When we train our minds to expand consciousness

In my two blogs ‘Initiation Renaissance In Our Pandemic Times‘ and ‘Wu Wei‘, I wrote about a subjective, yet universally accessible dimension of reality that opens up like wakefulness emerging from a dream, when we train our minds to expand consciousness through successive stages of depth and integration, all the way to the realization of the transcendental emptiness of Being. We take this journey because it allows us to unleash our full human potential for wisdom as defined by peace and equanimity independent of circumstance, including respect and love for all human beings, all living creatures, the universe as we know it and oneself. The question I want to address here, is why transcendence and emptiness of Being are experienced and manifest in our actions as love? Why is the universe fundamentally benevolent, when science tells us that it is just energy meaninglessly and randomly flowing according to certain physical laws without rhyme, reason or purpose, clumping, exploding and vanishing haphazardly here, there, and everywhere? To address this question I first want to explore truth.

1. TRUTH

Definition

Let’s begin with the question of what truth is. Philosophy has whole libraries filled with tomes written about this topic. I am not going to review that, but instead, propose a few poignant definitions that serve our purpose. One definition I like comes from my teacher Northrop Frye: It is what keeps coming back and hits you over the head the more you try to ignore it. Psychoanalytically that would be the return of the repressed. Another way would be to say that it is what still stands and continues to define people’s view of reality after it has been repeatedly refuted. Or, truth has something to do with the primary human concerns that satiety is better than hunger, pleasure better than pain, love better than hate, wealth better than poverty, and freedom better than bondage. Finally, and quite simply, truth is agreement with fact or reality as more narrowly defined in terms of what exists without lies.

Truth and reality

Truth and reality overlap, but are not exactly the same. Lying, deception, and delusion, all opposites of truth, are sad aspects of human reality. The truth is that humans can lie, while the content of their lies is an aspect of reality, but not of truth. Practically though, we cannot build our lives on lies, deception, and delusion without toxic consequences. To simplify, we can, therefore, discard the aspect of reality that is a distorted human construction from our understanding of reality, except for the purpose of recognizing it when it appears. Reality and truth then become for all intents and purposes synonymous. If so, can we humans share a universally accepted reality that has a common ring of truth for all? I will try to show that this is indeed possible, but only if we train ourselves to mobilize higher human faculties we often keep dormant, thus missing out on discovering the awe-inspiring vastness of life in a mysterious universe.

The universality of truth

Are you familiar with the famous elephant of reality and the blind men trying to describe it? One man touches the tusks and says reality is like a battering ram, another touches his ears and insists reality is like a cabbage leaf. One touches his legs and argues it is like a tree trunk; another the end of his tail and believes it is like a brush, and yet another man touches his trunk convinced reality is like a snake, and so on. Everyone has a clear sensory experience of a part of the elephant and for each individual, the elephant is clearly what the senses tell him it is. The problem is that each individual has blinders on and does not check what his colleagues experience. The result is a tower of Bable situation, in which we not only disagree on what the truth is, but hold on tightly to our opinions and cannot communicate nor hear each other. The truth becomes ‘what I see as truth’, from which follows that ‘whatever you think is the truth must be false and misguided’. It would appear that discovering a universally valid truth is a hopeless endeavor and that truth is locked in the tiny bubble of human subjectivity.

The Tower Of Babel, Peter Brueghel the Elder, 1563

Limitations of the senses and scientific objectivity

Let’s establish a few facts first, in order to better understand what follows. Like all animals, we take in reality through our senses, which register reality through the restricted dimension of their unique architecture. For example, the eye is able to register electromagnetic waves in the range of 400-700nm. What’s beyond, ultraviolet or infrared is invisible. In other words, we are naturally limited to seeing the world in a very particular human way that is very different from a bat’s, for example. However, given our unique conceptual brainpower with its ability to imagine what does not exist, we developed mind mechanisms, including mathematics, with which we can measure and experiment, invent and create in such a way as to develop extensive knowledge of the physical world beyond what our senses can pick up. So we know all about subatomic particles, molecules, black holes, the probable origin of the universe, cells, and X-rays without being able to have a direct experience of them. In short, our inherently biased and limited view of reality is expanded by our reasoning faculties beyond what the senses are able to register to include vast swaths of the collectively verifiable physical reality around us that is not accessible through the senses.

Geographical and ecological environments

Now, how about different ways reality shows up in our consciousness depending on ecological and geographical factors? With the same senses, we experience reality very differently depending on the environment we live in and by implication, the stories, myths, and cultural envelopes we create are very different from one place to another. A tribe in the middle of the Amazon jungle has very different views on life than the farmers high up in the Swiss Alps. Could they conceivably share the same circle of truth and a common view of reality?

Mindsight and the development of inner clarity

And how about the world of individual subjective experience, the mind and the imagination that gives rise to other cultural phenomena, such as personal views, artistic expression, philosophical and religious beliefs? Some societies do not recognize subjective experience. Each individual is a function of the collective and ‘naturally’ behaves and sees the world as its expression by subsuming the subjective under the collective. In our culture, we must begin with the notion of our organism as an open complex system. When through trauma or other influences this organism is intrapsychically divided into competing parts that do not communicate well with each other, we display physical and psychological symptoms of all kinds, because the organism struggles with entrenched states of chaos and rigidity it has no way of processing towards integration without external help. Non-integrated organismic states make it impossible for the person to see reality clearly, the way looking through a fractured windshield makes it impossible to see the road clearly or a disorganized orchestra with non-communicative players is unable to play a symphony one would want to listen to.

Developing a clear mind through mindsight (remembering that the mind is embodied and includes the heart, the guts, and the whole body) is, therefore, a crucial precondition to seeing the truth. At the level of this step, we already have love emerging: Mindsight can only develop through the combination of focused attention, open awareness, and kind disposition on the basis of strong intention. Daniel Siegel‘s COAL (Curiosity, Openness, Acceptance, and Love as the emerging property of the first three) is a precondition for deep insight and wisdom. In collective societies, in which subjective experience is completely subsumed into the collective mind, it is the medicine man or wise elder of the tribe who is responsible for guiding the individuals between the Scylla of chaos and the Charybdis of rigidity towards an integrated societal functioning. The way he or she does it is no less imbued by the principles of COAL we apply to our own individuality. If it isn’t, the tribe fractures and does not thrive. To summarize then, the development of mindsight through COAL, whether individually or collectively, results in a far less distorted view of reality we can, therefore, all share, because defensive mind mechanisms that lead to distortions of view, experience, reality, and truth by throwing the individual or collective organism into chaos or rigidity, can be relinquished in favor of more integrated, and both intra- and interpersonally attuned connections to reality.

