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When during one of our regular walks she spoke to me about a novel by Niall Williams she had just read, entitled ‘This Is Happiness’, my friend Janet did not know that I had started a blog about enlightenment and liberation. I have not yet read the book myself, but this coincidence seemed synchronistically meaningful to me as I felt a lovely resonance between us. This apparently very well-written novel seems to be about what I am addressing here in non-fiction form.

The desire for liberation

The desire to feel better and get to better places in our lives is deep and pervasive, causing strong motivational strivings that take many different forms. Common to all those strivings is the role of our imagination with its idealized visions of possibilities not yet realized. Throughout our lives, we invest enormous energy into turning those strivings into tangible results, and for the most part, these improvement projects give us some satisfaction that sweetens our lives.

However, we all know that these desires and strivings are never quenched and keep us indefinitely wanting more and more. Each time we have met a newly perceived need, the arrived-at-promised land turns quickly into the deficient and disappointing make-due land we need to improve again. And so it goes, cycle after cycle until our death. During this process, idealized images, ideas, and conceptions keep us hopping along like the carrot dangling in front of the donkey. When it comes to finding rest, peace, and equanimity in our lives, these idealizations pull us in the wrong direction following an addictive path towards never-enough land, which makes it impossible to get grounded.

Am I enlightened? A play in three acts.

Act 1: If I say I am, I embarrass myself. If I am not, based on what authority do I write about it?
Act 2: Unless you are evangelically compromised and undiscerning, you will have doubt about anyone’s claim to enlightenment. The problem for you and saving grace for me is that you cannot possibly tell, whether I am enlightened or not, because you will never live in my skin. If I really were, you could never tell anyway, because we would both assume that you are blind and I am clear, and the blind cannot see the truth. Whether I am or am not, how would I really know? To be sure, selling enlightenment is a lucrative business indeed because it takes advantage of people’s insatiable thirst for liberation from suffering, and their propensity to project their own disowned power and authority on an idealized hero of their choice. That’s why gods, tyrants, and saints are so popular!
Act 3: If I claim to be enlightened, or try to teach you how to become enlightened, consider I might do better teaching you how to find a unicorn. Enlightenment is just not what we may ever think it might be. So why not dispense with this notion of enlightenment?

What is (enlightenment) … unendarkenment?

Peruse the page in Wikipedia on enlightenment, and your head will start spinning. There are as many views on enlightenment as the square root of the number of people on this planet multiplied once by itself times two. Does that not tell us something? Notions that are attached to this phenomenon called enlightenment are non-duality, no-self, liberation, non-suffering, awakening, understanding, oneness, absolute, emptiness, Buddhahood, perfection, infinite compassion, wisdom, and skill – just to name a few. The aim of this blog is to cut through this jungle of confusion and make a very simple point: It is all much simpler and less glamorous than we think, indeed so simple as to be too simple to easily grasp! What complicates everything is the way our mind works without us knowing how it works. To get down to real effective business in this matter, we have to unendarken our view of reality.

The world of nouns

The word ‘enlightenment’ is a noun, and its attached cognitive notion refers to a thing or a mental state. Nouns point to objects we can possess, and mental states are psychological places we want to own or reach. By thinking in nouns, we find ourselves in mindscapes that present a static world to us. You either are or are not enlightened (a state you either possess or not). If you are not enlightened, you want to become enlightened (you are here, enlightenment is there, and you want to find a way of getting from here to there). Once you are enlightened (more accurately, you believe you are enlightened), you have the illusion of having arrived, and you possess the holy grail that will allegedly cause you eternal bliss.

Much like buying a new house, isn’t it? The old house is here, the new, better one there, you find ways of getting from here to there, and once you are there, you have happily arrived as the new owner. We call this mind function the problem-solving mind – a very useful mind function, but only then when it does not tyrannize and monopolize our way of meeting reality. The problem is that for most, it does and causes untold suffering.

The web of connotations attached to nouns

The notion of enlightenment conjures up many imaginative forms of permanent bliss and final liberation from pain and suffering. Once we have it, so we think, life is a perpetual breeze and we are finally, constantly happy – finally arrived in the kingdom of heaven. Because no one ever finds themselves in that state, or if they do, it never lasts, yet our mind constructs such a psychological place, our problem-solving mind gets busy. It imagines that place to be somewhere else than where we presently are, it also imagines the place we are now as a hell to escape from, it then compares the place we are now with the imagined heaven we allegedly could be in, and then busily tries to problem solve how to get from here to there. It does that repeatedly, obsessively, and obstinately, even when sooner or later it becomes clear that the imagined heaven is like the mirage of an oasis in the desert – constantly retreating further the closer you think you get to it, leaving you eternally thirsty.

