Life unfolds between moments of doing something and moments of doing nothing.

One is the opposite of the other in the same dimension of external appearances. Life seems to pendulate between the polarities of activity and rest. But that is just the surface.

There is a third doing belonging to another dimension: Non-doing at the core of both doing something and doing nothing. This non-doing is the secret bridge to life’s dimension that in its becoming and disappearing, arising and fading, is independent of whether we do something or do nothing. From the depths of this other dimension of life, or of Life (with capital L) if you so want, the law of Being manifests as one of the most essentially human characteristics – presence. Whether we do something or do nothing, presence is the way Being manifests beyond just automatic and mindless existence, and it remains unshakably linked to its lawful principles of non-doing. That path, that way of Being as presence is the essential non-doing within both doing something and doing nothing. In Chinese culture, this is called Wu Wei.

Doing something and doing nothing become wholesome and sacred acts only then, when they don’t impede the manifestation of Being coming from the depths Life. Whether we act selfishly or selflessly, being too wrapped up in our busyness runs the risk of impeding Being from becoming manifest as presence in our lives. It seems obvious how busyness impedes the radiant blossoming of presence; it is trickier to realize how doing nothing may impede presence just as much, when it is filled with inner unrest.

Non-doing is the expression of presence emerging from the stillness of Being. This stillness is not the absence of movement, but our learned capacity to get out of nature’s dynamically unfolding ways. Stillness is therefore always there to be tapped into when we know-how, right in the midst of life’s bustling catastrophe. Conversely, in life’s quiet moments of doing nothing, non-doing is also the expression of a profound connection to the irrepressible, creative, and dynamic source of life. In other words, non-doing is both a vast space of stillness amid chaos and an intimate connection to the ever-creative and dynamic source of life.

Being is beyond doing something and doing nothing, and therefore often seen as the transcendent dimension of existence. Our collective calling to becoming fully human during our existence, beyond the animalistic fulfillment of needs for survival, is precisely about making sure that nothing gets in the way of the subtle, quiet, but the powerful human impulse to reveal the presence of Being. To this end, it behooves us to develop and practice non-doing within all our many active and receptive doing activities, and consistently orient ourselves towards its powerful energy that serves as a beacon, measure, direction, and meaning for our lives. When rooted in non-doing, the lively and life-affirming dynamic of our human essence is protected from the suffocating busyness of our goal-oriented doing.

We typically practice non-doing in our formal meditation sittings. Through meditation, we remain open to the initiatory core of all doing and behaving. In Wu Wei, we maintain an accepting openness towards life’s mystery, which yearns for expression and human testimony.
When Wu Wei directs action, there is ease and relaxation, because our ego steps aside to allow our true self to be in charge. This true self is not a unified entity in us, but rather our moment-by-moment attitude when we can get out of life’s spontaneous, dynamically unfolding ways. This free and easy non-doing amid the busy market place we call Wu Wei, also carries the living word of our communications. Speaking in accordance with the presence of Being means speaking from the depth of stillness as the resonance board for our words’ deeper meanings. Words with power come from silence. Right speech that is attuned to whom we speak with, sounds loudly with the silence that is so characteristic of presence in Being. Conversely, the word of Being falls silent amidst the yapping and chatter of mindless gossip.

If all this sounds theoretical or philosophical to you, let me give a recent example from an email I just received from one of my students. She writes: “Regarding the four steps of our transformation algorithm meditation practice, letting oneself go and surrender to the flow of the breath, how do I surrender and trust the flow to carry me, if (based on my life experience) I no longer believe in the ‘benevolence of the Universe’?” This a question that typically arises when as I described above one is stuck in ‘the suffocating business of goal-oriented doing’, which severs our connection to ‘non-doing as the lively and life-affirming dynamic of our human essence’. To the extent this student is alienated from Being, what she fails to realize is that this state of alienation is a huge opportunity and one of the royal roads to accessing the mystery of Being.

