The oceanographer Francois Serano recounts an experience with a young male sperm whale, who approached the researchers with curiosity and communicated the way sperm whales usually only communicate when they intimately interact among themselves. It was a highly unusual encounter, as if the whale wanted to tame the researchers and invite them to become part of their own. This meeting of two curiosities from vastly different worlds made him feel he was in harmony with the world. This curiosity about the radically other, that which is so profoundly different from me and by all accounts appears unrelatable, and the caring respect for each other across this large divide of different realities as we spend time in the presence of each other, creates peace, calm and harmony. This peace reveals itself to be communicative.

We have a habit of wanting to make the radically other our own, to assimilate it into our own reality, even devour it as a way of satisfying our thirst for knowledge, power, safety, and belonging. Case in point: Stuffed hunted wild animals as trophies at people’s homes, ethnic cleansing, and assimilation. We use our mind and the constructed sense of self to literally suck like a vacuum the radically other such as our body’s otherness into our familiar intellectual orbit, believing that we can understand its full complexity. Alternatively, we have to defend against other cultures, who with a similar mind like ours attempt to invade us. We have no clue how to really get to know the radically other by honoring the safe distance that invites the other to reveal itself.

In the presence of a wild animal, one cannot cheat, rationalize, defend or lie. Reality is inescapable and one is completely naked, forced to embrace vulnerability and simplicity in full presence. This also applies to being with and in our bodies. The body not only keeps the score, but has an existence, motives, drives, agendas, and energy flow all its own, belonging to a very different world from our world of thoughts.

When with an empty head and open ears we offer ourselves completely to nature, the other, and the body, and when we do that with mindful attention and respect, one then discovers an unexpected and infinite world we never imagined existed, which is the world we need to share with our children. This kind of curiosity for and openness to the radical other creates the real, deep sense of peace we crave.

We will never understand the radical other, the way we will never understand a whale or a whale us. What is essential though is the fact that there is intention on both parts to bridge the vast gap of different existential realities. We don’t need to fully understand the other to feel good; all we need is to want to understand the other across vast canyons of mystery. Given that we inter-are with everything, to live in peace and harmony with everything means finding the right distance that allows for the kind of presence that is the sum of freedom and togetherness. The space between me and the other is a matter of degrees of separation that ensure the thriving of curiosity as a way of safely reaching out without aggression or hesitation. In that sense, nature is inherently deeply social and teaches us how to live in peace by honoring uniqueness and variety.

Loaded with prejudice and preconceived ideas about the radically other, we become scared of otherness and difference. We then form opinions and engage in a distorted and dangerous chatter about that, which one has never mindfully reached out to, visited, explored, or invited for tea with an open heart. The result is war, ignorance, and self-imprisonment. We ought to become aware that we are inextricably connected to this world; and then, honoring that interconnectedness, that membership in a large web that has no weaver, makes us realize how serene we become, the way nature is an interwoven world that brings serenity. Segregation, isolation, and protective demarcation cause stress and tension, not peace. In reaching out with mindful curiosity, we always discover that the other is rich, and has marvelous stories to tell. Even if it is difficult or impossible to understand each other, it is the curious attempt at reaching out with kindness that counts. Whenever one goes to meet the radically other, other cultures, other species, other environments, our bodies, one can find that right distance that allows interacting and inter-being in peace. We then discover at the same time the unity of the world through that which we all fundamentally share when it comes to important questions, but also the diversity and the inequalities that are based on everyone’s uniqueness. We should never hierarchize these inequalities, attaching value judgments to them, but recognize them as what constitutes the world’s richness.

Let’s look at the jungle, a seemingly chaotic place of deadly competition, internal survival wars, and mutual interspecies aggression. We call that the law of the jungle. A closer look reveals a very different picture. When in the wild immediate survival needs are met, what’s left is free time to caress, to play, to explore, to just be there, wander around and cultivate the useless. The law of the jungle is about laziness, frugality, and cooperation, not striving, accumulation, and war. It is our minds that create this sense of time as a limited commodity, within which we feel constant pressure, the pressure to perform, to achieve, to distract, even to kill time and never waste it. We have a pathological and oppressive notion of time as something that can be wasted, killed, used or lost, as we go through life driven by the fear of never having accumulated enough. In the wilderness of nature and the healthy nature of our bodies, accumulation does not exist beyond what is necessary for survival, cooperation is the foundation for thriving, and laziness or leisure is the name of the game.

The jungle and the oceans are cauldrons of evolution, and competition is not the motor of evolution – cooperation and association are. Take corals: They are a combination of two small, seemingly insignificant, most simple organisms, and yet they have given rise to humungous structures that have profoundly changed the planet’s geography and given rise to many new and varied environments making an incredible diversification of life possible. The small has huge impacts that are only visible over time! Evolution gives rise to diversity, not privileged selections. What we are used to calling ‘natural selection’ is in fact natural diversification. Survival of the fittest and removal of the weak and dysfunctional is not the way nature works; these notions are human mind constructions about nature. On the contrary, what we thought was ‘natural selection’ and now understand to be natural diversification, is about the principle of encouragement of anything that has the ability to reproduce and survive, however imperfect, weak, or defective it may be. Evolution and its natural diversification are incredibly generous. As long as reproduction, creativity, and survival are possible, go ahead. Natural diversification supports the whole package, the unity of morphology, physiology, behavior, and where applicable social interactions, as long as the entity can reproduce itself. Nature is creative and tolerant; it is human beings that are selective, impoverishing, and intolerant. We reduce, nature multiplies. Our ideal is power, superman or superwoman, the hero, the strongman we elect into dictatorships. For nature, everyone is superman with its own uniqueness and assets, like the people of a democracy. Diversity in nature is beautiful, rich, and solid the way integration as linked differentiation manifests the FACES flow of energy, Flexibility, Adaptability, Coherence, Emergence, Stability, and health. The more we select by picking the good and discarding the weak, the bad, and the mistake, the more we reduce the potential for new creations.

Our world is now so small and we are so many that we cannot escape otherness anymore the way we could in the past with only a few human groupings on the planet. Isolationism profoundly goes against the laws of nature, which is the most creatively flexible, adaptive and stable phenomenon on this planet. Isolationism cannot lead to anything else than impoverished selection with catastrophic consequences from walls to bombs and wars as the symptom of our self-imprisonment.

The genius of nature is reproduction in the inexorable flow of change, and with such rich and enormously creative reproduction come little mistakes that sneak into the unfolding process, creating variety. The way the human mind creates by avoiding mistakes through repetition and reductive selection for a certain purpose, is antithetical to change, resilience and adaptability. The problem is that the purpose for which we select will inevitably change, and what has been selected for that purpose cannot adapt. To foster adaptability, we need errors and mistakes we can then nourish with a beginner’s mind instead of being so afraid of them, afraid of making them. Errors have no purpose and therefore tolerate any changing circumstance, thus always winning the survival game. When there is change, variety always provides at least one specimen able to do something new adapted to the demands of change. Variety always provides options to adapt. With monoculture, when there is a change, there is no variant to take over or compensate and adapt – it’s the end, meaning death and extinction. This is why in deep meditation we access the open plane of infinite possibilities, that vast, indescribable, and non-definable awareness itself as the source of everything that comes into being.

