Reflection requires the development of mindfulness and mindsight.

I am not a historian. Who knows how most people lived and thought in the privacy of their home before the age of Facebook. Through Facebook, I am told that a vague acquaintance of mine just made a bean soup, and the notification is accompanied by a picture of the said soup. Another one informs me of someone using a new deodorant, and why this seems to be a life-changing event. A third one shows off their new dog, obviously soaking in the accolades of friends expressing their admiration. Really? Should I care about soups, deodorants, pets, and whatever else the kitchen sink can swallow in other people’s homes?

I actually am interested, although unlikely for the reason you may think. I am fascinated by how social media like Facebook reflect the workings of the human mind. I am no exception – my own day is full of  Facebookisms: Like that cheese? Love this new pillow! This peach is so smooth! Trying a new toothpaste. Tired of this old bike – want a new electrical one. Did you hear about aunt Polly buying a new Volkswagen? … The ongoing daily chatter expressing some sort of sentiment or emotion disguised by a sea of irrelevant gossip, as we connect with one another in mysterious ways. Trouble is, this sea of communication is more like a vast desert of irrelevant soundbites, leaving me terribly thirsty for a different style of human interaction I always imagined to be more prevalent ‘in the good old days’. If only these Facebookisms were just small talk, but I suspect them to be more sinister than that. They don’t seem like light-hearted reprieves between deep moments of connection, but more like desperate expressions of rigid narcissistic minds that have lost access to something deeper. I come to realize that the good old days were likely not much better than the bad new days, just different. Now I wonder, and doubt that it was ever much different between people – today we just have more direct insight into each other’s bedrooms.

The deeper style of relating I am referring to is reflection, which in turn is directly connected to how we use thought, emotion and language. To understand reflection we need to examine the ways we share our stories. Our stories take different forms. We have the everyday chatter, which is a free-associative process by which we voice whatever seems most salient in the stream of our consciousness. Then there is linear, logic language like the descriptive language of science that describes concrete reality, or the conceptual language I am using now for this essay, developing abstract concepts.  The metaphorical language of literature (both prose and poetry) and spiritual wisdom texts, is not linear and logical, but holistic and intuitive. These language modes are based on how our right and left brains collaborate: While our right brains directly present reality to us in the form of metaphor like a waiter serves us a nourishing dish, the left brain re-presents reality in the form of logic like a waiter giving us the menu about available dishes. This is the reason why, like the menu, logic alone never fills our tummies. Only when we are connected to the right brain’s messages are we really alive. The work in mindfulness consists in exactly that re-connection with the right brain.

Over the course of human evolution, we also developed progressively more complex ways of thinking and using language.  Yuval Harari points to the cognitive revolution that unfolded somewhere between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago (Sapiens, A Brief History of Mankind, p. 21), during which we may have progressed as follows: First, we talked about things that existed in the concrete world – coming home from a hunt the hunter may have warned his tribe not to go to the river bend below the cliff because he spotted a tiger roaming there. As our thinking became more complex, we started to gossip, talking about other people’s minds – we would discuss why the husband of our best friend would have an affair with a next-door neighbor and what could be done about it. Finally, and that was the decisive step towards becoming the earth’s dominant species, we began to talk about things that don’t exist, such as the notion of freedom, equality, God or mathematics, giving rise to large systems of imagined orders that organize human societies. If you consider for a moment that the cell phone and computer were all implicitly in existence during the stone ages, just still buried under the fog of unevolved imagination, you get a sense of what incredible power the human imagination has.

It is becoming quite obvious, how versatile our capacity to use cognition and language is. These different ways of thinking require many different parts of the brain to be engaged. Altogether, the versatility with which we are able to freely roam these language scapes is precisely what makes us human and gives us untold powers we can use for construction and destruction. However, what I seem to notice is that as a matter of course, on a day-to-day basis many people live a linguistically, and therefore cognitively impoverished life by not having access to or not using these different language aspects. This brings me right back to Facebookism, to a culture in which people connect through rather meaningless soundbites devoid of deeper and more extensive cognitive and emotional elaboration.