The first step is to understand that when she says she no longer believes in the benevolence of the universe, what she is really saying is that her problem-solving, goal-oriented mind no longer believes. In other words, she is saying something of crucial importance without knowing that she is saying it – and that is that she has reached the limit of what the problem-solving mind can handle, understand, and process. To put it differently, she has reached the limits of the ‘doing-something-and-doing-nothing’ dimension. This is good news she can rejoice in – on one hand, that is. On the other hand, the scary leap starts now: It is the leap that entails a relinquishing of this limited sense of meaning the problem-solving mind creates, and surrender to what from the problem-solving mind’s point of view appears as the universe’s utter malevolence, destructiveness, meaninglessness, forsakenness, and absurdity. It is a leap into the void with the seemingly real expectation of falling to one’s demise. This is why wise men and women say that when you die before you die, you will not die when you die. It is a leap of faith without a shred of trust, or maybe if lucky, a shred of trust that comes from the encouraging words of the many teachers who have taken this journey before you. This infinite void without reassurances appears to be so dark, destructive and absurd, because the problem-solving mind, which we allowed to dominate our sense of reality over a whole lifetime, has no reference points for it. No words, no concepts, no narratives, not even any sensory experiences apply to what this apparent void is all about.

Only once we have dared to take the leap, which is, in fact, another way of saying that we dared to show up, live fully and manifest presence in Being, only then do we discover a most astonishing reality – what we thought was the universe’s benevolence was nothing more than our little ego’s rationalization that when we thrive and have no pain, no illness, and no death, we think the universe is benevolent. When calamities occur, we think it is bad. What meager nonsense! We discover something of untold beauty, namely that whatever happens, whether we are young or old, fresh or decrepit, smooth or wrinkled, healthy or sick, alive or about to die, an incredible, nameless sense of peace and love awaits us to be discovered, and that we are not just part of the universe, but we are, have always been, and will always be this universe unfolding, filled with love and awe-inspiring beauty. It is impossible to properly describe this awakening when we open ourselves up to this new dimension – as they say in Zen, we can only talk about the finger pointing to the moon, not the moon itself. For those inclined to read sacred texts, read the story of Job in the Bible, or the story of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, just to name two among many, and you’ll know what I am trying to write about.

Back to my student: How do you take that leap? You have to embrace the stark and painful darkness of absurdity and meaninglessness with curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love while making sure you consistently use your meditation tools and psychotherapy, if necessary, the proper way. Most people shy away from that precipice, often because they simply don’t have the tools to meet their mind’s depth, they don’t have the patience and dedication to walk that path, or they don’t have a teacher experienced enough to guide them through. Having a teacher with experience is essential because without him or her one can easily shatter under the barrage of dangerous weapons of our mind’s bad neighborhoods. Not surprisingly Jesus said: “Many are called, but few are chosen!” Who does not want that kind of liberation independent from circumstance? Yet who is prepared to put in the necessary training to make that more probable?

Just a short aside, resist the idea that liberation from suffering is absolute, perfect, and a painless paradise. Instead, it is about a journey without end, a journey that in its endless unfolding is the goal, an abiding equanimity and peace in the middle of the busy marketplace with all its pleasures and pains. It is Wu Wei.

The practice of non-doing is a practice in taking oneself back, in undoing and unlearning. It is a retreat from identification with the external appearances of reality, which threaten to overstretch, or even break the golden thread that binds us to our transcendental essence. This retreat from the world of appearances is at the same time a turning towards and tuning into the depths of Being and presence, and therefore by no means a withdrawal from life, but a deepening of our access to life’s full context and splendor.

Living that way is an art, which requires the intentional effort of dedicated practice we commit ourselves to when we decide to walk the path of freedom. When we become experienced in the art of non-doing, everything we encounter in life radiates with the power of Life and its transcendental dimension that is awaiting to be discovered. We then recognize how the multitude of life forms and things in the universe are each individual and unique space- and time-bound manifestations of timeless and nameless Being. To live a life of initiation means to dedicate ourselves to recognize life as endless transformation, in which we lovingly manifest through presence and deeds the timeless principles of sacred Being.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Mindsight in Our Pandemic Times

COVID is one of those unpredictable natural phenomena that throws the whole of humanity into multi-level turmoil, challenging much of how we thought we can live our lives. We are forced to reflect, review and rethink how we live on this planet, making it improbable to hold on to the old consciousness horizons we were used to. This can be seen as a form of initiation we are willy-nilly subjected to.