As an example, someone suffering from complex childhood trauma may get triggered by a comment you make, even though your comment is not ill-intentioned, nor aggressive. The person’s reaction is to immediately fall into the childhood survival situation, disconnect from the socially-engaged middle prefrontal cortex (MPC) and experience a brainstem activation in the form of a fight/flight situation. The moment that happens, the person is incapable of attuning, hearing what you really say, repair if necessary, and process the situation from the present perspective where there may be no danger at all, and instead unconsciously projects the childhood trauma onto the present moment. The result is that this person cannot see the truth, nor reality as it is. She can only see a long-gone reality that does not exist anymore, thus distorting what is going on in the present moment.

Mindful learning

Mindsight and getting better at reaching integrated states for oneself is not enough to discover the universality of truth. A second ingredient is mindful learning, which Ellen Langer has explored in detail. The essence of mindful learning is to offer learning material in a conditional format rather than as a series of absolute truths. Universal and absolute truth are not the same. Absolute truth is in fact not truth at all, but simply a stubbornly-held rigid opinion about how things are. Mindful learning requires us to keep an open mind about the contexts to which new information can be applied. To foster this openness in a practical way, we use spacious terms such as ‘might’, ‘can be’, ‘could be’, ‘might entail’, ‘may on occasion’, ‘could involve’, ‘may have’, and ‘could have been’, rather than foreclosing ones such as ‘is’, ‘are’, or ‘were’. Mindful learning lets us know what quantum physicists already know from their experiments, that the outcome of our experiences is shaped in part by our own attitude, which shapes the direction of our learning. Mindful learning consists of openness to novelty, alertness to distinctions from which we create categories, sensitivity to different contexts, implicit if not explicit awareness of multiple perspectives, and orientation to the present. This encourages the mind to disentangle itself from premature conclusions, categorizations, and routinized ways of perceiving and thinking.

Certainty eliminates the need to pay attention, and without precise attention, we miss the details that reveal reality. Given that the world around us is always in flux, our certainty is an illusion. Mindful learning involves concepts such as intelligent ignorance, flexible thinking, avoidance of premature cognitive commitments, and creative uncertainty. It is neither top-down conceptually averaged and conditioned learning (I miss the uniqueness of this flower I see right now because long ago I created the category ‘flower’ from many different flowers I saw, making it more expedient for me to just project the category on this unique flower I see now), nor bottom-up formlessly creative learning; neither left-brain (linguistics, linearity, logic, literal thinking) nor right-brain (non-verbal, holistic, visuospatial, embodied) learning; it is rather a sideways stance of learning, an orthogonal shift in awareness, where left- and right-brain styles, top-down and bottom-up processing are intertwined, where learners are conditional in how they take in information and uncertainty is a friend. Creative uncertainty strengthens learning and makes the learning experience more enjoyable and accessible to Being beyond doing. With this kind of learning, we are clear about what we know, what we don’t know, and how different perspectives illuminate aspects of reality we may not be able to see ourselves. Again, as previously seen in our discussion of mindsight, this kind of learning comes with an attitude of openness and kindness towards what seems foreign, unintelligible, unknown, or even absurd.

Consilience

Mindful learning sets the stage for people with mindsight to meaningfully dialogue and hear each other without exclusion or dogmatism, at which point a third ingredient will close the loop that makes it possible for us to rethink the tower of Babel. There is a way of developing a common vocabulary across the different ways and modes of knowing to be able to transcend our limited views and converse about our common reality. It is an approach to knowing about what it means to be human that allows us to draw on all the different disciplines of science and other ways of knowing (art, philosophy, mindsight, jurisprudence, carpentry, etc.); E. O. Wilson calls that consilience. The consilience approach honors subjectivity as much as science. Consilience takes many different ways of pursuing knowledge through science and other means and finds the universal principles that emerge when you see these independent disciplines as a whole. Consilience means finding universal principles across separate ways of knowing.

The combination of mindsight, mindful learning, and consilience integrates not only one’s organism but also one’s relationships with others, thereby making it possible to humbly respect and accept other people’s views as facets of the elephant of reality we are trying to see. Views that are difficult to assimilate do not get rejected but are seen within a larger context. By combining principles from different ways of knowing we are afforded the opportunity to see a larger picture, the whole, or at least as much as possible of the elephant of truth. To rephrase, the deeper our knowledge and understanding of, and our attunement with the human condition is, the more of the elephant of truth can we see and share.

Lies

I wish I had Trump as my patient – I would feel more knowledgeable about the psychology of lying. He symbolizes everything that can be wrong in a society, and we should not forget that he can only occupy the post he does when a majority of citizens collude with what is emerging now as a collective psychological madness, which includes ‘pathological lying, habitual and institutionalized corruption, dishonesty, serial groping, casual racism, the glorification of violence, winking to Nazis, laziness, impulsiveness, childish tantrums, bottomless ignorance, vanity, insecurity, vulnerability to flattery, bullying, crudity, indifference to suffering, incompetence, rabid narcissism, chaos in the White House, attacks on America’s allies and support for its foes, contempt for experts and for expertise, for truth and the press, for norms and conventions, for checks and balances, for limited government, for the very rule of law’ (adapted from Andrew Coyne: The virus of Trumpism and his infectious moral failings – Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 8, 2020).

Lies are part of reality, as are deception and delusion, but they are not part of truth. With mindsight, mindful learning, and consilience, developed through learning the technique of kind attentiveness, we learn to discern the difference between distortion and clarity, falsity and veracity, manipulation and guidance, domination and leadership, rhetoric and reason, demagogy and unification. This complex process of reality exploration makes us generally less vulnerable to succumb to lies. The kindly attentive mind has the patience of learning about context through complex analyses from established and trustworthy sources, and not just react emotionally to meaningless social media clips and news flashes. No information, no news, no opinion is unbiased, but there is a difference between bias and lie. The bias prefers certain parts of the elephant of truth, openly admits it, and remains open to other biases. The lie tells a story, either consciously or unconsciously, that distorts or hides the elephant of truth, and is incompatible with it. Most lies are toxic, although some can be skillful and life-affirming, such as a lie that gets you out of a concentration camp.

The healing power of truth and now

Having laid the foundations for seeing truth from a more multifaceted and holistic perspective, we now have to ask ourselves why truth is so important. It is said that the truth shall set you free, but why?

