Let’s be clear about the difference between a hallucination and an illusion. A hallucination is a perception of something that does not exist. If I sit in my Oakville office and see a gorilla sitting across from me, it is a hallucination, because there is no gorilla. My brain made the gorilla up. We can experience hallucinations in all sense modalities, touch, sight, sound, smell and taste, giving rise to tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory and gustatory hallucinations (some are more common than others). By contrast, an illusion is the distorted perception of something that exists and is already there. For example, a straight stick with one end at the bottom of an aquarium diagonally sticking out above the water. Because of the water’s refraction of light the stick will seem like it is broken, even though it is not. Or imagine walking in the dark out in nature and suddenly you jump thinking that you saw a snake, when it is just a branch lying on the ground. Unless we suffer from a mental illness, take mind-altering drugs or experience any other unusual mental state, hallucinations are relatively rare. They won’t concern us here. Illusions however are common. In fact so common that we don’t realize how much of reality as we see it, is illusory. The brain creates many illusions we are utterly unaware of and that can only be discovered through special tests. When spiritual traditions such as the Vedanta mean that the physical world is illusory, they don’t mean it does not exist, but that the way we see it is so distorted as to cause suffering.

Once upon a time, a father of three sons died. In his will he left the following instruction as to how to divide his 17 elephants among his three sons: The eldest son was to receive half of the elephants, the middle son one third, and the youngest son one ninth. Upon reading the will, the three brothers became understandably upset, because in order to divide the elephants that way, the would have had to cut some elephants in half. They did not know how to solve the problem, when one of the king’s ministers happened to ride to town on his elephant and hear about their conundrum. He sought them out and gave them his elephant. With deep gratitude the three brothers proceeded to divide the elephants. The first brother took half of 18, thus 9 elephants. The second brother took a third of 18, thus 6 elephants (that’s 15 so far). The third brother took a ninth of 18, thus 2 elephants, bringing the total to 17. The 18th elephant became redundant and the minister took his elephant back and rode away.

This story is a metaphor for the useful illusion, a process so fundamental on our journey of mindfulness that it lies at the core of wisdom. The useful illusion is the distorted, yet helpful way we perceive reality. As we meditate and learn to look deeply into all elements of experience, we differentiate between perceptions of the world, sensations of the body, and cognitions (thoughts) of the mind. We realize how impermanent they all are, and how the structures we believe to be so solid are in fact nothing but energy flow in space. We look for mountains, but end up seeing perceptual energy flow coming and going. We look for a body, but we end up finding sensory energy flow temporarily organized in a certain way. We look for a mind, but we end up finding cognitive information flow arising and dissolving every split second in front of our observing awareness. We look for a self that endures, but all we end up finding is the non-self elements of perceptual, sensory and cognitive energy flow coalescing and dissolving every moment. By the end of it all, through precise and deep observation we realize that we are left empty-handed. Instead of finding wonderful things, we find energy flow, but even that dissolves upon closer observation into nothing at first. If we don’t stop there, but continue to investigate nothing, we realize that nothing is still something, the thing called nothing, which like all things we thought existed, turns out to be no thing. We have a word for this no-thingness: Emptiness.

Emptiness is reality and awareness itself. It cannot be described or captured in words. It cannot be intellectually or conceptually understood. It is the nameless, timeless and spaceless reality that stares us all in the eyes when we learn how to look. It is therefore not somewhere else or only accessible at another time. Since it transcends both space and time, and we have not been trained to see it, it is hidden in plain view – right here, right now. It is the most fundamental aspect of reality there is; in fact, what I should more accurately say is that it is reality itself – unadorned, direct, immediate, inescapable. Our ancestors discovered that, only when we discover this fundamental truth in the form of direct experience, not just conceptually, our suffering stops.