Deconstructing the noun

Reality is just not made of nouns or objects. What we perceive as objects are useful sensory approximations. The ball you kick is usefully seen as an object you can manipulate and kick into the goal. In reality, the ball, like anything else in this universe, is energy flow. Some energy flow is obvious as when we deal with electricity or watch a river flow, some much less so as when we touch a rock. But no matter how we slice it, nothing in this universe is static, permanent, or motionless. Everything is energy flowing, creating flow patterns that arise out of pure potential, taking shape as a dynamic and ever-changing form for a while, before dissolving again into pure potential.

When it comes to our minds and how we view ourselves as organisms, bodies, and humans, the mind’s bias toward constructing a world of objects needs to be recognized. To meaningfully live in this world and survive as an organism, we need to create order in the chaotic, aimless flow of energy at the base of everything. The mind does that by parsing the energy flow into manageable energy chunks that have a reasonably stable life span, such as the perception of a ball for example, and these parsed energy chunks can then be manipulated in more or less predictable ways. We can plan a holiday in the future, knowing with statistical (not absolute) certainty that we have a reasonable chance to get there and enjoy ourselves when the time comes, even though foundationally reality is radically uncertain.

This statistically relative certainty is good enough for daily living and survival, although not necessarily to thrive. We routinely experience unsettling breakthroughs of uncertainty in those black swan events, when three days before the planned holiday someone dies of a heart attack or the plane to the holiday destination crashes. We are then forced to remember that certainty does not exist and that the only game in reality town is uncertainty. Everything, absolutely everything, is impermanent energy flow, coming and going, causing us to fear uncertainty, yet also making growth and transformation possible. In other words, those useful approximations created by the construction of nouns and objects, turn out to be much less useful when it comes to finding happiness, decreasing suffering, and searching for liberation. Understanding the way we construct reality and particularly our view of the human mind, requires the more sophisticated and reality-based notion of flow, process, and verb instead of static, thing, and noun. Not that static, thing, and noun don’t exist as an approximation, but rather that the foundations on which to base our lives cannot be certain, solid, and permanent – it is radically uncertain, flowing, and impermanent.

The implication is that being grounded in flow and process, which means being grounded in reality rather than flights of fantasy, reveals a most puzzling and simultaneously liberating insight – there is no place, state, or destination somewhere else at a future time to ever be found, discovered, or reached. If there was, given that everything is fundamentally impermanent flow, it would be already changed and gone the moment we reach it, and we could never own it, hold it, or dwell in it forever. We can then relinquish our worry about getting enlightened since there is no such state to be permanently had. Instead, there is only the journey without a goal, the journey of noticing improvement described in one of my blogs. Ground yourself in the foundational reality of impermanence, change, and transformation, and you will lose this painful obsession with inadequacy and having to get somewhere you are not. The imaginary place of enlightenment that does not exist gets replaced by the real process of unendarkenment.

Reality and fantasy

There are people who chase enlightenment the way others chase twisters. They are motivated by its promise of liberation from suffering. That promise is linked to fantasies about enlightenment and its absence of suffering, which are devoid of any sense of the reality of non-suffering. Fantasies are ultimately just thoughts connected to emotions they engender, therefore constructions of the mind, and very often disconnected from reality. Unwittingly, we chase Santa Claus believing that fantasy is a reality to be discovered, even though time and again the glass of milk and the plate of cookies remain untouched when no magician gets involved. Barking up the wrong tree, the chase becomes the thrill of a promise that never gets fulfilled. That thrill can sadly sustain the chase for a whole lifetime, leaving us empty-handed and disappointed. Let’s not take that route!

Pain is not suffering

Without understanding the difference between pain and suffering, we can never understand what the promise of mindfulness is all about. Having a body with a sentient nervous system to regulate our energy flow, we are bound to make sense of reality and be guided to survive by having to regulate pleasant and unpleasant experiences. The more extreme unpleasant experiences become, the closer they get to our definition of pain. Pain is unavoidable and an integral part of living.

Needs that are not met create unpleasant states and drive the organism to fulfill them, causing in turn pleasurable satisfaction for a while when they get fulfilled. The more seamlessly embedded in nature an organism is, and the more rudimentary the organism’s capacity for self-reflection is, the simpler the formula for successful survival is: Follow what’s pleasant and avoid what’s unpleasant, and you will be fine.

