Understanding the Dream Experience

Wherever you look, there is mind, and wherever is mind, the opportunity for mindfulness presents itself – that means everywhere and all the time. It is not just about meditation, but about insight into one’s inner world, empathy for others, and integration of the energy flow within ourselves and between each other. The stories we tell are part of the landscape of mind to be mined for the hidden treasures of meaning our illusions have so deeply buried.

A dream I recently encountered comes to mind: “I see this woman approach me”, recounts the dreamer, “and there is nothing threatening about her. While dreaming I remember that in the past seemingly harmless people appearing in my dreams would suddenly turn nasty and attack me or even try to kill me. So I make a proactive decision to preempt such a possible development (you may call this a lucid dream). Instead of waiting for her to approach me further, I begin to take initiative to approach her. In doing so the atmosphere of the dream becomes very windy and a strong gale blows against me. I have to fight the wind force against me but do manage to make progress in getting closer to her and find out who she really is. This is when I woke up, feeling satisfied that I had overcome the danger of being attacked, and relieved to have been able to take control of the situation.”

It used to be a common occurrence in his dreams – seemingly harmless people suddenly turning against and threatening him, causing him to wake up in a panic from these nightmares. After lots of psychotherapy and meditation practice, this rarely occurs anymore, and in this dream, we see further development in his strength of consciousness, as he takes charge of getting closer to dissociated contents of childhood conditionings. The fact that he is able to reflect while he dreams and choose a different path than he would have in the past speaks for his developed capacity to be strongly aware of being aware and not see himself anymore as a passive victim. Dissociated and non-conscious content being unknown, in dreams it tends to present itself as something foreign, other than oneself, often other people we don’t know or animals. In this case, this woman is a non-conscious aspect of himself that represents some problematic energy and information flow he has not mastered yet since in the dream the mind’s attentional system focuses a spotlight on her.

The dreamer is prescient and experienced, knowing himself well enough that what appears harmless can suddenly turn nasty if he is not attentive. It is almost a cliche to mention that in his childhood his mother was emotionally somewhat unpredictable and his father rather angry and aggressive. That is an old story he knows well and has worked through ad nauseam. But attachment conditionings run deep and take a long time to be undone. The dream shows how the dreamer can see behind appearances of his own mind’s productions and has achieved the capacity of observation and some objectivity about his own mind processes. On some level, he realizes while dreaming that the dream is dreamt up and a production of his mind. He is able to transcend the childlike naïve trust in appearances that very often used to betray him. He can take on the potential enemy before this hidden part of himself has a chance to evolve into an enemy, because he knows the woman to be just a hidden part of his own information processing. His intention to pay attention to the hidden intention of this almost invisible part of himself opens up a whole new relationship dynamic to himself, a whole new state of integration.

The gale strength winds tell us that there is more to do, more awareness strengthening to practice, or maybe they simply tell us that being fully transparent to the unknown of the non-conscious will always be a challenge to be reckoned with. While fighting these winds there was a tinge of anxiety, because he knew that the hidden power of this woman could kill him. But he also knew that it would be nothing more than one aspect of him trying to kill another. He was ready to die to see the truth, the truth of what this woman hides because he somehow knew that all that would die is a constructed illusion about himself.

This reminded him of a dream 15 years ago, in which he saw this stupendously beautiful iguana sitting on a large branch of a tree. It was mind-bogglingly colorful, displaying shimmering shades of blue, green, red, orange, and yellow. He was awestruck by how beautiful such a creature can be, when he suddenly discovered a tiny little handle on its side, suggesting that there was a door he could open. He did open this door, and to his amazement and deep disappointment, he discovered that the inside of what seemed like the most beautiful living creature he had ever seen, was simply a mechanical clockwork. Of course, the archetype of the Wizard of Oz comes to mind, but the echo from this old dream is quite audible in his present dream. It is frightening to discover that what seemed alive is in fact lifeless, and at the time he could identify with the sense of living a life driven more by internalized expectations of others than by his own authenticity. Not now anymore, but he now knows very viscerally how toxic illusions can be. He knew that ultimately the gale-force winds, the touching of that woman could fully dissolve the magic of this play he had written that night, in order to show more of himself to himself. Fifteen years ago the clockwork was the disappointment of discovering lifelessness in beauty; this time the woman turned attacker would have revealed her clockwork nature to a dreamer much stronger and more self-assured than then. It would not have been a beauty to be debunked, but dangerous enmity.