Initiation is a rite of passage. The person undergoing initiation, the initiate, enters either by tradition, design or chance into a psychologically embodied process of transformation that opens her consciousness to further dimensions of human existence not previously aware of. Initiation is a transformation, in which the initiate is ‘reborn’ into a new role. Examples of initiation ceremonies might include Christian baptism or confirmation, Jewish bar or bat mitzvah, acceptance into a fraternal organization, secret society or religious order, or graduation from school or recruit training. A spiritual initiation rite normally implies a shepherding process, where those who are at a higher, more experienced level of consciousness, guide the initiate through a process of greater exposure to a fuller breadth of knowledge. One famous historical example is the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece. Puberty rites were historically very important as a way of channeling the adolescent’s unruly states of mind towards a contextually more encompassing and knowledgeable view of reality. The adolescent has to learn to see beyond the consciousness of his own tribe into the vastness of world reality. In short, the importance of initiation lies in its consciousness-expanding effect, so that we do not remain stuck in the false, and frankly often painful belief that the state of consciousness we spontaneously slide into during the transition from childhood to adulthood is all there is.

With the dawn of quantitative science a few centuries ago and the temporary amnesia with regards to the fact that humans have minds, the notion of initiation became obsolete, because initiation is a mind process. With the recent (a few decades) recognition of consciousness and mind as possible objects of scientific inquiry, and the central importance of subjective experience as an aspect of mind so necessary for living the good life, I think it is time to revive the notion of initiation, which can teach us so much about our human existence and how to make it more bearable.

Initiation entails a fundamental structure seen across cultures, which we can use as a psychological guide on our exploration of mind and consciousness and our development of mindsight. This is why in this year’s Mindsight Intensive I have been focusing attention on initiation therapy and the transcendental aspect of human existence.

Every initiation rite teaches five negative and positive truths that need to be absorbed. These are:

1. Life is hard and full of suffering, but there is a way of easing this burden.
2. You are not that important, yet there is a way of realizing that you are everything.
3. Your life is not about you, but you can discover that you are about life.
4. You are not in control, yet you can learn to become an active participant in the inevitable flow of life.
5. You are going to die, but you can discover that you are much more than what dies.

The transformation algorithm meditation we practice in the Mindsight Intensive, essentially a practice focused on the phases of the breathing cycle, allows us to access these five dimensions of initiation in a most direct and efficient way. Each initiation dimension, when deeply incorporated and assimilated, contributes to decreasing our suffering.

1. Through mindsight we discover that the inevitability of suffering cannot be met successfully through avoidance of pain. We learn to let go of the fight against the inevitable. Instead, we embrace as best we can the full complexity of reality and the full force of truth with a kind and welcoming intention that helps bring clarity to our awareness of what is really going on. With that awareness, we gain more freedom of choice when it comes to possible actions that contribute to decreasing our suffering. Embracing our breath the way it is without manipulation teaches us that.

2. Science tells us that so far in the evolution of the universe we are an infinitesimal afterthought the universe can do without. From a cosmic perspective our solar system will soon be burnt up and transformed into cold nothingness. So when it comes to you and me in the individual physical form we came into existence, we have precious little importance. However, our mindsight reveals the possibility of a great fascination we can cultivate with how energy and chance conspire over huge periods of time to give rise to something as marvelous as our human consciousness; and we can do that without having to resort to any extraneous notion of a creator. Not only that, but the expansion of consciousness through mindsight allows us to touch the direct experience of actually being the unfolding universe. Each one of us is the universe and life in its unfolding, beyond the temporary and mortal carcass we presently find ourselves imprisoned in. In fact, once we see our bodies more deeply within the large context of universal reality, and realize that we not only have, but also are a body, the body ceases to be a prison, but becomes the vehicle of liberation. The breath teaches us to see beyond the physical concreteness of our body into the limitlessness of our Being.