Ours, however, is an organism capable of self-reflection. We can think about thinking and about our experience of the world, thereby through imagination also creating worlds that do not exist. That capacity is hugely powerful and enabled the development of our human civilization. Through imagination, we evolved from stone age hunter-gatherers into creatures using cell phones to communicate at great distances. Keeping in mind that nothing was brought to us earthlings by extraterrestrial beings from another galaxy, ask yourself where the cell phone was thirty thousand years ago, and it is awe-inspiring to contemplate the fact that the cell phone arose purely through our use of the imagination. In David Bohm’s terms, the cell phone existed then as part of the implicate order of things, and we managed to slowly bring it into the explicate order of reality.

This power of self-reflection has a negative side. Our capacity to imagine what does not exist also applies to narratives about our lives, particularly negative ones. As Mark Twain once said, “the worst things in my life never happened”. We may have an unavoidable pain in our right thigh, and if we just experience that pain and nothing else, it usually remains very manageable and only tolerably interferes with the enjoyment of our lives. However, if the pain causes us to spin doomsday scenarios that it must be cancer and our life is ruined, then the unavoidable pain gets enhanced by a secondary, avoidable, and optional cognitive-emotional elaboration, which not only worsens the unavoidable pain but adds on top of that a whole lot more pain that is largely disconnected from reality. That additional unnecessary pain our self-reflective mind creates is entirely optional and called suffering.

When we talk about liberation, we don’t mean liberation from unavoidable pain, but from avoidable suffering that the mind superimposes on the pain. The cause of suffering lies mostly in our defenses against acceptance of what is, whether we like it or not. Our resistance to what is, and our act of getting into our own way cause the kind of rope burn suffering is all about. The final equation can be put this way: Pain + resistance to pain = suffering. Decrease the resistance to pain, and suffering will decrease. The promise of mindfulness is all about that.

Changing metaphor

Let’s start with an anecdote as we ask ourselves what enlightenment is and why it can be liberating to be interested in it. Here is a Zen master’s definition of enlightenment:

‘Enlightenment is the realization that there is no difference
between enlightenment and non-enlightenment.’

Interesting, isn’t it? The Zen master implies two things: (1) Who cares about enlightenment given that it is an imaginary, non-existent place constructed by the mind? (2) If we drop out of our mind’s constructions, and down into the reality of living, we realize that everything is flow, process, and endless evolution without a goal and that what we are really left with is a constant process of skill improvement as sailors on the ocean of life. We stop chasing an endpoint and instead start cherishing the endless process of inquiry, discovery, and creativity that allows us to notice improvement, a process better referred to as unendarkenment. Whatever our thoughts may be about and re-present like a menu representing the meal or a map the territory, we then remain grounded in how reality presents itself as the meal or the territory we are directly embedded in – the timeless process of energy flow arising and passing.

Awareness and relationship to experience

When you only have a bicycle, you can experience transportation and its world only from the bicycle perspective. You will work very hard at creating as many varied bicycling experiences and adventures as possible, but they will always be bicycle experiences. If you own a bicycle and a car, that increases your experience options, and if you imagine having access to boats, trains, helicopters, airplanes and rockets, you are suddenly able to see the world from many different perspectives. It dawns on you that how you reach your destinations becomes more important than the destinations themselves. We are biased toward the misunderstanding that the promised land resides in a particular set of experiences, and then we chase experiences for liberation. Not so. Experiences, as transient and impermanent as they all are, can never provide liberation from suffering. Chasing after experiences, whatever the means of this chase are, like psychedelics, for example, will never reveal the quiet, stable peace and serenity independent of circumstance we so fervently yearn for. Only through our attitude and relationship to all experience, and realizing what that is, can liberation occur and our suffering quiets down.

What is the nature of this relationship to experience? This is a very complex topic I cannot possibly exhaust in this short blog. We have to explore two avenues – one is the question of who or what is relating to experience, and the other is what this process of relating refers to.

The first question is often taken too simplistically, and one assumes that “of course, it is me who relates to experience”, without giving a second glance at who ‘me’ really is. When we look deeply into that question, ‘deeply’ meaning not only conceptually, but as a whole body-mind experience, it becomes quickly quite clear that all we find are further experiences. In other words, the ‘I’ we are trying to understand immediately dissolves into further experiences that are not ‘me’ the moment we try to examine it. The observer is just nowhere to be found, despite the fact that we have the illusion of being the observer. When this discovery hits us as a realization, what we thought was a relationship between ‘me’ and experience dissolves into a web of interactive energy flows that have no weaver. The unfolding universe we observe and the observing ‘I’ are exactly the same. We are the unfolding universe knowing itself, and the unfolding universe knowing itself is, among many other manifestations, us.

