The Vision Of Improvement

Sometimes our meditation practice ‘does not go well’, whatever that may mean in the meditator’s mind, and we get frustrated and end up giving up. The interpretation of it ‘not going well’ is fraught with confusion and misunderstanding about what meditation is. Inexperienced practitioners often say that a practice does not go well when painful experiences arise that are difficult to handle. Such experiences are routinely part of practice, though, since mindfulness meditation opens our awareness to the entirety of possible experiences, good or bad. Whatever experience content thus arises, pleasant or unpleasant, painful or enjoyable, says nothing about how well a meditation practice is going.

That does not mean that a practice cannot be deficient and not go well. It can, when lack of experience leads to deficiencies in meditation technique that can derail the whole process. This is no different than in any other discipline – with a lack of or wrong technique nothing productive can be achieved. For example, if a meditator tries to get rid of a painful experience, mindful self-compassion may be missing from the technique and the meditator will not benefit from the practice. The level of skill the meditator brings to using the necessary tools to meditate is therefore essential for a successful practice. When we are not clear about our technique, the mind cannot be examined. Most patients and students I see struggling to keep up the practice are not afflicted by a lack of will, motivation, or mental ability to practice, but they don’t realize which meditation tools they have forgotten or have not yet learned to use.

Meditation practices that repeatedly derail lead to the practitioner giving up. When we give up, we often end up berating ourselves for our lack of competence, instead of embracing it as an interesting fact about our mind to be explored. One of the most frequent reasons we end up failing in our meditation practice comes from resisting what is without realizing that that is what we are doing. We want bad things to go away, and if we don’t change that impulse, our meditation will certainly fail, and we fall into a sense of futility and resignation.

Resignation

Giving up or resigning means getting overwhelmed by an internal chaos of energy flow, combined with the perception that our meditation practice is no match for one’s mind’s overwhelming power. We then easily fall prey to the usual autopilot mode of everyday living that cannot make sense of what is going on, is powerless to improve life’s experience, and is based on avoidance for survival. Resigning means giving up on our close examination of the mind because we are not able to handle it skillfully, feeling forced to accept that our meditation practice does not work. We are forced back into the autopilot mode of living that propels us through time without a sense of meaning and purpose, stringing us along an unending series of necessities that have to get done. In that mode, what we try, like meditation, in this case, does not seem to work well. We are stuck in an unconscious addiction to ignorance that is sweetened by the allure of the familiar and doctrinal, even though we know very well that those conditioned patterns do not work for us as we only cope for survival without ever tasting the joy of inspiration that creates a thriving life.

We should not assume that mindful living would eliminate any trace of resignation in life. There are moments when our conditioned brain wiring is just too powerful to work with and we will automatically be forced to temporarily give up. However, through mindfulness training, we will eventually be able to prevent having to resign or create a shift during the process of resignation. It is a shift in our relationship to what we experience through an expansion of awareness that allows us to step back a bit, kindly embrace ourselves in our entirety and wholeness without berating ourselves, and bring a curiosity of exploration to the situation. Even if we have already started to berate ourselves for having given up and being ‘bad students and hopeless losers who will never get anywhere in meditation’, even then we can embrace that, too, as part of our wholeness, exploring with curiosity how amazingly complex our mind is in its attempts at making sense of life and ensuring survival.

The moment we are able to take that step of bringing investigative awareness and attention to giving up, and not simply staying mired in that defeatist mental state forever, the mindfulness journey can continue, and giving up is immediately transformed into a tactical retreat, a purposeful surrender. With experience, we can remain aware of an upcoming internal storm that is threatening our ability to stay grounded before it has reached its full destructive force, and take steps to access resources that allow us to navigate the mental storm more skillfully and with more elegance.