The current state of our planet causes many to give up, but giving up ignores the incredible creativity of nature that bursts open when we begin to simply protect it and not exploit it. Resignation and inaction are plainly inconceivable and morally irresponsible. The solution can only be found by humanity as a whole working together, with everyone involved.

The core learning points from all this for mindfulness practitioners consist of the following idea: To liberate ourselves from suffering, we need to liberate ourselves from the prison of stories and their associated emotions we incessantly and compulsively create in our minds. These stories are nothing more than the construction of an airtight virtual reality, in which we are the protagonists that act in the storied drama and continually try to make sense of our place in the scheme of the world. The body is the vehicle par excellence to extricate ourselves from our narrative bubble, and attention to the somatic sensations in the whole body, the breathing, and the experiences from the external five senses are paramount to teach us to disidentify from the stories we tell ourselves. However, the body and the external world are the radically other I was speaking about earlier, and it is very challenging for most to fully immerse ourselves into the experience of reaching out across a vast canyon of mystery to the radically other and unfamiliar the way the sperm whale did with the researcher and vice versa. It is this act of loving, well-meaning curiosity for and reaching out to what is entirely outside our familiar realm of comfort that lies at the core of healing and peace. The principles and laws of nature described above apply most definitely to our daily mindfulness practices, and in particular, the realization that nature entails not only the trees, rivers, forests, animals, and oceans in the external world, but also our very own embodied mind and body we inhabit day-in and day-out.

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

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What the mindfulness journey is really about

Was it not for a recent dream one of my patients brought into a session, in which a two-faced person appeared, I would likely not have started this blog with Janus. Consciously, my patient knew nothing about this Roman god. I concluded, that the collective unconscious Carl Jung described is alive and well even in this technological day and age of science and computers, where studying Roman mythology is hardly the main menu in our school curriculums anymore. Come to think of it, that the collective unconscious has not lost its power is hardly surprising, given that the brain that inhabited our ancestor’s skulls 30,000 years ago, is anatomically and physiologically still the same brain as today – and as far as its wiring is concerned, in its fundamental functions it is still wired the same, just different in some of its higher cortical functions. Granted, some of the content in the collective unconscious has of course shifted with the cultural shifts of our civilization.

Was I an ancient Roman to pick a god for my role as meditation teacher and psychotherapist, it would be Janus. The two-faced deity is found in many cultures, all the way back to original Hinduism and Vedic times. Fast forward to today, the ‘god’ notion has morphed into the psychological notion of archetype through Jung’s work, a universal, collective and unconscious psychological force with cultural significance. Janus’ two faces look into the opposite directions of past and future while belonging to the same head that creates and contemplates reality. They are sometimes a feminine and masculine face. Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and transitions responsible for change, transformation, motion, and time. He is the god of space, time, and creation, always present in the midst of transitions, with one eye towards what came before, and one towards what comes next. In our work with mindfulness, he may as well be the symbol of the present moment, which as I have explored in my previous blog, invites us into its inescapable orbit with the beckoning scriptural and mythological call ‘Once upon a time, ….’ or ‘In the beginning …’, both formulaic idioms that in today’s mindfulness parlance would translate into ‘Bring your attention to the present moment and begin to explore what you find.’ In the double role of Janus, I am also related to the name’s etymological roots in the Latin ‘ianua’, meaning ‘door’, suggesting that Janus is the ‘ianitor’, the doorkeeper of transitions. You see where I am going with this: Could it be that as a meditation teacher and psychotherapist I am the janitor, opening the doors to the place of work and education, and closing them after everyone has left in order to safeguard the sacred place of daily busyness and erudition, then going about my real business of cleaning it in the dark hours of the silent night when everyone has left it behind with unsolved messes the way we all leave behind our unconscious?

The champion of the present moment is mindfulness, defined as impartial present moment awareness with kind acceptance of what is. When I sit across a patient or a student, I sit there in humble awareness of my role as janitor and gardener, mindful of the present moment as I engage with an attitude of kind acceptance with this other human being, sharing and exploring our common humanity and the mutual dance of inquiry into what is. In this act, which is a profound act of love towards the other and myself, we are both not just aware of, but inescapably embedded in the present moment, always partially aware and mostly unknowingly unaware.

With our thoughts, we can create the temporary illusion of not being in the present moment and in far-out places and times of our imagination. That escape invariably fails as our neighbor in the theatre of life coughs and brings our attention away from the plot on the screen into directly lived reality. We inevitably wake up from the movies of our own creation to realize that we are tightly gripping the armrests of our theatre seat in the only reality we can fall back on, the stubborn reality of the inescapable truth of Now.

‘In the beginning’, meaning ‘in the present moment’, the two faces of Janus, past and future, are one as they only exist now. In this Now, there are no categories of energy flow except for those we create as maps to orient ourselves in the territory of Now. Our memories of yesterday occur now, our anticipations and plans for a future occur now, our history is completely enfolded into the layers of now, and above all, in this Now there is nothing but wholeness, even if that wholeness appears fragmented at times. Unless I dissociate or compartmentalize, I can only meet my fellow human beings and myself as whole organisms in the inescapable wholeness of now. Therefore, within the context of mindfulness, I personally cannot separate meditation from psychotherapy while looking my fellow human in the eye. For practical reasons I can separate the two in the way I introduce them to students and patients, but that is all. Sitting with a person who asks for help I am thus compelled to see wholeness in the process of transformation, not static ‘issues’ to be dealt with through compartmentalized techniques.

I am always at once a meditation teacher and psychotherapist, which gets reflected in the way I work. Showing my students how to access the mystery of Now always entails the realization that our memories and stories about our history are also revealed now. Even if the content of these memories and stories does not get extensively explored within the context of a meditation class, awareness and openness to its narrative power and degree of coherence are crucial in guiding students towards the knowledge that additional psychotherapy will be essential for their success on their journey towards health (see my blog on ‘The Dangers Of Improper Guidance By Meditation Teachers‘). Conversely, psychotherapeutic reflections on our stories, and how we create them, is frequently not enough to heal, because the patient needs training in here-and-now attentiveness in order to be able to see the inner world with greater precision, and therefore greater depth. This often requires mindfulness meditation training to complement the psychotherapeutic endeavor. In short, unless meditation includes awareness of its procedural limitations with regards to the stories we create, and psychotherapy fosters meditative attentiveness beyond the story content it explores, we tend to fall short on our life’s journey towards wisdom and health most of us so fervently desire. The reason lies in how we are wired with the complexity of nine domains of integration, all of which require our attention for our journey towards wholeness.

According to Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) we are wired with nine clusters of neurocircuitry responsible for nine functions of the mind that are essential for healthy living. Those are the domains of integration just mentioned. When these clusters function harmoniously, we say they are integrated, and that translates into health. When one or more of them do not function harmoniously and find themselves in states of chaos, rigidity, or both, we develop dis-ease and both physical and psychological diseases. In our role as healers, we cannot in good conscience ignore any of these domains, nor privilege one over any other. When we suffer, something is rotten in the united states of these nine domains, and we need the expertise that gives us full access to all necessary tools to address disharmonies. Mindfulness, with its combined tools of meditation and psychotherapy, provides what is necessary to address the whole human being.