The second question about what process constitutes this perceived relationship arises from resolving the first question. Once we realize that we are the unfolding universe knowing itself, it becomes clear how fundamental awareness is to reality. The unfolding universe knowing itself is just a special case of something even broader touching on timelessness in limitless space – an energy flow with a center everywhere and a circumference nowhere. Our true identity is then revealed as this timeless movement and eternal change from pure and unimaginable potential to identifiable patterned manifestations and back, somehow all steeped in incomprehensible awareness with its powerful force for transformation, healing, and love.

In human beings, the arising of patterned energy flow manifestations simultaneously creates a duality, which arises from focusing non-dual awareness in the form of attention that moves from a subjective center towards a whole range of objectively perceived centers of energy flow. Upon closer examination, the subjective center of energy flow always turns out to be as varied and manifold as the many objects of its awareness, throwing us again right back into the fundamental insight about the non-duality of reality. In this way, awareness and its focused manifestation we call attention, non-duality and duality, pure potential and impermanent manifestations, the universal ‘me’ as the unfolding universe and the individual ‘me’ observing the unfolding universe, all are a mysteriously sacred dance we need to learn to dance in order to decrease our suffering in a fundamentally stable and reliable way. What that does to our conditioned patterns of behavior, both physiologically and psychologically, is a systematic unlearning of rigidly predictable pathways of illusory knowing, often accompanied by full immersion in nothingness, followed by a creative expansion of new pathways of insight that ceaselessly connect with each other in vast new webs of awareness.

Coda on mindfulness meditation

No goal, just a journey, and a thousand-year one at that. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to change, nothing to solve, nothing to achieve, and nobody to be. Just noticing improvement.

Zenkei Shibayama (1894-1974), the overseer of the large Rinzai Zen Nanzen-ji branch of temples, once said: “There is a common saying [in Japanese Zen], ‘Miso (bean paste) with the smell of miso is not good miso. Enlightenment with the smell of enlightenment is not the real enlightenment.”

And so, a wise old Zen master, very near death, lay quietly on his mat with his eyes closed, all his disciples gathered around. Kneeling closest to him was his number one disciple, a long-time practitioner who would succeed the old man as head of the monastery. At one point the old master opened his eyes, and lovingly gazed at each and every one of his disciples assembled in the crowded room. Finally, his glance rested on his successor, and he managed to speak his last words to the man: “Ah, my son, you have a very thorough knowledge of the teachings and scriptures, and you have shown great discipline in keeping the precepts. Your behavior has, in fact, been flawless. Yet there is one more thing remaining to be cleared up: you still reek and stink of ‘Zen’!”

Once through much effort you have internalized the scaffolding of proper mindfulness technique to meet the immense complexity of the human mind, you can trust that like the experience of a seasoned sailor on life’s oceans, or an accomplished musician with her instrument, it will effortlessly carry you through the worst storms and weather patterns with the reasonable success of meaningful survival. You can then let go of the preoccupation about whether you are ‘doing this right’, freed to fully give yourself to the most rewarding task there is, the creative exploration of human possibilities for healing and ceaselessly grow towards ever larger spaces of wisdom.

If you believe your teacher is enlightened, wake up and look for the disowned authority you project onto your teacher. If your teacher believes he or she is enlightened, run for the hills. Your belief will preclude the possibility of waking up to realize the deep nature of reality. If instead, your teacher is a log on fire that sets your belly on fire, getting you to sweat in practice and inspire you to be the explorer of your own mind, proceed, as he or she may just be undarkened enough to have relinquished much suffering and have the ability to be of great benefit to you, although you would never know it.

Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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

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

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

Resignation

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

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

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

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

Noticing improvement

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

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

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

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

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

Surrender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

The Mindsight Intensive is more than a program. It is a statement of intent put into daily practice, aiming at mustering the courage to stand as uncompromisingly as possible in truth and learn to speak it, no matter the consequences or how uncomfortable it may be. Truth as opposed to the truth is honesty with oneself and others in evolution. Truth evolves and deepens, and is not an immutable authoritative decree. There is no end to the development of honesty, as there is no end to the unconscious conditionings that interfere with it. Truth being a process, it arises from the ashes of the examined present moment, and cannot be prepared, prepackaged, or planned. It is a spontaneous creation coming from the deep dive into the rubble of one’s pretensions. Uncompromisingly, through one’s very own uniqueness it takes its needed space to give voice to what’s inconvenient. Truth can never come from the adoption of someone else’s or a social collective’s voice. We have only lived our lives if we have lived in truth, for only in truth can we find our true, authentic identity.

