What the mindfulness journey is really about

I. The Blind Spot

We stand at a peculiar crossroads in history: transfixed by the spectacle of silicon minds assembling themselves from human thought, we have turned our gaze outward toward the machine – and in doing so, turned away from something infinitely stranger and more wondrous. The neuron firing in your visual cortex as you read these words has been refined by 500 million years of ruthless experimentation. It speaks simultaneously in electrochemical gradients, synaptic geometry, glial whispers, epigenetic memory, and the mysterious way it feels to be you – a language so layered that we have barely begun to translate it. Artificial intelligence, for all its breathtaking mimicry, is a shadow cast by the organic: flat, fast, and legible precisely because it has been stripped of the irreducible complexity that makes life alive. The real frontier was never the one we built. It is the one we inhabit – and have barely looked at. The real moral concern is not AI’s consciousness, as it will forever just be a machine; it is the irreducibly different organic world of biology – life. Substrate matters.

* * *

II. The Flight from the Organic

And yet, rather than turn toward that complexity, we are doubling down on the flight from it. Somewhere deep in the cultural psyche, an ancient archetype is running – a Noah’s Ark for the digital age: the dream that we can load our minds onto servers, colonize Mars, and outrun the fate of being mortal, embodied, and organic. It is a fantasy that the laws of physics greet with indifference. Mars is not an oversight in our evolutionary story; it is simply not within the conditions that made us possible. We are not minds that happen to have bodies. We are bodies that learned to think – and the thinking cannot survive the abandonment of the substrate. 

Meanwhile, mindfulness – which might have been the corrective, the return to the full-bodied, right-hemispheric, emptiness-rooted intelligence that the organism actually runs on – has been quietly colonized by the same left-brain agenda it was meant to interrupt. Stripped of its contemplative roots in what I have coined Core Mind Realigning, it has been repackaged as a cognitive performance tool: stress reduction by spreadsheet, attention training as productivity hack. MBSR, as it is now commonly taught, too often becomes another exercise in mental management rather than a genuine rewiring of the organism’s relationship to itself. The silence at the center – the emptiness that is not absence but generative ground – has been edited out. What remains is technique without transformation: the map sold in place of the territory. Even technique is routinely taught superficially as many of my students coming from elsewhere attest – stripped of the exacting, unhurried rigour that navigating the infinite complexity of the mind demands. Too many practitioners have become more invested in the reductive confidence of evidence-based orthodoxy than in the kind of authentic human engagement that makes living transmission possible. But the deeper problem is one of timescale. The journey toward liberation from suffering is not a course. It is a lifelong apprenticeship – and the willingness to commit to it without horizon is not incidental to the path; it is the path. This is a principle Core Mind Realigning holds at its centre – with rigour, precision and commitment. It is no surprise, then, that people who complete a time-limited MBSR program without further training remain essentially untrained, unable to sustain a meaningful daily practice – because transformation is not an outcome. It is a way of living, a way of patiently walking the thousand-year journey and notice improvement.

* * *

III. The Complexity We Cannot Build

Consider what forgetting life with its organic substrate actually costs. Despite centuries of biochemistry, we have not yet assembled a single living cell from its chemical constituents – not one. The cell remains, in this precise technical sense, beyond us: a self-organizing, self-repairing, meaning-making system of such staggering intricacy that our most sophisticated laboratories can only observe it, never truly replicate it from the ground up. Even if we eventually construct something that qualifies as a living cell, what it would lack is not an ingredient but a history – and four billion years of unbroken evolutionary inheritance is not a detail that any laboratory procedure can retrospectively install. And the cell is merely the beginning. Trees negotiate resource-sharing through fungal networks with a sophistication that shames our internet. Animals navigate, grieve, play, and remember in ways that suggest an interior life we have only begun to take seriously. Ecosystems regulate climate, water, atmosphere, and fertility through feedback loops so interdependent that we cannot yet model them fully – only disturb them. And disturb them we have. Roughly 70% of insect biomass has disappeared within living memory, quietly and almost without public mourning, even though the loss of insects would mean the collapse of the terrestrial ecosystem. The organic world – the only world that actually made us – is being unmade, and we are largely looking elsewhere. Time matters, evolution matters, nature matters – replanted forests have little in common with old growth jungles. Just as a rich broth cannot be hurried – only tended, over hours, until what was raw and separate becomes nourishment – so the untamed processes of the mind yield their healing secrets only under the slow, sustained heat of trained awareness.