To come back to the elephants, the beauty of our human condition is that the scaffolding of illusions with which we see the world as we leave our childhood behind, enter adulthood and pay our taxes, is exactly like the 18th elephant – a useful scaffolding affording us the precious opportunity of liberation from the scaffolding itself. Without the bodymind and its illusions about life, we could not solve the challenge of liberation from suffering, the same way the three brothers could not solve the problem of their father’s will without the 18th elephant. But once we see through the nature of illusions and the distorted ways we see our bodymind and the world, the radiant reality of emptiness emerges from the clouds of ignorance, the same way the solution to the puzzle the three brothers were struggling with elegantly emerges with the ephemeral appearing and disappearing of the 18th elephant.

The nice thing is that we don’t need to worry, struggle or go through hoops. All we need to do is embrace our embodied existence fully for the length of our bodies’ existence, pay our taxes, have kids, buy a home, find fulfilling work – and then examine the illusions of this existence deeply. Like Sirens these illusions beckon us to come and explore their indecent nakedness hidden behind their clothing of diverse appearances and distortions. As we engage, they retreat like mirages, shy to reveal their naked essence to the inquiring eye. Once these retreating nudes have nowhere else to retreat to, like mirages, their nakedness reveals itself to be exactly also their insubstantiality, the oasis of emptiness that delights with its refreshing treasures of awareness itself. Then, like the airplane piercing through the cloud blanket into the space above, where the blue sky timelessly reigns, liberation into the timeless truth of the nameless, of God, always present, always available, just not seen, automatically ensues as we systematically shed our multiple layers of ignorance. We don’t have to learn anything new – we only have to unlearn the old learned distortions that cloud our view.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

I recently asked one of my students how her practice was going. She was cursing me, she said. Her practice had gone so well before, but since she dug deeper into her life through psychotherapy, it had become so uncomfortable that she wished she could just go back to the innocent state she was in before she started all this. I quipped that the innocent state must have really worked well for her, given that it lead her to seek help. She laughed. So now her practice had dwindled, and instead she had taken to consuming boxes of cereal by the truck loads. I hoped it was at least whole grain cereal!

This is a common challenge. Meditation practice changes constantly, moving through easy and difficult periods all the time as we work our way through deeper and deeper layers of illusions and ignorance. What to do when the going gets tough? Her sense was strong that she ‘needed a break’ from practice because it was so challenging. The question is what this ‘needing a break’ really means and how to handle it.

For the untrained monkey mind ‘needing a break’ means metaphorically having started the ascent of a mountain, finding it too hard and simply abandon the mountain, or having termites in the basement, having started to deal with them, but finding it too challenging and slamming the door to the basement shut. That is not helpful. All boxes of cereal will do is make you fat! Not only are they not good for you, but they don’t solve the ongoing issue that plagues your life.

‘Needing a break’ can be interpreted much more skillfully. You are working with the window of tolerance of energy flow. What does that mean? Our organism is energy flow, and the brain regulates that energy flow so that the organism stays healthy and survives. This regulation occurs within a spectrum of energy flow patterns, from the chaotic on one end of the spectrum to the rigid on the other end. In between is the harmonious flow, which corresponds to health. When we fall into chaos (anxiety for example) or rigidity (depression for example), the brain tries to bring us back to harmony and health by mobilizing certain mechanisms.

In meditation, we engage the MPC (medial prefrontal cortex) to regulate energy flow in a new and more efficient way, which corresponds metaphorically to how a sailor navigates the ocean with all his instruments and experienced skill. We learn not to start a mountain climb unprepared, but have all the tools we need with us in our backpack. Depending on the nature of the energy flow for the meditator or the quality of the weather for the sailor, that navigation can become really difficult. There comes a point, where the meditator faces such strong headwinds in the energy flow that it becomes difficult to be in one’s own skin. This is the work we do with the window of tolerance for stress. The borders of the window is where the regulation of energy flow becomes difficult and borders on either chaos or rigidity. When the energy flow is so unruly as to trespass the borders, we are not in control anymore; chaos or rigidity have taken over and the fight/flight system is in full swing. We become reactive instead of responsive. In that reactive state we don’t handle stress constructively anymore and our meditation becomes unproductive.