This audacity of voicing one’s truth requires quite a bit of thick skin with regards to the unconscious conditionings that try by any means possible to resist their demise. As useful as our sense of an efficiently functioning self is, we cannot forget that it is a narrowly constructed psychological process that shields us from the vast expanse of our true potential, including our healing potential. Our familiar, socially accepted self is but a small part of our truth, and it cuts us off from our organism’s vast living potential, and thereby also from our healing potential. To fully touch our authentic Being with its vast healing potential, we need to break through the blinders of our dearly held conventionality. More specifically, given that the chatty default mode network in the brain is responsible for this familiar sense of a restricted storied self, it is this network that requires to be quieted down to allow wider contexts of our Being to emerge and manifest.

Psychedelics do just that, among other things. One of the most frequent and fundamental psychedelic experiences is the frightening dissolution of the self, often experienced as a real death and physical dissolution, following which an exhilarating rebirth into an incomparably freer life occurs. This process of breaking out of the prison of narrow self-definition is profoundly healing. Through psychedelics, this process of one’s old self dying to allow an expanded version of one’s being to emerge is passively induced by a substance, quite dramatic, and requires ongoing post-ingestion work to implement the insights gleaned through this transformative experience.

Psychedelics are not the only path to developing expanded awareness traits. Without using psychedelics, in the Mindsight Intensive, we follow the same principle of discovering the limitations of ordinary waking consciousness in order to access our full awareness potential. We start by examining the ordinary world of waking consciousness, exploring its limitations and cracks, and then penetrating those cracks into nothingness and emptiness. That’s when infinity becomes a hot topic with regards to its relationship to the confines of everyday living. The access to nothingness is akin to the psychedelic effect of self-dissolution as the default mode network quiets down and the right brain receives more space to shine. Liberated from the confining exclusivity of the prison of ordinary waking consciousness, one can then access reality in its vast context that was inaccessible before. This redefines our sense of self in new, creative, and healing ways. The difference between the meditative and psychedelic paths, which by the way are in no way mutually exclusive, is that our meditative path taken in the Mindsight Intensive is active, slow, gradual, and methodical. At every step of the way, transformations get solidly anchored in our personality structure, giving space to new healing ways of Being and living our lives.

Mindfulness meditation was traditionally developed eons ago without particular knowledge of trauma. Trauma is a particularly deep and damaging reconfiguration of brain functioning, making it much more challenging to deeply penetrate one’s mind. Consequently, many people with trauma had likely no access to meditation. Nowadays we know so much more about the brain and the mind that we can refine our approach so that the examination of one’s mind for the purpose of healing through meditation becomes available to many more people. Interestingly, though, it turns out that the dissolution and contextually larger rediscovery of self through psychedelics are very effective for many in overcoming trauma. I find the same principle applies to the work we do in the Mindsight Intensive as we learn to penetrate nothingness and discover emptiness. In both cases, it is as if all these conflictual emotional entanglements take on a sense of irrelevance compared to the vastness of the new context of reality we gain access. It is as if the spoon of salt that keeps salting the cup of water, now suddenly is thrown into a lake – the salt becomes irrelevant.

References:
Two new Netflix movies are strongly recommended for anyone, but particularly those intending to take the Mindsight Intensive:
1. How to change your mind (limited series about psychedelics in medicine)
2. A trip to infinity (inspirational reflections for everyday life)

Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

With the Mindsight Intensive fast approaching, I hope these reflections will facilitate the way students and teachers are going to embark on this most unusual journey. These ideas apply not only to the more advanced students in the Mindsight Intensive, but also to beginners who are enrolled in the MBSR-X or MBSR-CC, or to those taking the Mindful Self-Compassion program. What I write here is personal, an expression of my own intimate meditation experiences that have shaped my own path, and that as best I can, I try to live by.

The Greek word ‘charisma’ means ‘favor’ or ‘gift’, derived from the verb ‘charizesthai’ meaning ‘to favor’, which in turn comes from the noun ‘charis’, meaning ‘grace’. Originally used in English within a Christian context to refer to a divine gift or power, we all know its current use to refer to social, rather than divine grace. ‘Grace’ is the operative notion here, complete with its sense of compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others. The power of grace is originally understood to be divinely conferred, which within our context translates into the vast world of energetic processes that drive us and are too subtle to be aware of. Isn’t it surprising to speak of attractiveness and charm in meditation? Think of it this way: Without passion life is like food eaten without taste buds. Passion is thus as crucial to meditation as it is to a life lived with a sense of meaning. The attractiveness and charm of grace come to life when we learn how to wisely and efficiently meet our minds, and mindfulness meditation is all about that. The charisma that flows from it includes the elegant grace with which we meet our inner world with all its limitations and foibles, and through that the compassionate kindness we bring to our relationships with others.