The iguana was too beautiful to be real, and this woman as a potential killer was too dramatically dangerous to be a real enemy. All this is, all these nightmares are in the mind in conflict with itself creating unnecessary fireworks.

This whole dream experience, and drama the dreamer authored for himself to gain more clarity about his inner world, includes every level of energy and information processing we humans have, from the physical/somatic to the emotional and cognitive. The dream reveals a story that was originally concealed and requires psychotherapy to be understood and integrated. At the same time, the dream is steeped in a whole nonverbal world of implicit energy processing beyond the reach of stories, requiring meditation to be penetrated and integrated. The evolution I expect to see some time in the future would manifest in a dream, in which the dreamer not only knows that this woman is a stranger not to be intimidated by and actively pursued for understanding. In a future dream, the dreamer would recognize himself in that woman and embark on a mediative action between two dream characters he would know beyond intuition are both aspects of himself.

Copyright © 2018 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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Mindfulness is about how we live, not a theory to be indulged.

Having the opportunity to witness fellow travelers and students expressing with succinct beauty and force how the directly experienced journey really looks like from within, always touches me. It is a particular treat to be directly engaged in exchanges of such nurturing and healing richness. What follows is a recent example in the form of an email exchange (for reasons of confidentiality I will call the person I had this exchange with Suzanne)

Hi Dr. T.,

Something is coming up in my practice that I thought I would write to you about. I may not even do a good job of describing this to you right now, because it feels like I am very spooked by it.

Recently, in my practice, choiceless awareness seems to be the practice I naturally initiate. I am finding a good connection with my awareness, just seeing where it is and what that feels like, instead of getting caught up in the what’s and the why’s. I think this is where my freak out started.

In my psychological work, I have been noticing recently how narrow my definition of myself is and how greatly that limits me from having the kind of relationships and the kind of fulfilling and happy experiences I want to have. I am noticing how confining it is to limit my definition of self by past experiences and gyp myself of all that I could potentially be (or not). It feels a bit like I am trying to let go of my narrow self-identification in my practice as well and that is massively terrifying me.

I think about what about this could be so terrifying, and really it’s just a fear of the unknown. Some part of me recognizes from your teachings and what I know of this practice that what I want is likely on the other side of all of this – a sense of freedom, moving from one thing to another, without identifying with it or getting caught up with it, a sense of ease and some sort of liberation that I fantasize about.

I am trying to put all this together (the psychological and the spiritual (?)) and figure out how to move forward, but, to be honest, am a bit paralyzed by my fear. So I thought I would reach out to you. What do you think?

Hi Suzanne,

Yours seems like quite a classic stage in one’s growth towards wisdom. Assuming a definition of the spiritual as dealing with our relationship to the ineffable emptiness of Being, notice how the psychological can quickly and imperceptibly become spiritual and vice versa. From the conduit of direct sensory experience we move into the constructor of psychological insight, only to then have to transcend both into the vast emptiness of nameless Being. (When the spiritual is defined within the context of a personal relationship with God, things can become more complicated and confining, given that only the self or remnants of it can maintain such a relationship, and all identifications with a self are by definition limiting and confining, including how they limit the notion of God).

Coming back to the other definition of spirituality I much prefer, as you rightly point out, when you let go of conditioned identifications with old patterns of being and gain greater flexibility and freedom of Being, you encounter the ‘unbearable lightness of Being’, accompanied by the insight of the self’s illusory nature. The more you investigate the self, the more it dissolves into a puff of fleeting energy flow, leaving you with nothing of what you were used to have, and everything you never dreamed of being. In fact, from this perspective, psychology with all its formulations of a senses of self, quite generally seems to me like a verbal clothing worn over the indecent and therefore often unacceptable nakedness of its core called the emptiness of Being, so as to allow it to appear in public. Our work in mindfulness consists of trying to stalk this retreating nude – not an easy task, because it demands this constant shift between the tangible verbal world of energy manifested as form and the intangible world of the formless nameless.