Depending on the combination of lived history and innate temperament, we all have different sizes of windows of tolerance for the variations in energy flow. But we all have windows with borders, and at some point we need to know how to skillfully handle the instances when the energy flow threatens to trespass the borders. That is the moment when we may feel we ‘need a break’.

Rather than give up, we have to realize that working with the window and its borders is part of meditation. The single most frequent mistake meditators do is to not emphasize the attitude of COAL (curiosity, openness, acceptance and love) enough, without which the window tends to become significantly more restricted. COAL widens our window and allows us to continue our investigation of experience phenomena, even when it becomes difficult. Part of COAL however is also knowing when to back off, not giving up in a state of flight, but continuing the process of meeting our experience with curiosity and steadfastness. This new kind of ‘taking a break’ looks very differently from the ‘giving up/flight’ type. Rather than giving up, we take charge in a new way.

We won’t flee to the cereal box, but we will judiciously chose an activity that is wholesome, will allow us to continue our observations and at the same time also fall back into the window of tolerance. If you are in sitting meditation, this might include switching to walking meditation, or doing a few stretches, maybe a soothing bath or a drink of water, all activities done with judicious discernment and awareness, until we are back within the borders of the window and the brain feels safe, at which point we immediately get back to sitting meditation. Knowing how to constructively work with the window of tolerance is an art and a crucial part of a successful practice, because we cannot deeply observe and investigate our nature with a brain in panic. The brain needs to feel safe.

Safe does not mean easy – the practice can feel very challenging. Safe means not overwhelming, within the window of tolerance of today. As long as you feel you are in charge accompanied with a sense of mastery, no matter how difficult your experience is, your meditation practice is effective and you are rewiring your brain furiously. The moment you feel out of control in a fight/flight or even freeze state, Your practice is counterproductive, you only reinforce miswirings and you are wasting your time at best, if not hurting yourself. With time and practice, during which we cultivate our work at the edge of the window, the window expands and we become increasingly resilient. We then don’t need the cereal box anymore to find a sense of having a break.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Dynamic Mindfulness is a term I coined for a systematic meditation technique I developed in the course of honing an integrated view of human nature encompassing both traditional descriptions of human subjective experience based on thousands of years of collective human experience and the newest insights gained into the way our embodied brain functions. The uniqueness of this approach lies in the fact that each step taken during meditation, which can be defined as a way of using one’s mind to rewire the brain through attentional and awareness training, correlates rather specifically with what we nowadays know about the brain and its workings. In memorizing the different steps of this technique we simultaneously tour the functional anatomy of the brain, giving our meditation practice a particularly tangible and embodied sense of reality.

At first blush the term ‘Dynamic Mindfulness’ may seem like a tautology, since mindfulness is naturally dynamic. A closer look at the way we experience life makes it clear though that juxtaposing these two notions of ‘mindfulness’ and ‘dynamic’ is not as redundant as it seems. All you need to do is a quick experiment looking out the window onto a country landscape for example and notice what you see. Your thoughts will abound with nouns such as trees, grass, a field, a mountain, a river, a horse, a house etc. The reality that all these nouns are in fact verbs, processes unfolding before your eyes, escapes us for the most part, even though intellectually we can all agree that it is the case. Experientially we do not pay attention to the dynamic nature of reality, focusing instead on its static appearance. We then live our lives accordingly, out of touch with the dynamic nature of reality, manipulating objects instead. We live as if we were part of a large canvas of objects interacting with each other, out of touch with and unaware of the fact that every object, including ourselves, are processes unfolding in the first place. This leads to such phenomena as ‘bringing my sore knee with a torn meniscus to the doctor to be fixed’, thus leaving myself out of the equation of the healing process, oblivious to the fact that I, my knee, my relationship to my knee and the whole organism the knee is part of are all intertwined dynamic processes involved in both the reason for the torn knee and its healing. Such an approach to the living organism that we are is limiting and therefore causing unnecessary suffering.

