen from the perspective of an enduring self, and therefore continues to partially remain within the field of duality. What that means is that ‘nothing’ still survives as ‘something’ we are aware of. The thing we are learning to surrender to is called ‘nothing’. As we eventually realize that this inevitable nullification of existence also applies to the constructed self, it also dissolves into nothing, and no vantage point remains from which to see nothing as something. At that point the breakthrough to the next most encompassing awareness mode occurs, the field of emptiness.

It is called that way because we then fully realize reality to be as it is, free from our confusion with the constructed maps about reality. There is no attachment left to the constructions of the field of consciousness. This does not mean that we don’t grieve the loss of our loved ones anymore, or that we stop paying our taxes. It simply means that we have stopped seeing existence as fundamental to reality, and instead have come to realize that everything is nameless, timeless potential in perpetual movements of coalescence and decomposition, so that nothing is ever born, and nothing ever dies. There is only movement and transformation, and that is our true identity. As they say in Zen, at the beginning of the journey (as we explore the field of consciousness) a mountain is a mountain (unidimensional view); in the middle of the journey (as we explore the field of nothingness), the mountain ceases to be a mountain (two-dimensional view); at the end of the journey (when the field of emptiness reveals itself), the mountain is again a mountain, but a profoundly different, now three-dimensional view of the mountain. When we started, we were awed by the magic show of the field of consciousness, believing that the magician has superpowers we could be jealous of not having. In the middle, we became disheartened by the realization that these are only tricks and the whole magic we saw was fake (the field of nothingness). In the end, we have been transformed by the power of the performance and can now fully enjoy the magic show, knowing that what we see is caused by a bag of tricks, allowing ourselves to admire the power of these tricks, and knowing that behind it all lies the timeless extraordinariness of the ordinary that is capable of such wonders.

Navigating the numinous

The moment we enter the field of nothingness, fundamental transformations occur, and they are not easy to navigate. Sooner or later, we encounter the fear of giving up our familiar prison walls, and that comes with many painful feelings of meaninglessness, despair, pointlessness, forsakenness, absurdity, sadness, depression, anxiety, and panic. This is the phase of the forty days or forty years in the desert and corresponds to the aspect of the numinous experienced as tremendous (from Latin = ‘awful, dreadful, horrible’). It provokes terror because it presents itself as an overwhelming power causing a profound sense of disturbance as we realize how wildly deluded our sense of reality within the field of consciousness is. We experience a certain shrinking, a sense of inadequacy to cope with such an enormous discovery, followed by deep humility. In Shakespeare’s words: “Under it, my genius is rebuked.”

Once we have worked through the nullification of not only the world but also the self, the second aspect of the numinous presents itself as the field of emptiness appears. It is experienced as fascinating (from Latin = ‘bewitch, charm, dazzle, enchant, captivate, enrapture, enthrall, beguile’). We now find a sense of wonder, awe, and love, of merciful graciousness, and a sense of glory and beauty as an adorable quality. We realize the blessing, redeeming quality, and salvation-bringing power of our transformation through the three awareness modes. As they say in Zen, we find ourselves to be able to be ‘free and easy in the marketplace’, which means experiencing peace and serenity independent of circumstance. This break-out from the field of consciousness through the field of nothingness (“forget about his wretched self”) into the field of emptiness (“God’s world”) is experienced as deeply liberating, calming, grounding, enlivening, and healing, causing suffering to melt like snow in the warm sun of deep self-awareness of reality.

Coda

Through all that, the work of chopping wood and carrying water (Zen) or doing the laundry (Kornfield) begins. This is the lifelong task of living one’s life as an unending process of noticing improvement on our transformative journey through the three awareness modes, inspiring others, and bringing soothing, healing love into this world. The beauty in all this is that it does not require beliefs, gurus, churches, dogmas, miracles, magical thinking, or otherworldly imaginations. All we need is the power of direct, embodied, present-moment lived experience, examined by the shared subjective reality of psychotherapeutic, meditative, contemplative, and philosophical reflective tradition, and grounded by the shared objective reality of science. All we need to do is closely examine our minds, and reality presents itself to us in its full glory, from Golgi to God. That is the greatest miracle I can think of.

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Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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’.

Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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A meditative journey through the power of darkness

Creativity has its roots in the power of darkness. Orpheus may have been an extremely talented artist of very ancient times, but he also became a powerful archetype in the ancient Greek and Roman imagination. He was venerated as the greatest of all poets and musicians. As a hero, he visited the underworld and returned to the world of the living. He was an augur and seer who was also credited with several other gifts to mankind, such as medicine, writing, and agriculture.