We have already seen that access to truth requires certain attributes that hinge on being consistent with reality and fact: Focused attention, open awareness, kind disposition, strong intention, humility, honesty, and integrity. As the etymology of the word ‘integrity’ reveals, integration is at the core of truth. Integration is the process by which the parts of a system link together without losing their differentiated uniqueness, and like in a dance of two connected individuals, give rise to a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Where there is integration, integrity, and an easy relationship to truth, in other words, a resonance with facts, whether we like them or not, our organism does not need to tense up, create reality-distorting defenses and fight against itself. Little energy gets wasted in defensiveness and having to then deal with the toxic consequences of it on the organism and its environment. Once we see what is true and real, however painful it may be, we gain the freedom of choice for potential corrective actions. This is also what it means to access the present moment, the now. We only assume to have such freedom but really don’t when we are caught in deception and the distortions of mind constructions outside the now. Deception is like having a termite-infested basement with a locked basement door. While the foundations are slowly eroding and eventually leading to collapse, we blissfully pretend that everything is fine and are terribly surprised the day the roof collapses on us. When we challenge ourselves to see the truth and open the basement door, we sure do not feel good about discovering the termite mess. However, this pain corresponds to the clarity of seeing the truth and gives us the opportunity to address the termite problem. It is the essence of what it means to be here now. Action based on truth keeps us grounded in what’s real, which is what’s now, and a clear vision of reality sets us free by giving us the freedom to act skilfully in accordance with context and circumstance. We don’t end up meeting surprises coming from truth distortions, such as when castles built in the air collapse. Bad neighborhoods are only in the mind’s constructions, and the present is a much more benevolent place. As Hamlet said: “Nothing is either good or bad, only thinking makes it so.”

2. LOVE

So truth reveals itself through integration, and integration happens now, leading to a sense of peace and well-being, which in turn engenders trust by calming our reptilian fight/flight/freeze systems and connecting us to ourselves and each other through attunement. That open connectivity between most or all parts of who we are means that nothing real gets excluded from consciousness. Confidence arises that no locked basement doors impede access to hidden catastrophes, and the trust that grows on this basis allows the elements of COAL we trained all along to grow, including the emerging property of love, however difficult reality might be. Through truth, we thus discover love and vice versa. The simple act of facing truth and reality, which inevitably requires attention and COAL, is an act of love. The simple surrender to the universe ‘as it is’ is an act of love. All acts of love bring peace and equanimity in a very deep way. This is why transcendence and emptiness, the result of reality and truth having been revealed at their deepest level, are pure love, and this is why in vernacular parlance or New Age rhapsody people keep proclaiming the benefits of discovering the universe’s benevolence. It is not the universe that is benevolent, for it is first and foremost awe-inspiring, frighteningly gigantic with brute power and endlessly fascinating. What’s benevolent is the present moment in comparison to the mind’s constructions; our new, mindful way of meeting our human experience unencumbered by resistance as the unfolding universe becoming conscious of itself. Our sheer existence becomes love in action in the form of transcendental Being.

3. A LETTER FROM PAUL TO THE CORINTHIANS

It is fascinating to find in the Bible of all places, a passage that could have been written with Interpersonal Neurobiology in mind. I insert my comments in red throughout the text:
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. Non-attachment, no rope burn.
5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Non-attachment, no rope burn.
6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Truth at the root of love.
7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Fosters the processes of integration.
8 Love never fails. Because it is beyond the problem-solving mind. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; love tethers us to the present moment away from future preoccupations; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; love is beyond what’s conceptually graspable and words; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. Love is the highest form of knowledge beyond left-brain rationalizations.
9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. The conceptual mind parses reality and cannot see context and wholeness.
11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. When caught in left-brain reasoning we are caught in virtual conceptual reality and only see the menu, never the meal. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. Left and right brain balance is essential to see the whole elephant of truth, and thereby fully know oneself.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. This means that when we clearly see the ways and laws of the unfolding universe, which we are a manifestation of, hopes for the future become tangible knowledge in the present and we appreciate reality’s hidden complexities as the most obvious foundations of wisdom. But the greatest of these is love, because it is the emerging property of such clarity of view allowing us to roam freely and easily in life’s marketplace as manifestations of the transcendental emptiness of Being.

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

Life unfolds between moments of doing something and moments of doing nothing.

One is the opposite of the other in the same dimension of external appearances. Life seems to pendulate between the polarities of activity and rest. But that is just the surface.

There is a third doing belonging to another dimension: Non-doing at the core of both doing something and doing nothing. This non-doing is the secret bridge to life’s dimension that in its becoming and disappearing, arising and fading, is independent of whether we do something or do nothing. From the depths of this other dimension of life, or of Life (with capital L) if you so want, the law of Being manifests as one of the most essentially human characteristics – presence. Whether we do something or do nothing, presence is the way Being manifests beyond just automatic and mindless existence, and it remains unshakably linked to its lawful principles of non-doing. That path, that way of Being as presence is the essential non-doing within both doing something and doing nothing. In Chinese culture, this is called Wu Wei.

Doing something and doing nothing become wholesome and sacred acts only then, when they don’t impede the manifestation of Being coming from the depths Life. Whether we act selfishly or selflessly, being too wrapped up in our busyness runs the risk of impeding Being from becoming manifest as presence in our lives. It seems obvious how busyness impedes the radiant blossoming of presence; it is trickier to realize how doing nothing may impede presence just as much, when it is filled with inner unrest.

Non-doing is the expression of presence emerging from the stillness of Being. This stillness is not the absence of movement, but our learned capacity to get out of nature’s dynamically unfolding ways. Stillness is therefore always there to be tapped into when we know-how, right in the midst of life’s bustling catastrophe. Conversely, in life’s quiet moments of doing nothing, non-doing is also the expression of a profound connection to the irrepressible, creative, and dynamic source of life. In other words, non-doing is both a vast space of stillness amid chaos and an intimate connection to the ever-creative and dynamic source of life.

Being is beyond doing something and doing nothing, and therefore often seen as the transcendent dimension of existence. Our collective calling to becoming fully human during our existence, beyond the animalistic fulfillment of needs for survival, is precisely about making sure that nothing gets in the way of the subtle, quiet, but the powerful human impulse to reveal the presence of Being. To this end, it behooves us to develop and practice non-doing within all our many active and receptive doing activities, and consistently orient ourselves towards its powerful energy that serves as a beacon, measure, direction, and meaning for our lives. When rooted in non-doing, the lively and life-affirming dynamic of our human essence is protected from the suffocating busyness of our goal-oriented doing.