As you know, freedom comes with responsibility, and responsibility is what prisons relieve us from. Freedom from prior prisons can routinely be first met with anxiety, until we get used to the larger landscape. Although ultimately liberating, new senses of self that are not as limited as the old ones can be very disconcerting at first.

I am sure there will be much more to explore, but I hope these thoughts may help clarify a few things a bit.

With kind regards,
Dr. T.

Hi Dr. T,

Thank you for your response.

It’s interesting, it’s been a few days since I sent this email and because I didn’t get a response “in time”, things became slightly more psychologically challenging. Or another way to say that is that a lot has come up that I am seeing and learning so much about myself from! It’s kinda cool, even though massively emotionally challenging to keep perspective at times. This being said, the spiritual and what I had said in my email seems to have retreated to the background a bit. To the extent that I even had to reread my own email to remind myself what I had said/felt. The connection with it isn’t much there now.

It’s amazing how much a narrow identification and the conditionings can take over and make an experience, which was so convincing and tangible a few days ago, seem just like theory now.

I’m glad at the very least I still have my awareness to watch this go back and forth, and though it gets emotionally challenging sometimes, I try to keep investigating the difference and the shift (as you said) just to learn and explore. It’s cool.

The only problem with this approach and also with what I had said before is “what do I identify with if I don’t identify with the emotional or the stories?”. I think back when I had written that email to you, at least I had a very small connection to my awareness and that calmed this down a bit. Now that’s gone and the psychological is a bit more anxious, so avoidance seems tempting.

The interplay between psychological and spiritual (definitely the way you describe spiritual, not the religious constructs of “god”) is very interesting and something I’ve been noticing for a while now! And how we need a stable healthy construct of “self” first as a tool to explore what’s beyond. Trying to build this and I see how the psychological can still cause fear causing me to retreat to what’s not the unknown, even if deep down there is always the knowing that it is a construct and the convinced “nagging” that it doesn’t stop there and there is more.

Thanks,
Suzanne

There you go, Suzanne, the retreating nude! And by the way, you write eloquently with a depth of insight.

The barrel of a gun (and the heat of emotions) always seem to bring the tangible of form and manifestation to temporary victory, and the shy nakedness of awareness itself is always ready to temporarily cede the limelight. Conditionings and attachments to form are powerful and superficially reassuring, and the stories we weave ensnare us like spiders catch their prey in their web. Ironically, there is indeed a lot to learn from these webs of meaning, and as you rightly say, a strong sense of self, however illusory it is from a spiritual perspective, is the prerequisite for the ability to withstand the pounding waves of existential insights that gradually dissolve our whole constructed world into its empty essence. Follow the shifts from substantiality to ephemerality without resistance, and flexibly surrender to the back and forth from the open plane of possibilities to the peaks of activation. Your sentiment that this journey to nowhere is cool, is a cool and useful bonus that motivates to press on through pain and resistance!

Your connection to awareness beyond identification with your stories does not mean identification with awareness. That’s the beauty of realizing the impermanent nature of everything: Identification is not necessary anymore, even if it arises and passes like everything else, and this movement from form to formlessness and back is the revelation of life’s mysterious ways. Fear disappears the moment the illusory is not taken for reality anymore. Then, we discover that who we really are is what cannot be known or named and grasped, not what we can define and put into a neat little cage.

With kind regards,

Dr. T.

Hi Dr. T.,

Your second paragraph brought me to tears, because running in the hamster cage is getting utterly exhausting, and being afraid of something that (somehow) seems peaceful isn’t making sense.

I appreciate your encouragement when needed. It is definitely interesting to watch it go back and forth. “Oops look at this, I’m wound up”, “ah, what’s this feeling of flexibility and okayness. Wow”.

I’ll keep looking and see what happens. It can get a little exhausting to yo-yo. I have some more giving in to do.

Thank you for your email,
Suzanne

Copyright © 2018 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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The difference between aloneness and lonesomeness

Meditation is often misunderstood as a solitary activity – sitting alone in silence on a pillow. This could not be further from the truth.