Mindfulness meditation training begins by fostering a trajectory of consistent, intelligent practice that eventually leads to an enormously crucial point we can look forward to – the sudden realization that the process of meditation has become our very own, and not anymore something that we do because of someone else’s encouragement or opinion that we should do it for benefit. This fundamental shift towards owning our own authority over the meditative process is immensely empowering, but also a source of charisma. It creates an internal psychological reorganization with profound effects on our way of showing up in the world, including how we can then later transmit the sense of grace to others. We become self-motivated, or even more deeply, the natural instrument of our own awakening and healing. We embody deep respect for the immeasurable vastness of energetic processes we cannot possibly ever become aware of, and the humility of Being that comes with it. Then, the passion for wisdom takes hold of us and becomes our raison d’être.

On the way, we must first develop a meditation technique strong enough that it becomes invisible during the act of meditation and seamlessly weaves itself into the fabric of mindful Being. We then don’t have to think about it anymore. Our head, heart, and viscera are in unison, able to just creatively explore our mind’s complexities without having to think about meditative techniques or how we do it. Technique becomes instinctive and allows us to be competent and free in our observations of experience and how our organism creates our sense of reality. This is the hard practice journey that requires the guidance of a good teacher, who does not let us get away with nonsense and mistakes. This slow and arduous examination of every minute detail of observation and experience eventually allows meditation to become ‘automatic’ (not in the lack-of-awareness sense) and appear easy. There is such a thing as virtuosity in one’s ability to navigate the unpredictable seas of the everchanging mind. Such virtuosity manifests as charisma.

Then, in the next step, we try to discern and make sense of what is involved in our observed experience, differentiating between fact and fiction, reality and delusion, truth and distortion. We try to listen to what our newly observed reality is trying to say to us and by implication to others, while at the same time modifying the energy flow as needed.

Finally, and the most difficult step of all, is to learn how to be simple. This is possible only when our internalized techniques are strong enough to guide our vision towards embracing complexity, rather than staying stuck in compartmentalized rigidities that give us a simplistic view of reality. Simplicity comes easily to very young children and becomes the obvious path towards ease in very experienced meditators; in between, a long way of apprenticeship is necessary to master it.

My own teachers had the wisdom to know that the quality of a good teacher is to teach the student how to teach him- or herself, and not interfere with what the student naturally gravitates to. We must learn to attune to our inherent deep wisdom that is already active deep in the fibers of our organism, albeit at times quite buried under the rubble of distorting conditionings. Teaching ourselves does not imply a free-for-all of just doing whatever we want. The meditative process confronts us with the boundaries of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and spirituality that determine how our organism works. These boundaries of reality must be respected, otherwise, our practice becomes troubled. We must learn to master effective techniques that allow us to best meet upcoming challenges and untapped potentials the mind is capable of handling. With my students, you will therefore see me interfere in cases of significant procedural, physical, emotional, or conceptual errors in technique or attitude that are bound to occur during this journey. Ultimately, we want to learn how to be as natural as possible in the practice of meditation.

Whatever we do is an expression of who we are, and who we are results in part from gathering knowledge and experience, and developing presence. The more we can do that, the richer our life and the beneficial effect on others will be. With this all-embracing interest in our nature, accompanied by a constant, insistent curiosity, we have to be unwilling to accept anything as a final fact, knowing that knowledge is always tentative and evolving. Meditation is driven by a powerful human need for freedom to search, look, and try without fear of failure. The skill to give this exploration full rein does not come easily. At all times we must have a fire in our belly. Without this driving desire that no matter what, we must do it, something is missing.

The mind is constantly evolving, and its scope needs to constantly be widened and enlarged. The larger it is, the greater our ability to have both, objectivity about reality and what we are doing, and subjectivity in believing in what we are doing. There is a constant duality and tension between doing and observing, being and learning, being experienced and naive, satisfied and dissatisfied. Living in the midst of that tension is the name of the game, making for interesting human beings in any field. We must relentlessly not be satisfied with anything less than total devotion to truth. The ultimate truth, which we call love, appears at first in the form of a realization that what we can know is forever precious little, and then second with the insight that even that is uncertain. In this humble truth of uncertainty lies hidden the deepest of experiences we can have: The experience of mystery. This mystery cannot be argued, thought about, debated, or rationally understood; it can only show its true and inescapable existence through instinct and intuition, imagination and creativity. It is the source of wonder that fuels our passion for life, and with it the quiet assertion of love as what’s most important in life.