Why do we objectify reality into a collection of interacting nouns and forget the deep dynamic nature of reality as verb? The reason has to do with three mechanisms by which we forget the deep dynamic nature of reality. They relate to the nature of beliefs, the relationship between the left and the right brain, and psychological development through childhood.

1. The first mechanism by which we forget the deep dynamic nature of reality pertains to how the brain processes beliefs in its main sensory areas, the very same areas where we perceive pain. As surprising as this might seem, belief centers are not located in the flexible intellectual thought-based areas of the frontal cortex. Instead, they are located in the sensory areas that we rely so heavily on to keep us safe. It is through our perception of pain sensation, touch, pressure, position, motion, vibration, temperature, sight, sound, smell and taste that we test reality and decide how to change and adapt for survival. Our beliefs, deeply embedded and embodied in these brain areas that define our concrete reality, define who we are in a very fixed and defined way, and are therefore not easily amenable to exploration and questioning.
2. As for the second mechanism, the problem-solving left brain is for most of us unfortunately not properly integrated into right-brain functioning and therefore quite literally a lose tyrant without checks and balances controlling our lives. Its mode of functioning is to parse reality into bits without noticing context, and then crystallize these bits as conceptual things or objects in our awareness. In addition, contrary to the way the right brain presents reality to our awareness in the form of direct experience, the left brain gone rogue only represents it to us conceptually. Locked into such a controlled, objectifying construction of reality as a virtual world of interacting things or objects, we are incapable of seeing the deeper truth, namely the fact that the perception of things as objects is but a rough, imprecise, disembodied and limited view of reality (although under certain circumstances useful in its own right) that misses the deeper truth of reality as a limitless dynamic field. This comes with a hefty price, the price of a very bad habit, the habit of unnecessary, optional suffering.
3. The third mechanism is deeply embedded in our childhood development. As we grow from a young child into preadolescence and adolescence, our capacity for abstraction evolves. Young children are not capable of complex abstract reasoning (thought differentiation). Their world is concrete, and their not yet very evolved reasoning capacities not very differentiated from fantasy (Piaget: concrete operational stage). This is the reason why there is no logical conflict in their minds when they envision Santa Claus fly on a sleigh and descend through the chimney to bring gifts. As we grow older our capacity for abstraction and differentiation of complex thought processes increases, and what seemed conflict-free and logical in the past suddenly poses serious logical problems. In other words, our ability to differentiate complex mind processes from one another and realize different facets of consciousness changes and grows as we age. For different complex reasons I cannot possibly elaborate on here, many people remain stuck in preadolescent ways of thought processing and remain incapable of sophisticated reasoning. The result is an overly concrete, rigid, dissociated view of the world full of conflicting parts, coupled with an unawareness of inconsistencies. Its hallmark is belief and dogma. An example of that is the creationist belief in how the physical universe came into being, which is essentially a version of the Santa Claus story. I am not saying that the physical universe cannot possibly have come into existence through an act of divine creation. I am simply identifying creationism as a rigid dogmatic structure, when it manifests socially in the form of schools that forbid the study of evolution in their curriculum, thus expressing more the anxieties of their proponents than anything worthwhile about truth or reality.

Dynamic Mindfulness investigates these mechanisms that distort our sense of reality. It is the experiential realization that

1. All objects of observation are energy and information flow (EIF),
2. No object of observation can ever be seen in isolation from all other objects of observation (interbeing),
3. Every object of observation is both caused by a multitude of other objects of observation and causes a multitude of other objects of observation (this is, because that is; this is not, because that is not),
4. There is a relationship between the objects of observation, the known, and the subject that observes, awareness or the knowing,
5. Every observed object is automatically modified by the awareness brought to the object,
6. Awareness and its objects is the dualistic aspect of awareness, and
7. Awareness itself encompasses both the knowing and the known and is non-dualistic.

