Meditation invites us to explore how thoughts are not facts

This topic was recently discussed in the Mindfulness Community Group (MCG) as one some people have trouble with. A few participants offered helpful clarifications to help understand what is meant. I remained unclear about whether the discussion really went far enough, as it seemed to stop short of the core issue at stake. Here is a short synopsis to shed light on what I mean.

In a simplified way, thoughts can be seen as left-brain re-presentations of right-brain direct experience presentations. The left brain brings us the menu about living that describes reality in the form of thoughts, while the right brain serves us the meal of directly experienced reality in the form of direct experience of living. That’s in short how we can cursorily conceptualize the relationship between thoughts and direct sensory experience. Thoughts are the map or menu about the territory or meal of facts.

Thoughts are a form of highly and complexly processed energy flow that is at once embodied in the brain as neuro firing patterns and relationally emergent in the mind as virtual aboutness. Said more simply, they are secretions of the brain that carry a meaning beyond themselves. My thought ‘tree’ is a secretion in my brain in the form of neuron firings with movements of neurotransmitters and electricity, which has been processed by the brain to such complexity that it has ended up taking on a meaning that points to, but is not the same as, this large living object 100 yards from me sticking out of the ground with a brown stem, brown branches and green leaves.

Refraining from getting too philosophical about it, we can now introduce facts as something that is, that exists. If it rains, the falling water that gets you wet is a fact. If your mother is diseased, her not being among us anymore is a fact. If you have been fired, you cannot go back to the office and you don’t make money anymore, that is another fact. Reality can be said to be what is the case, and all that is the case can be seen as facts, particularly if they can be independently verified by different people. Even matters of belief or art can be seen as facts: If I see fairies bringing me my breakfast in the morning, for me the fairies are a fact; for you the fairies themselves are not a fact, but my telling you about fairies bringing breakfast is also a fact. Needless to say, the world is full of facts.

The first level of approaching the meditation ‘thoughts are not facts’ was addressed by participants of the MCG: This concerns the relationship between thoughts and facts and belongs to the psychological level of inquiry psychotherapy is particularly concerned with. In short, some thoughts correspond to and point to facts, in which case they are healthy to cultivate, while others don’t, in which case we don’t want to invest energy in them. The thought ‘the earth is a round globe moving through space’ corresponds to or points to (but is not the same as) a measurable and provable fact. The thought is an accurate map of facts in reality. The thought accurately reflects that the earth is indeed a globe-shaped mass hurling through space. This thought is the menu or the map, which helps me directly experience the meal or territory of this reality it maps. Conversely, the statement ‘the earth is a flat disc swimming in an endless ocean’ does not correspond to any fact. The thought is an inaccurate map of reality facts. In the group’s exchange, the point was then made that for the cultivation of health it is important to distinguish between thoughts that point to facts and those that don’t, and that mindfulness practice reveals how extensive our tendency is to not recognize so many thoughts we believe in, even though they do not point to facts. It was noted that distinguishing accurate from inaccurate thoughts is important for health and wellbeing. So far so good.

Meditation invites us though to explore a second level of inquiry I found was not fleshed out enough. On this level, we explore how thoughts are not facts, period – not whether they correspond to facts or not. In other words, we explore how maps are never the territory, menus never the meal, whether the maps or the menus are accurate or not. We investigate the phenomena of maps or menus arising in our brains and minds, not the territory or the meal they point to, and we also don’t focus on whether these maps and menus are accurate or not. We can also say that thoughts are internal brain/mind phenomena we examine as such, without getting diverted into what they mean in the external world. As you can see, on this level we do not concern ourselves with the relationship of thoughts to facts. Whether accurate or false, every thought is still a thought with the same energetic characteristics as any other thought, and it is this ‘thoughtness’, this energy flow with a particular characteristic that feels virtual we are interested in. We deeply penetrate the nature of thoughts as this dual manifestation of physiological energy flow giving rise to a different flavor of energy flow consisting of a virtual meaning in the mind, whether the thought is accurate or not. On this level, our work is utterly unconcerned about meaning. Instead, we examine the direct experience of this virtual phenomenon called meaning and thought as it flows by, like all other kinds of energy flowing by. In this way, we end up penetrating beyond mind and meaning the vast emptiness of nameless Being.