When we give up, the central coordinating brain structure responsible for the conscious regulation of the organism’s energy and information flow, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC), goes offline and we fall into various combinations of uncontrollable fight/flight/freeze-conditioned mental states. The moment we reconnect our MPC after having given up or keep it connected with appropriate mindfulness measures when we anticipate overwhelm and a possible resignation, we engage in a tactical retreat leading to surrender. With surrender as opposed to resignation, we remain fully aware and mindful of what is going on without losing our connection with the MPC. Like climbing a mountain that gets pummeled by a storm, we wisely, not impulsively, decide to temporarily retreat further down in order to regroup, wait until the storm has passed, and then start climbing again when the weather allows. Forced resignation with the hallmark of hopelessness transforms into deliberate and conscious surrender that retains the sense of agency on the path to awakening.

Noticing improvement

Pablo Casals (1876 – 1973) needs no introduction as one of the greatest cellists of all time. One day he received a visit at his home from one of his friends. Pablo was in his nineties practicing his cello when his friend arrived. “Pablo, you are the greatest cellist to ever walk this earth, and you are in your nineties, why are you still practicing?” asked his friend. Pablo answered: “Because I am noticing improvement!” A similar story comes from the piano legend Vladimir Horowitz (1903 – 1989), who was once asked why in his eighties he was still practicing daily. “If I don’t practice for a day”, he said, “I notice it; for 2 days, my wife notices it; for 3 days, everybody notices it!” Both gentlemen were fully accomplished in their field and world-renowned representatives of their art. As Jack Kornfield entitles one of his books, ‘After The Ecstasy, The Laundry’.

The pleasure of noticing improvement without an end or goal in mind is the grail of mindfulness, driven by a vision of life as a journey to nowhere. Meaning and fulfillment do not appear in disembodied fantasies about a past and a future that are always somewhere else than where we are, but from the oh-so elusive bowels of the present moment that is always right here now. The journey to nowhere is then the awakening to the ever-flowing energy of the present moment. The vision of noticing improvement is the act of harnessing the power of the imagination to conceive with unusual discernment and foresight what does not yet exist, without ever feeling the need to glimpse an ever-elusive end or goal. Such is life and love, like play for a child, reality dancing with us for the sake of dancing, creativity for the sake of endless creation with nothing else extraneous. The journey to nowhere is its own purpose and meaning that does not require anything outside itself like a goal. The vision of noticing improvement is the crown jewel of mindfulness meditation that integrates all organismic functions like the body, the emotions, and the intellect. With this vision we remain humble and relaxed, not needing to chase non-existent goals that tend to lure us like mirages into narcissistic gratifications.

Our work consists of awakening awareness from the autopilot monkey mode of living, and it is a major challenge to calm down the striving problem-solving mind, which always creates imagined better results and prizes to be had at the end of the effort. Often, such striving is accompanied by an idealized view of the teacher as having arrived exactly where the student strives to arrive one day. At work is an automatic psychological mechanism, through which students project their own disowned authority onto the teacher, while their conscious self-image gets flooded with perceptions of imperfection. This mechanism manifests when we have not yet integrated disowned or dissociated parts in us. The result is that we don’t feel at peace, we identify our sense of who we are with this state of discomfort, and the problem-solving mind presents to our minds the fantasy of goodness as a solution to be found outside, somewhere else at a future date. Students often don’t notice that the teacher is exactly there where they are, maybe just a bit more so!

The ideal we seek is an imagined state of contentment and relief from whatever pain we suffer from. Freedom never appears to be there where we are but is imagined either somewhere else or at a future time. We want to be happy when we are not, or happier than we are. We are in the grip of a discomfort-driven psychological seizure to get to the place of relief as soon as possible. The problem-solving mind plans for us to get from here to there as quickly as possible, never mind that we don’t have the faintest idea about where ‘here’ is, what ‘there’ looks like, and what role time plays in it all. Both ‘here’ and ‘there’ are misconstrued in black-and-white terms: ‘Here’ is deficient and ‘there’ is fulfillment. In addition, we expect that getting from here to there should not take more than a few weeks.