In Dynamic Mindfulness we base our work on a 5-dimensional view of reality as we explore the 5 aspects of human experience in an integrated fashion:

1. Physical dimension: The brain, the body and behavior as they are objectively observable and measurable through science.
2. Somatic dimension: The mind as it is subjectively experienced as body through physical sensations and emotions.
3. Psychological dimension: The mind as it is subjectively experienced as psyche through emotions, thoughts and narratives in relation to day-to-day living.
4. Existential dimension: The mind as it is subjectively experienced as sense of an independent and embodied self and human organism (or bodymind) in relation to its own finite existence within the boundaries of time and space.
5. Spiritual dimension: The mind as it is subjectively and transcendentally experienced as dissolution of an independent sense of self in relation to the nameless, timeless and spaceless essence of reality called transcendence.

Because we express these different aspects of experience through action, one form being language, different facets of consciousness in different experience modes will be expressed in different language modes. In Dynamic Mindfulness we need to familiarize ourselves with these language modes, learning how to use and interpret them. The four language modes allowing us to access different facets of consciousness and different experience modes are:

1. Unstructured everyday language: It re-presents and expresses a running commentary on life experience. The criterion of truth is unexamined subjective experience.
2. Left-brain descriptive language: It re-presents external reality as being separate from the speaking subject, and gives us objective knowledge into the physical world. The criterion of truth is out there in the physical world – if it corresponds to something physical and concrete in the world, it must be true. The speaking subject is minimally involved. It emphasizes aboutness. Examples are history, biography and science.
3. Left-brain conceptual or dialectic language: It re-presents internal reality as being separate from the speaking subject, but less separate than in description, and gives us knowledge into the psychological world. The criterion of truth is in its internal consistency or coherence – if it sounds logical and well thought out, it must be true. The speaking subject is more intensely involved. It emphasizes aboutness. Examples are psychology, meditation, philosophy.
4. Right-brain metaphorical language: It presents the whole (internal and external) reality as lived by the speaking subject (no subject-object separation) and gives us knowledge about how to live. The criterion of truth is in its efficacy when lived and compelling sense of wisdom. The speaking subject and the objective world he/she lives in manifest as a whole in the here and now. It emphasizes direct experience and wholeness. Examples are myths and metaphors, sacred stories.

The challenge is to become aware which aspect of experience is being accessed with what language mode. They all express different facets of consciousness that give us clues about the nature of reality. No level of experience is better or worthier of inquiry than any other. They all need to be investigated in an integrated fashion. When we master that, we are not in danger of confusing facets of consciousness, language modes and levels of experience, and we will gain the freedom to access reality in its complex entirety without dissociating any part of it. We will get a glimpse of the whole elephant.

Dynamic mindfulness gives us a systematic and clear roadmap to explore awareness, which we define as the subjective experience of consciousness. Awareness entails four aspects we learn to become familiar with:

1. The objects of awareness (i.e. the content of awareness, the known, experience phenomena),
2. The subject of awareness (i.e. the witness, the knowing),
3. The dynamic process by which the subject and its objects are related, and
4. The quality of the whole awareness experience.

Dynamic Mindfulness highlights the way awareness is an EIF (energy and information flow) tracker and modifier, tracking everything it modifies, and modifying everything it tracks. Why? Because where awareness goes, neurons fire, and where they fire, they rewire. Result? Awareness differentiates details of what seems uniform, thus dissolving rigidity, and creatively links disparate parts that seem unrelated, thus ordering chaos.

