Charisma In Meditation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Automaticity of the human mind

Human function, action, cognition and behavior under the lens of automaticity

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1. Left brain perspective

For several consecutive early spring days, a single, distinctive fly appeared to relish the bright sunlight illuminating my bathroom. We have grown familiar, coexisting as two entities engaged in our respective routines. I designate her as "she"—perhaps influenced by the feminine grammatical gender of la mouche (French), la mosca (Italian), and die Fliege (German)—an intuitive attribution rather than a biological assertion. She occasionally positions herself on the curtain railing above my bathtub, observing as I shower. More frequently, she rests on the windowsill, tracking my movements as I shave, and at times briefly alights on my hair for a few seconds. I have been aware of her presence throughout, akin to an inquisitive cohabitant sharing this confined space, but today I intentionally sought a deeper engagement.

She was once again stationed on the windowsill, basking in the sunlight, as I shaved. I approached closely, examining her large, compound eyes, and posed the question, “What is it like to be a fly?” Initially, my cognition activated a predictable analytical response, retrieving stored knowledge about her physiology: a head encasing a compact brain; expansive, multifaceted eyes affording a broad visual field; antennae functioning as olfactory and gustatory sensors; specialized mouthparts adapted for sponging or piercing-sucking; a thorax anchoring six articulated legs, rapid wings, and club-shaped halteres for flight stabilization; and an abdomen housing digestive and reproductive systems, concealed from view. Her exoskeleton, black with muted grey striations, bore a subtle, fur-like texture, as though she had ornamented herself for this encounter—a sizable specimen, impossible to ignore.

Yet, I deliberately suspended this intellectual framework, opting instead to engage her in a silent, receptive state. My question became more personal and changed to “what is it like to be you”? I consciously down-regulated the default mode network—the neural substrate of self-referential thought—relinquishing the ego’s persistent drive to assert its permanence. This ego, in its dualistic framework, projects constructed identities onto the external ‘other’, rendering her so alien that I might, without reflection, swat her away, extinguishing a life deemed insignificant, irritating, or even repellent by that limited perspective.

In this shift, a different entity began to emerge within my awareness—not a mere object, but a presence actively relating to me, exhibiting a form of consciousness distinct yet perceptible. Her curiosity, perhaps reciprocal, prompted her to take flight and settle briefly on my hair. I remained immobile, registering the faint tactile sensation of her tentative exploration of my surface—an interaction probing my identity as much as I sought hers. The contact was transient; she soon returned to the windowsill, fixing her gaze upon me. I speculated that she might, in her own unknowable way, ponder a parallel question: “What is it like to be this massive, terrestrial organism, incapable of flight, beyond my capacity to name?” The perceived separation—me here, her there—dissolved into a unified ‘we’, marked by a tangible exchange of vitality through our shared, living awareness. Though our modes of consciousness diverge, they intersect intimately, each of us enacting existence according to our inherent capacities. Together, we participated in a dynamic interplay, a microcosm of the universe’s unfolding, so affecting that tears briefly surfaced, reflecting regret for the countless instances of inattentiveness lost to automaticity.

This encounter with such a remarkable organism illuminated a progression of awareness. Initially, I had navigated the ‘dark night of the soul’—a dualistic state of nihility, a relative nothingness characterized by existential desolation and the collapse of meaning within a self-other framework. Beyond this, I accessed a non-dual absolute nothingness, a broader mode of awareness where subject-object distinctions dissolve into a unified field of being, devoid of relational constructs. Yet, this was not the terminus; it opened into emptiness—the ultimate awareness mode, a boundless, vibrant expanse where the extraordinary manifests within the ordinary flux of daily existence. This state, achieved through direct presence with this fly, surpasses any chemically induced psychedelic experience in its clarity and depth, revealing a profound interconnectedness inherent in the fabric of life, the extraordinariness of ordinary existence. No answer could ever come close to the tantalizing peace of timeless questions.

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2. Right brain vantage point

For several radiant spring mornings, a singular, remarkable fly has basked in the golden sunlight flooding my bathroom. We have become familiar companions, each merrily tending to our daily rites. At times, she—yes, she, anointed feminine by the lilting echoes of la mouche, la mosca, die Fliege, a soft intuition humming through language—perches atop the curtain railing above my bathtub, a silent witness to my shower’s misty veil. More often, she lingers on the windowsill, her gaze fixed upon me as I shave, now and then darting to alight for a fleeting instant upon my hair. I’ve felt her presence all along—a curious housemate in this shared sanctuary—but today, I vowed to bridge the chasm between us.