The most famous story about Orpheus involves his wife, Eurydice, archetypally his Muse. At their wedding, she was attacked by a satyr, a mythical creature symbolizing raw and untamed creativity and sexuality. In her efforts to escape, she fell into a nest of vipers and suffered a fatal bite on her heel. Her body was discovered by Orpheus who, overcome with grief, played such sad and mournful songs that all the nymphs and gods wept. On their advice, Orpheus traveled to the underworld. His music softened the hearts of Hades and his wife Persephone, who agreed to allow Eurydice to return with him to earth on one condition: He should walk in front of her and not look back until they both had reached the upper world. Orpheus set off with Eurydice following. She must have been unsure of his commitment and sought reassurance on their way to the upper world by trying to get his attention, maybe even feeling more at home in the darkness of the underworld. As to Orpheus, as soon as he had reached the upper world, he immediately turned to look at her, forgetting in his eagerness that both of them needed to be in the upper world for the condition of her return to the living to be met. As Eurydice had not yet crossed into the upper world, she vanished for the second time, this time forever.

This archetypal story sheds light on the fact that creativity has its roots in the darkness of the unknown, not in the light of consciousness. No seed germinates in the sun. Creativity and healing go hand in hand because both thrive on multiplying connectivity within the embodied brain and between innumerable mindstates we are capable of. Fostering creativity and healing requires the courage to travel to the darkness of the underworld, which has generative and creative power. The deepest depth of the underworld is meaninglessness, forsakenness, and nothingness, the darkness of which contains the timeless source of all existence. It can never be brought to light, but only to flourish into its myriads of forms through our transparency towards the invisible and uncontrollable unknown we can only receive through openness. Eurydice is thus bound to belong to the underworld as the great muse and mother giving birth to the many facets of reality through Orpheus’ consciousness.

Mindfulness meditation is not just a technical activity, but like playing an instrument, it uses a precise technique to harness the creative power of its instruments, the brain, and mind, for the purpose of healing. How can anyone ever expect to penetrate the depths of our inherently creative healing power without walking through the shadows of the valley of death? The pervasive pitfall I see many meditators fall into is the illusion of being able to heal and escape pain and suffering from the comfort of their couch – without having to leave the comforting light of their familiar ordinary waking consciousness. The adventure of awakening is bound to begin with a plunge into the uncertain darkness of the unknown.

There is a scene in the Amazon Video series ‘The Great’, where Catherine The Great and her army commander in chief argue about going to war. This by the way reminds me of Arjuna and Krishna arguing about exactly the same thing in the Bhagavad Gita. Her commander (like Krishna, and by the way Jesus also in several Bible passages) argues for the importance of going to war: “I suggest going to war, not because of a lust for blood. I feel for the soldiers lost, but I also understand war is a place where men are found. They look at death, they understand life deep in their marrow. They are asked questions with impossible answers and yet find them. They embrace the dark in themselves, and so understand the light. And the country, well, it’s the same for it.” To which I might add: And your mind, well, it’s the same for it.
Then the dialogue proceeds:
Commander: “The war will define us!”
Catherine: “Not going will also define us.”
Commander: “I just know it is my faith, that battle. I have known it forever.”
Catherine: “Perhaps I will bring you a new fate.”
Commander: “Wouldn’t call it fate if there were new ones.”
At that moment a crocodile crawls into the room, a beast the whole court was looking for because it had attacked members of the court. People did not know what kind of animal it was and in their ignorance fantasized it to be some kind of mythical dragon with wings that had come as a bad omen for the fact that Catherine had usurped power from her emperor husband, who initially was a complete, ignorant brute. Catherine is trying to bring reason and compassion into people’s lives and the following exchange ensues:
Commander: “Now we kill it?”
Catherine: “No, not the animal, but we do kill the idea.”

This dialogue speaks for itself. The war metaphor is widespread in spiritual literature. Taking on the mind is the most difficult thing you will ever embark on, and it often feels like going to war against deeply conditioned, stubbornly tyrannical, and hopelessly misguided beliefs. To this end, we must turn away from substance and concreteness (‘not kill the animal’) towards the elusive nature of process and meaning (‘kill the idea’). We must also face the darkness to find the light, the way I have written elsewhere we have to face nihility to find the liberation of emptiness. This archetypally male war metaphor is as important as the archetypally female one impersonated by Catherine, who advocates for attunement, compassion, and reason. Surprisingly, war and compassion are the two sides of the same coin of awakening; both have to go hand in hand, which is why Catherine and the commander get along so well.