3. Life is not about you, because this separate ‘you’ or ‘I’ we always refer to is but a construction of the mind, just a thought, a notion, and not anything real, the same way a wave thinking of itself as a separate entity is but a movement of the ocean. Our mental capacity to construct a ‘me’, or more accurately many different ‘mes’ from moment to moment, which we are usually unable to differentiate, is a gift of human consciousness that allows us the freedom to realize how our existence is about life. The universe lives in part through us as marvelous conduits of its awe-inspiring enormity. In the outbreath we learn to relinquish this constructed notion of a separate self.

4. Science tells us that we are biological algorithms as I have written elsewhere, and as such control far less than we believe. Having little control does not mean we are at the mercy of the slings and arrows of circumstance. We can actively participate in the universe’s creation! We need to relinquish our sense of omnipotence by learning to get out of our own way and not resist the inevitable flow of reality, which causes so much suffering. I love swimming down the Rhine in Basel. The current is strong, and there is no way to swim upstream against it. But carried by the current, you can swim closer or farther from the shore, and decide when you want to get out of the water. After the long pause at the end of the out-breath, the in-breath will arise whether you like it or not – you might as well not waste your energy taking the in-breath – instead, just let it happen.

5. Although you are going to die, the question is who ‘you’ is. As in the above paragraph 3., our mindsight examination of this question reveals that we are not defined by the boundaries of physical birth and death. The pause at the end of the out-breath is an opportunity to enter the nameless, timeless essence of your Being and realize how constructed your sense of time-bound separateness is. This is your chance to learn to die before you die and lose your fear of death, so that you won’t die when you die.

This whole initiation process causes a basic change in one’s existential condition, liberating us from the profane of time and history, so that we can fly like a butterfly into the sacred dimension of timeless life. The mundane becomes sacred, and this sense of sacredness alleviates our suffering. As Mircea Eliade would say: “Initiation recapitulates the sacred history of the world. And through this recapitulation, the whole world is sanctified anew. The initiate can perceive the world as a sacred work, a creation of the Gods.” This is a way of saying that we don’t have to be tyrannized by an autopilot mode of consciousness that leads to living and destroying like animals, but that we have the capacity to meaningfully participate in the awe-inspiring mystery of our universe’s unfolding in a constructive and beneficial way. Eliade again: “Initiation’s function is to reveal the deep meaning of existence to the new generations coming after us, and to help them assume the responsibility of being truly human and hence participating in culture.” This human world in the deepest and most evolved sense of the word, reveals a world open to the limitless capacity of human consciousness we call transcendence, because it transcends the limited view of an untrained human mind.

To this end, we cannot stay stagnant in our endeavors to improve our lives, as if we were trying to improve the script of a dream, even though we all want to use any means available to us to make ‘the dream’ of our physical and social reality as palatable as possible. Beyond that, initiation towards transcendence is about waking up from the dream and touch a dimension of consciousness that allows us to feel the mystery of life in a direct and compelling way beyond all suffering and time-bound existence. This awakening also called an orthogonal shift in consciousness, is not some kind of remote prize for the chosen few, even though so many people look for it their whole lives without success. It is quite simply speaking an inherent capacity of most human beings, for which we are all wired. What’s difficult is the methodical training process necessary to activate this dormant faculty, which requires dedicated work on challenging every assumption we are used to living by within the boundaries of every day, untrained consciousness. Once seriously launched on this journey, its beauty lies in the fact that there is no return, no place to reach, and no achievement to pursue. There is only the walking on the path to nowhere and everywhere, knowing that we never ‘get there’, but can simply notice an improvement in our ability to lovingly get out of our own way and surrender to what is, whether we like it or not, moment by moment. Our conscious walking is Being.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Counteracting Our Mind’s Deceptive Ways in Meditation

The Case For Careful Self-Monitoring

We constantly intend many things in life, but all too often what turns out does not correspond to what we intended. We then blame factors outside our control, rather than noticing that we undermine our own intentions. How so? A very simple mechanism plays a predominant role: We forget to self-monitor, assuming that once an intention has run out of the gate, the stars are properly aligned for all concerned neurofirings to shoot in the same direction as they do the intention’s bidding. This could not be more wrong! Just because we intend something, does not mean that our actions actually follow what we intend at all. There is a whole world between intention and execution, a chaotic sizzling of myriad contradictory neurofirings with their own agenda and unconscious intentions that undermine our original intentions. For survival purposes, the brain is infinitely creative in the construction of useful and not so useful illusions we fall prey to. These illusions are then embedded in seemingly seamless narratives that depict a distorted reality we believe in, not noticing the many inbuilt gaps we remain completely unaware of. In short, making sure that an intention comes to fruition as the corresponding intended action, is an art, the art of self-monitoring. Most meditation failures my students seek my help for have their roots in a lack of self-monitoring.