Our brain is the relational organ par excellence. We are deeply wired to relate to both others and ourselves. More than any other species or animal on this planet we are shaped by relationships. Of all the animals we have the longest childhood spanning about 28 years, all of which revolves around learning to be human through relationships with our primary caregivers. Indeed, it is through our relationships to each other that we become who we are and come to know ourselves.

In meditation you attune your observing self with your experiencing self, engaging the resonance circuitry of the brain responsible for our fundamental relatedness. This same circuitry is the one responsible for our attuned relationships with others. This is why meditation harmonizes our relationships to others, and attuned relationships with others facilitate our meditation.

To learn and sustain a meditation practice we are continually engaged with teachers and other meditators, and it is through this meaningful and attuned engagement with a teacher and others that we develop via resonance circuitry the capacity to be attuned to ourselves. When we have internalized these attuned and healing relationships to our teachers, we develop the capacity to be alone. This means having the ability to be alone without feeling stressed about it, due to the fact that our aloneness entails our internalized relationships. Only through this capacity to be alone, paradoxically a deeply relational state of being, can our meditation reach the depths it is meant to reach, including the vast realms of emptiness.

Refer to my recent blog ‘Alone or Lonely?‘ for more on the difference between aloneness and lonesomeness.

Copyright 2019 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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The Brain, DMN and Consciousness

Of the virtually unlimited information available in the world around us, approximately ten billion bits per second arrive on the retina at the back of our eye. The optic nerve attached to the retina sending impulses back to the visual cortex, has only one million output connections. This means that only six million bits per second can leave the retina, and only ten thousand bits per second make it to the visual cortex. After further processing, visual information feeds into the brain regions responsible for forming our conscious perception. Surprisingly, the amount of information this conscious perception is made of amounts to less than 100 bits per second. From ten billion (10,000,000,000) to 100 bits per second – if that was all the brain took into account, this thin stream of data would hardly produce a perception. To add to this picture, of all the synapses in the visual cortex, only ten percent are devoted to incoming visual information from the retina, so that the vast majority of visual cortex connections must represent internal connections among neurons in that brain region. This shows how little information from the senses actually reaches the brain’s internal processing areas, and how extensive the processing of information through internal connections within the brain really must be. What you see is mostly what your brain constructs from scant data coming from the outside world. I guess Shakespeare hit the nail on its head: “Sir, what you see is not what you see!”

You may think that the brain lights up in different ways when you perform different tasks, and that it turns off when you are at rest. Far from it. There is a persistent level of background activity, called the default mode, that is critical for overall brain functioning and the planning of future actions. When your mind is at rest (daydreaming, meditating, sleeping), dispersed brain areas chatter away to one another, and the energy consumed by this ever-active messaging is twenty times higher than the energy the brain uses to accomplish specific tasks. Everything we do marks a departure from the brain’s default mode, and the energy used for such specific activities is only about five percent more than what the brain already consumes in this highly active default mode. During specific activities, the default mode continues underneath. Because this background default mode of high energy consumption is difficult to see and was difficult to find, brain scientists gave a reverential nod to dark energy in astronomy and called it the brain’s dark energy. This dark energy was later found to be predominant in four widely separated areas of the brain, the lateral parietal cortex, the lateral temporal cortex, the medial parietal cortex and (no surprise) the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). Together, these areas constitute the default mode network (DMN), thought to behave like an orchestra conductor issuing timing signals to coordinate activity among different brain regions. Damage to the DMN may be involved with a whole series of mental and physical disorders. In this way, the brain integrates all its regions in a way that allows them to function and react in concert to stimuli. Integration is the key.

Moving from neuron to narrative, I write about neurons in order to shed light on the story of meditation. We only use very little information residing in the outside world to know that world. Instead, we mostly construct a perception of that world by means of a staggering amount of internal brain processing involving neural networks that are widely distributed throughout the nervous system. To do that effectively, it is essential that the integrative function of the DMN be intact and unfold in optimal ways. Proper brain hygiene, which includes time for play, goal-oriented focusing, sleeping, physical activity, connecting with others, non-focused day-dreamy downtime and time for inner reflection, ensures such brain health.