We typically practice non-doing in our formal meditation sittings. Through meditation, we remain open to the initiatory core of all doing and behaving. In Wu Wei, we maintain an accepting openness towards life’s mystery, which yearns for expression and human testimony.
When Wu Wei directs action, there is ease and relaxation, because our ego steps aside to allow our true self to be in charge. This true self is not a unified entity in us, but rather our moment-by-moment attitude when we can get out of life’s spontaneous, dynamically unfolding ways. This free and easy non-doing amid the busy market place we call Wu Wei, also carries the living word of our communications. Speaking in accordance with the presence of Being means speaking from the depth of stillness as the resonance board for our words’ deeper meanings. Words with power come from silence. Right speech that is attuned to whom we speak with, sounds loudly with the silence that is so characteristic of presence in Being. Conversely, the word of Being falls silent amidst the yapping and chatter of mindless gossip.

If all this sounds theoretical or philosophical to you, let me give a recent example from an email I just received from one of my students. She writes: “Regarding the four steps of our transformation algorithm meditation practice, letting oneself go and surrender to the flow of the breath, how do I surrender and trust the flow to carry me, if (based on my life experience) I no longer believe in the ‘benevolence of the Universe’?” This a question that typically arises when as I described above one is stuck in ‘the suffocating business of goal-oriented doing’, which severs our connection to ‘non-doing as the lively and life-affirming dynamic of our human essence’. To the extent this student is alienated from Being, what she fails to realize is that this state of alienation is a huge opportunity and one of the royal roads to accessing the mystery of Being.

The first step is to understand that when she says she no longer believes in the benevolence of the universe, what she is really saying is that her problem-solving, goal-oriented mind no longer believes. In other words, she is saying something of crucial importance without knowing that she is saying it – and that is that she has reached the limit of what the problem-solving mind can handle, understand, and process. To put it differently, she has reached the limits of the ‘doing-something-and-doing-nothing’ dimension. This is good news she can rejoice in – on one hand, that is. On the other hand, the scary leap starts now: It is the leap that entails a relinquishing of this limited sense of meaning the problem-solving mind creates, and surrender to what from the problem-solving mind’s point of view appears as the universe’s utter malevolence, destructiveness, meaninglessness, forsakenness, and absurdity. It is a leap into the void with the seemingly real expectation of falling to one’s demise. This is why wise men and women say that when you die before you die, you will not die when you die. It is a leap of faith without a shred of trust, or maybe if lucky, a shred of trust that comes from the encouraging words of the many teachers who have taken this journey before you. This infinite void without reassurances appears to be so dark, destructive and absurd, because the problem-solving mind, which we allowed to dominate our sense of reality over a whole lifetime, has no reference points for it. No words, no concepts, no narratives, not even any sensory experiences apply to what this apparent void is all about.

Only once we have dared to take the leap, which is, in fact, another way of saying that we dared to show up, live fully and manifest presence in Being, only then do we discover a most astonishing reality – what we thought was the universe’s benevolence was nothing more than our little ego’s rationalization that when we thrive and have no pain, no illness, and no death, we think the universe is benevolent. When calamities occur, we think it is bad. What meager nonsense! We discover something of untold beauty, namely that whatever happens, whether we are young or old, fresh or decrepit, smooth or wrinkled, healthy or sick, alive or about to die, an incredible, nameless sense of peace and love awaits us to be discovered, and that we are not just part of the universe, but we are, have always been, and will always be this universe unfolding, filled with love and awe-inspiring beauty. It is impossible to properly describe this awakening when we open ourselves up to this new dimension – as they say in Zen, we can only talk about the finger pointing to the moon, not the moon itself. For those inclined to read sacred texts, read the story of Job in the Bible, or the story of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, just to name two among many, and you’ll know what I am trying to write about.

Back to my student: How do you take that leap? You have to embrace the stark and painful darkness of absurdity and meaninglessness with curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love while making sure you consistently use your meditation tools and psychotherapy, if necessary, the proper way. Most people shy away from that precipice, often because they simply don’t have the tools to meet their mind’s depth, they don’t have the patience and dedication to walk that path, or they don’t have a teacher experienced enough to guide them through. Having a teacher with experience is essential because without him or her one can easily shatter under the barrage of dangerous weapons of our mind’s bad neighborhoods. Not surprisingly Jesus said: “Many are called, but few are chosen!” Who does not want that kind of liberation independent from circumstance? Yet who is prepared to put in the necessary training to make that more probable?

Just a short aside, resist the idea that liberation from suffering is absolute, perfect, and a painless paradise. Instead, it is about a journey without end, a journey that in its endless unfolding is the goal, an abiding equanimity and peace in the middle of the busy marketplace with all its pleasures and pains. It is Wu Wei.

The practice of non-doing is a practice in taking oneself back, in undoing and unlearning. It is a retreat from identification with the external appearances of reality, which threaten to overstretch, or even break the golden thread that binds us to our transcendental essence. This retreat from the world of appearances is at the same time a turning towards and tuning into the depths of Being and presence, and therefore by no means a withdrawal from life, but a deepening of our access to life’s full context and splendor.

Living that way is an art, which requires the intentional effort of dedicated practice we commit ourselves to when we decide to walk the path of freedom. When we become experienced in the art of non-doing, everything we encounter in life radiates with the power of Life and its transcendental dimension that is awaiting to be discovered. We then recognize how the multitude of life forms and things in the universe are each individual and unique space- and time-bound manifestations of timeless and nameless Being. To live a life of initiation means to dedicate ourselves to recognize life as endless transformation, in which we lovingly manifest through presence and deeds the timeless principles of sacred Being.

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

Mindsight in Our Pandemic Times

COVID is one of those unpredictable natural phenomena that throws the whole of humanity into multi-level turmoil, challenging much of how we thought we can live our lives. We are forced to reflect, review and rethink how we live on this planet, making it improbable to hold on to the old consciousness horizons we were used to. This can be seen as a form of initiation we are willy-nilly subjected to.