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

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Through mindfulness, we realize the potential for creative expansion

The feel of the Mindsight Intensive program is exploratory and experiential. Many participants are familiar with many of the principles of Dynamic Mindfulness and Interpersonal Neurobiology. What we focus on is learning to play and be creative with this knowledge, so that it becomes life-transforming and integrative. In each session we practice meditation, interact as a group, and digest new nuggets of knowledge I present.

The flow and content of this program correlate as closely as possible with the neuroplastic and networking functions of the brain. The way we use our minds to make sense of our lives is far from linear and logical. Instead, the entirety of our subjective experiences, from physical sensations to emotions, thoughts, and actions, result from a vast information processing network with nodes of energy flow, able to connect in many different ways at any one time.

We are driven by certain energy processing highways that tend to keep us locked in routines, but with awareness and training, we are also able to leave those highways at any time and forge new paths into the wilderness of the human potential. Bits of information clusters and small units of meaning combine freely in associative ways and create unstable narrative chains of knowledge we temporarily work with. We say a sentence or express an idea, followed by another sentence and another idea, not noticing that the move from the first set of expressions to the second is arbitrary and that we could have moved into a completely different direction. Through mindfulness, we realize this multidirectional potential for creative expansion and become more willing to constantly review the apparently seamless bodies of knowledge we create and modify them under the influence of life’s ever-changing circumstances and experiences. What was true yesterday becomes false today, and that is how life really is.

I want to convey to my students a sense of ease with the flexibility of mind to roam freely through all its registers of knowing, including its potential to free itself from well-worn highways of habits. We will work on deconstructing the stories we tell ourselves and believe in, and begin to connect their elements together in new ways. The same basic units of knowledge combined in new ways give rise to new insights we never thought possible before. Saying the same thing in a different way and in new contexts opens the door to new insights that are only accessible through the creative flexibility of linking known elements in new ways and new elements in familiar ways.

Riding the wave of avant-garde and evolving with the leading edge of knowledge, has always been one of my central teaching missions. What this means is that my themes quite often appear foreign to many, until I start to appear like a dinosaur by the time they become mainstream. When I started to engage in mindfulness meditation over 48 years ago, I was regarded as a far-out anomaly, and when I started to teach it over 20 years ago, it was suspiciously regarded as something very new in medicine, despite the fact that it had already started to establish itself in certain centers in the United States and Europe. Enriching the MBSR curriculum with new insights of Interpersonal Neurobiology is still a novelty only practiced at our Centre. Now, a ‘new’ very old topic is being resurrected again after having gone extinct during the 19th century – a topic I believe to have profound adaptive value and be essential for human survival. It disappeared from public discourse 150 years ago, in part because it was only associated with philosophy and religion while social evolution took a major turn into science and technology, and in part because of the empirically minded direction psychology took, culminating in behaviorism’s 20th-century abhorrence of having anything to do with the notion that humans have minds.

Imagine then a lost civilization. All that is left for you to understand that civilization is archaeological artifacts – nobody around to teach you the language, the customs, and traditions that defined that civilization. How are you going to revive it? Today we find ourselves in a similarly difficult situation with this central, yet to be named old, new topic. Fortunately, late 20th-century psychology seems to have relaxed a bit, and specific schools of thought within psychology have lost their dominance. In fact, greater openness of mind, globalization of different knowledge modes, and further advances in science have produced encompassing ways of knowing, such as Interpersonal Neurobiology, which have allowed scientific inquiries into the nature of the mind to mushroom into many unexpected directions. The topic in need of resurrection I am referring to is central to the human mind and to our ability to lead the good life with minimal suffering  – wisdom.

Because of its intrinsic value for healthy human adaptation, in the last 30 years or so wisdom has begun to interest scholars, philosophers, and scientists again, and is now resurrecting in scientific and philosophical discourse. Yes, wisdom is starting to pique people’s curiosity again, because it might well be one of the most central factors giving humanity hope for survival. We can now find a handful of researchers taking this topic seriously as a central human concern, and beginning to revive this once dead phoenix with serious scientific, philosophical, and practical approaches.