This brings me to reflection, a very distinct function of our minds that has its equally distinct neuro correlates. Reflection is a function of the middle prefrontal cortex (MPC), from an evolutionary perspective the latest and uniquely human part of the brain. Reflection is at the heart of mindfulness and refers to a way of paying attention that goes beyond concentration, is not routinely available unless we train ourselves to access it, and entails three aspects. These are (1) openness to whatever arises in consciousness, (2) observation of experience with an investigative interest as being different from the observer and who we are, and (3) objectivity, the mind’s capacity to automatically, effortlessly, and nonconceptually know itself in the form of awareness.

Putting reflection at the core of human communication is not an easy task and is a very complex mind activity that requires education and training. It requires the development of mindfulness and mindsight, the ability to see the mind of others and our own mind clearly, then integrate the two. With reflection comes the flexibility to roam all three language modes, five language categories (Fig 1), and three language stages (Fig 2). Observe people’s main communication patterns and you will quickly realize that many are stuck in concrete thought patterns and gossip, or everyday associative language, without access to other language modes. This conceptual and linguistic impoverishment reduces the depth and vibrancy with which we live life and eventually leads to destructive social trends. Without being able to expand on that in this context, the very survival of liberal democracy is at stake. The authoritarian political trends of our time are directly related to the impoverishment of our thought and language modes. When we have never been taught or even lose the ability to reflect, our sense of clarity regarding how we see reality diminishes. With it comes an inability to access truth’s complexity, compensated by clinging to lies and fake news that falsely seem to ring true. We then become victims of the power of false convictions, which belie strength, when in fact the resulting low self-esteem cannot be hidden. To compensate for these deeper insecurities we project our strength on autocratic, tyrannical leadership that undermines all decency and sense of moral orientation.

What does reflection subjectively feel like? It is inherently about a deep relationship, both to another person as well as yourself. The playful openness to all possibilities of imagination is palpable. You sense your body and the inner life of the other person. Unlike most conversations you may pick up around you, reflection reveals the complexity of the dialogue’s content. It feels like you are in a dance with your partner and no one needs to have the upper hand. The argument is of little interest as it is replaced by expansive creativity in thought generation. There is a rhythm to it with breathing spaces for silent contemplation of what is said and attuned exchanges of ideas. The sense that nobody has the truth is strong, and with it comes a relaxed feeling of not needing to convince your partner of anything. On the contrary, there is a joining in the common cause of exploring the fabric of truth as far as it can possibly go. You are invited to feel vulnerable and freely switch from one language mode to the other. You cannot possibly take your thoughts and beliefs as the truth and are able to realize that your experiences are neither you, nor reality. Like a mirror, reflection reflects you back to yourself and the other person back to you, and the process is mutual. Through the dialogue with another person or yourself, you become your best possible you, in all your fluid complexities that never cease to evolve and transform.

Reflection is the only act of mind that can save humanity from tragedy, and yet, it is sad to say, there is little evidence for it happening on anything more than the small scale of pockets of sanity here and there, dispersed in the jungle of frantic mindless survival. Even with your closest loved ones, it is not easy to come by.

Copyright © 2018 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Discover Mindfulness Meditation »

Mindfulness and the complexity of Meditation.

Contrary to common views, meditation is not only not simple, but also not easy – just check the Abhidhamma for example, the core of Buddhist psychology, if you don’t believe me. ‘Just’ paying attention to the breath, for example – sounds easy enough. What’s so difficult about that? Well, having taught and accompanied hundreds of students very closely on their path, I can tell you that the easiest of instruction becomes for most people a major challenge. My first meditation teacher, the Zen master Karlfried Graf Duerckheim, once told me years ago that it took him twenty years to begin to understand and be able to get out of the way of his breath. Many traditions have refined the exploration of the mind to the umpteenth degree, and there is no escaping the infinite complexity of reality we encounter once we dive deeply into the embodied mind.