Initiation is a rite of passage. The person undergoing initiation, the initiate, enters either by tradition, design or chance into a psychologically embodied process of transformation that opens her consciousness to further dimensions of human existence not previously aware of. Initiation is a transformation, in which the initiate is ‘reborn’ into a new role. Examples of initiation ceremonies might include Christian baptism or confirmation, Jewish bar or bat mitzvah, acceptance into a fraternal organization, secret society or religious order, or graduation from school or recruit training. A spiritual initiation rite normally implies a shepherding process, where those who are at a higher, more experienced level of consciousness, guide the initiate through a process of greater exposure to a fuller breadth of knowledge. One famous historical example is the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece. Puberty rites were historically very important as a way of channeling the adolescent’s unruly states of mind towards a contextually more encompassing and knowledgeable view of reality. The adolescent has to learn to see beyond the consciousness of his own tribe into the vastness of world reality. In short, the importance of initiation lies in its consciousness-expanding effect, so that we do not remain stuck in the false, and frankly often painful belief that the state of consciousness we spontaneously slide into during the transition from childhood to adulthood is all there is.

With the dawn of quantitative science a few centuries ago and the temporary amnesia with regards to the fact that humans have minds, the notion of initiation became obsolete, because initiation is a mind process. With the recent (a few decades) recognition of consciousness and mind as possible objects of scientific inquiry, and the central importance of subjective experience as an aspect of mind so necessary for living the good life, I think it is time to revive the notion of initiation, which can teach us so much about our human existence and how to make it more bearable.

Initiation entails a fundamental structure seen across cultures, which we can use as a psychological guide on our exploration of mind and consciousness and our development of mindsight. This is why in this year’s Mindsight Intensive I have been focusing attention on initiation therapy and the transcendental aspect of human existence.

Every initiation rite teaches five negative and positive truths that need to be absorbed. These are:

1. Life is hard and full of suffering, but there is a way of easing this burden.
2. You are not that important, yet there is a way of realizing that you are everything.
3. Your life is not about you, but you can discover that you are about life.
4. You are not in control, yet you can learn to become an active participant in the inevitable flow of life.
5. You are going to die, but you can discover that you are much more than what dies.

The transformation algorithm meditation we practice in the Mindsight Intensive, essentially a practice focused on the phases of the breathing cycle, allows us to access these five dimensions of initiation in a most direct and efficient way. Each initiation dimension, when deeply incorporated and assimilated, contributes to decreasing our suffering.

1. Through mindsight we discover that the inevitability of suffering cannot be met successfully through avoidance of pain. We learn to let go of the fight against the inevitable. Instead, we embrace as best we can the full complexity of reality and the full force of truth with a kind and welcoming intention that helps bring clarity to our awareness of what is really going on. With that awareness, we gain more freedom of choice when it comes to possible actions that contribute to decreasing our suffering. Embracing our breath the way it is without manipulation teaches us that.

2. Science tells us that so far in the evolution of the universe we are an infinitesimal afterthought the universe can do without. From a cosmic perspective our solar system will soon be burnt up and transformed into cold nothingness. So when it comes to you and me in the individual physical form we came into existence, we have precious little importance. However, our mindsight reveals the possibility of a great fascination we can cultivate with how energy and chance conspire over huge periods of time to give rise to something as marvelous as our human consciousness; and we can do that without having to resort to any extraneous notion of a creator. Not only that, but the expansion of consciousness through mindsight allows us to touch the direct experience of actually being the unfolding universe. Each one of us is the universe and life in its unfolding, beyond the temporary and mortal carcass we presently find ourselves imprisoned in. In fact, once we see our bodies more deeply within the large context of universal reality, and realize that we not only have, but also are a body, the body ceases to be a prison, but becomes the vehicle of liberation. The breath teaches us to see beyond the physical concreteness of our body into the limitlessness of our Being.

3. Life is not about you, because this separate ‘you’ or ‘I’ we always refer to is but a construction of the mind, just a thought, a notion, and not anything real, the same way a wave thinking of itself as a separate entity is but a movement of the ocean. Our mental capacity to construct a ‘me’, or more accurately many different ‘mes’ from moment to moment, which we are usually unable to differentiate, is a gift of human consciousness that allows us the freedom to realize how our existence is about life. The universe lives in part through us as marvelous conduits of its awe-inspiring enormity. In the outbreath we learn to relinquish this constructed notion of a separate self.

4. Science tells us that we are biological algorithms as I have written elsewhere, and as such control far less than we believe. Having little control does not mean we are at the mercy of the slings and arrows of circumstance. We can actively participate in the universe’s creation! We need to relinquish our sense of omnipotence by learning to get out of our own way and not resist the inevitable flow of reality, which causes so much suffering. I love swimming down the Rhine in Basel. The current is strong, and there is no way to swim upstream against it. But carried by the current, you can swim closer or farther from the shore, and decide when you want to get out of the water. After the long pause at the end of the out-breath, the in-breath will arise whether you like it or not – you might as well not waste your energy taking the in-breath – instead, just let it happen.

5. Although you are going to die, the question is who ‘you’ is. As in the above paragraph 3., our mindsight examination of this question reveals that we are not defined by the boundaries of physical birth and death. The pause at the end of the out-breath is an opportunity to enter the nameless, timeless essence of your Being and realize how constructed your sense of time-bound separateness is. This is your chance to learn to die before you die and lose your fear of death, so that you won’t die when you die.

This whole initiation process causes a basic change in one’s existential condition, liberating us from the profane of time and history, so that we can fly like a butterfly into the sacred dimension of timeless life. The mundane becomes sacred, and this sense of sacredness alleviates our suffering. As Mircea Eliade would say: “Initiation recapitulates the sacred history of the world. And through this recapitulation, the whole world is sanctified anew. The initiate can perceive the world as a sacred work, a creation of the Gods.” This is a way of saying that we don’t have to be tyrannized by an autopilot mode of consciousness that leads to living and destroying like animals, but that we have the capacity to meaningfully participate in the awe-inspiring mystery of our universe’s unfolding in a constructive and beneficial way. Eliade again: “Initiation’s function is to reveal the deep meaning of existence to the new generations coming after us, and to help them assume the responsibility of being truly human and hence participating in culture.” This human world in the deepest and most evolved sense of the word, reveals a world open to the limitless capacity of human consciousness we call transcendence, because it transcends the limited view of an untrained human mind.

To this end, we cannot stay stagnant in our endeavors to improve our lives, as if we were trying to improve the script of a dream, even though we all want to use any means available to us to make ‘the dream’ of our physical and social reality as palatable as possible. Beyond that, initiation towards transcendence is about waking up from the dream and touch a dimension of consciousness that allows us to feel the mystery of life in a direct and compelling way beyond all suffering and time-bound existence. This awakening also called an orthogonal shift in consciousness, is not some kind of remote prize for the chosen few, even though so many people look for it their whole lives without success. It is quite simply speaking an inherent capacity of most human beings, for which we are all wired. What’s difficult is the methodical training process necessary to activate this dormant faculty, which requires dedicated work on challenging every assumption we are used to living by within the boundaries of every day, untrained consciousness. Once seriously launched on this journey, its beauty lies in the fact that there is no return, no place to reach, and no achievement to pursue. There is only the walking on the path to nowhere and everywhere, knowing that we never ‘get there’, but can simply notice an improvement in our ability to lovingly get out of our own way and surrender to what is, whether we like it or not, moment by moment. Our conscious walking is Being.