What better position to tap into what wisdom is all about, learn to develop it, and apply it in our daily lives, than from our mindsight perspective. Wisdom will be the background theme this year, imbuing our traditional work of deepening expertise in mindfulness and mindsight with new contexts and vistas.

The Mindsight Intensive is designed to not only provide the necessary tools for short-term success in the conscious regulation of energy and information flow but also inspire you to explore the contextual backdrop of life that makes long-term growth towards wisdom possible. As I wrote in a recent blog, the exploration of black holes does not seem to have much relevance for daily living, and yet it belongs to the foundation for all the practical knowledge we have acquired, which improves practical living. The same applies to our Mindsight Intensive, which is only partly a ‘how-to’ program; it is also designed to give you the kind of foundation that at first blush does not seem to have immediate relevance for daily living, and yet over time profoundly changes your life’s direction and purpose.

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

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Through wisdom we grow and find peace, to access the full potential of human consciousness.

What I teach can sometimes feel daunting, first and foremost because the brain is the most complex object in the known universe, the mind even more so, and there is no way around complexity in teaching and learning about the mind. I also consider my students’ experts in their own subjective experience of being alive. This does not mean they are experts in harnessing their full mindfulness potential, but if they come to my programs, I assume they are serious about wanting to penetrate the depths of their minds, and I owe them the most expert and advanced knowledge and experience I can muster. One of my students, who like many others struggled with the complexity of the material, once wrote the following after having been frustrated by a ‘dumbed down’ lecture she heard elsewhere: “I was wrong about ‘dumbing it down’ … and you were right not to. Should I just get used to saying that?”

I admit, my language used to be quite atrocious and unnecessarily convoluted, and I hope the rich feedback I received from many dedicated students and team members has improved this situation. However, there is no way around the challenge of having to create new categories, concepts, and sometimes words, when we penetrate new knowledge spaces that were not accessible before. You just cannot use the same vocabulary to describe and convey information about the mind as you do in daily life when you go shopping or picking up the kids from school. Having to invest effort in learning new concepts is therefore an inevitable part of the process of deep learning in any field imaginable.

If we want to learn, we just established that we have to get used to reading without the expectation of immediate understanding, and that is the easy part. What’s more difficult is to rein in impatience and desperation for immediate results. The point I want to make here is the distinction between basic and applied mindfulness, the same distinction science makes between the basic (pure) and applied sciences. Some of what I have been exploring in blogs and courses belongs to the reflective dimension of basic mindfulness that does not provide direct and immediate benefits in any technical or practical way, and yet is fundamental to the cause and intrinsically rewarding.

For the most part, people come to mindfulness with a significant degree of suffering, and they understandably hope for results. The fact that mindfulness has now penetrated the hallowed walls of medicine mobilized additional scrutiny regarding the efficacy and scientific rigor. ‘Evidence-based’ is the new buzzword, and when it comes to people’s health, one sure does not want to mess around with quackery. These expectations for evidence-based results are the ones inspiring applied mindfulness and everything that is written in this scientific stream. Applied mindfulness is practical and generally quite accessible, therefore also most sought after. It is about the exploration of what works within the boundaries of what we already know, and there are clear expectations of results. This is no different from the applied sciences, where strange, far-out concepts are used to put a working cell phone into your hand. Applied specialized knowledge tends to yield immediate effects and get expressed in declarative certitudes. Look at any advertisement for mindfulness or any invitations to engage in it – it all sounds very characteristically practical and results-oriented: ‘How to …. bring peace into your life; 10 tips for ….; immediate results with ….; here is what works: ….’.

With basic science, we enter a very different mindset. Scientists would be unlikely to argue against the importance of basic science; it provides the necessary knowledge for a better understanding of reality and all the material applied science needs to advance technology. But most people have no interest nor any relationship to basic science. Basic science usually has no direct relationship to and no direct impact on everyday life. It tends to be seen as an indulgent luxury to be pursued when you have nothing better to do. Why care about black holes other than for curiosity? Humanity has survived over 100,000 years without knowledge of them, so the argument goes. And yet, our civilization would not be where it is without the kind of inquisitive mindset that fuels basic science.