Not all domains of integration are accessible through either one or the other of the two modalities, meditation or psychotherapy. Some require one, some the other, some both. At the core of both, however, is mindfulness, which could be characterized with one word as attentiveness. When we are attentive, impartiality, present-moment awareness, acceptance of what is, and kindness are all included. Sitting with another person or oneself, attentiveness is the Janus that regulates our way of flowing with our energy through time, space, life, and beyond. Yes, regulation of our energy flow is a profoundly important process and skill that has to be learned, by which we monitor how our energy flows, and then modify it to cultivate the harmony of integration necessary for good physical and mental health, resilience, vibrantly loving relationships, existential fulfillment, and spiritual awakening.

Everything is in the present moment like the ingredients of a minestrone, partly explicitly visible, partly implicitly hidden. The art is to make sense of it all and skillfully differentiate the wheat from the chaff so that the inherent power of regulation dispersed throughout our organism can be brought to bear by the loving act of getting out of our own way. As meditators, psychotherapists, and seekers, we are Michelangelos contemplating a raw piece of marble. The wrong question to ask is how to sculpt our vision through this piece of marble. It is not about what we can do to become better versions of who we know we already are. The better approach is to listen to the marble slab, and hear what sculpture it already holds hidden in the mystery of its density that begs to be liberated from the excess stone. Our journey is about peeling away unnecessary complications, scars, and distortions of a life lived for desperate survival. We have to learn to get out of our own way through the process of unlearning once useful patterns of survival we mobilized at an age we had but few resources, then replacing them with skills that enhance and foster the organism’s natural and spontaneous tendency towards the light of integration, health, and spiritual fulfillment.

What the mindfulness journey is really about is to find out how we can relinquish our ideas about who we think we already know we are supposed to be, so that who we really are can emerge in an unexpected and creative act of rebirth into a person we would have never imagined we could be.

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

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Beginner’s mind is an attitude of openness

Beginner’s mind is a notion that originated in the Buddhist Zen tradition, referring to an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when examining one’s mind. Maintaining beginner’s mind is what’s most difficult in mindfulness because we are customarily imprisoned by our mind’s incessant chatter. We are deeply wired by evolution for this chatter, which has a very particular function. It is mediated by the brain’s default mode circuitry, a network of neurons devised by nature to use cognition and story-making to construct a sense of self from our body’s sensations, and project that sense of self into the past and future, so that we can remember and plan. In addition, this circuitry constantly scans for problems it then goes about trying to solve in conditioned ways, that are often rigid, chaotic, or otherwise distorted by having had to survive difficult past experiences. In short, this chatter is our brain’s built-in mechanism to construct a sense of self it then tries to guide through life by means of stories that are supposed to make sense. We live enveloped in a storied world of concepts and narratives that are supposed to reflect reality, when in fact they are just the maps of the territory, the menus of the meals of directly lived experience. What’s even more problematic is that these stories contain various and many distortions we don’t recognize as such.

This default mode circuitry is active when the brain is at rest, inactive when we are engaged in concentrating on a task. This is the reason why so many people cannot fall asleep at night. The moment they ‘relax’ to try and go to sleep, this chatter becomes active and keeps some of us awake by its ruminative ways of trying to solve imaginary problems it can never solve that way. In other words, we are locked in a world of constant chatter, whether task-oriented or for its own purpose of constructing and guiding a self as it lives and acts in the world. This chatter consists of information about lived experience, with all the distortions that story-making gives rise to. The direct experience of being alive through pre-conceptual awareness called beginner’s mind eludes us, causing substantial suffering.

Beginner’s mind is an attitude of openness to the present moment without preconceived knowledge and expectations. It is difficult to embody and requires training to develop. Imagining the curious mind attitude of young children, for whom everything is utterly novel, is the habitual metaphor used to describe it. We can however examine more closely what elements constitute beginner’s mind by exploring mindfulness and compassion.

In Mindful Self-Compassion, Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer differentiate mindfulness with its target on experience from compassion with its target on the experiencer. Mindfulness can be described as impartial present-moment awareness with kind acceptance of what we are aware of. It focuses on experience with the question ‘what am I experiencing right now?’, inviting us to directly experience our suffering with spacious, pre-conceptual awareness. Compassion, both towards others and oneself acknowledges the fundamental relational aspect of human experience and focuses on both experiencers, the self and the other. By asking the question ‘what do I/you need right now?’, compassion invites us to be kind to ourselves and others when we suffer. Mindfulness brings clarity of view on experience and reality; compassion brings the necessary sense of safety for the experiencers (both self and other) to be able to open up to and bear difficult experiences and develop clarity of view. The clarity of view of mindful awareness develops through attentional training, while the sense of safety in compassion comes from an empathically attuned relationship to others and oneself.

Mindfulness and compassion are mutually reinforcing in a dance of bidirectional correlation. They need each other. Without compassion, the observing experiencer feels unsafe, tenses up, and makes the mindful work on attentional stabilization to gain clarity over experience impossible. The experiencer becomes like a photographer on the back of a pick-up truck crossing a river bed, who tries to stabilize the camera. Instead of being in the service of gaining clarity, the attentional energy then gets detoured into problem-solving and goal achievement. Conversely, without mindfulness, experience and experiencer get confused and there is no clarity of experience to relate to, giving compassion no clear target to attune itself to. Instead of being directed towards the experiencer, it then gets used to change experience as resistance to pain.

Beginner’s mind is the amalgamation of clear differentiation from a mindfulness point of view, and radical acceptance from a compassion point of view. Through clear differentiation in mindfulness, we don’t satisfy ourselves with an approximate fuzzy view of experience, such as ‘my knee hurts and I fear that I am going to have an operation’. Instead, we cultivate intense curiosity about the details of experience on a direct, pre-conceptual level of awareness in the here and now, and never take anything we observe for granted as something we may delude ourselves to already know. As for radical acceptance, we drop the idea of progress and refine our intention to be compassionate for its own sake, not to feel better, but because we feel bad. We don’t practice compassion to be free from pain, but just because at times it is hard to be embodied and human. Curiosity for details of direct pre-conceptual experience in the here and now through mindfulness, combined with radical acceptance through compassion, together form the two fundamental aspects of beginner’s mind.

Beginner’s mind finds its expressions also in mythology and sacred texts as I wrote about elsewhere. You would unlikely use Bible style and say ‘In the beginning of my holidays it rained, but the weather turned nice later on’. Instead, you would most likely say ‘At the beginning of my holidays it rained, but the weather turned nice later on’. ‘At’ implies a point or period in time, before and after which other things happened. ‘In the beginning’ echoes ‘once upon a time’. There is a sense that what is about to be said is situated right inside at the core of something called the beginning, or ‘on top of’ and therefore outside time. The Book of J assumed to be the original poem from which later the Bible evolved, is rather explicit: ‘… from the day Yahweh made the earth and sky, a mist from within would rise to moisten the surface.’ Again, our attention is drawn to a ‘soothing mist within time’, the nature of which we need to understand. By stepping ‘inside’ the beginning, we step out of time, the same way we do so by stepping ‘on top of’ time. Both the inside and the outside of the beginning, expressed by the idioms ‘In the beginning …’ and ‘Once upon a time …’, are about timelessness, the soothing mist and mystery of human life as experienced through the direct means of pre-conceptual awareness in the here and now.