In Dynamic Mindfulness we use a very specific set of practices and tools that first close all the doors of avoidance the organism is conditioned and used to mobilize, then lead us through the processes of differentiation and linkage to integration. We explore in a sequential and systematic way first the objects of awareness, and once we are solidly anchored in the world of phenomena, we then move on to the much more difficult topic of the subject of awareness. We proceed by first grounding ourselves in the world of objects of our experience through stable concentration as the core tool for differentiation, spacious equanimity (COAL – curiosity, openness, acceptance and love) as the core tool for linkage, strong somatic awareness without which no liberation from identification is possible, and clear view of the different categories of experience. In a later stage, we then move on to explore the witness, the subject of our experience, including the relationship between the objects of awareness and awareness itself, until we ultimately discover the non-dual foundations of reality and Being.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Nothing satisfies me more than to discover the world in a grain of sand. A few moments of lived life can reveal the fundamental laws underlying our embodied awareness. Looking at the small and seemingly insignificant has the advantage of being available any time and everywhere. It also requires that we slow down to see it, and by using words we can free its treasures from the grip of irrelevance. In my newsletters and blogs, what I prefer and most of the time endeavor to write about is just that.

The grain of sand is this present moment, and this present moment is Grand Central Station, the nodal point where all the energies of reality converge in the complex human experience of being alive. Our evolutionary and cultural conditioning, our conditioned patterns of behavior, movement, thought and feeling, our memories and anticipations, and the novel experiences we never encountered before, all converge in this nodal point of a multidimensional continuum called reality.

Reflecting on the present moment, which extends to a few seconds of lived life, is like unpacking a symphony, listening to its interpretation by the orchestra of our organism, and realizing by the end of it that one has penetrated reality, truth and time to its timeless essence.

To describe these moments adequately words need to meet the expectations of eloquent discourse. They should delightfully embody the liberating lightness of being, and be free to imperfectly hint at the unspeakable truth of stillness and silence. They can truly be what they are supposed to be, signifiers suspended between what they signify and the consciousness they both structure and express in space and time.

Do you hope to glance at this newsletter between two other urgent emails in the long list of things you have to get done today? If that is the case, don’t hesitate to unsuscribe, because I do not write for you. No, sorry I am wrong – I do write for you, but for the authentic you who is perhaps buried under the rubble of the hectic shell of you skidding through time on the surface of life. I write for the you who yearns to hear the faint whispers of the soul, and that you, the ‘real you’ you may barely know, demands that you slow down, that you treat language mindfully with the respect it deserves. For language is your soul’s translator who shapes your consciousness in such as a way as to become intelligible to others as you express yourself.

I like to believe that my words are not facile infomercials for the addicted monkey mind, but that they invite you to slow down, and according to your needs, to give each sentence the contemplative space it deserves. I hope you take the time for reflection, the time to mindfully engage in the movement of grabbing a dictionary if necessary and look up a word you may not be familiar with. I am not trying to be cryptic and complicated for the hell of it. On the contrary, I am trying to be as precise as reality can bare, as evocative as language allows and as simple as the complexity of the bodymind demands. But I am also trying to do justice to the complexity of truth.

Sami languages of Norway, Finland and Sweden have as many as 300 words for snow. If you don’t need to penetrate the depths of truth you don’t need a sophisticated language. Short soundbites sounding like horses slurping water are enough to grunt something irrelevant to your neighbour. But short soundbites do not capture the finesses of what human consciousness is capable of expressing. To know snow in all its complexity you need apparently 300 words, and to express the magical details of truth that are encapsulated in the flow of a present moment, you need not only many words, but also creative and novel ways of stringing them together.

Mindfulness has to extend to our capacity to formulate what often seems unspeakable, and to express what’s nameless through the power of metaphor. Our use of language reaches its full potential when we mindfully give it the time it deserves to evoke in us through the power of reflection an appreciation of the full complexity of reality and truth. Then, reading becomes a meditation in its own right with the power to reveal to us the great mystery of Being.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

In last Thursday’s Mindsight Intensive course a student I will call Sarah shared with us her direct experience of the doors of avoidance I talked about within the context of Dynamic Mindfulness.