We can apply a similar distinction in our field; basic mindfulness as it would be called is equally important as its practical cousin. Its hallmark of reflection for reflection’s sake is profound, provides the kind of interdisciplinary knowledge we need to thrive, and informs the mindfulness journey at its very core. I am wondering whether in our mindfulness field we may be encountering similar challenges as the basic sciences do? Like the basic sciences, basic mindfulness does not show immediate results, and its benefits are slower to appear and less obvious. It raises more questions than answers and suggests restraint towards practical expectations. Hence, unlike applied mindfulness, basic mindfulness may as yet not get the same respect and be as popular, because it is about the exploration of elusive truths and of virtue in decision-making within the boundaries of the unknown, without any expectations of results or certainties about where we are going. Without it, though, none of the goods of applied mindfulness would be accessible. Besides, its engagement affords us an intrinsic sense of reward through peace and serenity.

Basic mindfulness may in fact be nothing more than the process by which we develop a human trait that only fairly recently has begun to find interest within the scientific community at large and psychology more specifically: Wisdom. Through wisdom, we grow and find peace, because through wisdom we refine our capacity to access the full potential of human consciousness.

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

Life-changing insights and experiences which transform lives

A student graciously agrees to share an intimate insight with all, affording us a direct glimpse into the ‘heat of the kitchen’ and the intimacy of the soul.

The most profound insights emerge after having invested long, hard work into getting to know our minds. They come up in the intimacy of one’s relationship with oneself. They often have universal appeal and importance, helping us to not feel alone on this difficult journey of mindfulness.

Students often come up with life-changing insights and experiences that transform their lives forever. Sometimes they actually formulate it so compellingly and well, that I could not have expressed it any better. Here is such an example I just recently received by e-mail from a meditation student. I am very grateful that he allowed me to publish it.

“Dr. T.,
I always thought the ground under my feet was solid. Thanks to you, it turns out to be nothing but a trap door!
I never expected to deem my ‘ruin’ [the fact that never again can he see things the same way he used to see them] a gift.
But, aside from bringing me to my knees, it brought me here.
And now, I can’t go back to what I knew, because you’ve made that a heap of smoking rubble.
I can’t stay where I am, because that’s a bleak shroud of despair (and no, I’m not being histrionic).
I can only move forward into the absolute unknown.
The only way to do that, is to change. And frankly, change sucks. I would much prefer to ascend poetically from the lowest point in my life in a tidy, straight line. Instead, it’s bloody exhausting … and messy … and jerky … and unpredictable. But it is a trajectory nonetheless … and as I crawl and bawl, shedding whatever (and whomever) I need to, I remind myself that the general direction … is indeed up and out.”

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

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The Nature of Mindlessness

Your doorbell rings at 2 o’clock in the morning. Startled, you get up, make your way downstairs and open the door. A man stands before you wearing diamond rings and a fur coat; a Rolls Royce stands behind him. He is sorry to wake you up at this ridiculous hour, but he is in the middle of a scavenger hunt. He needs a piece of wood about three by seven feet, two inches thick. Can you help him? To make it worthwhile for you he will give you $10,000, which he holds in cash in his hand for you to see. He is obviously rich and you believe him. ‘How in the world will you find such a piece of wood?’, you say to yourself. You think of the lumber yard, but at this hour it is closed. You struggle to come up with a solution but are unable to. Reluctantly, you give up and tell him you are sorry.

The next day you pass a construction site near a friend’s house and you see a piece of wood that is just about the right size, three by seven feet – a door. For $10,000 you could have just taken a door off its hinges in your home last night and given it to him. ‘Why on earth’, you say to yourself, ‘didn’t it occur to me to do that?’