Here are two vignettes I recently encountered with my students:

Lydia, as I will call her, reported that she experienced anxiety, whenever she was paying attention to her breath, which is why she did not pursue this practice. She wondered how to deal with that. In my presence, I invited her to close her eyes and focus her attention on the somatic sensations accompanying the breathing in the belly. I then asked her, whether the focus of her attention is now on the sensations in the belly, and she confirmed it was. Next, I asked her to describe the sensations she was witnessing within the focus of her attention, and her response was ‘very strong heartbeat and thoughts about how unpleasant the meditation is’. Her anxiety, as seemingly predicted by her original complaint, was fairly high.

Peter, as I will call my second student, sent me an email with regards to a meditation he was supposed to practice, in which the focus of attention is also in the somatic sensations accompanying the breathing in the belly. He wrote: “The challenge I have by keeping the focus on the pelvis is boredom and restlessness.  Can I instead focus my attention on a candle to ward off boredom?”

Before you read on, take a break and reflect on these two vignettes. Ask yourself how you would help these two students, and where the problem might lie. Imagine being one of those students and what your problem might be.

In both cases, the mind is playing tricks on them, and they don’t notice it. Completely unaware, they either think seeing a reality they are actually not seeing, or blatantly disregard cardinal rules of mindfulness they are theoretically well aware of. The result is as Shakespeare would say ‘what you see is not what you see’, a sort of unconscious lying to oneself, which leads to believing the mind’s distorted constructions, not noticing that these beliefs are just constructions of the mind, and finally mistaking these beliefs for reality and truth. It is a good thing that these two students reached out to examine their challenge, because, without an experienced teacher, their meditation attempts would understandably falter and never lead anywhere.

Lydia’s predicament is that she thought her attention is in the somatic sensations in the belly, when in fact her response to my second question made it very clear that her attention was in the region of the heart and even far away from somatic sensations in cognitive stories about meditation, not in the somatic sensations of the belly. In other words, her attention was not endogenous, meaning intentionally aimed at a chosen focus, but exogenous, meaning captured by whatever her organism was preoccupied with. Since anxiety was one of her challenges, she unwittingly fed it by not noticing that she was maintaining the same dysregulated monkey mind that caused her anxiety and she struggled within her everyday life. The moment I helped her realize what was happening, and she really started to focus on the belly sensations, not only did it become clear that intentionally taking charge of one’s attention is hard work, but her anxiety temporarily lifted.

Peter is an experienced meditation student, and he is very familiar with one of the fundamental principles of mindfulness – that we turn towards pain and discomfort rather than avoid it. Somehow, in that situation, his mind did not make the connection and gave him the impression that it would be a good idea to find an easier focus of attention. First of all, since the candle has more appeal to his curiosity, by switching to the candle he would weaken endogenous attention in favor of the exogenous attention of the monkey mind. Second, his idea of ‘warding off’ would strengthen the repressive forces of the mind, which contribute to getting us in trouble in the first place. Third, he would dismiss boredom and restlessness as experiences and mental states not worthy of exploration, thus perpetuating the suffering caused by what is hidden behind these mental states. It is therefore of utmost importance he sticks with the original instructions and makes sure that he faces and works through whatever challenges arise, rather than avoid them.

In my experience, most students who give up on mindfulness meditation or cannot penetrate all the way ‘down’ to the transcendental dimension of existence and our Being, fail to do so, because they are not solid in their use of meditation tools, nor do they recognize the myriad ways our awe-inspiring human mind, embodied in the most complex object in the known universe, our brain, can so easily and massively fool us. Precision in our way of observing and mastery of our meditation tools are essential on our mindsight journey. The human capacity for self-deception is limitless, and if we are not steadily on the look-out for the next mind trap, and cultivate a healthy skepticism for anything we believe we see, we suffer, cause suffering for others and get hopelessly lost in the swamp of our own ignorance.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Transcendental Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Transcendence is about the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of our truth.