Central to these aspects of brain hygiene is time for inner reflection, also called ‘time in’. This is what we hone through mindfulness meditation. We harness the power of the master integrator of the brain, the middle prefrontal cortex (MPC), to create a still point, different from, but not unlike sleep, a state of concentrated and ultimately effortless rest. This allows the brain to get out of its own way. Were I to put my money on something, I would put it on the hypothesis that this concentrated rest optimally activates the DMN for its sweeping integrative function throughout the body-brain. Integration is the linkage of differentiated parts and stands at the core of health. For integration to occur, the ability to differentiate between the parts of the whole system and then connect them by holding them in awareness is key, not problem-solving. Open awareness of the details of the mind’s landscape discovered through focused attention changes everything it becomes aware of. Relative to neurons, we are talking about the differentiation and linkage between widely distributed brain regions, neural networks and neurocircuits; relative to narratives, we differentiate between the different somatic sensations, feelings and thoughts, between embodied and cognitive self-awareness, and ultimately between the different narrative threads we weave about our lives. Holding all that in awareness, after having gained a clear and detailed view of our energy flow through focused attention and kind intention, we then allow the DMN sweep to creatively reconnect in ever new ways all these parts moment-by-moment, thus forever changing everything in its wave-like repetitive surf movement.

Following the principle of the DMN sweep, and with the same ease we try to move from neurons to narratives, from science to subjective experience, in examining the intricacies of our internal world we need to learn not to focus too much on solving problems, but on finding new connections instead. This is the hallmark of creativity and health. If you are depressed, it is more important to stop fighting the obvious, deeply examine the space of darkness and find out how you create a dark reality devoid of connections to other possible ways of constructing reality, than it is to try to solve the problem by substituting negativity with positive thoughts. This latter project usually only partially works, because positivity that tries to replace negativity without exploration of the relationship between the two, only leads to the repression of darkness, which then lurks in the unconscious depths waiting to return with a vengeance at the first opportunity that arises.

What makes us sick is the combination of lack of clarity about the differentiated details of our internal sea and lack of connection between these details. What paralyzes people in depressive states is the lack of connection between the darkness and the larger context of the living organism, not the presence of darkness itself; for darkness is always around as a matter of course in human life. It is not about here and not wanting to be here, nor is it about there and wishing one was there, but about the ways here and there are connected or not. It is the nature of transitions from one mental state to the other that is crucial for integration and healing. Like in the Tango, with its unique aspect of improvisation also so prevalent in brain functioning, the excellence of either dancer is secondary to the couple’s ability to move in mutual attunement. Without the latter, no amount of expertise will put you in awe of the dance’s inspired aspirations. We need great curiosity and acceptance in simply being, as we closely examine the complex intrigues that make up the story of the mental state we don’t desire – more so than the conscious problem-solving wish to get rid of the undesired state. In approaching our inner world this way, we stimulate the brain’s creative propensity to find and create new connections, and that very process is the one that will lift us out from underneath the wreckage of chaos or rigidity.

The DMN works largely below the radar of consciousness. In order to reach the non-conscious realm, or more accurately, to become permeable to the constant flow of energy and information from non-conscious body and mind processes, we have to surrender to the unknown. The most powerful forces that influence our lives are not the ones we know about and are conscious of, but the ones we don’t know our mind has decided to adopt and work with as its own.

Copyright © 2019 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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Awareness into deeper unconscious energy with Mindfulness Meditation

An important rule in proper meditation is to relinquish control of one’s limbs, because the brain uses movements of arms and legs to express restlessness, discharge nervous energy and avoid the deeper awareness of painful subjective experiences. Without even noticing, we wiggle, jiggle, shake and scratch, not realizing how deeply we interfere through arm and leg movements with the penetration of our attention and awareness into deeper unconscious energy flows that drive our suffering. After we have properly stacked the spine, consciously relinquishing control of one’s limbs is a natural aspect of mindfulness meditation (both sitting and lying down), as we focus our intention on the exploration of energy flow without movement. This is why someone sitting in meditation seems motionless. I use the word ‘seems’, because the spine itself is always involved in slight adjustments of effortless posture as it moves like a hollow bamboo in the wind with the cycles of the breath, the pulsations of the cerebro-spinal fluid and the alignment process of noticing tensions in the inbreath, releasing them down into the earth in the outbreath and at the end of the outbreath realigning the spine within the effortless space of balanced sitting. Good sitting meditation posture never looks or feels like a telephone pole, but rather like a hollow bamboo in the wind. From this perspective, the limbs are kept still, but never stiff.