There she rested once more, cradled in the sun’s warm embrace upon the windowsill, watching me wield my razor with quiet intent. I leaned closer, peering into her vast, prismatic eyes—kaleidoscopes of a secret world—and murmured, “What is it like to be a fly?” At first, my mind thrummed with the familiar pulse of knowledge: her head, a miniature cathedral of instinct; those grand, jeweled eyes unveiling a boundless vista; antennae, fragile wands of scent and savor; mouthparts sculpted for sipping or piercing; her thorax, a delicate frame bearing six crooked legs, wings that shimmer with thunderous speed, and halteres, poised like a dancer’s plumb line; her abdomen, a veiled chamber of life’s mysteries. She gleamed, black as night with faint grey stripes, her form cloaked in a gossamer sheen, as though she’d adorned herself for this tender rendezvous.

This time, like as many other times as I can possibly honour in daily life, I let this torrent of facts dissolve, beckoning her to meet me in the hush of silence. The question changed to become more personal: “What is it like to be you?” I stilled the restless clamor of my mind, loosening the ego’s tenacious hold—that brittle self, desperate to cling to its mirage of eternity, casting endless conceptual shadows upon the being before me. So remote she might appear, I could, in a careless flicker, swat her away, deeming her life a trifling annoyance, a speck of disdain. But no—a different essence began to bloom within my consciousness.

A presence unfurled, no longer separate but alive with me, awake in her own cryptic grace, her curiosity a mirror to my own. Suddenly, she soared, settling upon my hair. I stood statue-still, captivated by the faint tickle of her pilgrimage across my scalp, a gentle quest into the enigma of my existence. The moment was ephemeral; she soon returned to her sun-gilded throne, gazing back at me. Perhaps she mused, too: “What is it like to be this lumbering, wingless colossus, a riddle beyond my silent tongue?” The gulf between us—me here, her there—dissolved into a luminous we, tethered by a pulsing filament of shared aliveness. Our ways of knowing diverged, yet entwined, each of us threading life’s arc with singular devotion. Together, we spun a strand in the vast loom of the cosmos, a dance so piercing that tears brimmed in my eyes, lamenting a lifetime’s moments lost to the fog of unawareness.

In that tranquil void, beside this astonishing fly, I brushed against an abyss beyond sorrow—a stillness forged in the crucible of the soul’s dark night, rising into the infinite embrace of nothingness. From there, it was but a tender plunge into the world’s embrace, a surrender that let peaceful nothingness blossom into vibrant emptiness—a radiant field teeming with the miraculous veiled in the everyday. This quiet epiphany, outshining the wildest psychedelic odyssey imaginable, unveiled life’s timeless poetry: unspoken, extraordinary, woven into the ordinary cadence of days. The nameless question remains.

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Searching Everywhere But Where It Counts

Forgetting that we have a mind.

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October 12, 2024

Before you worry about symptoms such as depression and anxiety and how to improve or get rid of them, before you get your blood boiling arguing with people who can't deal with anything beyond their own viewpoint, before you develop and become ensconced in your own opinions, before you vilify who disagrees with you, before you shake your head wondering how seemingly obvious facts cannot be agreed upon, before you assume you have no blind spots, before you despair that crowds never learn from history, before you become bitter at humanity's collective stupidity, before you get passionate about religion, mythology, and archetypes, before all that, wouldn't it make sense to inquire into the source of all of it - these symptoms, views, opinions, thoughts, actions, distortions and, frankly, miseries?

While it does not take rocket science to realize that the source of it all is the embodied human mind, for most, embarking on its exploration is at best a big challenge, at worst insurmountable, non-sensical or incomprehensible. How many times have you heard nonsense like “I don’t believe in psychology”, as if the existence of the moon were a matter of belief? How often do patients enter their physician’s office complaining of being anxious or depressed, and are sent home with a prescription without one question that would try to understand how their mind creates such suffering? Many people, including professionals who should know better, live and act as if they had no mind.

The mind is the source of all subjective phenomena and experiences, and we are astoundingly unaware of it. Our mind’s task is to ensure survival and the propagation of our species, not to ensure we live our best life. To this end, it needs to be efficient, rather than concerned about maximizing its potential. Efficiency results by pairing down information processing to the bare minimum. Embedded in the way mind functions are mechanisms that cause reality distortions, delusions, wild beliefs, and a profound obliviousness of one’s own ignorance. Whether we like it or not, our mind drives our lives like our heart pumps blood through our veins. The universe's natural processes have caused us to evolve that way, and for better or worse, we are stuck with a mind that functions sub-optimally as it creates profound reality distortions that seem at first blush to have successfully allowed us to multiply and propagate towards earth dominance. In the long run, however, it turns out that humanity may end up stampeding dangerously close to extinction. To thrive both individually and as a species we must come to terms with our rather dangerous mind and train ourselves to use it beyond its basic survival mode by accessing its inherent potential evolution has graciously also built into it. That takes work, training, effort and patience.

