Finding Freedom through Chronic Pain

One of the most elusive and difficult conditions to bear and treat is chronic pain. In this article I refer to three forms of chronic pain physical, emotional/mental and existential/spiritual. These three forms are similar in quality, in that they torture and can lead to despair. They are however dissimilar in distractibility as you move from the physical to the mental and finally the existential form, it gets easier to find ways of distracting yourself from the pain. In other words, physical chronic pain is the form that is most in your face, inescapable and hard to find distraction from. In an ironic twist of logic, of the three forms it is therefore also the most efficient teacher of awareness. As you read on, you will therefore see me focus on physical chronic pain.

Pain is radically subjective and therefore invisible to direct observation. Only its ripple effects become visible: a bad mood, unhappiness and possibly dysfunctionality; an inability to cope, facial distortions and lamentation as the expression of suffering. Depending on a persons attitude towards their chronic pain it can become exhausting to be around them, because one feels so powerless to help. One then tends to withdraw, and the person in pain feels like a burden and also withdraws, which creates social isolation as a secondary problem. Often people with chronic pain are not understood or believed, and sometimes even seen as faking and malingering. In children with chronic pain conditions it can even go so far as to put honest and caring parents into situations, in which they are accused of child abuse and their children taken away by the Childrens Aid Society. Chronic pain is awful, because it is relentless and real, yet elusive, difficult to quantify and difficult to treat.

Pain in general can be seen to be experienced along the two dimensions of how treatment-resistant and chronic it is. The less amenable to treatment it is and the longer it lasts, the less subjectively bearable it is and the more mindfulness training becomes important. This means that without mindfulness chronic untreatable pain is sure to cause despair and disability.

Along this ‘bearability spectrum’ we can categorize pain as a way to help us organize our thinking around the issue of mindfulness. The easiest pain to bear is the short-term one we know to be due to an underlying condition that is transient and treatable, such as the pain of breaking a leg. I will call this category 1 pain. A bit more difficult but still bearable is the longer term pain we know to be due to an underlying condition that is treatable, such as certain back pains (category 2). It gets more difficult when the underlying condition cannot be treated and the only way to get rid of the pain is pain medication or operations (category 3), because these pain treatments tend to be only partially effective and have side effects which negatively impact the quality of life. The most difficult situation is the one where not only the underlying condition is not treatable, but the pain itself is also resistant to treatment (category 4). These cases may sometimes belong to a subsection, in which the pain appears to be untreatable because we know little if at all anything about the underlying condition, the underlying condition is not recognized and missed, or access to treatment is difficult or unavailable. In these cases new medical discoveries, increased social awareness of a diseases prevalence and increased medical access to treatment can suddenly move the situation into a more bearable category 1, 2 or 3 pain. An example of this would be the Ehlos-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), which has inspired the work of the ILC foundation. However, just because more insight into the disease through research, more social awareness of its existence and more access to treatment has allowed some children to become pain-free more of the time and has significantly improved their lives, does not mean that they cease to struggle with the impact of this devastating illness and some side effects of treatment.

Pain has a complex physiology that spans a whole spectrum of bodily structures and hormones. Let this paragraph wash over you like a pleasantly warm wave of Caribbean ocean water and dont focus on details. Involved in the production of pain are peripheral receptors everywhere in the body that create signals traveling along attached nerve fibers, which converge in the spinal cord and ascend through the brainstem, the limbic system and the cortex all the way to the most evolved of all brain parts, the master integrator of the whole organism called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC). At every level along the way multiple parallel interactions and feedback loops between different brain centres and the body participate in the processing of pain and the unleashing of biobehavioral responses that attempt to return the organism back to safety and health. Engaged are not only the neurons of the nervous system with its neurotransmitters (Serotonin, Oxytocin, Acetylcholine, Norepinephrine, Opiates, Dopamine, Histamine just to name a few), but also the hormonal system from brain to body, including the hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal glands. Among many other hormones they secret Cortisol that affects the whole body, including blood pressure, blood glucose, the immune system, the whole metabolic energy system and the muscular-skeletal system. The glia cells in the brain (outnumbering the neurons by 5-10 times!) as well as the Nitrous Oxide system in the body are also involved in complex ways we are only just beginning to understand.

With chronic pain the organisms attempts to heal often fail and a vicious cycle ensues. The very ways the organism tries to get rid of pain in fact only serve to boost defensive processes that increase tension and further worsen the pain. Pain causes fight, flight and freeze survival responses. The person tenses up as a consequence of the constant barrage of suffering that feels like torture. Distraction is part of such defensive survival responses and often seems to be an effective way of making the pain more bearable, but in the long run the exact opposite happens. The tensions created by avoidance behaviors make the pain only worse as they block the organisms healing potential. As the person becomes increasingly mobilized in an attempt at avoiding increasing pain, the organism gets weakened and stiffened, which only increases the pain further. This is a vicious cycle largely driven by our inbred autopilot reactivity honed over many years of life. In other words, the vicious cycle of chronic pain is nourished by a restricted sense of self-awareness.