An instruction may sound simple: “Bring your attention to the somatic sensations of the movement of your breath in the region of your lower belly”, and yet there is no shortage of complexities and complications that arise as soon as the instruction is heard. Despite hearing those exact words, many simply don’t actually do what the instruction says – for example, they think about the breath or begin to create images of the breath instead. They may focus on the breath, but without the required attitude of curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love. They try to focus, but soon lose it and end up lost in some non-conscious la-la-land. They cannot withstand the many experience intrusions of the wide field of awareness as time passes and don’t know what to do with the myriads of challenges the mind throws their way. In week 9 of our 12-week mindfulness meditation courses, in which we teach in detail method, technique, and scientific evidence for what we do, one participant commented that she did not enjoy paying attention to her breath, that she didn’t practice it, and that by the way, she couldn’t understand the point of doing such a thing. As a teacher, you wonder what tortuous complexities imprison this person’s mind to the point of almost complete obliviousness to weeks of teaching. Yes, this is an extreme example, but I could go on and on giving you more of those examples unfolding on more or less subtle levels of energy flow, eventually leading to the person’s giving up on the practice.

Meditating, or more broadly speaking developing mindsight (a term coined by Daniel Siegel to describe the ability to clearly see one’s own and other people’s minds), is one of the most difficult journeys you’ll ever undertake – complex, difficult, and challenging. These days, in our era of easy soundbites we mistake for knowledge, frivolously facile simplicity we mistake for reality, and easily available quick fixes that mask the fundamental rot at the core of our being, nobody wants to hear about challenge and difficulty. We want instant quick fixes, we want things to be easy without having to invest our whole being into it. Apps and the internet facilitate that illusion – myriads of free guided meditations giving you the impression you won’t have to sweat it: ‘Bite-sized meditations for busy schedules’, ‘It only takes a few minutes to change your life’, ‘Download your free one-minute meditation guide!’, etc. These may be solid nets to catch the unsuspecting fish who has never heard of mindfulness. But in the end, that’s only the beginning of a long and arduous journey, not the destination as many people erroneously believe. The drop-out rate of people beginning to explore mindfulness and eventually giving up is impressive, and that’s a pity. Superficial curiosity and infatuation are easy, but walking through the mud of a lifelong conditioned mind is a different story.

Meditation must not only be practiced but also studied. As in all endeavors that entail the discoveries of a new discipline, in meditation we encounter things, energy flows, realities, and phenomena for which we had no words and words for which we have no experience to match. Words for new discoveries need to be coined and learned. To competently use our tools we have to know them intimately and master their use. As opposed to centuries ago, when all that was available to understand reality was self-exploration, sensory examination, literature, religion, and philosophy, we now have science that completes our picture of reality. The theory and practice of meditation are now unthinkable without scientific knowledge, which has deeply enriched our comprehension of who we may be, the universe, and reality at large.

For some students who are new to this, the necessity of having to engage the conceptual mind can feel ‘theoretical’, unsure as to how it relates to the direct experience of meditation practice. The 2-part article entitled ‘Find Your Answers In Your Speech‘ tries to address this dilemma by showing how seemingly innocuous questions posed by a student in an email entail all the answers the student is looking for if only we can learn to look beyond appearances, hear with the third ear and read between the lines of our cherished stories.

At the core of mastering the art of navigating life’s difficulties with flexibility, tenacity, and resilience like an elegant dance, and to live life being ‘free and easy in the marketplace’ as they say in Zen, is the capacity to regulate our energy flow. But do we have access to that capacity?

The organism that we are (not the body that we have) is always self-regulating on its own without ‘your’ permission or participation, I am happy to say. If evolution had relied on ‘your’ judgment to ensure survival, humanity would have never evolved past the earthworm stage. However, evolution bestowed on us our human consciousness, the capacity to think about how we think about our world, and with it the power to bungle everything up by choosing unwise actions against nature’s well established ‘wisdom’ of many tens of thousands of years, thereby interfering with our health and sanity. The main reason for that lies in our algorithmic nature resulting in a degree of automatism so extensive we can barely fathom. Way over 90% of what we believe to be free, conscious decisions in our lives, from what car we buy to what mate we chose, are in fact automatically decided for us by this organism that we are, only leaving us with the illusion to have been in control. Creating messes is not only easy but unfortunately for the most part our default setting, ironically captured in the Bible, which tells us that it only takes about 10 pages to get ourselves into such unspeakable messes, then roughly 1342 pages to get out of them. Evolution is ruthless in its drive and insistence on survival, and as the genie of consciousness has now escaped the bottle, never to be put back again, we can botch things up as much as we want – our organism will always ensure survival at all costs. But survival is not thriving. Live we will, one way or another, and our organism will regulate energy flow one way or another, with, without or despite our unwise participation; the result will always be the survival of as many human specimens as possible under ever worse conditions until the ecosystem that sustains us collapses under our ignorant stewardship. The earth and evolution don’t care one bit as our species may disappear like an afterthought into the dustbin of history, an interesting cosmic experiment gone wrong.