There are however exceptions to this rule. These pertain in formal practice to the two situations of meditators who have experienced psychological trauma and those with physical pain, in informal practice to the issue of gesticulation during communication.

With psychological trauma, being still and bringing intense attention to the body during formal practice can activate implicitly encoded painful memories, causing the meditator to experience intense somatic pain, emotional activations in the form of panic, or bodily movements in the form of shaking, convulsing or flailing. When the meditator is not overwhelmed by panic and therefore not in need of interrupting the meditation in order to get back into the window of tolerance, it can be useful and important to know how to allow the body to move in whatever way necessary, without interfering with these spontaneous movements. Although also possible during sitting meditations, this applies particularly to bodyscan meditations, during which the meditator is lying down, and therefore freer to allow the body to just let lose and take over with its spontaneous movement discharges.

These movements are spontaneous and not willfully activated by the meditator. The instruction in such a situation would be to allow ‘it’ (the body) to move without ‘you’ moving it. Physiologically these movements are part of the body’s self-healing processes as it reactivates and moves through the polyvagal stages of trauma recovery, from freeze to fight-flight to social engagement function. These spontaneous movements are the result of re-activation of freeze states into the fight-flight stage, as the body works its energy flow back to the more integrated energy flows of the healthy social engagement system, when the middle prefrontal cortex (MPC) comes back online. The hallmark of these movements is that they spontaneously move through the body like a storm through the landscape, coming and going, and that when allowed to flow, they do not engage the meditator into wanting to flee and interrupt the meditation. Often, but not always, emotional and cognitive content may arise, old unresolved narratives and memories may surface, which then have to be worked through in psychotherapy. While the movement discharge proceeds, it is therefore crucially important to continue the practice of meditation, including using all the appropriate tools of meditation, the intention to pay attention with kindness in certain learned and skillful ways. Blocking such movements in the mistaken belief that one has to remain still during meditation practice, would be a misguided and damaging way to practice. In mindfulness practice, stillness is not the absence of movement, but the meditator’s ability to not be reactive and interfere with the inevitable movements and energy flows of life. The deeper the ability to get out of your own way, the greater the stillness you will be able to access, and this stillness is exactly the wide open plane of almost infinite possibilities we learn to access through deep mindfulness.

The other exception to the rule of not moving one’s limbs during formal meditation pertains to the case of physical pain caused by physical problems. Indeed, during meditation all kinds of different functional pain experiences can arise, during which it is not advisable to move if one wants to deepen one’s practice. These functional pain experiences often seem to unexpectedly arise from nowhere, and they tend to decrease the more one works with that energy flow during meditation practice. If they don’t decrease during practice, they mostly tend to disappear the moment one changes the posture. There is however another kind of pain experience that is due to known physical conditions, such as a disc or joint problem. In these cases, trying to stay with the pain is futile. What usually happens is that the pain simply increases the longer we stay motionless with it, until we reach the point of entering the fight-flight red zone that is counterproductive to the work. Pushing through is the last thing one wants to do in this situation. Instead, the approach to such pain has to be much different. One explores it as long as possible without moving, as long as we can stay within the green and orange zone of the window of tolerance of energy flow, in other words, as long we don’t force or push through. Once it becomes clear that the body needs adjustment in order to avoid tensing up, we mindfully engage in a posture readjustment, so that the pain can diminish or disappear. This mindful adjustment is a skillful way to honor our organism’s need for healing in the case of known injuries and limitations.