It didn’t occur to you to give the gentleman one of your doors, because when he showed up at 2 o’clock in the morning asking for this piece of wood, your door was not a piece of wood. The three by seven feet, two inches thick piece of wood was hidden from your view, stuck in your constructed category called ‘door’. You thus could not make the connection between ‘door’ and the exact piece of wood the gentleman was looking for. In addition, you were also stuck in the familiar context of construction costs, which does not price a door at $10,000. You were not able to enlarge your context and realize that for $10,000 the cost of giving him one of your doors would have been amply covered and you would have actually made a profit. You were entrapped by the category ‘door’, which impeded your view of ‘door’ as this piece of wood, and also entrapped by the context of construction costs, which does not equate ‘door’ with $10,000. This entrapment by category and context, which imprison your action, are some of the mechanisms that can help us understand the nature of mindlessness. Literally, the lights are on, but nobody is home. Day in and day out we unwittingly practice mindlessness and are surprised to find our lives so full of suffering.

(Adapted from: Ellen Langer, Mindfulness, 25th anniversary edition, p. 11)

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

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Reflection requires the development of mindfulness and mindsight.

I am not a historian. Who knows how most people lived and thought in the privacy of their home before the age of Facebook. Through Facebook, I am told that a vague acquaintance of mine just made a bean soup, and the notification is accompanied by a picture of the said soup. Another one informs me of someone using a new deodorant, and why this seems to be a life-changing event. A third one shows off their new dog, obviously soaking in the accolades of friends expressing their admiration. Really? Should I care about soups, deodorants, pets, and whatever else the kitchen sink can swallow in other people’s homes?

I actually am interested, although unlikely for the reason you may think. I am fascinated by how social media like Facebook reflect the workings of the human mind. I am no exception – my own day is full of  Facebookisms: Like that cheese? Love this new pillow! This peach is so smooth! Trying a new toothpaste. Tired of this old bike – want a new electrical one. Did you hear about aunt Polly buying a new Volkswagen? … The ongoing daily chatter expressing some sort of sentiment or emotion disguised by a sea of irrelevant gossip, as we connect with one another in mysterious ways. Trouble is, this sea of communication is more like a vast desert of irrelevant soundbites, leaving me terribly thirsty for a different style of human interaction I always imagined to be more prevalent ‘in the good old days’. If only these Facebookisms were just small talk, but I suspect them to be more sinister than that. They don’t seem like light-hearted reprieves between deep moments of connection, but more like desperate expressions of rigid narcissistic minds that have lost access to something deeper. I come to realize that the good old days were likely not much better than the bad new days, just different. Now I wonder, and doubt that it was ever much different between people – today we just have more direct insight into each other’s bedrooms.

The deeper style of relating I am referring to is reflection, which in turn is directly connected to how we use thought, emotion and language. To understand reflection we need to examine the ways we share our stories. Our stories take different forms. We have the everyday chatter, which is a free-associative process by which we voice whatever seems most salient in the stream of our consciousness. Then there is linear, logic language like the descriptive language of science that describes concrete reality, or the conceptual language I am using now for this essay, developing abstract concepts.  The metaphorical language of literature (both prose and poetry) and spiritual wisdom texts, is not linear and logical, but holistic and intuitive. These language modes are based on how our right and left brains collaborate: While our right brains directly present reality to us in the form of metaphor like a waiter serves us a nourishing dish, the left brain re-presents reality in the form of logic like a waiter giving us the menu about available dishes. This is the reason why, like the menu, logic alone never fills our tummies. Only when we are connected to the right brain’s messages are we really alive. The work in mindfulness consists in exactly that re-connection with the right brain.

Over the course of human evolution, we also developed progressively more complex ways of thinking and using language.  Yuval Harari points to the cognitive revolution that unfolded somewhere between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago (Sapiens, A Brief History of Mankind, p. 21), during which we may have progressed as follows: First, we talked about things that existed in the concrete world – coming home from a hunt the hunter may have warned his tribe not to go to the river bend below the cliff because he spotted a tiger roaming there. As our thinking became more complex, we started to gossip, talking about other people’s minds – we would discuss why the husband of our best friend would have an affair with a next-door neighbor and what could be done about it. Finally, and that was the decisive step towards becoming the earth’s dominant species, we began to talk about things that don’t exist, such as the notion of freedom, equality, God or mathematics, giving rise to large systems of imagined orders that organize human societies. If you consider for a moment that the cell phone and computer were all implicitly in existence during the stone ages, just still buried under the fog of unevolved imagination, you get a sense of what incredible power the human imagination has.