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

Counteracting Our Mind’s Deceptive Ways in Meditation

The Case For Careful Self-Monitoring

We constantly intend many things in life, but all too often what turns out does not correspond to what we intended. We then blame factors outside our control, rather than noticing that we undermine our own intentions. How so? A very simple mechanism plays a predominant role: We forget to self-monitor, assuming that once an intention has run out of the gate, the stars are properly aligned for all concerned neurofirings to shoot in the same direction as they do the intention’s bidding. This could not be more wrong! Just because we intend something, does not mean that our actions actually follow what we intend at all. There is a whole world between intention and execution, a chaotic sizzling of myriad contradictory neurofirings with their own agenda and unconscious intentions that undermine our original intentions. For survival purposes, the brain is infinitely creative in the construction of useful and not so useful illusions we fall prey to. These illusions are then embedded in seemingly seamless narratives that depict a distorted reality we believe in, not noticing the many inbuilt gaps we remain completely unaware of. In short, making sure that an intention comes to fruition as the corresponding intended action, is an art, the art of self-monitoring. Most meditation failures my students seek my help for have their roots in a lack of self-monitoring.

Here are two vignettes I recently encountered with my students:

Lydia, as I will call her, reported that she experienced anxiety, whenever she was paying attention to her breath, which is why she did not pursue this practice. She wondered how to deal with that. In my presence, I invited her to close her eyes and focus her attention on the somatic sensations accompanying the breathing in the belly. I then asked her, whether the focus of her attention is now on the sensations in the belly, and she confirmed it was. Next, I asked her to describe the sensations she was witnessing within the focus of her attention, and her response was ‘very strong heartbeat and thoughts about how unpleasant the meditation is’. Her anxiety, as seemingly predicted by her original complaint, was fairly high.

Peter, as I will call my second student, sent me an email with regards to a meditation he was supposed to practice, in which the focus of attention is also in the somatic sensations accompanying the breathing in the belly. He wrote: “The challenge I have by keeping the focus on the pelvis is boredom and restlessness.  Can I instead focus my attention on a candle to ward off boredom?”

Before you read on, take a break and reflect on these two vignettes. Ask yourself how you would help these two students, and where the problem might lie. Imagine being one of those students and what your problem might be.

In both cases, the mind is playing tricks on them, and they don’t notice it. Completely unaware, they either think seeing a reality they are actually not seeing, or blatantly disregard cardinal rules of mindfulness they are theoretically well aware of. The result is as Shakespeare would say ‘what you see is not what you see’, a sort of unconscious lying to oneself, which leads to believing the mind’s distorted constructions, not noticing that these beliefs are just constructions of the mind, and finally mistaking these beliefs for reality and truth. It is a good thing that these two students reached out to examine their challenge, because, without an experienced teacher, their meditation attempts would understandably falter and never lead anywhere.

Lydia’s predicament is that she thought her attention is in the somatic sensations in the belly, when in fact her response to my second question made it very clear that her attention was in the region of the heart and even far away from somatic sensations in cognitive stories about meditation, not in the somatic sensations of the belly. In other words, her attention was not endogenous, meaning intentionally aimed at a chosen focus, but exogenous, meaning captured by whatever her organism was preoccupied with. Since anxiety was one of her challenges, she unwittingly fed it by not noticing that she was maintaining the same dysregulated monkey mind that caused her anxiety and she struggled within her everyday life. The moment I helped her realize what was happening, and she really started to focus on the belly sensations, not only did it become clear that intentionally taking charge of one’s attention is hard work, but her anxiety temporarily lifted.

Peter is an experienced meditation student, and he is very familiar with one of the fundamental principles of mindfulness – that we turn towards pain and discomfort rather than avoid it. Somehow, in that situation, his mind did not make the connection and gave him the impression that it would be a good idea to find an easier focus of attention. First of all, since the candle has more appeal to his curiosity, by switching to the candle he would weaken endogenous attention in favor of the exogenous attention of the monkey mind. Second, his idea of ‘warding off’ would strengthen the repressive forces of the mind, which contribute to getting us in trouble in the first place. Third, he would dismiss boredom and restlessness as experiences and mental states not worthy of exploration, thus perpetuating the suffering caused by what is hidden behind these mental states. It is therefore of utmost importance he sticks with the original instructions and makes sure that he faces and works through whatever challenges arise, rather than avoid them.

In my experience, most students who give up on mindfulness meditation or cannot penetrate all the way ‘down’ to the transcendental dimension of existence and our Being, fail to do so, because they are not solid in their use of meditation tools, nor do they recognize the myriad ways our awe-inspiring human mind, embodied in the most complex object in the known universe, our brain, can so easily and massively fool us. Precision in our way of observing and mastery of our meditation tools are essential on our mindsight journey. The human capacity for self-deception is limitless, and if we are not steadily on the look-out for the next mind trap, and cultivate a healthy skepticism for anything we believe we see, we suffer, cause suffering for others and get hopelessly lost in the swamp of our own ignorance.

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

Transcendental Being

Let me preface this blog with a healthy dose of reservations and skepticism. This topic lends itself to idealizations and unrealistic fantasies of deliverance from suffering the human mind is all too ready to indulge in. Just because I write about an incredibly powerful aspect of consciousness, does not mean it is easily accessible or even desirable for everyone, nor that in writing about it I belong to an exclusive club of enlightened beings, for whom suffering, getting lost in their own mental distortions and screwing up in life is a thing of the past. Without exception, we are all in the same soup – terribly flawed creatures having to deal with the lifelong challenge of coming to terms with such a powerfully complex brain and incredibly vast mind full of conflicts and contradictions. Like Jack Kornfield’s choice of title for one of his books, after enlightenment comes the laundry. The notion of enlightenment is such a treacherously seductive one that causes much unhealthy wishful striving, that I even propose to abolish it. I much prefer the humbler notion of unendarkenment, which is so much more authentic and true to reality as it is, and more apt to keep our feet on the ground, instead of seducing us to lose our head in the clouds.