I often use this word, which of course in strictly dictionary terms can mean many things, depending on context. You might be surprised to hear it from me, a psychiatrist with a solid footing in science, since from the sound of it, transcendence seems to denote an esoteric, far away place in some kind of spirit world you may or may not believe in. That is too vague a notion to be useful in our context of meditative explorations of the mind, which is why a clearer explanation is in order.

Our seemingly seamless experience of reality is a well-constructed illusion. For example, you see a seamless field of vision without dark spots in the middle of it with nothing there, and yet those dark spots very much exist. They are the blind spots resulting from the fact that where the optic nerve enters the retina, there are no light sensors. The brain skillfully compensates and creates the illusion of continuity, where there is none. This same principle applies to consciousness in general. In quite the same way, we don’t notice that our ‘perception’ of reality is far from an objective or ‘pure’ perception. Instead, it is a complex, often largely distorted construction, involving concepts, words and stories we create on the basis of information bits the brain has already unconsciously manipulated to suit the occasion, so to speak, and not the pursuit of truth and a clear vision of reality. We are not conscious of living in a narrative envelope that mediates a virtual experience of reality we mistake for direct experience of reality. In other words, we keep trying to feed on the menu and don’t realize we never have the meal in front of us.

We can call this situation tragic, because it causes untold human suffering. Subjectively so deeply ensnared in fictions of our own construction, the only reality left for us to orient ourselves by is the external, objective scientific one, against which everything gets measured. What objectively works becomes worthwhile and in fact the ultimate goal of human growth. We learn to function, perform, accumulate knowledge and measure outcomes. We measure success by accomplishments and possessions, and by how well we solve problems, fix things, improve our lives, develop and get somewhere, wherever that somewhere may be. We draft legislations that exclude all that is not evidence-based and measure psychological wellbeing by symptom scales, as if they were reflective of the person being measured. We value well-functioning adaptation to life, which includes professional and financial success, the picket fence fantasy of an accomplished life and a family life that allows its members to conform and survive, maybe even thrive.

This does not sound so bad, you may say, and I would not only agree, but even subscribe to its usefulness and importance for a well-lived life. What I described is a useful fiction indeed, that ensures our ability to survive, put in place what concrete aspects of life we need and pay our taxes on time. Most counselling and psychotherapeutic approaches to mental health, and most mindfulness meditation approaches used in Western societies, teach techniques that address this practical aspect of our human lives. But that is not the whole story. Many people who live these principles successfully, are in fact not satisfied with life at all, living with a nagging sense of something fundamental missing. In addition, the more arduously they try to improve this fiction, the clearer it becomes that nothing can fundamentally change. Stuck in a nightmare, one cannot improve one’s life experience by improving the nightmarish world.

The human being as experiencing subject (as opposed to constructed object) unwittingly retreats into the shadows of non-consciousness under the overwhelming power of the tyrannical narrative mind, which research shows seems to be in part mediated by the overwhelmingly controlling left brain. We can barely taste our meal, because we overwhelmingly see menus. You can imagine how this keeps us hungry and causes us to become dysfunctional, diseased and unhappy. The question becomes, ‘what would reality really be like, if we had access to our subjective experience of life outside the narrative envelope, if we had complete access to our full subjective experience beyond concepts and stories we construct for ourselves’? This question opens the door to a very different aspect of human existence, one that is much more difficult to access.

This process of liberating ourselves from the restrictive stories we envelop ourselves with, and through direct experience engaging in the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of truth we are embedded in, is what transcendence is all about.