It is becoming quite obvious, how versatile our capacity to use cognition and language is. These different ways of thinking require many different parts of the brain to be engaged. Altogether, the versatility with which we are able to freely roam these language scapes is precisely what makes us human and gives us untold powers we can use for construction and destruction. However, what I seem to notice is that as a matter of course, on a day-to-day basis many people live a linguistically, and therefore cognitively impoverished life by not having access to or not using these different language aspects. This brings me right back to Facebookism, to a culture in which people connect through rather meaningless soundbites devoid of deeper and more extensive cognitive and emotional elaboration.

This brings me to reflection, a very distinct function of our minds that has its equally distinct neuro correlates. Reflection is a function of the middle prefrontal cortex (MPC), from an evolutionary perspective the latest and uniquely human part of the brain. Reflection is at the heart of mindfulness and refers to a way of paying attention that goes beyond concentration, is not routinely available unless we train ourselves to access it, and entails three aspects. These are (1) openness to whatever arises in consciousness, (2) observation of experience with an investigative interest as being different from the observer and who we are, and (3) objectivity, the mind’s capacity to automatically, effortlessly, and nonconceptually know itself in the form of awareness.

Putting reflection at the core of human communication is not an easy task and is a very complex mind activity that requires education and training. It requires the development of mindfulness and mindsight, the ability to see the mind of others and our own mind clearly, then integrate the two. With reflection comes the flexibility to roam all three language modes, five language categories (Fig 1), and three language stages (Fig 2). Observe people’s main communication patterns and you will quickly realize that many are stuck in concrete thought patterns and gossip, or everyday associative language, without access to other language modes. This conceptual and linguistic impoverishment reduces the depth and vibrancy with which we live life and eventually leads to destructive social trends. Without being able to expand on that in this context, the very survival of liberal democracy is at stake. The authoritarian political trends of our time are directly related to the impoverishment of our thought and language modes. When we have never been taught or even lose the ability to reflect, our sense of clarity regarding how we see reality diminishes. With it comes an inability to access truth’s complexity, compensated by clinging to lies and fake news that falsely seem to ring true. We then become victims of the power of false convictions, which belie strength, when in fact the resulting low self-esteem cannot be hidden. To compensate for these deeper insecurities we project our strength on autocratic, tyrannical leadership that undermines all decency and sense of moral orientation.

What does reflection subjectively feel like? It is inherently about a deep relationship, both to another person as well as yourself. The playful openness to all possibilities of imagination is palpable. You sense your body and the inner life of the other person. Unlike most conversations you may pick up around you, reflection reveals the complexity of the dialogue’s content. It feels like you are in a dance with your partner and no one needs to have the upper hand. The argument is of little interest as it is replaced by expansive creativity in thought generation. There is a rhythm to it with breathing spaces for silent contemplation of what is said and attuned exchanges of ideas. The sense that nobody has the truth is strong, and with it comes a relaxed feeling of not needing to convince your partner of anything. On the contrary, there is a joining in the common cause of exploring the fabric of truth as far as it can possibly go. You are invited to feel vulnerable and freely switch from one language mode to the other. You cannot possibly take your thoughts and beliefs as the truth and are able to realize that your experiences are neither you, nor reality. Like a mirror, reflection reflects you back to yourself and the other person back to you, and the process is mutual. Through the dialogue with another person or yourself, you become your best possible you, in all your fluid complexities that never cease to evolve and transform.

Reflection is the only act of mind that can save humanity from tragedy, and yet, it is sad to say, there is little evidence for it happening on anything more than the small scale of pockets of sanity here and there, dispersed in the jungle of frantic mindless survival. Even with your closest loved ones, it is not easy to come by.

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

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