The psychological mechanism creating these entanglements is compartmentalization and dissociation, both preventing a holistic view of who we are in the present moment. Sun without shadow is not possible, very much like pain here cannot exist without joy here, and joy there cannot exist without pain there. The grass is not greener on the other side of the fence, but where you water it. The promised land we are all so desperately looking for is therefore not at the end of our journey somewhere else at another time – particularly since there is no end to the journey. It is the learned and trained capacity to embrace the full catastrophe of our existence in the present moment with equanimity and elegant flexibility. It is enjoying the peace and contentment of ceaselessly noticing improvement. It requires relinquishing the sanitized doctrines and disembodied ideas of the dissociative mind and reconnecting with our emotions, our body, and the world around us in an act of radical embodiment, so as to turn sterile intellectual ideas of perfection into the complex visions of messy creative potential. That all takes time and patience, a lot of time and patience – the thousand-year journey.

Surrender

At the beginning of the mindful journey, this ideal of where we are supposed to end up is like a mirage. It recedes in proportion to our advances, never to be reached. Eventually, as we get closer and closer to realizing what we are looking for, the mirage disappears completely, only to leave us with the endless trail snaking through eternity around us. For a moment we may be despaired and lost, because the closer we seem to get to the ideal, the farther away we find we are from it because the ideal is just a disembodied idea, a thought, and not liberation itself. The idea of liberation is just a fantasy not to be worried about, except for learning to realize that only complete embodied presence with the fullness of perfectly imperfect reality can afford us the freedom we so desperately yearn for. The full embodiment of a previously disembodied idea turns it into a vision we can manifest moment-by-moment in our daily lives. Then, not only the ideal disappears, but the perceived trail itself dissolves and we discover that the path is not linear at all but meandering sloppily in all directions like the many arms of a river delta. We grow in all directions, and eternity is touching us from all directions until we can finally satisfy ourselves that once and for all, and for all eternity, becoming has no origin, no final goal, and no destination. We never arrive – that is the mystery of timelessness.

The practice of noticing improvement is the simplest and most ordinary of all possible states of being, and therefore so extraordinarily rare and coveted. The subtle internal work we do is intimately connected to others, and we cannot hide our internal world without affecting others. How we regulate our own energy and information flow directly affects others and vice versa. The resonance circuitry of the brain responsible for our dependence on relationships is exquisitely sensitive; there is not much leeway – ‘only 2 days, and then everybody notices’. Our practice needs to occur not only with our fellow humans in mind but in the field of all our relationships. Relationships and their harmony are at the core of spiritual awakening because our brain is a relational organ, wired for relationships. As Buddha already knew, one of the three refuges in our practice we can find safety is the sangha, the community of people on the path to awakening. The journey to a better place is in reality the story of a deeper and more refined settling into the web of relatedness that already exists in the present moment.

Casals’ statement is hauntingly beautiful. Old, at the end of his life, he continues to improve, unknowingly celebrating how neuroplasticity in the brain persists throughout our lifetime and never stops. You are perfect as you are, and there is room for improvement according to Buddhists. Your perfection is the manner of your becoming. Room for improvement is the infinite potential for ever deeper acceptance, clarity, simplicity, and love in every moment of becoming. The goal of this journey of liberation is the becoming, the journey itself. That sounds almost trite, as I am sure you have heard and intellectually absorbed that a million times. What should intrigue us here that makes the difference between intellectual understanding and being-as-lived experience, is how to realize what becoming is all about.

You are already becoming (and disappearing) moment-by-moment. Nature does that for you without your consent. You are form arising with the main trajectory already laid out. You become as a life form, not as a rock; you become a human being, not a lizard; and you become with a temperament and certain proclivities, not as a tabula rasa. You already are a river flowing, coming and going, and you cannot push the river. For better or for worse, as humans, we have the brain and mind capacity to interfere with becoming. You have the capacity over a lifetime to strongly influence the shape, size, and direction of the riverbed by regulating the river’s flow. But you cannot stop it or push it uphill without negative consequences. Because we can regulate the flow, and because we usually use only a small fraction of our brain’s capacity (the problem-solving mind) to regulate, we can regulate really badly, so badly that we end up dysregulating. We can regulate so badly as to push the river and not notice that we are involved in such hopeless nonsense. Then chaos and rigidity arise, and we get sick.