What if, as we do in the Mindsight Intensive, you could start simply, with a review of technique that allows you to go to war successfully, knowing your weapons and how to use them? How about learning the art of less effort for greater gain? Then, you would open your vista on the landscape of consciousness, awareness, and reality by having the necessary skill and expertise to properly examine your constructs and delusions. You then would gain access to three different awareness modes, the field of ordinary waking consciousness, of nihility, and of emptiness. You would proceed by first reviewing the sitting meditation process: Dynamic alignment and its four aspects; how to use the tools of intention, attention, and peripheral awareness as you deal with the wandering mind; the embodiment of the attitude of COAL (D. Siegel: curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love); describing and not explaining as you use the sensorimotor vocabulary to make sure you focus on conduit process rather than construct content; the intricacies of working with the breath and decontracting with each out-breath; and how to properly end a formal practice.

The Power of Darkness

As you master the technique, components of reality as revealed at first by the field of ordinary waking consciousness, later by the fields of nihility and emptiness, come to light: Pain and suffering; resistance; impermanence; spaciousness; duality and the nature of objects of the world and the observing subject of ‘me’. You would discover how the familiar field of ordinary waking consciousness is limited and biased towards substance, seeing the world as a collection of things, rather than processes. In this field you would also find the fundamental question ‘why are there things rather than nothing in the universe?’ You would be able to allow your meditation practice to lead you to this field’s limitations as you learn to embrace the inevitable dissolution of everything through impermanence – meaninglessness, forsakenness, absurdity, nothingness, death, spacelessness, timelessness, and namelessness, thereby opening your view onto a contextually broader field of awareness, called the field of nihility. Embracing nothingness is a powerful healer, you would discover, allowing you to take the last step towards the most encompassing awareness mode, the field of emptiness. And you would embark on this incredible journey for the simple reason of finding deep abiding peace and serenity independent of circumstance. How about that?

Copyright © 2021 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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As opposed to person-to-person psychotherapy, mindfulness meditation is primarily a solo exploration. Because in both cases we deal with the same mind, brain, and body, healing principles of psychotherapy have to be adapted to the solo journey of meditation. This course provides an advanced, practical, and experiential mindfulness meditation training conceived to hold participants as close to direct experience as possible.

Having access to at least four awareness modes (fields of consciousness, nihility, emptiness, and return), we begin by working within our naturally available awareness mode, the field of consciousness.

1. The field of consciousness
   • Foundational mindfulness meditation techniques: We begin by making sure we have a solid grasp on the foundational techniques of mindfulness meditation: Alignment, intention, attention versus peripheral awareness, conduit and constructor, breathing, decontraction, COAL (curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love).
   • Polyvagal regulation: Instead of conceptualizing our experience as pleasurable or painful, which activates our danger systems, we learn to tune into and track the processes, by which via the autonomic nervous system our brain monitors what is going on both in- and outside the organism (called neuroception). This allows us to describe our experiences in a more neutral, objective and equanimous way in terms of the three polyvagal states of regulatory activation (ventral vagal, sympathetic, dorsal vagal).
   • Resourcing: The fundamental challenge we face in our attempt at living a balanced, health-promoting, and stress-reducing life is to effectively deal with the organism’s inevitable energy flow fluctuations from chaos and rigidity to the Goldilocks zone of integration. Nothing can be achieved if we are imprisoned in states of high activation or paralysis. In order to be able to consciously contribute to our organism’s regulatory processes that try to move it towards integration and health, we must know how to create a sense of safety by accessing the following resources:
     • Ventral vagal access: Learning to shape polyvagal regulation by not giving in to habitual sympathetic and dorsal vagal survival responses and instead practice patterns of ventral vagal connection, integrate it by consolidating awareness and access to the resilient pathways of the ventral vagal system, and connect in new ways to oneself, others and the world.
     • Attunement: Learning to notice and hold in awareness both resonance and dissonance in our relationships to ourselves, parts of ourselves, others and our environment, thereby respecting differences and cultivating compassionate connections.
     • Breathing: Learning to work with the breathing movement by familiarizing oneself with (1) its different dimensions: Non-interference, location of breathing movement in the body, in- and outbreath quality, breathing rhythm, in- and outbreath length, speed, emphasis, pauses; (2) connection to other parts of the body or the environment; (3) connection to the imagination.
     • Sacred place: Using imagination or memory to settle in a place that feels sacred.
     • Grids: Open or closed. Different grids: Body grid with body resource locations; grid within grid; light, antithetical, medical, ancestral resources, auditory grids.
     • Attachment: Orienting towards attachment resource that get precisely described; learn to hold parts within wise MPC awareness. Trusting connection with others, enhanced connection with the body via grid, sense of belonging to a sacred place, deeper connection with the Core Self.
     • Distress: Provides the opportunity for healing; the state of distress is utilized as a resource from which healing unfolds. Turn towards it. Use distress eye position to zero in on distress and bring COAL to it.
     • Personal power being: Using the imagination to conjure up sacred or spiritual beings of all kinds, including animals, angels, dragons etc.
     • Core self: Unconditionally loving, non-intentional Being Self, felt beyond the boundaries of the individual. Transcends space and time. Everlasting; pure consciousness; divine self; true, authentic essence separate from trauma history. Age regression technique. Core Self eye position. This dimension points to the field of nihility and emptiness explored later in the course.
     • Parts identification: Differentiating, naming and attuning to different energy flow streams as parts with roles for survival and thriving. Three basic ones (from both ‘Trinity of trauma’ by Nijenhuis and Internal Family Systems): Fragility or exiles, control or firefighters, ignorance or managers.