When the Bible begins in Genesis with ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’, and in John’s Gospel with ‘In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God’, or when our favorite fairy tale begins with ‘Once upon a time there was a very kind princess …’, we are invited to hear something about timelessness, not a historical description within time. What follows these idioms is what happens now, in every moment of our lives, which has always happened and will continue to happen now for all eternity. It is therefore non-sensical to ask what was before the beginning or to think that the Bible is a historical account of what happened next. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’ means that God always creates the heavens and the earth right now and that the invitation is for us to go beyond the chatter of the default mode circuitry and drop into the direct, pre-conceptual awareness of Being as life’s deepest mystery, where we will discover ‘God’ creating everything that exists right now, and now, and now, moment by moment, out of the great nothingness of pure potential. The same applies to ‘Once upon a time there was a kind princess, who received a visit from the wicked witch’. The witch’s visit to the princess always occurs in the eternal Now, to be relived moment by moment again and again as a ritualistic mystery that reveals the secrets of our soul. To recognize that and be able to feel it as a lived experience in the eternal Now, is beginner’s mind.
To respond to the invitation to enter the world of beginner’s mind in a directly embodied fashion is not so easy. It may thus be appropriate to leave the last word to an age-old master of beginner’s mind:

In the pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally, you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.

True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way.
It can’t be gained by interfering.

Tao Te Ching #48, by Lao-Tzu

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

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The mirror neuron

A mirror reflects back to us what we cannot see directly. We cannot directly see the inner subjective experience of someone else, and yet the capacity to ‘put ourselves into someone else’s shoes’ is essential for human survival, good relationships, and health in general. What does it mean to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, and how do we do that? In our cortex, we have special neurons, called mirror neurons, that are attached to a whole network of neurons called the resonance circuitry. These mirror neurons have a fascinating capacity to fire both when we engage in an action, and when we see someone else engage in the same action. What’s even more interesting, is that they only fire if they pick up intention behind that action. So if I drink a glass of water, and I then watch you drink a glass of water, my mirror neurons fire both times; however, if I watch a robot drink the glass of water, they only fire when I drink, not when the robot drinks, because a robot has no intention. In other words, these neurons mirror the other person’s intentional behavior, as if I was the one performing that behavior.

Besides the activity of the mirror neurons themselves, the whole resonance circuitry attached to these neurons plays a crucial role. When my mirror neuron picks up your non-verbal behavioral expressions, it sends the information down the brain’s levels of neuro-processing all the way to the web of neurons around the heart, the lungs, and the gut. Remarkably, around those central organs, we have a web of so called parallel-processing neuro-circuitries, which simply means that this web of visceral neurons around those organs is able to process information in an intelligent way quite independently from the brain. In fact, the size of these visceral circuitries corresponds to approximately the size of a cat’s brain. This is where the notion of ‘gut feeling’ comes from, and it is likely the source of intuition.

As the mirror neuron’s information reaches our own visceral ‘cat brain’, we somatically resonate like a well-attuned instrument to the other person’s internal energy flow they convey non-verbally to the outside world. This resonance means that our bodies vibrate with the same frequency as the other person’s, and so we viscerally sense what they sense. That information gets then sent back upwards into a sub-cortical structure called the anterior insula, where our organism makes a map, a representation of that deep visceral resonance. Now, we not only viscerally resonate, but we emotionally feel what the other person must feel. This is called attunement. However, attunement is not yet enough of a useful process for sustaining healthy relationships, because if I just feel what you feel, and what you feel is awful, I will feel as awful as you do and be hopelessly useless in being able to help you. So nature has it organized so that the attuned firing in the anterior insula is then sent further up the processing hierarchy all the way back to the cortex, where I end up being able to cognitively make sense of the fact that even though I resonate and am attuned, feeling what the other person feels, I am also not that person and not in that situation. Now, I can remain grounded in myself, my own life situation, while simultaneously being able to feel what is going on in the other person. This is called empathy.

Whether we like it or not, this is how we are wired. As mammals and very complex ones at that, with the ability to mentalize and create imaginative worlds that don’t exist, we are particularly dependant on this resonance circuitry to raise our children and help them learn to make sense of the world. A well-functioning resonance-attunement-empathy process is at the core of healthy attachments we must develop in order to live healthy lives. There is no such thing as a healthy human being in a vacuum; tragic cases of humans that were raised in isolation make it clear that these people grow up mentally retarded and physically sick. Our capacity to be peacefully and productively alone rests on having been able to internalize secure attachments with caregivers. When we are successfully ‘alone’, we are in fact successfully relating inside ourselves to all the people who once provided us with secure relationships, which are now internalized. To put it bluntly, taking a successfully peaceful and soothing shower means being in relationship with a whole committee of internalized benevolent people that accompany us internally while we shower.

Do I need to say more regarding the importance of groups? Human beings grow, survive, and thrive in groups of all sorts, and knowing how to navigate our deeply social nature is at the core of health and wellbeing. At our Mindfulness Centre, we pay great attention to and integrate group dynamics in the way we run all our groups, including our mindfulness meditation groups. No meaningful work can be done in isolation. Without a harmonious, supportive, respectful, and empathic base of relationships among students, no meaningful learning can take place.

A mentor in group awareness

In June of this year Dr. John Salvendy, co-founder and first president of the Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association sadly passed away. In 1984 he became my group psychotherapy supervisor during my psychiatric residency at the University of Toronto. Within 3 years he taught me everything I needed to know to begin my own 35 years of group psychotherapy practice.

We quickly became friends as we both shared our common European roots. For years we presented group psychotherapy workshops at the annual meeting of the Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association and used to go for our bi-weekly Sunday walks sharing our imagination on all kinds of subjects. Sadly, his passing coincides with a message that recently appeared on the Canadian Group Psychotherapy website saying: ‘We regret to inform you that we are not able to respond to requests at this time. Please check back later’. It is my understanding that the association had to suspend its activities for lack of interest in group psychotherapy in Canada. What a shame, given that it is such a rich, powerful, and effective^[22] modality in the field of psychotherapy.

The longterm psychotherapy group

Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy, or ‘long-term intensive interactional group psychotherapy^[21] assumes diverse and diagnostically heterogeneous group membership and an open-ended time scale’ (Wikipedia). I have been running 4 open-ended groups of 12 members each over the past 30 years. The sessions take place weekly and everyone is committed to attend every session. When after several years a group member has accomplished the work of personal transformation they set out to complete, they leave the group, and someone new joins. Not only is a group like that a fertile cauldron of transformative energy, but it is also very cost-effective. For psychiatrists here in Ontario the cost per group member is about ⅙ of an individual session of the same length. To run a group like that effectively requires special training within the field of psychotherapy, the way a plastic surgeon requires specialized training within the field of surgery.

There are many therapeutic groups being offered by mental health professionals, most of them short-term. The one we are addressing here is a fundamentally different kettle of fish. Members of my groups have three things in common: (1) They are all productive members of society with professions, jobs, hobbies, and families; (2) they have significant psychological symptoms that interfere with or sometimes even impede their capacity to fulfill their social, familial and personal obligations and aspirations; and (3) they have the capacity to introspect, examine their own mind and meaningfully explore who they are within the context of the intimate relationships that develop in the group. Their symptoms may have traumatic or other origins and may include relationship issues, PTSD, depression, anxiety, OCD, stress, and other manifestations of psychological suffering. Patients with active substance dependence issues or psychosis, and those who are either not able or willing to examine themselves, are not accepted in these groups.