This is not only an ecological crisis. It is a crisis of attention – and perhaps, at its root, a crisis of wonder. Where is the mindfulness project equal to this moment? Not the one that teaches you to breathe through a difficult meeting, but the one that rekindles genuine passion for what we are made of – that positions the practitioner not merely as a calmer self, but as a custodian of biological heritage and wisdom. The original invitation of contemplative practice was never stress reduction as its core; it was the direct investigation of the nature of mind and reality – including the emptiness at the heart of both. Quantum biology is now finding that coherence, superposition, and non-locality are not metaphors when applied to living systems – they may be operational realities at the cellular level. The void is not outside biology. It may be biology’s deepest mechanism.

* * *

IV. The Left-Hemisphere Civilization

And what happens to the collective mind when this dimension is foreclosed – when a civilization becomes, structurally and habitually, a left-hemisphere operation? The results are not difficult to observe, and they are not accidental. The left hemisphere, as McGilchrist has meticulously documented, is not unintelligent – it is narrowly, brilliantly, dangerously competent. It categorizes, systematizes, and controls with extraordinary efficiency. What it cannot do is hold complexity without resolving it, tolerate paradox without collapsing it, or remain in relationship with what resists being named. When it becomes the dominant mode of a civilization – not merely a tool but the operating system – the dire consequences ripple outward into every domain of collective life.

Politics becomes the first casualty. Discourse that was once capable of holding tension – the irreducible tension between liberty and solidarity, tradition and renewal, the individual and the commons – hardens into opposed and irreconcilable certainties. Each side constructs an internally consistent worldview devoid of common sense, a closed epistemic system that processes only confirming data and experiences disconfirmation not as information but as attack. This is not disagreement. Disagreement requires a shared ground. What we are witnessing is something closer to parallel realities – each one coherent from within, each one increasingly unable to perceive the other as fully human. Dehumanization does not begin with violence. It begins with the foreclosure of ambiguity.

Religion (from Latin ‘re-ligio’ meaning ‘re-connection’), which at its contemplative root was always an encounter with what cannot be controlled – the groundlessness beneath ground, the silence beneath thought – gets conscripted into the left hemisphere’s project. Mystery becomes doctrine. Paradox becomes heresy. The apophatic tradition, which knew that the deepest truths can only be approached by unsaying, is replaced by literalism: sacred texts read as mindless instruction manuals, transcendence repackaged as tribal identity. God becomes a flag. The infinite becomes a weapon. And those who wield it do so with the serene confidence of people who have mistaken the map for the territory so completely that they have forgotten a territory ever existed.

Power displaces respect because respect requires the recognition of an interior life in the other – and that recognition is a right-hemisphere act. When the right hemisphere’s contribution is diminished, the other becomes a category before they become a person: a demographic, a threat vector, an ideological position. Empathy does not disappear entirely – but it narrows, becomes tribal, and then, in one of the more tragic ironies of our moment, turns against itself in suicidal inevitability. What begins as genuine moral sensitivity curdles, under left-hemisphere management, into a performance of sensitivity – competitive, punitive, and ultimately self-consuming. The result is the tyranny of division, entitlement and indoctrination. Truth becomes dangerous, because it is routinely inconvenient and offensive to the spineless – then gets replaced by the scourge of political correctness. Cultures begin auditing their own histories not with the nuanced grief of people trying to integrate a difficult past, but with the prosecutorial zeal of systems seeking to purge contamination. Here again, the substrate is forgotten, history is forgotten, the sense of identity lost. The result is not healing. It is a new form of the same splitting: the world divided again into pure and impure, victim and oppressor, the saved and the condemned, with the terms simply reversed.

Polarization deepens not because human nature has changed but because the cultural and technological environment now systematically rewards the left hemisphere’s preferred mode: fast, certain, categorical, and emotionally activating in the most reductive sense. Social media does not merely reflect the divided mind – it selects for it, amplifies it, and profits from it. The algorithm has no investment in wisdom. It has an investment in engagement, which is to say, in the kind of arousal that forecloses reflection. We have built, at civilizational scale, a machine that feeds the part of us least capable of governing wisely – and then expressed bewilderment at the quality of our governance.