The sapiens curse is what I just described, our inherited ability to interfere with nature and the organism’s spontaneous regulation without the necessary experience to do so, or possessing a powerful consciousness we allow to be largely ruled by conditioned automatic reflexes we are completely unaware of. Luckily (although not necessarily accessible enough to save our species), our consciousness and the brain/body connected to it also harbor a gold mine, physically manifest as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC), psychologically as the capacity to be mindful and develop mindsight, which can expand the notion of regulation to a whole new level. This is where mindfulness meditation comes in. But here is the rub: For millennia experienced teachers in this field have known how difficult it is. Buddha said that you must want liberation more than a drowning man wants air to be successful. Jesus talked about the many who are called (everybody wants to feel better and stop suffering …) and the few who are chosen (… but few actually have the stamina to embark on this arduous path). More recently
Dr. Moskowitz put it in the acronym ‘MIRROR’:

There can be no doubt that this is hard work, promising more ‘blood, tears, toil and sweat’ than a walk in the park. Why? The answer is quite simple: Because we are wired for autopilot, not to command wisdom on our destiny. To thrive in our age beyond the dangers of lurking predators behind the bushes means something profoundly new for the human species – namely the complex task of harnessing the power of our MPC to steer our algorithm into new directions never before trodden, the capacity to resist certain automatisms and replace them with wise and skillful action. This is a 1000-year journey requiring 10 years, 10 thousand hours of intensely motivated inquiry, research, practice, and implementation.

Copyright © 2018 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

About Psychiatrist Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud »

Ralph struggled for years digesting childhood trauma, because he never could reconcile a repeated tug of war between two mind states that kept painfully repeating themselves in everyday life. Either he reflected on his trauma and he felt like he was intellectually examining someone else’s experience from afar without much details of experience, or he got plunged into reliving the trauma in all its details and felt he was drowning in a tornado of unbearable pain. This left him at a loss as to which view point is the truth.

Our organism is fundamentally energy flow organized into a temporarily well orchestrated collection of interrelated energy flow processes of different kinds and complexities. As such we are energy flow processing machines capable of modulating this energy flow in different complex ways that manifest as different organismic structures, from cells to organs, organ systems and minds. As energy enters our organism through its senses, it first flows in an unencumbered way, only limited by the structure of each sense organ that specializes in capturing a limited aspect of the universe’s energy flow. For example, our eyes only capture the energy flow of light between the wave lengths of 400-700 nanometers. X-rays, infrared or ultraviolet light with wave lengths outside this visible spectrum are not captured by our eyes. This energy that flows unencumbered from the environment into the organism gives rise to what we call ‘direct experience’, and is referred to as ‘bottom-up processing’ or ‘conduit’. Direct somatic sensations in your body are an example of this. When you are fully immersed in the conduit, you feel you are in the middle of direct experience like being in the middle of the market place with all its noises, smells and other sensations, like being in the streets of Paris or in the process of eating a meal. In the midst of the traumatic tornado of his past, Ralph is in the conduit.

This energy then flows through the peripheral nervous system into the central nervous system up the ladder of increasingly complex elaborations by the different levels of the brain. In this process this ‘pure’ energy gets mixed in with and influenced by memory and organization of prior experience, thus turned into a constructed energy form we call ‘top-down processing’ or ‘constructor’. This constructed energy form manifests in different ways, one being thoughts about the direct experience of conduit, experienced as a distant intellectualized conceptualization of direct experience, like looking at the market place from a hill top afar, like looking at a map of Paris with pictures or reading the menu before a meal.

What’s important is to realize that both conduit and constructor are essential aspects of human experience, none more important than the other. The problem arises when we get locked in either place. Ordinarily we get locked into a life lived from the point of view of the constructor, without access to the conduit, thus losing access to a tremendous amount of information necessary for a fully embodied, alive and healthy life experience. People with trauma like Ralph often experience the distressing opposite of getting locked into reliving the trauma in the conduit, thus losing the necessary perspective for living a balanced life.