The group process is unstructured, in order to allow the unconscious to speak. Whatever emerges during sessions is the manifestation of how everyone shows up in life. This affords group members the opportunity for self-examination, understanding, transformation, and application of new and more adaptive mental, behavior, and relationship patterns within the group at first, and eventually in their daily lives. What makes such a group so rich and effective is that group members learn through 4 levels of engagement: (1) By observing and listening to other people’s stories and interactions; (2) by getting actively involved in helping other group members explore themselves; (3) by having the group actively involved in helping them explore themselves; and (4) by addressing here and now interpersonal dynamics that arise in the course of each session. The group leader helps members develop a direct, respectful, and supportive style of communication that allows everyone to experience the safety of the intimate group process, as the often hard and painful exploration of truth unfolds towards new levels of integration, personal satisfaction, life success, harmonious relationships, and inner peace. On this basis, members learn to make better life choices, and over time many symptoms they originally came for disappear or reach manageable levels that do not interfere anymore with everyday life.

The principle of universality allows group members to lose their sense of embarrassment and isolation, learn to validate their experiences, and develop strong self-esteem as they recognize shared experiences and feelings among group members as widespread, universal human concerns. Because the group is mixed with members at various stages of development and recovery, everyone can be inspired and encouraged by other group members, which instills hope. Those who have overcome a problem can consolidate their self-esteem by realizing that they have developed the wisdom to help others with what they have learned to apply for themselves, and those who still struggle can benefit from that wisdom of others. The group provides a safe and supportive environment, where altruism can flourish, thereby consolidating our human nature as deeply relational. Members feel safe to take risks and extend their repertoire of socializing techniques for the purpose of improving their social skills, including interpersonal behaviors and the way they listen and talk to each other. Imitative behavior can be an important part of social learning through a modeling process, as members learn to observe and imitate the therapist and other group members in the way they share personal feelings, show concern, and support others.

Members learn to help each other and give their insights to others, which lifts their self-esteem and thereby helps develop more adaptive coping styles and interpersonal skills. In doing so, members often unconsciously experience their relationships with the group therapist and other group members quite similar to those with their own parents and siblings, creating a form of group transference specific to this type of group psychotherapy. With the help of the therapist’s interpretations, this allows participants to engage in a corrective recapitulation, reworking, and transformation of their primary childhood family experiences. By gaining an understanding of the impact of childhood experiences on their psyche and personality, participants may learn to avoid unconsciously repeating unhelpful past interactive patterns in present-day relationships. Through the development of attuned communication, as this process can be summarized by, all members feel a sense of belonging, acceptance, and validation. which gives the group a sense of cohesiveness. In such a cohesive environment, it is safe to experience relief from emotional distress through catharsis, a free and uninhibited expression of emotion. In telling their story to a supportive audience, members obtain relief from chronic feelings of isolation, shame, and guilt. Through this process of interacting with others in the group, who give feedback on one’s behavior and impact on others, group members achieve a greater level of self-awareness and self-understanding with the achievement of deeper insight into the way their problems developed and their behaviors were unconsciously motivated. Last but not least, and technically not a direct aspect of psychotherapy, useful factual information can occasionally get imparted from the therapist or other members in the group, which is often reported as very helpful.

In our increasingly fast-paced, narcissistic society (although COVID-19 may seriously challenge this trend), in which self-interest trumps all sense of community and responsibility for others, people often misinterpret group therapy as less valuable than individual therapy, even though the above explanations make it abundantly clear how rich and fruitful a process it really is. As I explained elsewhere here and here, people also look for quick fixes even when none is to be had. Not long ago I assessed a new patient with a significant history of childhood abuse. When I gave her feedback and my recommendation for this kind of therapy, she said she did not want to be so involved and asked me for a ‘quick fix’ so that she ‘can get on with life’, despite the fact that she had had years of short-term ‘quick fix’ interventions in the past, with no measurable result. Insurance companies are notorious for pushing quick fixes, apparently not realizing that they create revolving door situations that I assume must cost way more than a well-run longterm psychotherapy that addresses issues more permanently. The human mind in general looks for quick fixes, uncomfortable with the reality of much human healing that unfolds at the pace of watching your grass grow. There is no way around it, and this kind of group provides exactly the kind of safe, but intense transformative environment some of us need to heal deeply to the point of being able to thrive in our own skin without constant relapses, or worse, progressive deterioration.

Of course, not everyone is suitable for these kinds of groups, not the least because it is challenging to participate in such a rich and multifaceted process. Those who do, however, are usually rewarded by what they often call ‘an experience of a lifetime’, having had the privilege of participating in a group with like-minded and like-hearted people capable of a degree of intimacy, insight, and empathy not found anywhere else in life.

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

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Thrive to live meaningful lives in health and well-being

Occasionally, as during this past week, important insights of potentially universal interest arise from the work in self-exploration in my psychodynamic groups. What we can learn from the detailed work the group members were involved in, is worth sharing for the benefit of a larger audience. For reasons of confidentiality, no identifying details are mentioned of course.

To understand the profound message from this kind of psychological working through, we need to familiarize ourselves with the notion of an open complex system, however intimidating it may initially appear. So let’s put it simply: Like all living things, human beings are open complex systems. This means many things, but in essence, there are specifically two aspects I want to mention in this context: (1) We are organisms that take different forms of energy from the outside world, process that energy for our survival, and return energy in yet other forms back to the outside world. (2) For the organism to be healthy, this energy has to be self-regulated and processed within what is called the window of tolerance, which could also be referred to as the Goldilocks zone of energy processing. This means that the energy that gets processed has to on one hand be intense or strong enough to be perceived by the organism and impact its internal energy flow, but on the other hand also not too intense or strong so that the organism does not get overwhelmed. Energy processing within this Goldilocks zone ensures that we can thrive and maintain health. In this case, we enjoy what is called integration of energy flow. In other words, when we can regulate our internal energy processing within the Goldilocks zone, we move towards integration of our organism’s energy flow, which is experienced as health and well-being. Now here comes a profound scientific insight: When we are not subjected to excessive energy impacts from the outside world that are outside the Goldilocks zone, our organism spontaneously moves towards integration, health, and well-being without us needing to do anything.

Of course, energy impact from the outside world can sometimes exceed the boundaries of the window of tolerance and be either too weak or too strong. When too weak, we tend to fall into different variations of rigidity; when too strong, into chaos; sometimes even a combination of both. In these cases, the central regulation of energy flow becomes compromised, more primitive systems of regulation like the fight/flight/freeze systems located in the reptilian brainstem take over, and the spontaneous energy regulation towards integration located in higher brain centres becomes either compromised or impossible. As a consequence, we become ill, dysfunctional, and diseased. In fact, we can conceptualize all forms of illness and disease, whether physical or psychological, as various energy states of chaos, rigidity, or a combination of both. For example, anxiety would be a state of chaos, depression a state of rigidity, and OCD a combination of both.