Movements of our limbs is one of those doors of avoidance. To create safety the brain uses physical movements of our arms and legs. You are certainly familiar with this phenomenon. Before your meeting with your disgruntled boss for example you see yourself fidgeting, nervously picking your fingers, rhythmically moving your foot back and forth in fast motion or frequently changing body position. Unconsciously engaging in these movements creates a superficial sense of internal pressure relief, but never addresses the cause of our restlessness. Were you in such circumstances making a point of relinquishing control of your limbs and keep them absolutely still, the finer internal energy flow of emotions and thought patterns would surface more clearly into your consciousness, and you would be much better able to explore how you create your internal hell, realize distortions you engage in and modify your outlook to your advantage.

Through experimentation Sarah was astonished to realize so viscerally how powerful movement can be in obscuring our view of our internal world. When in complete physical motionlessness of formal practice she deliberately moved just one finger, the spaciousness of awareness with its focused and stable attention got disrupted and her view of the internal energy flow became murky, like water becomes murky when the sediment that has settled at the bottom gets stirred up. This direct realization of the doors of avoidance I had been talking about was just the sideshow to the main story of this blog.

In describing her experience Sarah wanted to know what the scientific explanation of this phenomenon was, and that was what immediately piqued both my and her curiosity. The question was motivated by more than just intellectual curiosity. There was a sense that her subjective experience, as powerful and clear as it was, required scientific validation. Why was her experience not enough for her understanding of reality? Why did she need a scientific explanation to validate her experience? This profound question brought tears to her eyes, an expression of sadness that would take her some time to understand within the psychodynamic context of her childhood experiences. However, beyond the conditioning of her childhood there was an existential learning in store, and that was the radical primacy of subjective experience. Let me explain.

Carl Jung once talked to one of his students about a dream one of his patients had, which involved this patient walking on the moon. In telling this dream he spoke as if the patient had actually been walking on the moon, which struck his student as somewhat odd. The student asked somewhat perplexed: “But he was not really walking on the moon, only metaphorically so in the dream?” To which Jung answered: “No, no, he absolutely and really had been walking on the moon.” At that moment the student experienced an orthogonal shift, as John Kabat-Zinn would say, “… a transition from a two-dimensional ‘flatland’ into a third spacial dimension, at right angles (orthogonal) to the other two” (J. Kabat-Zinn, Coming to our senses, p. 350, Hyperion, 2005). This is the fundamental shift I invited my students to explore during our exploration of non-dual awareness, and which Sarah was about to experience in a direct embodied fashion. It was the shift into realizing the fundamental primacy of our inner world, from which all sense of meaning emerges.

The shift is radical, from a strongly conditioned conventional consensus reality that is ultimately incomplete and therefore a mere superficial appearance, to a spacious, unconditioned view of what is often referred to as ultimate reality, which is capable of recognizing conditioning as it arises. This absolute reality is awareness itself, more fundamental than conventional reality and every bit as real, the knowing capacity of mind itself beyond a knower and what is known. We tend to see ourselves as inhabitants of a world we are born into, and which we experience as conventional everyday reality of lived experience ‘out there’ created by the way our brain processes information from our external five senses. The deep conditioning at the root of this view creates a consensus trance we all share, akin to a dream world we don’t recognize as such. The orthogonal shift created through awareness feels like an awakening from this dream, more often than not experienced as nightmare, and we recognize how like fog the dream obscured our view of the horizon that opens up multiple degrees of freedom we did not know we had before. Suddenly we realize that seeing ourselves as inhabitants of a world we are born into is limited, and that in fact in every moment of our lives a world is born and vanishes in us, provided we allow ourselves to recognize our identity as the timeless Being that we are.