What is missing – what has always been missing from political discourse conducted entirely within the left hemisphere’s jurisdiction – is the capacity McGilchrist calls 'Aufhebung': The ability to hold opposites in a higher synthesis without destroying either pole. This is not compromise in the weak sense – the splitting of differences – but genuine dialectical movement, the kind that requires sitting with discomfort long enough for something new to emerge. It is, not coincidentally, precisely what contemplative practice trains. The still point is not politically neutral. The capacity to remain present with what is unresolved, to resist the premature closure of complexity into slogan – this is a civic faculty as much as a personal one. Its absence is not just a spiritual problem. It is a governance crisis.

* * *

V. The Return

And yet – and this is the turn that neither the political left nor right can quite bring itself to make – the remedy is not more analysis. It is not a better ideology, a more refined critique, or a superior epistemic framework. The left hemisphere cannot think its way out of dominant left-hemispheric insanity. The exit is not through the same door. What is required is a return – not a nostalgic one, but a radical one, in the original sense of radix: root. A return to the substrate. To the body that breathes without being asked. To the forest floor where a single teaspoon of soil contains more microbial organisms than there are human beings on earth. To the silence that is not the absence of noise but the generative presence of something prior to noise – the ground state from which experience arises and to which, in deep practice, it returns.

This is what the organic world has always been quietly offering. Not consolation. Not escape. But scale – the humbling, orienting scale of a complexity so vast and so intimate that it cannot be othered. You cannot stand in genuine relationship with an old-growth forest, with the mycelial network threading beneath your feet, with the migratory intelligence of a bird navigating by magnetic field and star – and remain entirely inside the left hemisphere’s jurisdiction. Something shifts. The boundary between self and world becomes, not dissolved, but permeable. This is not mysticism as an add-on to biology. This is biology, perceived at the depth it deserves.

The contemplative traditions knew this long before neuroscience had the instruments to confirm it. The Zen master pointing at the moon was not making a metaphysical claim – he was performing a corrective, redirecting attention from the symbol to the thing, from the map to the living territory. The Buddhist teaching on śūnyatā – emptiness – was never a nihilistic statement about the unreality of the world. It was a precise phenomenological observation: that all phenomena, including the self, arise interdependently, without fixed essence, in a web of mutual conditionality that modern ecology recognizes under a different name. The Buddha and the mycologist are, at some level, describing the same discovery. The cell membrane and the Markov blanket are, at some level, encoding the same ancient problem: where does self end and world begin, and what does it mean that the answer is always – here, and not quite here.

Core Mind Realigning we practice in our meditation programs at The Mindfulness Centre – the full-spectrum return to embodied, right-hemisphere-inclusive, emptiness-rooted awareness – is not, then, a wellness intervention. It is a reorientation to reality. It asks not merely “how do I manage my stress” but “what am I, actually, and what world am I embedded in.” It trains the capacity to tolerate not-knowing long enough for genuine knowing to arise – the kind that includes the body, the relational field, the silence beneath thought, the intricate aliveness of the organism that has been, all along, doing something far more extraordinary than anything we have yet programmed a machine to do.

* * *

VI. The Frontier We Forgot

We are not at the dawn of intelligence. We are, if anything, at a moment of reckoning with how much of it we have ignored. The intelligence that assembled the human eye, that coordinates the immune response, that allows a murmuration of starlings to move as a single fluid mind without a conductor – this intelligence does not fit in a prompt. It does not run on servers. It also does not require the optional imaginative maneuver of engaging in an intimate relationship with a divine creator. It ‘simply’, yet astoundingly runs on carbon, water, time, and a set of thermodynamic constraints so precise that the margin for life, in the universe we can observe, appears almost impossibly narrow. We are that margin. We are what happened when matter became curious about itself – and the least we owe that fact is attention.