Imagine now tearing a leg ligament at the gym. The energy impact would have obviously been outside the Goldilocks zone and your leg is now in a state of chaos. You are in physical pain and therefore unable to walk properly. You are forced to rest your leg and possibly apply various kinds of treatments, from more conservative ones such as ultrasound and physiotherapy to more invasive ones such as a cast or an operation. The forced immobilization required to let the tissue heal decreases the state of chaos and replaces it with rigidity, which through careful and gentle mobilization then has to eventually be dissolved until the organism is able again to regulate its own energy flow within the window of tolerance of integration towards health and well-being.

Like excessive force causing a torn ligament, many people, unfortunately, grew up in family circumstances, which imposed chronically inadequate or excessive psychological energy influences on the child’s fragile organism. This causes children to have to cope outside the psychological Goldilocks zone in constant mental energy states of fight, flight, or freeze, experienced as stress. Parents may have been inattentive and absent, causing children to fall into avoidance states of rigidity; they may have been overly intrusive and controlling, causing them to fall into ambivalent states of chaos; or they may be outright physically and emotionally abusive, causing in their children complex mixed states of chaos and rigidity called complex trauma. Imagine for a moment being like an orchestra as a metaphor for an open complex system. The orchestra is scheduled to play Beethoven’s fifth, but for unfortunate reasons the second violins are striking (dissociation), the trumpets are fed up with the director and decide to play anything they want (chaos) and the first cellos decide to play the same tune like the second cellos (rigidity). Your musical experience would obviously be severely compromised and the fifth symphony would not sound very good. Such is the experience of young adults emerging from compromised childhoods. Their various brain circuitries are not harmoniously connected, sometimes in conflict, sometimes not well connected to each other. The resonant interaction between all circuitries cannot occur, because the higher brain centres do not have a functioning orchestra (integrated brain) to work with. Children and adults end up not being healthy, displaying various kinds of physical, psychological, and social difficulties or illnesses caused by an organism in constant stress and incapable of regulating its energy flow within the Goldilocks zone of integration.

However, applied to our psyche, the example of the leg ligament tear becomes far more complex. To begin with, the torn leg ligament usually forces you to stop and let it heal; the pain is too great and function gets lost. Psychologically, on the other hand, we can continue to cope despite enormous psychological pain, because the pain can be repressed and compensatory thought, feeling, and action patterns can take over allowing us to function. Granted, we may not function at our full potential, yet well enough to dismiss these problems for a while and survive. Our organism is psychologically unable to fully regulate within the Goldilocks zone of energy flow and we bumble along as best we can. Instead of thriving within the window of tolerance, we survive in various combined states of rigidity, chaos, and partial integration, often displaying various kinds of symptoms, from physical symptoms to symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression, relationship problems, and more.

Most importantly, years of such survival adaptations become eventually psychologically embedded in our sense of self, our sense of who we are. For example, if a 10-year-old child enjoying a healthy and attuned relationship with her parents behaves inappropriately at the breakfast table and accidentally spills the milk just before it is time to go to school, she will get an admonishment regarding her behaviour, and maybe even an encouragement that accidents happen. She will temporarily feel bad about her behaviour as her organism is in a state of partial chaos, then later apologize, and the whole episode will be forgotten as a mistake that could be corrected and repaired. Her sense of who she is, her sense of self was always loved and respected throughout this incident, and only her behaviour was addressed. The child will feel a sense of accomplishment about having been able to overcome adversity, a sense of connection with her parents she experiences as guiding, supportive, and loving, and possibly a sense of better understanding with regards to her unskillful behaviour at breakfast. She will be back within the window of tolerance of energy flow feeling good about herself.

Now imagine the same scenario with a child whose parents are not attuned or even abusive. She will be told that she is useless and stupid as usual, that all she does is disrupt breakfast for everybody else, and she will be punished because she is bad. In this case, her behaviour is confused with who she is, and her very sense of self is being attacked and undermined. The punishment has the effect of subduing and controlling the person as opposed to being a natural consequence that raises awareness about behaviour and strengthens the sense of self. In this case, the child rarely manages to live within the window of tolerance of psychological energy flow, emotional repair is not possible, and she consistently feels stressed and bad about herself. Over the years of such parenting interactions, the child eventually internalizes a sense of self that is deficient and grows into an insecure adult with low self-esteem and various kinds of symptoms of a nonintegrated psyche. In short, it just feels bad to be who one is and all kinds of symptoms appear. But because the person has no external reference point to relate to, she does not know how having a healthy sense of self feels, and the nonintegrated state feels normal. In addition, differentiating between behavior and who one is becomes impossible, and there is no way of recognizing the causal connection between a damaged sense of self and symptoms. The person is at a loss as to what to do about it.

This is where psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation come in. Both being processes, in which healthy relationships are cultivated, and internal psychological distortions are examined, understood in their detailed intricacies, and corrected, people can start to differentiate between their sense of self and behaviour, between who they are and what they do. This paves the way to our capacity to strengthen the fundamental goodness of who we are while improving how we do what we do. The process of working through such long-standing psychological pain moves through four phases that Marlene Van Esch, my co-therapist, helped conceptualize during one of those sessions. When we first start psychotherapy, we suffer and don’t know why, the stage of being unconsciously unskilled. As we begin the process of working through, we become aware of our many distortions, the stage of being consciously unskilled. During this phase of psychotherapy symptoms often seem much worse, even though the person is making progress, and at the same time feels a new, unfamiliar sense of liberation within the pain. With time, as the defensive distortions are being undone and the capacity for skillful action improves, the person enters the stage of being consciously skilled and feels much better. Finally, when this state of well-being becomes a habit, the person enters the last stage of being unconsciously skilled, because it takes no effort anymore to be healthy.

You might remember me mentioning at the end of the second paragraph of this blog, that ‘… when we are not subjected to energy impacts from the outside world that are outside the Goldilocks zone, our organism spontaneously moves towards integration, health, and well-being without us needing to do anything’. In other words, within normal nontraumatic circumstances, integration, health, and well-being is our fundamentally natural state. Although pain and suffering are ubiquitous, the spontaneously most natural process our organism follows is the one towards integration, health, and well-being. This is an interesting scientific finding with profound consequences on our view of what it means to be human.

Because suffering is so ubiquitous, and probably a minority of people enjoy the kind of attuned and resonant psychological environment that strengthens self-esteem and causes them to be the best they can be, and because the psyche is so difficult to examine and therefore for many people remains an elusive reality they dismiss or don’t know how to deal with, suffering is often seen as primary, fundamental, and intractable. Suffering is a prison of our own making when we don’t skillfully deal with pain. In the Catholic Church for example this state of affairs is conceptualized as original sin. The idea is that human beings are fundamentally bad and need to be shaped through punishment and coercion into good soldiers of God. The implications are profound: Not only is the disruption, or even violence, which caused suffering in the first place, overlooked, but more disruption and violence are inflicted in the erroneous belief that this is how one shapes a strong human being into goodness.