What you need to take away from this are just three fundamental principles:
1. Pain is NOT the sensations from receptors in the body or the nerve impulses traveling up the neurons all the way to the cortex. Let me first say it in scientific terms: Pain is an emergent state of embodied self-awareness across the entire neural networks, and it is a re-representation of all the earlier processes of information. In plain language this means that pain is a subjective experience or a state of awareness that arises from the totality of all those nerve impulses across the whole body, but is not those nerve impulses themselves. In other words, pain is not a concrete thing, but a subjective state of self-awareness.
2. The MPC (see above) gives us the ability to modify our states of self-awareness. In the case of mindfulness training, we modify our state of self-awareness from being defined and restricted by autopilot reactivity into the direction of greater presence, which includes more openness to the totality of our human experiences, more acceptance of what is whether we like it or not and more curiosity towards all the ways we construct our reality. Being mindful is thus an expanded state of self-awareness, which is incompatible with autopilot reactivity. It is now hugely interesting to know, but also quite logical, that the mindful state of self-awareness is largely incompatible with the restricted, pain-filled state of self-awareness, since suffering from chronic pain is mostly due to autopilot reactivity. By altering our state of self-awareness we can alter and even extinguish the experience of pain. This means that body receptors may feed the same input signals to the brain like before, but how we experience it all and emotionally relate to it can be so permanently changed that the experience of pain significantly decreases and sometimes even vanishes.
3. Because pain is a state of self-awareness, the issue of awareness is key. Awareness is what gives us the space and freedom of choice. This leads to a paradox: The only way out is the way through. In order to liberate ourselves from the suffering created by pain, the reflex of trying to get away and distract from the pain does not work. Instead, we have to learn to dive right back into the pain and the body, and attend to the full experience of it all in embodied self-awareness. You now probably wonder what embodied self-awareness is?

Embodied self-awareness has to be distinguished from conceptual self-awareness (Alan Fogel, Body Sense). Most people live most of their lives trapped in conceptual self-awareness. This is a more precise way of saying that we live in our heads, caught up in the train of our thoughts we deeply believe in. You are likely quite familiar with the experience of having a pain in your chest and being flooded with thoughts telling you that you . probably have a heart attack / which may kill you / you are too young to die / what a pity / you wont see your grandchildren / when did you last review your will? / you wanted to travel to Borneo before dying / had you only taken more time off 10 years ago when you were in good health / what a mess / you dont want to leave your loved ones / how are they going to cope without you? / you were just in the middle of renovating your cottage and now what will happen? / is the doctor going to be able to save you? / maybe it is not a heart attack, but a lung cancer / if so, could be an early stage / you smoked until 15 years ago / etc. etc. etc. These thoughts completely envelop you and define your sense of self. They are concepts created in the cortex, which is why the resulting state of self-awareness is called conceptual. Without being grounded in embodied self-awareness conceptual self-awareness is extremely limiting and stress-inducing when it stands alone (as it does most of the time for most people). Needless to say, this thought world you are entrapped by causes huge stress, even though it seems to you that all you are doing is problem-solve in order to get out of this situation. You are actually not problem-solving that much at all, but mostly ruminating and getting in the way of real healing.

Embodied self-awareness is very different. You would experience the sensations in your chest in great detail: 3-dimensional size and shape of the sensations; their quality (knifing, burning, searing, throbbing, compressing, etc.); their intensity and the way they change from moment to moment; how far they reach and how they transition into other sensations in the shoulders, the abdomen, the neck etc.; you would differentiate these sensations from those that accompany emotions such as anxiety, sadness, regrets etc.; you would notice the barrage of thoughts and how they threaten to take over, yet you would let them unfold in the background and continue to stay rooted in your body. In embodied self-awareness you would allow the organism to be open to the full spectrum of energy and reality without undue interference, thus maximizing its own healing potential. Once seen by the doctor you would eventually find out that you just had a .. panic attack, and that all your catastrophic thoughts, so well-disguised as rational problem-solving ones you so deeply believed in, were just that thoughts, and not reality. In short, conceptual self-awareness is limiting and toxic when not embedded in embodied self-awareness, and embodied self-awareness is the royal road to mindful self-awareness.

The ILC foundation is rightly so involved in helping children with chronic pain by addressing all angles of pain management. This includes spear-heading research, providing access to treatment, raising awareness of the problem, developing a residential treatment program, and coordinating an encompassing approach to these childrens plight including medication, surgical interventions, familial support, parent involvement, psychological interventions and social accommodations. We could say this: One of these many treatment facets is mindfulness training, both for children and their parents, so that they can all learn to develop the all-important state of embodied self-awareness that is fundamental to mindfulness and so important for healing. We can however also say this: Underlying all problem-solving about and all treatment approaches to chronic pain and illness in general lies a fundamental choice between staying within the limits of what can be done, and opening the gates widely to how our state of being (self-awareness) can so immeasurably enrich and enhance what can be done. This is the choice between staying on autopilot or moving into mindfulness, which astonishingly is often also the choice between no or only slight pain improvement and painlessness.