The mind’s patterns are there like the musical score for musicians. It provides a silent scaffolding that requires interpretation to be enjoyed. Even just playing the notes won’t do. What matters is how in the spaces and silences between the notes one moves from one moment to the next. That is where charisma comes in. This is similar to meditation: Although of some importance, the content of experience is not what most concerns us. What we must focus on is how in the stillness, nothingness, or chaos between those patterned contents we move from one moment to the next. In the process, we notice where we have been, we are aware of where we are, and we wonder about what’s coming – all at the same time. That is called being in the moment since the moment is never a dimensionless point in time, but a meaningful space of energy flow encompassing past memories and future anticipations as they emerge in the now of the lived present. At all times, we must know and prepare for difficulties that will arise. We must know how to navigate them, and be aware of the bigger picture and the wider context as we surrender to the steady stream of nonverbal personal involvement. We don’t verbalize the flow, but navigate it, knowing that at any moment our conditioning will interfere with our meditation practice and mindful presence.

To meditate we must love, and we must also love the meditative process of finding out the hard truth of our lives. Meditation is part of the inwardness of being human, like holding our child or embracing our beloved partner. It is the process of deep connection to and resonance with our fellow human beings. It is the quality of touch and feeling, the experience of ecstasy in the sense of standing outside the petty entanglements of conditioning. Because we can never completely stand outside, there is a constant tension between full presence and mindless monkeying. We deal with that very simply by learning to live with it and trying our best to embody decency, knowing that this tension will always be there. That is training in equanimity at its best, resulting in the elegance of simplicity of the awakened mind at peace with ‘chopping wood and carrying water’ (Zen). Acceptance of the inevitability of that tension of imperfection is the ultimate liberation from suffering, soaking our Being in humility as we rejoice in this small act of huge consequence – noticing improvement. Noticing improvement is simultaneously all there is, yet also everything, the energetic motor that fuels our passion for the arduous path of awakening. Without that tension of imperfection, the aliveness of the moment would be lacking, and love would be impossible.

Being nervous and disturbed is an intimate and inevitable part of meditation. This makes it even more imperative to not shy away from propagandizing the value and necessity of meditation to society. We all have strong feelings about certain ideals and standards humans need to follow, certain actions we believe humans must take to stand up for the rights of others in the way we think is most effective. However, we cannot act as a herd ‘en masse’ without dire consequences like the buffalo herd that stampedes off a cliff. History could almost be defined as the tragedy of ‘en masse’ herd behavior – just look around at what senseless mass movements are in vogue today! Instead, we must act as individuals together. Being individuals means at its best to have the capacity for personal integration that ensures resonance with our fellow humans. Meditation well done ensures our individuality. ‘Well done’ means that it must be liberal and democratic to be creative, healing, and effective, and cannot be in the service of a narrow ideal or creed of any kind. We are never as important as nature, the creator of life, but giving that creation a wholesome and healing form that comes to life through wise practice is where we as meditators and concerned humans come in.

When through meditation mindfulness becomes our internalized authority, we must use our ability to transmit our charisma to our listeners, standing there freely, and like the bird singing its song, making it clear that one has something to say. To say “I am here, I am about to express an idea, a thought, and now you are invited to listen”, is an important act of self-confidence in one’s capacity to be the conduit of love and wisdom. This cannot be done proselytizing, evangelizing, intellectually or self-consciously, as it would appear fake. It has to be steeped in the humility of awe of the present moment, instinctive, natural, and unabashedly creative – which we have called charisma.

Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

These days in Basel streetcars you can see an ad that says something like: “Get closer to your enlightenment this coming weekend! Participate in our Yoga and meditation sessions, and come to enjoy peace, tranquility, and happiness.” What does everybody want when the idea of meditation comes up in one’s mind? Peace, tranquility, and happiness! And so, like flies swarming around a bright light, people flock to meditation venues, not realizing that they swarm around an idea, the idea of promised peace, tranquility, and happiness, hoping one day to fall into the honeypot of the promised Land of Cockaigne. Masses of people are deluded that way as they get involved in meditation with the meager promise of McMindfulness.

Granted, one has to start somewhere, and if an ad can get you in the door of the mindfulness journey, why not? And if in addition you can enjoy a weekend of bliss, all the power to you – except that it has nothing to do with mindfulness, let alone enlightenment. The problem is not so much how you get in the door, but how stubborn misunderstandings and distortions shape your journey once your interest is piqued. The way this particular ad is formulated lays the fertile ground for the activation of unconscious expectations that are bound to derail the mindfulness journey.