Today we can say that from the scientific perspective of open complex systems this view is questionable, even untenable. The notion of original blessing espoused by the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and many Buddhist schools much more aptly describes human nature. When through healthy parenting as children or later examination of our minds as adults we manage to deeply understand who we really are, and relinquish the many ways we get in our own way by unconsciously fighting old wars that don’t exist anymore in our present environment, our organism will spontaneously move towards integration, well-being, and health. Ease, goodness, and love are primary. The truth about ourselves literally sets us free, not because we have to do things to be better, but because gaining clarity about who we really are, allows us to undo unnecessary defenses and get out of our own way, as our open complex system always spontaneously tries to move towards integration, health, and well-being. Thus the notion of non-doing at the core of these psychological disciplines. Once a clear and strong sense of self has been allowed to emerge through the integrative movement of our open complex system, it becomes much easier and more powerful to practice skillful actions for the benefit of both others and ourselves. Our fundamental nature is to be found in the freedom to be, which in turn is based on the foundations of truth. The truth about who we are sets us free, and freedom is love (freedom in Sanskrit means love).

Fundamentally, every child, no matter how he or she behaves, is an open complex system in need of parental help for the development of its own capacity to regulate towards integration, health, and well-being. The last thing a child needs is punishment to learn to obey. That only creates subservient robots with no creativity to live meaningful lives. On the contrary, what children need is an emotional connection with their caregivers, parental guidance in the form of support and natural consequences to their actions, as well as parental help in learning how to examine who they are and make sense of reality. With that in place, they can develop a strong and healthy sense of self at their core that allows them to make their own skillful decisions, and if necessary correct and repair behaviour to improve the ability to be skilfully active and loving in their lives.

Keen curiosity, spacious openness, gracious acceptance, wise guidance, and love – these are the principles that ensure the possibility of seeing truth and find the freedom to be by getting out of our own way. Then, the immeasurably greater wisdom of the complex organism that we are can take over, and we can thrive to live meaningful lives in health and well-being.

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

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The Mindsight Intensive course begins soon, and during the preparation, the notion of a beginning intrigued me.

Not only are we at the beginning of an academic year, but to me, the fall is also the beginning of a descent into the unconscious realms of our psyche, in which we roam during the winter, and hopefully derive great benefit from the creative potential to be unleashed for the upcoming spring and summer.

I am not a Christian, a Buddhist, or any other kind of -ist, but I am a student of those. As far as I know, neither was Jesus a Christian, nor Buddha a Buddhist. Originality and innovation come more from ‘going out into the world and fucking it up beautifully’ (‘Make Trouble’ by John Waters), than dutifully following a master’s creative energy without making it your own. Owning our teachers’ creations means creating ourselves by transforming traditions and teachings into something new that reflects our unique, from the originator’s different circumstances. In his ‘The  Structure Of Scientific Revolutions’, Thomas Kuhn makes this point very nicely. We tend to stay safely imprisoned within a given paradigm as we contribute to its expansion and improvement, even when obvious discrepancies and limitations point to the fact that the paradigm may be inadequate. At some point, someone comes along and shows that the whole paradigm is flawed and proposes a better one. After much protestation, everyone falls in love with the new paradigm and then engages again in the process of expanding and improving it. This happened for example with Einstein’s relativity theory, which revolutionized the Newtonian view of physics. Of course, not everyone has the genius necessary to come up with and propose new paradigms, but it might at least be worthwhile exploring our tendency to defer and abdicate our creative authority and project its power on an idol we admire, thereby losing much of our own creative energy that makes us feel alive. That’s not to say that we don’t always stand on the shoulders of giants, who came before us – we do. But in integrating their wisdom, we tend to forget the importance of taking the risk of personal engagement in the journey into the wilderness, that has no signposts we can follow, and that challenges us in a profound way to allow the creativity of the unknown to transform us. That is in fact what the mindsight journey is all about. You cannot engage in the exploration of mind and expect that everything you find convenient in your life will stay the same. Mindfulness practice is deeply revolutionary, and therefore not entirely comfortable.

One giant, on whose shoulders I stand, is Northrop Frye. Around 1984 a book by Northrop Frye unexpectedly crossed my desk, and I was told that he was apparently famous and a towering figure in his field. I don’t remember which book it was, but a cursory look at it satisfied me that he was speaking gibberish to me in what obviously was a specialized treatise on literary criticism I knew nothing about. Two years later I heard the 1962 CBC Massey lectures he gave, entitled ‘The educated imagination’. Like a lightning bolt, they struck my neurofirings and opened my mind to what he had to say about the human psyche. I began reading these texts that were more relevant for my psychiatric bend – talks he had given on myth and metaphor, writings on matters spiritual and the imagination, as well as his two books on the Bible, ‘The great code’ and ‘Words with power’. Extremely interested in what he had to say about the mind and other psychological matters, I decided I had to meet the man. I was blissfully unaware at the time that Peter Gzowski, the longterm host of CBC’s ‘Morningside’, had once referred to Northrop Frye as the most difficult person he ever interviewed, because of his ‘thought-stopping silences’.

Frye graciously invited me for a chat in his office, where we spent about an hour talking and reflecting. Thought-stopping silences indeed followed his brief responses, comments, or questions he threw my way, during which he looked deeply into my eyes. As a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, I was used to that rhythm while dialoguing, where words, sentences, and stories are like pebbles thrown into a pond, after which long periods of reflection follow the waves the pebbles caused. We both enjoyed mutually created thought-stopping silences, during which much non-verbal and imaginative material was allowed to simmer like a primordial soup from which new creations arise. My time with him was transformative because I got to experience firsthand the embodied imagination of a genius from another field than my own, which frankly blew my mind. Our dialogue became increasingly animated over the course of that hour, and he ended up inviting me to audit his lectures on the Bible for free, which I attended religiously for a year at the Old Vic in Toronto. He spoke the way he wrote with immense clarity. His somewhat monotone voice seemed to be the perfectly self-effacing and humble messenger that carried his incredible wisdom to his audience. Lecture after lecture, I felt orthogonal shifts in my consciousness being triggered by his brilliance and vast imaginative vistas. Needless to say, he had taught me to look at the Bible in a completely new way as in fact the one text that shaped the imagination of western culture like no other. He helped me gain access to an intuition I already had my whole life, that the Bible, like the Bhagavad Gita, was a book of wisdom and revelation about the human mind and its liberation from delusion. It is scripture, and scripture is an art form that has been lost in our digital age. We don’t know anymore how to read it, let alone write it for what it is, a means of personal and social transformation, not a rigid dogma to confirm our own views. This is why I am now going to open the Bible on its first page as Frye would likely have wanted me to do.

When I talk about the Bible in mindsight circles, there are those who are enthralled by the new vistas I present, and those who for various reasons get extremely nervous, uncomfortable, or even incensed. I always find it astonishing to see how otherwise intelligent folks internally dissociate from reason and are just unable to see past their internalized religious doctrines of all sorts. These people are not able to just read the words that are on the page without regressing to preadolescent Santa Claus belief systems they hold on to for dear life. Beliefs are thought patterns unfolding in close proximity to sensory cortical brain centers, thus giving them an unusual sense of embodied reality, even though they are nothing more than thoughts. So if you believe the Bible, or any other scripture for that matter, was written by God as an external entity dwelling somewhere you are not, you are simply deluded. If on the other hand, you realize that these texts arose from the collective human imagination and wisdom that reaches way down through our collective unconscious to the mystery of the nameless unknowable, and you want to use the word ‘God’ to denote that mystery, then I am with you.