Realizing how the journey is the goal is not as simple as it may sound. That is the reason why the world teems with spiritual teachers who tell you how there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, and how liberation is right here, right now, already there for you to enjoy, yet most just don’t see it; and why the world also teems with students who compartmentalize and own all imperfection while projecting all perfection on the teacher! How simple that sounds – do nothing, let go, and you are already enlightened, already free. It is indeed simple once you get it. But getting to the point of getting it (if there even is such a thing as a journey to a point to be gotten!) is the challenge or the art, requiring intense and long training.

For the most part, we must acknowledge that everything worthwhile, including wisdom, requires hard work and mind training. There is an art, a challenge to this business of freedom from suffering with effortless effort. It is patiently learning the necessary technique of training the mind. We have to become proficient in how we use our mindfulness tools to undo conditioned compartmentalizations, dissociations, and resistances without pushing whole parts of who we are into the darkness of unconsciousness. That makes it possible for the organism to freely access its inherent wisdom and move towards integration, instead of continuing to create more suffering and eventually decompensation, overwhelm, and resignation.

We have to develop the ability to recognize and then connect all parts of what we are as human organisms into a harmoniously functioning whole, connecting the intellect with the heart, the guts, other human beings, and our environment. This does not come easily because, by virtue of our innate negativity bias and the reflex of wanting to get rid of pain, we are biologically wired to condition ourselves with all kinds of bad habits. While running away from an attacking tiger is a good idea, doing the same psychologically with an internally imagined aggressive tiger is a very bad idea. As the river inexorably flows, we naturally tend to diminish our capacity for skillful regulation and create suffering. We spontaneously and unwittingly tend to create chaos and rigidity in our lives. This natural and spontaneous capacity to create suffering can, fortunately, be met with an equally natural, but not usually spontaneously available capacity to decrease and eliminate suffering. To make it spontaneously available requires a certain attentional training of a very particular sort, called mindfulness training.

Here is the good news: The very engagement in that training is the prize! Enlightenment or liberation is the very real and embodied experience of relief that comes when we have decided to actively get involved in the integration of all our parts into a more harmonious whole, with no end in sight. There is no finish line to this endeavor, except maybe to say that we have arrived at the moment the mirage of the perfect place dissolves and we can peacefully settle in life’s imperfections; the moment the necessity to engage on this path has become so clear, so obvious to us that we never question it again and we become eternal students of existence. That is the laundry after ecstasy; enlightenment means to stop worrying about enlightenment as you go about the business of the laundry. Aren’t you enjoying clean clothes after your laundry, knowing that they soon will be dirty again? What more do you want than looking forward to the potential of ongoing laundries?

To be a student in that fashion does not end up in a degree, but on the contrary entails the fascinating journey of unknowing, knowing that there is no end to wisdom; knowing that there is always more after we get anything and that every time we get something, we are challenged to let it go and transform into something new, into what comes next in the flow of the river. What relief to drop into the space of the eternal student who knows there is no end to being a student and no land of Cockaigne to chase after. What a soothing experience it is to know that on this eternal path of study we have a chance, every moment of our lives, to integrate a bit more, to follow the river’s flow with a bit more ease, a bit more clarity, a bit more stability, a bit more depth, and a bit more love – that is mastery, and that is surrender instead of resignation! In every moment of our lives, we have this incredible opportunity to lovingly embrace imperfection and with delight notice improvement. But we have to actively take the opportunity, and it takes attention and effort to do so. Once the opportunity is taken, it takes learning effortlessness to bring the opportunity to flourish.

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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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