In this other realm of human reality, the scales, values, calculations and therapeutic approaches to the mind described above are not applicable. We have to learn ways of extricating our consciousness from the restrictive narrative envelope we are so familiar with by learning how to relinquish all striving for improvement, and instead diligently practice the art of entering the non-verbal flow of our organism’s energy through direct experience. Rather than seek and add more to what we think we know, we need to learn the opposite – unknowing, undoing, unlearning, surrendering and getting out of our own way, in order to make room in our consciousness for a depth and contextual vastness of experience we cannot even fathom. Because the only way we know how to find meaning is through the stories we create, the moment we fall out of this narrative envelope, there is no meaning to be found in the familiar sense of the term we know. Instead, we discover a vast, wide open (energy?) field of consciousness, the direct experience of which is timeless, nameless and empty of any conceptual essence we were used to construct. Not being familiar with this aspect of human existence, we are often overcome with fear when we first encounter it, and cannot fathom the infinite and powerful healing potential it has, when we are able to consciously become transparent to it, and live by it as the ground of Being. Stuck in a nightmare, the only way to really heal is to wake up from it. When we wake up to our collective, transcendental truth, we experience life radically differently.

Although we live in the same world we did before, with the same car, same house, same profession, and the same people, the additional dimensions of consciousness we gained access to through practicing transparency to the transcendent, open a completely new vista onto the same landscape of human existence. It is like the ball moving through a two-dimensional world. If you were a flat, two-dimensional being in a two-dimensional world with a two-dimensional consciousness, a ball moving through that world would appear to you as a process, not an object in motion. You would see a point growing into a line up to a maximum length, then shortening again until it becomes a point and disappears. The moment you developed a three-dimensional consciousness, you would realize that the moving phenomenon of a point becoming a line and then a point again is in fact a ball moving through space. Same world, different views with different possibilities. Consequently, the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of truth we are embedded in, is what transcendence is all about. With that comes a significant decrease in the amount of suffering we create.

The paradox is that transcendence is like being poor and sitting on a wooden box we don’t know is filled with gold. While desperately looking for gold elsewhere, we miss what is hidden in plain sight. Transcendence is about stepping outside of a self-imposed, constructed prison of our own making, realizing that the doors to freedom have always been open, but we just could not see it. This is why we sometimes talk of transcendence (= Latin ‘stepping beyond’) towards immanence (= Latin ‘dwelling inside’), whereby we have to effect a leap out of the box, so to speak, an orthogonal shift in consciousness, to discover what has always already been there, hidden in plain sight, unseen, unheard and therefore rendered powerless.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

The Mystery Of Transcendental Being

1984 has arrived. If you haven’t noticed, you are the frog about to be boiled to death as the water you are in has slowly and imperceptibly heated up over your lifetime.

After the horrors of the second world war, an unprecedented stretch of 50-60 years inspired Western countries to embrace the principles of liberal democracy. Prosperity ensued, and with increasing numbers of humans on this planet, we faced globalization. Liberal democratic values meant that we opened the door to multiculturalism like never before. There was a sense of importance about knowing the truth.

Unprecedented advances in science and technology amidst a population explosion with insatiable needs, have now seriously jeopardized our ecosystem. Greed has lead to economic polarizations with an erosion of the middle class, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. By opening our borders to other cultures and people in need, many have started to feel that their values and culture became compromised and watered down. With their cultural identity and economic stability threatened, many people lost faith in liberal democracy and are looking to strongmen to put the genie back in the bottle and deliver the good old times of strong national identity and economic prosperity. Meanwhile, strongmen are dictators with no regard for truth, freedom or people’s wellbeing, as they take control through ultra-nationalistic or ultra-collective agendas over what they perceive to be the chaos of democracy.

Strongmen heading up nationalistic political trends and their supporting crowds are now emerging everywhere, seriously jeopardizing liberal democracy and ushering in dangerous dictatorial tendencies. Trump has just publicly admitted that he has the right to interfere with the judiciary. Make no mistake, no country is immune to what happened in Nazi Germany, including the United States and Canada. Trump symbolizes everything that can be wrong in a society, and we should not forget that Trump can only occupy the post he does when a majority of citizens collude with what is emerging now as a collective psychological madness, which includes ‘pathological lying, habitual and institutionalized corruption, dishonesty, serial groping, casual racism, glorification of violence, winking to Nazis, laziness, impulsiveness, childish tantrums, bottomless ignorance, vanity, insecurity, vulnerability to flattery, bullying, crudity, indifference to suffering, incompetence, rabid narcissism, chaos in the White House, attacks on America’s allies and support for its foes, contempt for experts and for expertise, for truth and the press, for norms and conventions, for checks and balances, for limited government, for the very rule of law’ (adapted from Andrew Coine: The virus of Trumpism and his infectious moral failings – Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 8, 2020).