For Ralph the revelation came when I pointed out the pros and cons of each view, and the fact that far from being contradictory or conflictual views of different realities as he saw it, they are complementary and convergent views of the same reality. Imagine walking a trail in the jungle, experiencing nature in all its full and impactful glory, and experiencing this same jungle viewed from the space station with all the context of this marvelous blue planet in a cold, vast and scary universe.

While abstract and virtual, the constructor is also immensely flexible, capable of tremendous creativity in developing new maps, viewpoints, stories and understandings. The constructor makes human civilization and culture possible. The conduit is much more fixed and concrete. While the constructor can easily appear stale, dead, cold and not nourishing like a menu in comparison to a meal, the conduit is fresh, vibrant, alive and nourishing like the meal itself. The conduit is always just freshly emerging in the present moment, presenting reality by conveying the sense of presence that the constructor, always only re-presenting reality, is unable to. Through the presence of the conduit we live and relive direct life in all its infinite details in a constantly new and fresh process of emergence and recreation. Meanwhile, the constructor roams the far-away times of non-existence, the past that is no more except in the form of its repetition in the present, and the future that is not yet except in the form of anticipation in the present. The uniqueness and specificity of conduit experience contrasts to the averaged, invariant experience of the constructor, giving the conduit the power of presence and directly lived life, and the constructor the power of re-presentation, planning and problem-solving. As such, in the conduit vibrancy and aliveness come with excitement or fear, while in the constructor abstractness and virtuality come with calmness or numbness. Through the conduit we dig up memories that are locked in our bodies in their implicit form, making them available to the constructor in their explicit form. The conduit allows us to tap into the richness of moment-by-moment energy flow, the constructor helps us use this information to develop coherent narratives about our lives. In short, we need access to the conduit to feel alive and access to the constructor to gain perspective. Through the conduit we feel, through the constructor we learn. Mastering access to both in a balanced way is what wisdom is all about.

Ralph needed to learn how to freely navigate with his attention and awareness these shifts between conduit and constructor. His organism was like a dysfunctional orchestra with corners of rigidity and chaos everywhere that impeded him to function harmoniously as a whole. He needed to harness the power of a central integrator, of a good orchestra director so to speak, to bring those parts into harmonious collaboration. The medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) is what has this function in our brains, and through meditation and psychotherapy we harness its power of master integrator.

Each time he moved into the conduit, aided by the tools of mindful inquiry he was learning, he faced the fear of re-experiencing old traumas in real time by holding the experience in the loving embrace of his MPC’s awareness. Then, instead of being re-traumatized by simply reliving the trauma on autopilot, the relived experience and its correlated neurofiring patterns became a bit more reconnected with the whole organism that he is, a bit more integrated. This made it possible for him to be a bit better able to meaningfully interact with the rest of his mind, instead of remaining sequestered in dissociated chunks of energy flows. Conversely, each time he moved from the conduit into the constructor, equally aided by the tools of mindful inquiry, after having relived and reexamined another chunk of dissociated conduit experience in more detail, he could develop a more coherent narrative of his life’s story, a more coherent map of the scary jungle of his energy flow, a more comprehensive view of the conduit terrain. Toggling back and forth like that, from danger to safety and back, from immersion into the jungle of direct experience to the perspective on the wide context of his existence and back, his picture of reality became increasingly complete, differentiated and complex (as opposed to ‘complicated’, the way it was before when he was caught in chaos).

Such evolution comes with an increased sense of relief from suffering, a decrease of symptoms and greater health. It is important to mention that the techniques and tools necessary to deal with the conduit and the constructor are partly different, which is why the combination of psychotherapy and meditation is so crucial. This may be a little too simplified, but roughly speaking the constructor is only fully accessible through psychotherapy, while the conduit only through meditation. Ultimately, Ralph discovered that both conduit and constructor show an aspect of the same truth; both your expedition into the jungle and your space walk at the space station reveal different aspects of the same truth, aspects we need to lovingly and wisely hold in the great arms of our awareness with openness and acceptance, without excluding any view. Only then do we discover how these different perspectives are not conflicted, but complementary, and that TRUTH beyond this truth or that truth, can only be intuited by embracing all of its different manifestations into one whole.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Your limitless capacity for self-deception

A student asked:

“If the blind spot can be so convincing, and so can the illusion of separateness, how do we know connectedness and oneness is not also an illusion? How do we know that ‘it’ (if I have even the faintest idea of what I am talking about, I think you call it the ‘nameless’) is actually a thing? How do we know it’s not yet another fabrication of the mind, especially my mind that longs to feel connected?“

I have often said that the human capacity for self-deception is limitless. This may suggest that attempts at getting a glimpse of any kind of encompassing truth is hopeless. If that is the case, we might as well give up our inquiry into reality, stop our explorations in mindfulness and mindsight, go home and smell the decaying roses of a fleeting lifetime with as little awareness as possible until we vanish six feet under. In fact, if you approach life from a purely left-brain problem-solving perspective without a good dose of defensive protection against the complex stirrings of your unconscious, you might well find yourself in such a hopeless pickle.

Now see what happens when you reflect more deeply on your limitless capacity for self-deception. What I mean with ‘more deeply’ is an engagement of your right brain in connection with your left brain, guided and harmonized by your master integrator, the middle prefrontal cortex (MPC). Practically speaking, this means experiencing this statement (the limitless capacity for self-deception) with the full array of your potential for experiencing reality fully, including your thoughts and intellect, your fantasies and images, your memories, your feelings, your somatic sensations, your five external senses experiences, your sense of relatedness to the large context of social relationships, your sense of embeddedness in the large context of ecology, geography, our planet, and the universe, and your awareness seemingly holding all that jazz like a loving mother holds her baby in her arms.

What happens is that even our limitless illusions reveal a mysterious spaciousness around them that dissolves all noise and activity into a vast stillness of unspeakable depth. Imagine looking at a long stick in an aquarium, partly submerged in water, partly sticking out on top. Because of the refraction of light it appears broken, and yet you know it is not. The illusion is real and inescapable, and yet your mind in this case knows a deeper truth that is not accessible through the senses. Our situation with ‘ultimate truth’ is not dissimilar. Awareness reaches beyond the appearances created by the mind, revealing reality beyond the categorizations of our mind, beyond the either/or’s of our intellect, beyond our cherished words and stories that need to capture in order to understand, and cannot know without capturing.

So here is the thing: The nameless is not a thing. Let me back up for a moment. Everything we know is a thing in the widest sense of its meaning. The universe is made of things, and not nothing. Even nothing is a thing we can conceptualize, that thing called complete absence of things. Our cognition is made of bits of information flow called thoughts, which are also things. We think with things called thoughts, and each thought points to another thing elsewhere in the universe. A chair is a thing, an atom is a thing, energy is a thing, freedom is a thing, a black hole is a thing, dark energy is a thing, everything is a thing in its widest sense because our mind thinks with a currency (our thoughts) that is also a thing.

When I then say that the nameless is not a thing, I make a very simple, although somewhat surprising statement. Without waxing esoteric, I simply say that the nameless is no thing. It is not a thing, and since ‘nothing’ is also a thing we can conceptualize, it is also not nothing. In other words, the nameless cannot be conceptualized, therefore cannot be thought, imagined, named, described, or intellectually known. It’s that simple. You needn’t look any further. You just have to give up thinking about the nameless, trying to figure it out – you can’t. So if you just surrender that way, something shifts in your level of awareness, and you quickly realize that the nameless is a reality outside the purview of the mind.

The flatland example makes the challenge clear: Imagine being a two-dimensional being in a flatland. A sphere moving through your flat world would first appear as a point, then grow into a line up to a certain length, before decreasing in length again to become a point and finally vanish. It is as if the mind was this 2-dimensional flatland, unable to ever see the sphere. It only sees the size-changing lines. Our mind cannot see the nameless. In order to see it, an orthogonal shift is needed, where we can gain access to a further dimension, much like a vertical shift out of our two-dimensional flatland would suddenly open access to the 3-dimensional world, in which we can see the sphere for what it really is. Mindfulness and mindsight training do exactly that, give us access to dimensions of reality that are always there, but never seen or realized.