Our human mind provides the capacity for reflection. The mirror reflects what’s in front of it, meaning that as reality beams itself onto the mirror’s surface, the mirror beams it back to us as an image we can then examine from the outside. Notice how what gets examined by looking at the mirror is not reality itself, but an image of it. Our brain provides a similar process in the form of consciousness, whereby it maps reality in a virtual form we then can observe and manipulate. However, while the mirror reflects reality exactly as it is, the virtual reality consciousness creates is not only a map of reality, but that map is modified into a new creation. The brain as mapper functions as our central relationship organ that enables us to reflexively develop a relationship to reality and ourselves by having access to a virtual, mapped and modified reality we can ponder and manipulate. This is how we are self-aware.

As an aside, the mind is more than the creator of a virtual adaptation of reality we can reflexively relate to and have a relationship with. It can transcend self-awareness, and knowingly experience reality and awareness without the detour of mapped mirroring duality. That is the shift from observation to being, from knowing we exist in a universe to realizing we are the universe. More about that in another context.

The eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the retina, but you don’t see it. You have the impression of enjoying a seamless field of vision without two black holes in the middle, even though the holes are there. The brain manages to fill in the missing information to make the field seem seamless. Extrapolate that to the whole brain to realize that to function effectively for everyday survival our brain adapts our field of consciousness in two ways: It fills what’s missing to provide a sense of continuity and simplifies available information to not overwhelm you. It hides blind spots from you to provide continuity and withholds information to ensure efficiency. Both these mechanisms distort reality to ensure survival, while simultaneously laying the foundations for ignorance and suffering.

We each have many blind spots, but the core blind spot affecting us all is the proclivity to live as if we had no mind. We use our minds without realizing the extent to which our experience of reality is created by our mind. Without our conscious knowledge our brain creates the reality we experience. We don’t notice that the reality we experience is our brain’s creation. We mistake our brain’s constructions for reality. This results in a dangerous situation, in which we ignore the fact that our experience is subjectively constructed. We mistakenly believe that what we see and experience is automatically true, and because it seems true it seems real, and because it seems real it cannot be changed. Our primordial blind spot towards the brain’s constructions robs us of freedom of choice, of the power of clear view, wise discernment, and respectfully compassionate mutual understanding.

Our mind’s constructions seem so real that we hold on to them for dear life and want to shove them down other people’s throats without exploring their veracity. We get strongly identified with what we believe we know, emotions take over, and the capacity to hear each other vanishes. Identification with mind processes is the single most destructive problem in the way humans use their minds. Emotions suffocate the mind’s spaciousness to freely consider, question, doubt and explore, and before we know it, we are in conflict. If we cannot agree on facts, emotions drive us to use force to impose our views instead of inquiring more deeply into the divergent realities, and if necessary, compromising to try to resolve complexities. Force can take the form of yelling and screaming at each other, or legal and physical action.

The reality our mind constructs and we can have a relationship with, is in fact threefold. We first have objective reality, which is what happens in the universe independent of whether we know about it or there is anyone around to witness it. This reality consists of energy flow that is independent of how our brains and minds construct reality, and therefore as far from information as energy flow can get. The black death virus killed thousands of people without them knowing what viruses are or being able to see them. Although this is the easiest reality to agree upon, like in the case of flat-earthers, emotions still manage to cause distortions of objective facts.

Subjective reality is our own private experience nobody else has access to. This energy flow is entirely within as a construction by our own brain and mind. Although it is largely independent of objective reality, it is profoundly shaped by interactions with others. Even if everyone denies that I am in pain, if I experience pain, it is totally real for me. That is a difficult reality to agree upon, because seeing it from the outside requires trust and our capacity for empathy.

Then there is intersubjective reality, which is the reality of stories. This energy flow is deeply symbolic in the sense that language and stories are symbolic, therefore experienced as information flow, and a mutual co-creation with others. It is the reality that emerges through mutual narrative construction and is neither objective, nor subjective. It only exists in the interpersonal realm containing people who are willing to participate in it by accepting the shared reality. One such reality is money, but there are many others such as all collective ideas we can share. Money means nothing and has no reality unless it is shared in the interpersonal space. This is also a difficult reality to deal with, because it depends on the mutual capacity to regulate the multilayered energy flow between our intuition, our emotions and our intellect. When that occurs, empathy and clear insight become possible, allowing a degree of harmony within the intersubjective dance of energy and information flow to emerge. Any dance couple may dance a Tango, but those in conflict will not be able to present a harmonious dance.

To manage these three realities we each have a relationship with, requires a good deal of self-awareness and emotional regulation many people don’t have. Much of the time, the mind remains transparent like air to our eyes, invisible or not known, yet profoundly determining how we relate to real reality and live our lives. Like children playing in a house on fire, we remain oblivious to the many ways our ignorance of mind causes suffering and destruction all around.

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