Meditation is not something that we do an hour/day, but a state of mind we cultivate 24/7 in order for it to eventually become a mindful trait we generally embody. This means that the issue of limb movement is not just relevant during formal practice, but also in everyday life as we act and express ourselves. The principles we just described with regards to trauma and pain also apply to everyday life, as we are called to pay attention to the way we sit and behave with regards to unnecessary limb movements caused by inner restlessness. Situations in which we wait in line, sit anywhere for any possible reason or have a coffee with someone, are perfect opportunities to continue to deepen one’s access to deeper energy flow in everyday life by watching our tendency to move unnecessarily, the way we did during formal practice. This being said, I now want to draw attention to another form of spontaneous limb movement that is connected to communication. These are the gesticulations during conversations and speeches, as well as the pacing around during presentations.

Mindfulness practice alerts us to these communication-related limb movements, which are the non-verbal companions to our words. These are partially defined by our genes, temperament and social customs, such as Italians for example are more vivid gesticulators than British people. Deeper examination will quickly reveal however, that these natural companions to communication are often mixed with non-intentional expressions of inner nervousness, which interfere with and diminish the power of non-verbal communication. Mindfulness practice will allow you to slowly shed the need to cover up anxiety, embarrassment, other emotions or inner restlessness through unnecessary movements, and allow the natural, more attuned spontaneous movements accompanying the content of your communication to shine. Your sense of being solidly grounded in yourself and your world, as well as your power of communication, will increase because your gesticulations become a more attuned expression of the content you try to convey through words.

Meditation practice is simple but complex, and it is not easy to become a skilled meditator. Cookie-cutter approaches to meditation practice are toxic. We always have to meet the whole organism that we are, not only those aspects that meditation directly addresses. It is therefore so important to know how our organism functions as a whole in order to become a skilled meditator.

Copyright © 2019 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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A few thoughts about spirituality from a mindsight perspective.

A friend of mine sent me the above picture of Northrop Frye with the following email:

‘Good morning, Stephane.
Hope all is well with you.
I was on campus of Victoria College at U of T yesterday (my Alma Mater)
and noticed this fine gentleman sitting on a bench.
Made me think of you.’

I was delighted. The Old Vic is almost an Alma Mater to me, too. In his last year before passing he had been a mentor to me and profoundly influenced my view of the mind. In the Mindsight Intensive we examine spirituality these days, and what better way to share a few thoughts about spirituality from a mindsight perspective, than to take destiny’s email invitation and start with a quote from Frye’s ‘Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason‘, to which I have added two quotes from two additional philosophers in square brackets [ ] (all quotes in blue).

“The word irrational is derived from ‘reason’ and the word reason summons up the ghost of the old faculty psychology, in which ‘reason’ is the thing that man has, and frequently regards as uniquely his, to be distinguished from other things called ‘will’, ‘feeling’, ‘desire’, [‘instinct’ or ‘intuition’]. …. It is the faculty that shows off man as the only organism in nature whose horizon is not wholly bounded by the needs of survival and adaptation. ….

….. Some time ago, in reading through Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I noted  a comment he makes in introducing Aristotle’s conception of physics:

‘To understand the views of Aristotle, as of most Greeks, on physics, it is necessary to apprehend their imaginative background. Every philosopher, in addition to the formal system which he offers the world, has another, much simpler, of which he may be quite unaware. If he is aware of it, he probably realizes that it won’t quite do; he therefore conceals it, and sets forth something more sophisticated, which he believes because it is like his crude system, but which he asks others to accept because he thinks he has made it such as cannot be disproved.’

A passage in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, also about the Greeks, makes much of the same point:

‘Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.’

[Richard Shusterman in ‘Beneath Interpretation‘:

‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They show themselves. They are mystical. So said the greatest 20th century philosopher of language in his first philosophical masterpiece. What Wittgenstein fails to emphasize here is that the inevitable but manifest is as much ordinary as mystical, and it is only mystifying to those disembodied philosophical minds who recognize no understanding other than interpretation, and no form of meaning and experience beyond or beneath the web of language.’

Charles Taylor in ‘The Dialogical Self‘:

‘Our body is not just the executant of the goals we frame, nor just the locus of causal factors shaping our representations. Our understanding itself is embodied. That is, our bodily know-how, and the way we act and move, can encode components of our understanding of self and the world.’]

