How To Show Up For Transcendental Being

Transcendental Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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