In China, technological surveillance has now reached Orwellian proportions, allowing the ruling few to monitor their citizens’ every move, and categorize them according to a scale that quantifies their devotion to party creed. Depending on the score, their freedom to move around, do business, prosper professionally and take advantage of life’s opportunities is strictly controlled, curtailed or enabled. All over the world, through technology our children have lost the skill of sitting still, reading extensively and reflecting on the complex narratives of human history, thereby discovering where truth and lie are. Nonsensical information bits that can be combined in any which way one wants are now the currency of our short attention spans and impoverished faculties of reflection. The narcissism of social media makes it now possible for everyone of us to become legends in our own minds, believe them and mistake them for reality or truth. People are losing their faculty to discern truth from lie. Even more worrisome is the trend to not even be concerned about or interested in truth – all that matters is to feel ‘I am right’.

And we are guilty of destabilizing our planetary ecosystem and raping our very mother earth, which sustains us.

In medicine, evidence-based science is forcing us to be treated like robots and machines, thereby robbing us of the huge potential for healing embedded in the vast complexity of our brains and minds. A shocking case in point: In the new insurance- and money-driven medical industry psychiatrists are not trained in psychotherapy anymore, and they are unable to see patients regularly and do psychotherapy with them. Psychiatrists are only there to consult and prescribe medications. Psychotherapy is relegated to professions that command lower fees and don’t even have the kind of extensive training psychiatrists used to have in the past. The mind, never mind our deep nature beyond mind, are not topics of conversation anymore. Human beings are encouraged to become robotic machines with disembodied beliefs if they so want, without having anywhere to turn to for wisdom. Our wise women and men are temporarily becoming extinct.

As mindfulness meditation made its way from Eastern cultures to the West, it got hijacked by the rational mind into a discipline to achieve gains of several sorts, from relaxation to stress reduction, better health, better professional productivity, symptom relief etc. In other words, in the West meditation became like medicine a tool to do good things for the bodies and minds we objectively have. What got lost is the fundamental principle of working with our subjective experience of being alive in all its forms, thus exploring and practicing how to gain access to the body and mind that we subjectively are. The physical body, which is amenable to scientific analysis and which we attempt to fix through medication, surgery and other interventions, is the body that we have. The somatic body that goes beyond the objectively quantifiable, and that we subjectively experience as who we are, I call the soma that we are. Karlfried Graf Duerckheim originally made that distinction by using two different words for ‘body’ available in the German language. He called the body that we have ‘der Koerper, den man hat’, and the soma that we are ‘der Leib, den man ist’.

The collective insanity I described has its roots in the human mind and how we use it. Mind-boggling scientific and technological advances, combined with lifestyles that have become increasingly remote from nature, rely on brains that have been trained to curtail their vast (right-brain) potential, and cultivate the narrow belief that nothing else but left-brain rationality, practicality, functionality and productivity matter. This alienation from dimensions of existence that are not rationally, verbally or otherwise graspable, results in clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress, which can only be addressed by re-connecting with the whole complexity our brains and minds have to offer, and not just a part of it. Ultimately, we are now challenged to reclaim our full potential as intelligent, sentient beings by imbuing science with sentience, remove the mist from mysticism, relinquish the tyranny of words and reconnect with the wholeness of full presence.

Originally, in Eastern cultures meditation was steeped in the exploration and knowledge of the soma that we are. This opened the door to vast possibilities of healing beyond the rational, scientifically known body that we have, by giving us access to the nameless, timeless and transcendental essence of Being. It is this dimension of Being and transcendence we will learn to reclaim and I will focus on in the upcoming winter/spring sessions of the Mindsight Intensive – not only because it involves teachings that are being lost, but also because lack of access to this dimension can cause seemingly intractable symptoms and suffering. These can be mitigated and much better managed, when we know how to access what lies beyond the rational, problem-solving mind and tap into the vast, open plane of infinite possibilities of energy flow. We have to learn to relate to nothingness and emptiness as the vast context of existence.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.