The mindfulness project, at its fullest, is nothing less than this: the cultivation of a quality of attention adequate to the complexity we actually inhabit. Not the attention that optimizes, extracts, and moves on – but the attention that stays, that deepens, that allows the world to become strange and specific and irreplaceable again. The trees are still communicating. The genome is still, in every cell division, copying three billion base pairs with an error rate that would humiliate any human engineer. The glia are still doing something in the brain that we do not yet fully understand. The emptiness at the heart of matter is still – against all our productivity – simply here and, if you prefer, simply God in its incomprehensible essence. God does not have to be posited separately. This very ordinary embodied moment is extraordinary beyond imagination when we know how to look closely – it is God’s magnificent incarnation. 

We did not need to build a mind. We need to inhabit the embodied one we have – and wake up, at last, to the world it arose from.

Copyright © 2026 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Every novice meditator must understand the mind’s inherent automaticity, forged over eons of evolution to secure survival. The brain, the most intricate structure in the known universe, gives rise to the mind, whose elaborate workings unfold as the most profound phenomenon we can encounter. This complexity reveals our vast potential for self-deception, emphasizing the urgent need to avoid harmful habits early in practice. Cultivating a precise and resilient technical foundation is vital for navigating the mind’s labyrinthine depths. Let us briefly explore the scope of this automaticity, a formidable force we confront as we seek to understand our lives.

Estimating the exact percentage of human action and functioning that is automatic and not conscious is tricky, as it depends on how we define "action," "functioning," and "conscious." However, research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that a significant portion of human behavior and physiological processes operates outside conscious awareness.

1.     Physiological Functions: Most bodily processes—like heart rate, breathing, digestion, and reflexes—are automatic and controlled by the autonomic nervous system. These account for the vast majority of "functioning" in terms of rawprocesses. If we consider all bodily functions (including cellular processes),conscious control might apply to less than 1% of total activity, as most biological operations are involuntary.

2.  Behavioral and Cognitive Actions: When it comes to behavior, decision-making, and cognition, studies suggest that a large portion is driven by automatic processes:

- Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his work on System 1 (fast, automatic) and System 2 (slow, deliberate) thinking, suggeststhat System 1 dominates much of our daily behavior. Estimates vary, but someresearchers propose that 95% or more of cognitive processes (e.g., snapjudgments, habits, and intuitive reactions) are automatic.

- Studies on priming and implicit bias (e.g., by John Bargh) show that many decisions, from simple motor actions to complex social behaviors, are influenced by unconscious cues.

- Habitual behaviors, like driving a familiarroute or typing, often occur with minimal conscious input once learned.

3.     Conscious vs. Unconscious Balance: While no precise percentage is universally agreed upon, some neuroscientists estimate that 90–95% of brain activity is unconscious, based on the volume of neural processes handling sensory input, motor control, and background cognition. Conscious actions—like deliberateproblem-solving or focused attention—make up a smaller fraction, perhaps 5–10%of mental activity.

Rough General Estimate: If we combine physiologicaland behavioral aspects, roughly 90–95% of human "action and functioning" (broadly defined) is likely automatic and not conscious. Thisvaries by context—routine tasks lean more automatic, while novel or complex tasksrequire more conscious effort.

Copyright © 2025 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

I am drawing upon an instance from my everyday life to illuminate for my students how mindfulness practice in general, and the Mindsight Intensive curriculum in particular—which traces the trajectory of human existence through being and nihility towards absolute nothingness and emptiness—invites us to expand awareness in a very practical way as real, lived reality.

A substantial aspect of this undertaking entails familiarizing oneself with the differences between the realities shaped by the left and right hemispheres of the brain—most notably, the profound insight that the right hemisphere directly presents and reveals reality, whereas the left merely re-presents it as a simplified map of what truly exists.

With this understanding, I explored two contrasting linguistic approaches to articulate the experience: the descriptive, technical language of the left brain, rooted in an 'objective' yet inherently limited perspective, and the imaginative, vivid, and richly contextual language of the right brain, grounded in an embodied, more open-ended viewpoint. The single quotation marks around 'objective' highlight a neurophysiological truth: the brain never perceives reality impartially. Instead, its perceptions are shaped by a drive for certainty, manifested through value judgments that prioritize survival.

My hope is that this exploration may deepen my students’ understanding of the intricate human journey toward wholeness.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

Copyright © 2025 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.