One Mindsight student wrote me an email before taking the course, asking whether I could tell her more about the course, such as goals/outcomes. It sounds reasonable that you take the course to increase your knowledge, meet certain goals that make taking it worth your money, and achieve certain positives outcomes for whatever ails you. Let’s remember, though, that what’s ‘reasonable’ falls under the purview of reason, and reason is the power of the mind to think, understand and form judgments by a process of logic.

This mind power stems from what we also call the problem-solving mind, which is only a fraction of the mind’s function and power. Yet, it is this fraction of the mind that for various reasons thoroughly explained here overpowers the whole mind as we unconsciously slide from childhood into adulthood. The majority of human beings never manage to realize this, let alone leave this prison that prevents access to much of what consciousness could offer. In other words, we live in a narrative bubble, a cultural envelope of societal norms we mistake for reality, not realizing that the consciousness that goes with it, is heavily truncated and limited by the blinders of logic. Don’t get me wrong, the ability to problem-solve in a logical way is of course a uniquely human asset of great importance for survival. To live life deeply with an appreciation of reality beyond logic and an ability to relieve one’s suffering on the deepest level possible, the problem-solving mind alone is woefully inadequate.

An elderly Zen master received the visit from a Western journalist, who wanted to know a whole lot of things about Zen. They sat at a table, where tea was ready to be served. As the journalist began talking and asking all these questions he had in his mind, the Zen master began pouring the journalist’s tea. When the cup was full, he didn’t stop pouring, and the tea spilled all over the journalist’s clothes. Needless to say, the journalist was rather startled and became upset and irritated, wondering whether maybe this Zen master was after all senile. He asked: “Why on earth did you do that?” To which the Zen master responded: “You see, your mind is like this cup of tea when it was full. There is no room to add more understanding of Zen. In order to understand Zen, you are going to have to empty your mind first, in order to become receptive to a new reality.”

Taking this Mindsight Intensive with the right attitude that will allow you to see realms of reality you had no prior access to, is understandably going to be difficult because it goes against all that is reasonable or sensible. Thus the first order of business to join the course is to throw the idea out the window that you are coming to learn new things and replace it with the idea that you are coming to unlearn everything. Your knowledge will be a hindrance and your capacity to unknow a boon.

Once you have really absorbed what that entails, you can take it further. I am sure you are coming with the hope that certain life issues will improve – throw that out the window. You may hope to decrease certain symptoms – out the window. You may hope to learn to be less stressed or feel better, to have better relationships, or to get closer to life’s meaning – all out the window. Now look out the window and watch the pile of old, well-worn, outdated garbage increase as you systematically relinquish every idea you may have with regards to how this course is going to enhance anything in your life, whether it is knowledge, wellbeing, happiness, wealth, health or anything else you can think of. In fact, here is a good start to the program: Expect nothing, hope for nothing, and prepare yourself to become increasingly empty-handed and lose everything, in order to gain everything. How to do that, has to be learned.

Now here is the paradox: Reacting to what I just said, your problem-solving, rational mind, I am pretty sure, may already have created in you an apprehensive mental state dominated by fear, gloom and aversion, causing you to doubt the wisdom to spend your money that way. Surprisingly, though, engaging in this project I just described creates a deep sense of relaxation, relief, liberation, spaciousness, new vigor and peacefulness. It may now sound like this whole idea of losing everything to gain everything is an elaborate sleight of logic to hide the fact, that we are still pursuing a gain of some sort, pretending not to. Not quite – a closer look at this process will reveal why.

I give you this: Accessing the transcendent is not for the birds, and indeed, we gain immensely from it. The question is how we get to gain everything, and what that ‘gaining everything’ really means. The way we are used to gain is by adding and improving through the problem-solving mind’s logic, which leads to material, psychological and practical gains. What we don’t notice as this gaining evolution unfolds, is that it does so within the narrow context of consciousness with blinders on, the rational, problem-solving mind. Many an ailment, struggle, stress, unhappiness and symptom is due to this narrowing of consciousness we ignore. Because the rational mind’s currency (the cognitive concept, thought, and narrative containing strings of concepts) pretty well matches many aspects of everyday reality (when I ask you to pass me the butter, my words have a pretty precise correspondence to the actual objects and actions I am referring to), we unconsciously come to believe that our concepts and narratives that are managed by the problem-solving mind are the reality we live in. We don’t notice at all that we actually live in a reality of our own construction that only vaguely and incompletely reveals full reality to us. We try to be fed by the menu while we confuse it for the meal, surprised we remain consistently hungry. We live a dream, not noticing that we do so, and are therefore unable to wake up from it.

To leave the dream for reality in its more complete nakedness and truth, adding more to the knowledge of the dream will only perpetuate the dream. To wake up from the dream, a fundamentally counter-intuitive action of consciousness is necessary: Getting to know the nature of the dream and getting out of our own way by letting go of every item, action and belief in the dream, allowing the dream to dissolve in a puff of smoke. This involves an orthogonal shift in consciousness that adds more dimensions to its field. As this happens, it is not uncommon to be temporarily overtaken by fear, because it is the embodied experience and realization of losing most of what we believed was true. The old perspective does not work anymore and the new perspective has not taken hold yet. Falling into nothingness, we have to trust that in this dark night of the soul something beyond whatever God we believed in, beyond gods, the imagination, words, space and time is there to safely carry us. And indeed there is. With the new perspective, we have vistas and choices not known before, as well as a new set of attributes with which we live our lives, such as flexibility, adaptability, coherence, energy and stability. Greater peace and equanimity ensue.

Having explored how we counterintuitively come to gain everything by losing everything, let’s now look at what ‘gaining everything’ really means. It is easy to fall into the rational mind’s trap of seeing this gain as an addition, when in fact it is in this case a subtraction. A new vista opens itself up to our eyes, a vista that has always already been there, but hidden in plain sight behind the fog of a consciousness clouded by the distorted constructions of the conflicted problem-solving mind. Discovering that vista is the work of subtraction and fog dissolution, not adding more of what we were used to, but did not recognize as such – fog. The opening of such vistas is not something under our control, nor something we effect. It is something given to us as grace when we engage in the humble work of consciousness unendarkenment. Apart from ongoing, relentless purification of consciousness, we don’t ‘do’ these new vistas, but they get revealed to us. And when we have access to them, we see the exact same world we saw before, but from so many more perspectives, contexts and depths, that we are granted infinitely greater freedom of choice of actions that decrease our suffering and give our lives a profoundly new meaning beyond any words that could describe it. Like Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, often misinterpreted as taking a fancy rocket into the sky and a space far away into another galaxy, we die to the limited nightmare of an unexamined consciousness that distorts reality through conflicted constructions, wake up from it, and find ourselves ‘reborn’ into a radiant view of the same reality, offering possibilities beyond all our expectations. Liberated from the golden cage of familiarity, we now see the same world, but find ourselves being able to roam freely and easily over its full expanse with its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

Remember, this is always a work in progress with no endpoint, a purgatory of the mind, in which we can always notice improvement.