We get, then …. a conception of philosophy as a verbal clothing worn over the indecent nakedness of something called its ‘imaginative background’, so as to allow it to appear in public. It is this retreating nude that I have been trying to study all my life. I call it a metaphorical or mythological structure, and it seems to me that while a good deal of philosophy, as Russell and Whitehead say, consists in disguising it in various ways, literature approaches it more directly and re-creates it, age after age. ….

Our primary thinking, then, is not rational but metaphorical, an identifying of subjective and objective worlds in huge mental pictures. … Metaphor does not evoke a world of things linked together by overstated analogies: it evokes a world of swirling currents of energy that run back and forth between subject and object. Such metaphor may be followed by, or even translated into, more continuous or rational thinking, but when it is, it is not superseded by rational thinking: it remains in the background as its constant source of inspiration.”

I love Frye’s metaphor of the retreating nude I find myself incessantly trying to bring to the surface with my students – not only when it comes to helping them appreciate the immensity of the non-conscious, but particularly also in the inevitable matters of spirituality mindsight training brings forth. This socially unacceptable nude does not only retreat behind the cloak of rationality, but as the vast emptiness of Being as I call it, also behind our cherished beliefs and opinions we hardly ever recognize as so profoundly deluded as they really are.

When the spiritual dimension emerges, students suddenly begin to come up with ill-defined notions, such as soul, spirit or a bigger force, imaginatively placing them outside the ordinariness of everyday life and the human organisms we all are. The fallacious duality of the good belonging to God and the bad to some devil also creeps into people’s thinking, and before you know it, if you are not carefully examining the language used for these descriptions, the discourse casts human beings as fallen creatures living a humdrum ordinary life of platitude while yearning for liberation by an otherworldly superhero called God.

Many adults seem to never have transcended what Piaget called the ‘concrete operational stage’ of cognitive development (age 7-11). Only concretely touched reality that can be logically reflected upon is accessible to the mind, and abstract, hypothetical, imaginative or integrative mind processes are not available or not used. The aspects of reality that go beyond the reach of the concrete, problem-solving mind are either ignored, or worse distorted and squeezed into a simplistic form that upon closer examination cannot possibly make any sense. Our retreating nude remains elusive to all those who eschew the hard work of getting to know their own minds and becoming transparent and permeable to the immensity of non-conscious energy flow. Instead, like the alcoholic who vehemently denies having a problem, suffering continues unabated, temporarily mitigated by unrecognized delusions as poor substitutes for real insight.

Mindsight reveals that our retreating nude extends beyond Frye’s metaphorical and mythological structures, and is therefore only partially revealed more directly through literature. In our work we go beyond stories and language into the flow of direct experience called conduit, and then even further to the edge of all knowing, where any concept we may have about ourselves, the world and reality collapses, and we become that great contextual process of energy flowing into and out of existence.

As I mentioned elsewhere in ‘How the curriculum is structured’, our investigations into reality have to occur in several dimensions:

1. Physical dimension: The brain, the body and behavior as they are objectively explored through science.
2. Somatic dimension: The brain and the body as it is subjectively experienced through somatic sensations and emotions.
3. Psychological dimension: The mind as it is subjectively experienced through emotions, thoughts and narratives.
4. Existential dimension: The sense of an independent and embodied self in the form of a human organism or body-mind within a large universal context and the boundaries of time and space.
5. Spiritual dimension: The dissolution of an independent sense of self as we tap into the nameless, timeless and spaceless essence of transcendence beyond birth and death.

If you were an ocean wave, spirituality is about the direct discovery that you, the wave, are the ocean in movement, not an entity separate from the ocean. The extraordinary is beyond our mind’s concrete operational abilities and requires our full human consciousness potential to be discovered. The spiritual is not there and then, but here and now; not somewhere, something or somebody else, but the very fabric of who we are; not the good to the exclusion of the bad, but everything; not the extraordinary beyond the ordinary, but the extraordinariness of the ordinary; not complicated, but complex in its simplicity. As the etymology of the word ‘religion’ shows (from Latin ‘re-ligio’ = re-connection), spirituality is about reconnecting with our wholeness we lost in the translation from child to adult. That wholeness is the nameless emptiness of Being.

Copyright © 2019 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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