There is little more fascinating than to know that the Old Testament was mainly written in Hebrew; that Hebrew words have many different meanings that open vast webs of potential understandings; that meanings evolved and changed during the many centuries during which the Bible was compiled; that oral transmission of wisdom stories gave rise to a plethora of different Bible mythologies, out of which only some were chosen into the official canon; that the New Testament was written in Greek; that translations of all sorts are recreations and transformations of meaning rather than exact carbon copies of the original; that indeed there is no original, but only an ongoing process of creation, recreation, and adaptation over many centuries past without a beginning anywhere; and that the Bible is not a historical treatise, even though historical circumstances shaped the language used, but a mythological inspiration, ‘mythological’ meaning belonging to the domain of story-telling, not of historical science. In short, there is nothing simplistic about reading the Bible. On the contrary, it radically confronts us with the complexity of mind, life, universe, and love in ways we tend to ignore.

Put your preconceived ideas, beliefs, non-beliefs, or skepticism aside for a moment, and let’s just read the words on the page with discerning logic, imaginative sensibility, and a generally educated humanistic intelligence. The Bible begins with a Big Bang: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ With this logically non-sensical, paradoxical statement the Bible challenges the reader right from the start – either the Bible writers were illogical dumbheads, which is greatly to be doubted, or you know immediately that you are about to embark on a most uncommon journey. This statement tells us immediately that we are not into a scientific, historical, or otherwise logical account, but a metaphorical one that will defy the rules our problem-solving left-brain minds like to live by, let alone the rules our preadolescent concrete mind wished us to indulge in as a way of making the world magical. How incredibly difficult the journey proposed by the Bible will be is then further emphasized by the fact that it takes about 15 pages for humanity to get into deep trouble, and then 1500 or more pages to get out of it. So let’s get to it – what is so absurd in this first sentence?

If there really is a beginning to the heavens and the earth, then there cannot be anything before the beginning, since the beginning is an absolute one of everything, including time. The notion of something before the beginning of time is absurd since there can only be a beginning within the context of time. What was before the beginning is thus an absurd question. Yet, the sentence sounds like there was something or someone before the beginning, namely God. But that poses problems, since if there was, it would not be the beginning. This first Bible statement gives us a warning: Don’t even try to think of or imagine God, because if you do, God becomes an entity, a noun with certain attributes, and such an entity can only exist in time, which would make the notion of God absurd. Furthermore, God cannot exist before the beginning unless we invalidate the beginning and have to ask, who created God? We begin down the absurd road of an infinite regress, turtles all the way down. The absurdity of imagining God as an entity expressed by a noun is implied by the absurdity of someone before the beginning. Unless concretized by the primitive and infantile delusional mind and projected onto the image of a person, God is established right from the start of the Bible as a verb, which cannot be imagined, a verb that suggests God is a process, the formless source of diversity.

Unless you are happy to dumb down the notion of God into banality, ‘God’ is a notion that points to a no-thing that is nameless, timeless, unimaginable, indescribable, and unthinkable. In other, quite intriguing words, we can say that the beginning arises from a creative nothingness we call for lack of a better word God, and which has no beginning nor end, only transformations. That is not eternity, by the way, since eternity means endless time. We are talking about a timeless realm! Since even ‘nothingness’ is a noun pointing to something called nothing, and no ‘thing’ can exist before the beginning, we have to take our reflection a step further and speak of no-thingness in the sense of a fundamental absence of any essence. The beginning is the creation of diversity that timelessly occurs moment-by-moment, a manifest universe from a creative pure potential realm of no-thingness without an essence we could grasp, imagine, or describe. This unimaginable nameless is to my mind quintessentially God in unmanifest ‘form’, giving rise ‘in the beginning’ to the manifest form of the universe, which always vanishes back into its unmanifest source of no-thingness before reappearing again in a new form. As a not so unimportant and intriguing aside, physicists have now figured out through mathematical explorations that our universe was created out of nothing, the closest way to rationally imagine nothingness as a creative pure potentiality. Don’t try to get any clearer than that in your logical understanding.

The beginning of St. John’s gospel in the New Testament supports these ideas so far: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.’ Let’s not forget that while the Old Testament was originally written mostly in Hebrew (some parts in Aramaic), the New Testament was written in Greek. The ‘word’ is a translation of the Greek word ‘logos’, which refers to the manifest God principle as it appears out of no-thingness through everything created, as we have seen before. In the beginning is the manifest world of diversity, of phenomena and appearances, the exploration of which inevitably leads to the discovery and realization of the nameless, timeless, spaceless, and unimaginable ground of non-manifest Being as its source. Interestingly, we can find a neuropsychological correlate to this notion of a beginning: Formless sensory experience mediated by the senses called conduit, which does not make sense to us, receives meaning through its being constructed by the brain into language-based stories. ‘The word’ here is literally the beginning of meaning, and as we all know, most narratives end up sooner or later pointing beyond themselves to the nameless ground of Being. The beginning is thus always a bidirectional transition point between the manifest and the unmanifest, the creative present moment energy flow from the source into manifestations, and through dissolution of manifestations back towards the source.

Between the beginning and the end in the obscure and extravagant imagery of the Apocalypse, we meet a God quite like a person suffering from multiple personality disorder, at different times angry, petulant, vindictive, wise, loving, reasonable, bat-shit crazy, and more. This is in fact the one-person version of many pagan and eastern multi-god versions of religious beliefs corresponding to the Jungian notion of archetypes. Buddha always reminded his disciples that we are the boss having to manage and rule over these many gods, and this is no different from the ‘God’ of the Bible after the beginning, an archetypal collection of psychological tendencies it behooves us to manage with the power of awareness. God as the unmanifest nameless underlying the beginning is fundamentally different from the manifest divine archetypes. The nameless only appears through an orthogonal shift in consciousness mediated by a serious awareness training and is the foundation from which the archetypes can be successfully managed to give our lives meaning. Paradoxically, you need to familiarize yourself with emptiness to manifest God and keep the gods in check.

The beginning, as the Bible shows, leads to catastrophe pretty quickly after about 15 pages, which is the metaphor for the inevitable beginning of human suffering. This suffering is worth it, though, otherwise, the Bible would not waste 1500 pages worth of ink exploring how to get out of the suffering mess. Suffering is our ticket to liberation and wisdom. The beginning is thus an invitation to learn to deal with suffering effectively, and the nameless ground of being the beginning implies is the mystery of initiation and transcendence we need to orient ourselves towards by a very subtle, but powerful act of reorientation: Skillfully entering the now of the present moment. If your head spins now, feeling that such innocuously appearing an idiom as ‘in the beginning …’ has morphed into an intellectually confusing meaning monster you would rather avoid, the scripture has fulfilled its purpose. By simply grasping the message of scripture intellectually we have not mastered it by a long shot. Its real meaning lies in its power of transformation, which the scripture can only suggest or point to. To discover and embody that power, the real-life embodied relationship to the world we are a part of, and more particularly to an experienced teacher, is essential. The real power of words lies in their ability to point beyond themselves to timeless truths and the mystery of Being. Like any myth, words with power conceal their meaning unless it is put into daily practice moment by moment, hour by hour. The left and right brain need to cooperate harmoniously for us to decrease human suffering.

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