Before I get to the core issue of mindfulness and pain in this article, let me preempt a frequent misunderstanding that occasionally comes my way. Just because I focus on mindfulness and the aspects of pain management related to it does not mean that I am against medications, operations or any other approaches that help people cope with pain. If competently used with discernment, they are all very worthwhile and part of an encompassing approach to pain. All I am doing here is focus on what I specialize in as people come to me for help with chronic pain. So lets zero in on the core issue of mindfulness and chronic pain.

Some medical practitioners are sometimes so overwhelmed by their patients demand for relief and so desperate to offer something, that treatments are offered (often surgeries) which at best do not improve the situation, at worst make it significantly worse with each further intervention. When the underlying reason for the pain is untreatable, the focus becomes the pain itself, and patients often end up walking around with a whole pharmacy of medications that leaves them drugged, sluggish and too tired to function often with limited results. So then comes the million-dollar question: What if nothing more can be done? What if what has been done so far helps, but you are still left with substantial impediments to a good quality of life because treatments have side effects or because they only partly work? What if pain medication does not work or you dont tolerate it, operations only make things worse and are not an option, and your specialists and medical practitioners politely distance themselves and give up on you, because there is just nothing else they can offer? What if this is as good (or as bad) as it seems to ever get? What if (to put this question into a completely different context) you cannot change your circumstances, the way you cannot change the circumstance of (taxes and) your mortality?

When I sit with some of my patients referred to me by pain clinics and hear their tragic stories, I can sense the emotional relief I represent for the health practitioners who send these patients to me. It is as if they were saying to themselves and their patients: There is nothing else I can offer you just go and see Dr. T and hell do something with you. So here we then sit together, these suffering human beings full of agony and despair, and I, receptacle of these patients projected last hope, bearing my own lifes suffering as we all do, as limited in my knowledge and my ability to offer relief as both my patients and colleagues, having nothing else to offer but my presence. But presence is so unknown to most people. For some patients coming to see me represents the last struggle to hope for something we can do, and when they realize that even with me there is nothing we can do, I can see their final disappointment on their faces, the last hope having just vanished, as if I had just given a dying dog the last kick that sends it over the edge, and they sink into resignation and giving up. Some patients are in this state already the moment they walk through the door into my office. Paradoxically, it is exactly in this final letting go, in this final surrender to impotence on both our parts, patient and healer, that something radically and completely new arises we call presence.

In fact, this is when we begin to explore the difference between resignation and surrender, impotence and getting out of ones own way, ignorance and unknowing. Resignation, impotence and ignorance are states of defeat at the end of the line of what can be done. Surrender, getting out of one’s own way and unknowing are states of vulnerability at the core of the journey to Being. In this moment of transition from doing to being it begins to dawn to my patients that the way to healing is not the way of doing more, but the way of being differently, and this journey towards greater Being involves exactly the opposite of doing, let alone doing more it involves learning to undo and to embrace not knowing in order to make space for something completely new we call wisdom. What is astonishing is to discover over months and years of practice and training in this direction how chronic pain changes, morphs, decreases and eventually even disappears, when we have allowed ourselves to move through paths and regions of Being and Reality that were totally unexpected and unfathomable. If this sounds like voodoo to you, I have good news for you: We are nowadays in a position to scientifically show and explain why mindfulness and dropping into Being has such powerfully healing effects on the human organism. Of course, science cannot explain everything, but many people only find access to the seemingly fuzzy world of Being and the goodies that arise from that when they feel reassured by the relative objectivity of scientific insight.

One last word a word of grounding and realistic perspective: As amazing as the results of mindfulness training can be, as unfathomable as the outcome of practice always is, as hopeful as the journey reveals itself to be, and as profound as the effects of mindfulness are on the body and the mind, please beware: This journey does not follow our rampant contemporary cultural naivet, our tendency to drama and reality shows, and a general human propensity to seek what is fun, fast and easy. If for a moment you allow me to put it in biological terms, the plasticity (ability to change itself and rewire) of our brain and body is not only real, but also slow as compared to our expectations of instant results. To avail ourselves of the power of brain plasticity we are required to engage in steady, committed, longterm practice, combined with a good dose of courage and patience. The formula for success in this area may not be one you relish to hear: Failure plus hard work = success. To put it simply, mindfulness practices are easy, but it is difficult to become the one who practices. This is why we have to work with a good teacher your worst enemy is yourself.

One of my most dedicated meditation students who has moved within the span of 4-5 years from being a disabled, walking pharmacy just about to consider a third back operation for disabling chronic back pain, to living a very different and much improved life style, put it to me this way in a recent email:
Imagine that no meds now for over a year and recently I’ve been waking up occasionally with significantly reduced pain. Seems inexplicable but I know the correct response equanimity, no attachment. A world away from when I was first referred to you. Apart from pain management I have a deeper insight to life and how we should live it. And for that I am very appreciative. And so the journey continues!
He has many moments of painlessness, and when the pain arises, it is not debilitating. As he puts it, this journey is not just about the pain, but about the fact that by changing our state of self-awareness through mindfulness, the pain turns into our teacher of lifes unfathomable mysteries and the gifts are immeasurable.

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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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