How do you KNOW that THAT is not also a fabrication of your mind? Because you REALIZE that THAT is beyond mind. This realization is as clear as day and far more real than the partial truths of our story-telling mind. What makes it so clear is its independence from senses and mind, and ironically we find exactly that so disconcerting. The nameless is this non-graspable nameless luminosity that reveals to us an unshakable truth of peace and serenity beyond all movements of mind, time, world, and circumstance, in which all suffering simply stops. The orthogonal shift from line to sphere is as real as when you wake up from a dream. How do you know that when you have woken up from a dream you are not in the dream anymore? You just know. Mind you, you may then be in a new dream you need to wake up from, and that is exactly the goalless journey of awakening – there are levels and levels of increasingly refined awareness, each level shedding completely new light on the previous level. This is why the direction is clear: The path is the goal!

When you are grounded in this truth, no matter how you slice it, all appearances reveal the same nameless essence as their core. And in this core, if you really live from there, humility and love converge to allow you to accept the limitless illusory constructions of your embodied existence with equanimity, KNOWING in a non-intellectual, non-dual sense of wise contemplation, that your embodied existence is just a temporary movement of timeless, nameless and unfathomable potential, always about to be born, to emerge, to pass and to vanish, only to be reborn into another form. This is the famous I AM or I AM THAT I AM beyond the ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’ that all spiritual traditions talk about when they refer to who you really are. As they would say in Zen, the nameless is neither a thing, nor nothing, nor both, nor neither.

Enjoy the new vista!

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Learn more about self compassion »

“Where I specifically get stuck is around the “sense of self” and “non-self”. This is a real learning edge for me. I clearly see separation, although many of my spiritual teachers (including you) tell me otherwise. I still think there’s a “Jane Doe”. I get it that if I have a conversation with someone, I can impact their thoughts and behaviour. I also get that my conversation with them can then impact interactions with others. But I don’t see the greater interconnectedness and “non-self” that you describe.”

The central notion to be considered is ‘context’. Here is an example: When you want to build a house, Newton’s laws of physics work perfectly well. In fact, they are the only laws that can be used successfully. But if you want to understand chemistry, galaxies or the finest manifestations of matter, they don’t work anymore. This is to say that Newtonian physics is perfectly valid within a certain well defined context, within certain parameters of reality.

Human beings are organisms in the form of open complex systems with a certain defined anatomical and physiological structure, with sense organs that are also limited by their structure and physiology. We construct a view of reality that is defined by the capacities and limitations of the way our organism is built. Think of this deeply for a moment: You do not experience and see unfettered reality, but what your organism constructs on the basis of a vast reality it is part of, and that is largely inaccessible as such.

And now, let’s get a bit more complex.

Yes, what I said is accurate, sort of, but there is more. We are capable of meta-awareness, of thinking, as well as thinking about both thinking and our experience at large. Like a map, thoughts stand for a reality they represent, and we are capable of manipulating them in lieu of the reality that gets mapped, thereby transcending the limitations of our senses and discovering features of reality that are otherwise inaccessible through our senses. That is what science and philosophy are all about; but not only science. Our mindfulness and mindsight practices also allow us to develop levels of consciousness that go beyond the mind and its sensory constructions to discover features of reality way beyond our common unexamined day-to-day experiences of life.

In lectures of the Mindsight Intensive I have extensively talked about ways our brain is wired to create illusions as a way of protecting the integrity of our organism for survival. These illusions are sometimes more like delusions, meaning that what we subjectively experience does not correspond at all to what is really going on. The eye’s blindspot is such an example. Sometimes they indeed are more illusions, meaning that we do experience what is, but in a distorted, modified or incomplete way. The sense of self is such an example.

As an important survival mechanism humans construct a sense of self from the physiological processes of the body. That I am a passing, impermanent entity that lives a life is clearly an aspect of reality, and the way I experience this entity is in the form of a sense of me as myself. That entity is me, and when I don’t look at it more closely, I end up saying that ‘I am’ this organism. I can also say that the psychological experience of being a distinct organism in nature takes the form of a notion called ‘self’. This is a sloppy conclusion, because saying that this entity is me is only relatively true, relative to a restricted view that is based on a limited use of consciousness.