Once we are thoroughly familiar with these techniques and resources while working within the field of consciousness, we begin to notice its limitations and the need to access other awareness modes that are hidden from view and thus beyond what we are used to (transcendence). A hidden awareness dimension begins to show up as we notice signs of limitations within the field of consciousness. Accessing those awareness modes that are beyond normal, everyday waking and dreaming consciousness is in fact a major resource in itself. But because of the radical orthogonal shift out of the field of consciousness they require, we treat them as separate chapters.

2. The field of nihility:
   • The dawn of nihility: Noticing the signs that herald its discovery, such as the existential hallmarks of absurdity and meaninglessness, loneliness and forsakenness, purposelessness, and death.
   • Path to nothingness – science and religion.
   • Negation and annihilation of all existence; relative nothingness; remnant of duality.
   • Transcendence
   • Default mode network; pre/trans fallacy;
   • Impermanence;
   • Transverbal and transcognitive awareness; knowing of not knowing.
3. The field of emptiness:
   • Affirmation and nullification.
   • Absolute nothingness – sunyata.
   • No-thingness, no essence.
   • Non-attachment (as opposed to detachment).
   • Non-duality.
   • Verbal paradoxes; namelessness, timelessness.
   • Life
4. The field of return:
   • After enlightenment, the laundry.
   • Everyday living and love.

To paint you a picture of this curriculum content, imagine going for a scuba diving expedition. Section 1.1 describes the instruments you need and how to use them. Section 1.2. tells you about how your organism reacts to diving deep into the water and how to safely regulate that. Section 1.3. explores the different resources you can draw on to deal with various challenges that may arise from both the environment and your body while you dive. Section 2 is the equivalent of discovering ocean regions that you have never seen before with life forms that defy some of the biological principles you are familiar with. Section 3 reveals how everything discovered during your dive hangs together in a vast web of interconnectedness. Section 4 is the educational activity you engage in after having returned from your diving adventure.

Needless to say, this is a huge curriculum that would require a few years to be fully absorbed. However, the Mindsight Intensive will provide enough highlights from each section to enable students to incorporate the learning into their daily practice, and further their skill to expand awareness towards the limits of the field of consciousness and transcend it into the fields of nihility, emptiness, and return.

Literature:
* = Easy reading; ** = challenging text, specialist lingo; *** = Very difficult text requiring in-depth study.

1. ‘Polyvagal Exercises For Safety And Connection’, by Deb Dana.*
2. ‘Comprehensive Resource Model’, by Lisa Schwartz et al.**
3. ‘Religion And Nothingness’, by Keiji Nishitani.***
4. ‘The Religious Philosophy Of Keiji Nishitani’, edited by Taitetsu Unno.**
5. ‘How To Change Your Mind’ (on the new science of psychedelics), by Michael Pollan.*

Copyright © 2021 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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