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

Transcendence is about the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of our truth.

I often use this word, which of course in strictly dictionary terms can mean many things, depending on context. You might be surprised to hear it from me, a psychiatrist with a solid footing in science, since from the sound of it, transcendence seems to denote an esoteric, far away place in some kind of spirit world you may or may not believe in. That is too vague a notion to be useful in our context of meditative explorations of the mind, which is why a clearer explanation is in order.

Our seemingly seamless experience of reality is a well-constructed illusion. For example, you see a seamless field of vision without dark spots in the middle of it with nothing there, and yet those dark spots very much exist. They are the blind spots resulting from the fact that where the optic nerve enters the retina, there are no light sensors. The brain skillfully compensates and creates the illusion of continuity, where there is none. This same principle applies to consciousness in general. In quite the same way, we don’t notice that our ‘perception’ of reality is far from an objective or ‘pure’ perception. Instead, it is a complex, often largely distorted construction, involving concepts, words and stories we create on the basis of information bits the brain has already unconsciously manipulated to suit the occasion, so to speak, and not the pursuit of truth and a clear vision of reality. We are not conscious of living in a narrative envelope that mediates a virtual experience of reality we mistake for direct experience of reality. In other words, we keep trying to feed on the menu and don’t realize we never have the meal in front of us.

We can call this situation tragic, because it causes untold human suffering. Subjectively so deeply ensnared in fictions of our own construction, the only reality left for us to orient ourselves by is the external, objective scientific one, against which everything gets measured. What objectively works becomes worthwhile and in fact the ultimate goal of human growth. We learn to function, perform, accumulate knowledge and measure outcomes. We measure success by accomplishments and possessions, and by how well we solve problems, fix things, improve our lives, develop and get somewhere, wherever that somewhere may be. We draft legislations that exclude all that is not evidence-based and measure psychological wellbeing by symptom scales, as if they were reflective of the person being measured. We value well-functioning adaptation to life, which includes professional and financial success, the picket fence fantasy of an accomplished life and a family life that allows its members to conform and survive, maybe even thrive.

This does not sound so bad, you may say, and I would not only agree, but even subscribe to its usefulness and importance for a well-lived life. What I described is a useful fiction indeed, that ensures our ability to survive, put in place what concrete aspects of life we need and pay our taxes on time. Most counselling and psychotherapeutic approaches to mental health, and most mindfulness meditation approaches used in Western societies, teach techniques that address this practical aspect of our human lives. But that is not the whole story. Many people who live these principles successfully, are in fact not satisfied with life at all, living with a nagging sense of something fundamental missing. In addition, the more arduously they try to improve this fiction, the clearer it becomes that nothing can fundamentally change. Stuck in a nightmare, one cannot improve one’s life experience by improving the nightmarish world.

The human being as experiencing subject (as opposed to constructed object) unwittingly retreats into the shadows of non-consciousness under the overwhelming power of the tyrannical narrative mind, which research shows seems to be in part mediated by the overwhelmingly controlling left brain. We can barely taste our meal, because we overwhelmingly see menus. You can imagine how this keeps us hungry and causes us to become dysfunctional, diseased and unhappy. The question becomes, ‘what would reality really be like, if we had access to our subjective experience of life outside the narrative envelope, if we had complete access to our full subjective experience beyond concepts and stories we construct for ourselves’? This question opens the door to a very different aspect of human existence, one that is much more difficult to access.

This process of liberating ourselves from the restrictive stories we envelop ourselves with, and through direct experience engaging in the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of truth we are embedded in, is what transcendence is all about.

In this other realm of human reality, the scales, values, calculations and therapeutic approaches to the mind described above are not applicable. We have to learn ways of extricating our consciousness from the restrictive narrative envelope we are so familiar with by learning how to relinquish all striving for improvement, and instead diligently practice the art of entering the non-verbal flow of our organism’s energy through direct experience. Rather than seek and add more to what we think we know, we need to learn the opposite – unknowing, undoing, unlearning, surrendering and getting out of our own way, in order to make room in our consciousness for a depth and contextual vastness of experience we cannot even fathom. Because the only way we know how to find meaning is through the stories we create, the moment we fall out of this narrative envelope, there is no meaning to be found in the familiar sense of the term we know. Instead, we discover a vast, wide open (energy?) field of consciousness, the direct experience of which is timeless, nameless and empty of any conceptual essence we were used to construct. Not being familiar with this aspect of human existence, we are often overcome with fear when we first encounter it, and cannot fathom the infinite and powerful healing potential it has, when we are able to consciously become transparent to it, and live by it as the ground of Being. Stuck in a nightmare, the only way to really heal is to wake up from it. When we wake up to our collective, transcendental truth, we experience life radically differently.

Although we live in the same world we did before, with the same car, same house, same profession, and the same people, the additional dimensions of consciousness we gained access to through practicing transparency to the transcendent, open a completely new vista onto the same landscape of human existence. It is like the ball moving through a two-dimensional world. If you were a flat, two-dimensional being in a two-dimensional world with a two-dimensional consciousness, a ball moving through that world would appear to you as a process, not an object in motion. You would see a point growing into a line up to a maximum length, then shortening again until it becomes a point and disappears. The moment you developed a three-dimensional consciousness, you would realize that the moving phenomenon of a point becoming a line and then a point again is in fact a ball moving through space. Same world, different views with different possibilities. Consequently, the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of truth we are embedded in, is what transcendence is all about. With that comes a significant decrease in the amount of suffering we create.

The paradox is that transcendence is like being poor and sitting on a wooden box we don’t know is filled with gold. While desperately looking for gold elsewhere, we miss what is hidden in plain sight. Transcendence is about stepping outside of a self-imposed, constructed prison of our own making, realizing that the doors to freedom have always been open, but we just could not see it. This is why we sometimes talk of transcendence (= Latin ‘stepping beyond’) towards immanence (= Latin ‘dwelling inside’), whereby we have to effect a leap out of the box, so to speak, an orthogonal shift in consciousness, to discover what has always already been there, hidden in plain sight, unseen, unheard and therefore rendered powerless.

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