Look more closely, and you will soon discover that defining who you are by the boundary of your skin is quite problematic. Temporally, when do you start existing? Before your parents’ sperm and egg join, right after, when you are a 3 month embryo, a 7 month embryo, when you are born? Microscopically you have a vast microbiome in your body with billions of microbes that are responsible for your health. Are they you or part of you? Molecules of all sorts are exchanged between your organism and its environment, are they you when they swim through your blood stream and not you anymore when they depart? Where is your mind that has wired your children’s brains and many other people around you, and are other people’s minds that have wired your brain you? As you age and die, molecules and atoms that constantly came and went during your life time and upon your death continue to come and go in new directions, are they you? If you define yourself by the boundary of your skin and your legs are amputated, are you still you? If you define yourself by your personality and you develop Alzheimer’s, are you still you?

For many, identifying one’s sense of self with the apparent boundaries of this organism with a skin that appears like a boundary, is quite problematic and causes a lot of suffering. The way I see who I am can be the source of a lot of anguish when I don’t look deeply into the nature of reality through deeper contemplation. Context is everything. Relatively speaking, like when I build a house, certain local principles of viewing reality can be sufficient for survival, to pay taxes and save for retirement. From a contextually more encompassing perspective, beyond taxes and retirement, there are meaningful existential questions about our existence, our lives and the universe, which cannot be addressed with a conventional state of consciousness designed for survival only. We realize that who we are is far more complex than who we may think we are, and figuring out these deeper truths is profoundly liberating, decreases one’s suffering and provides us with a sense of meaning that is deeply healing and loving. This cannot be done philosophically, but has to be an embodied experience of reality that opens up through mindfulness and mindsight training.

In other words, the sense of self is not a problem per se, and the work does not consist in getting rid of it. The problem lies in our capacity to look deeply and our relationship to the inevitably existing sense of self. If we take it at face value as it presents itself to our awareness in unexamined everyday life, we are likely to suffer, because we only see the tip of the iceberg, believing that it is the whole iceberg. We need to first develop a strong sense of self, meaning a solid sense of the open complex system that we are as it regulates itself for survival throughout a lifetime. In other words, we first have to learn to feed ourselves, work, pay taxes and save for retirement in order to survive. Once that is achieved, we can look deeper and recognize that the tip of the iceberg is part of a much grander reality, much of which is hidden from view and requires special training to be discovered.

No-self then is not a thing that is opposed to this other thing called ‘self’. It is a notion that denotes the impossibility of defining who we are as a separately defined thing. No-self is the realization that who we really are transcends any notion, any nameable essence or entity we can imagine. The self is just the tip of the iceberg, the restricted view of an identity that transcends the boundaries of the skin. The nameless context of unfathomable reality is who we really are, and until we deeply realize that, in the sense of discovering it as a deeply lived reality, not just as intellectual concept, we will tend to continue suffering in more or less subtle ways.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Last year I bought a new shredder for the office – a Fellowes shredder. I kept its box and used it in our group room as a little ‘table’ to put papers as we teach. On it is the photograph of a ferocious bulldog determined to hold on and shred whatever it can grip in its powerful jaws. Over the course of time, some people wondered about the emotional impact of this creature on people learning to meditate. It looks menacing, wild and unfriendly. Doesn’t it represent exactly the opposite of the serenity we try to impart in a meditation program?

David, one of our students, took matters into his hands and one day came in with a cute, elegant and stylish little wooden table he donated as a replacement for this horrible box. We were delighted; however, the moment we considered getting rid of the box, a strange affection for the bulldog emerged. Its picture ended up being cut out from the box as the box went into recycling. The sense was that this bulldog, as ferocious as it appeared, was also serving a function, almost a protective and even motivating function. It didn’t take long for David to snatch the cut-out picture and return it to us a few weeks later, nicely framed for our group room. Thank you so much!

Indeed, we have come to love our little ‘fellow’, as it fearlessly stares at us, ready to jump into action, and doggedly pursue whatever goal has to be pursued without flinching. Although seemingly ferocious and maybe even frightening on the surface, he has come to symbolize to us the dogged determination, with which the work in mindfulness and mindsight needs to be pursued. Given that the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, it is not surprising that meeting one’s mind is the most difficult task we’ll ever take on, especially given its enormous complexity and the many ways it can fool us. It takes great patience, tenacity and staying power to practice an hour a day, knowing that it takes 10 years, 10 thousand hours to deeply rewire the brain on this 1000-year journey.

So after all, our little fellow is our friend, our ally on the journey into the unknown jungle, where the task of slaying dragons awaits us.

Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.