Sarah experienced this shift in slow motion as it unfolded in front of our very eyes. From seeing herself as arising and passing in a world, she shifted into seeing a world arising and passing in herself. The moment of her realization did not require scientific validation, as if science was more fundamental than our experience. Instead, accepting her experience as complete in itself opened the door for her to deeply honor awareness itself and its manyfold manifestations. At that moment, when she was able to let go of the conditioned need for a rational scientific explanation, she honored her deep, unique subjectivity without any attachment to what is supposed to be. She discovered the pleasure in living in a world that is either not supposed to be, or already there as it is, and that does not have to be anything. The healing effect of deeply listening to herself that way consisted of knowing that when we rest in awareness anything can happen, and we don’t have to make ourselves be like what other people want us to be or what is going to be accepted.

Consider this: When you touch the chair you are sitting on, you will never know the chair in itself. The closest you can come to knowing the chair is by way of translation, the very specific way your senses cause neurofiring patterns in your body and your brain. You can ultimately only know your own neurofiring patterns, not the chair itself, and if you had a very different brain, the chair would look and feel very differently, leading to very different conclusions about reality. When we honor that fact we realize the primacy of awareness, and our sense of Being profoundly expands in many new directions, providing untold degrees of freedom that reduce our conditioned and optional human suffering.

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

A psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher recently wrote me the following email: “I do have a question as my ‘mind’ struggles, and wants clarity about so many things! Maybe all things cannot be explained! As a therapist (teacher) and student of life, fear arises in me as I read the article on ‘Zen Lost in Translation‘. A fundamental aspiration, of ‘no harm’ or non-violence, for me only opens the experience of doubt, as I ‘do the best I can’; yet is this good enough, and when or how do we know if we are doing harm?”

This is a very important question for any teacher or psychotherapist. In my mind and experience, the answer is multilayered.

Since the human capacity for self-deception is limitless, we never know for sure how we are doing. This is the great doubt that is existentially unavoidable and very healthy to cultivate. It leaves us with the first task of not doing major harm for sure, and the second task of knowing that most of the time we are fostering healing. The two words ‘major’ and ‘most’ are important here, as there is no perfection. What follows should automatically prevent us from doing major harm, assuming an at least average intelligence and integrity. Now how about ‘tolerable harm’?

The fact that some time we make tolerable mistakes is unavoidable. This leads us to the next step, which is to make sure we recognize mistakes and when we have done harm as soon as possible. Given there is no perfection, making a mistake is in itself not a problem, as long as we know how to handle it. Part of competence is the ability to recognize mistakes fast and repair them. For repair it is very important to engage our clients, patients and students, because the capacity to repair is an integral part of healthy intimacy and health in general. This helps us recognize the psychological principle that perfection is a toxic ideal to be replaced by the search for what is optimal, because it is the optimal that has the greatest healing potential through the notion of being ‘good enough’. The best parent for example, is not the perfect one (God forbid we were raised by perfect parents – they keep generations of therapists in business!), but the ‘good enough’ one who has personal insight, is aware of his or her limitations, is capable of attunement, and is able to engage the child in repair.

Then, the idea of doing ‘the best you can’ is a tricky one. It is only valid if you have high standards and constantly hold your nose to the grindstone by having checks and balances in place. ‘Doing your best’ without checks and balances is not good enough. Guide posts in the work with clients are like the Scylla and Charybdis Odysseus sailed through: When our clients thrive we know we do good; when they don’t, they feel stuck, we feel stuck or we feel uncomfortable, then it’s time to question and dig deeper into what we are doing, reaching out to a teacher if necessary.

Next, learning and growing is a life sentence, which means that we never cease to expose ourselves to new learning, no matter how well things are going or how successful we feel. We do that by reading, taking courses, working with teachers, and take in new ideas and the most recent discoveries of our time.

Last but not least, when things are going brilliantly and the wind of success soothingly caresses the ravenous fibres of our ego, that’s when the alarm should sound: What am I overlooking? Where do I go from here? What’s next after this pleasant phase that will inevitably pass like everything else? Where is the next challenge lurking? How can I move beyond where I am?

Never smell the roses on the side of the path for too long – only long enough to revitalize and realize they all fade away. Then move on, move on, move on ……

Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.