The foolish proposition encapsulated in this ad creates a striving and expectant state of mind that is sure to set one up for failure. Like Godot, the promised land is a mirage that endlessly retreats ahead of our advances, and is sure to never materialize wherever we are. I encounter such counterproductive psychological constellations in the mental microcosm of each student of mine, who complains of not being able to meditate or keep up a fruitful practice. There is no such thing as not being able to meditate, I like to say; there is only the lack of interest and unwillingness to meditate or the fact that one does something wrong in one’s attempt at meditating. There can be many things one does wrong during meditation practice, one of them being the unconscious pursuit of Godot inhabiting the Land of Cockaigne.

Imagine now taking up meditation without a shred of expectations, especially expectations of peace, tranquility, and happiness. Why would one want to do that? What would then be the point of meditating? This question is similar to why one would want to have children. Any answer you come up with falls short of the question’s essence. The best I can come up with is the word ‘rich’ – not as an answer, but as a suggestion illuminating the question. Children enrich our lives, a notion that includes pain and pleasure, delight and worry, feast and famine, tears and laughter, reward and sacrifice, and love and loss. So does meditation, and when it does, it is because we have learned the art of non-meditation, characterized by a process of consistently stripping experience of its associated notions that are over-saturated with connotations of perfection. We get, then, a conception of meditation as a purely procedural clothing worn over the indecent nakedness of something quite unsettling called reality, so as to allow it to appear in our consciousness with greater clarity. It is this retreating nude with its perplexing, dark qualities of truth that non-meditation or true meditation is trying to study and illuminate with relentless fervor and commitment. The glory of non-meditation lies in its simplicity, expressed in Zen by the idea of enlightenment as being able to be fully present and equanimous ‘chopping wood and carrying water’ – exalting the extraordinariness of the ordinary.

Take your daily life. It just unfolds – things you like and don’t like to do, tasks you must and choose to do, events you seek and endure, moments of peace and upheaval – in short, the full catastrophe. There is no escaping the full catastrophe – there is only the opportunity to embrace it with as much elegance, skill, and equanimity as possible. Chaos and rigidity are life-long companions we can never shake, but instead learn to meet with greater flexibility and humor, dynamically riding through those energy waves rather than getting stuck in them.

The promised land then is the experience of steadily improving skills in facing the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, without having to ‘take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them’, for such resistance is ultimately foolish and counterproductive. By chasing peace, tranquility, and happiness, we burn to death like the moth in a flame, because none of those mental states ever endure. We can only find wholeness by bringing the darkness into consciousness, not by chasing metaphors of light or perfection. ‘Wholeness’ is to my mind this bittersweet verb hiding behind a fictitious noun that can never become real as an accomplished goal. Wholeness is the process of forever and delightfully noticing improvement without ever worrying about a non-existent goal. That’s what wholeness is all about – forever and delightfully noticing improvement, knowing that that is the goal. Then, we have woken up to the world of non-meditation: Expertly guiding our minds to uncover the unsettling truth of reality for the purpose of clarity. Surprisingly, that clarity that illuminates everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly, comes with a sense of peace, serenity, and equanimity independent of circumstance – and even that ebbs and flows according to the law of impermanence.

To develop the art of non-meditation we begin by illuminating the unconscious misconceptions and false expectations attached to the wish to meditate and the notion of meditation. To this end, we learn the simple techniques that our mind has to offer for the development of clarity about itself and reality. Then, with proper guidance, the rest takes care of itself, as we improve our skills in seeing the unfathomable complexity of mind and reality, including the limitless human capacity for self-deception. As we thus fall into non-meditation as true meditation, we are engaged in the most radical act of love, which provides space for even this to be uncertain.

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

The hidden power of awareness.

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Why Golgi?

The Golgi body is an organelle, a subcellular structure that is part of each cell like organs are part of each body. It was named in 1898 after its discoverer, the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi. Its function is to package proteins inside the cell so that they are transportable outside the cell as they are sent to their destination. As an alliteration to ‘God’, ‘Golgi’ creates a verbal resonance across the vast spectrum of seemingly separate domains of knowledge, from the most intricately physical to the numinous. Those domains are not separate at all, and similar to the Golgi body’s function, I try to package this knowledge in such a way as to make it transportable across such seemingly opposed and distant ways of knowing – science, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality.

Resistance to religion

A student in the Mindsight Intensive program sent me this eloquent email:

“I feel the urge to tell you that this week’s lecture touched me profoundly as it summarized at different points what is happening in my life. I will not pretend to understand everything you said, and will not try to use your language because I wouldn’t know how to. But most of the lecture resonated with me because it reflected what I am feeling in my day-to-day, in this journey of discovery I am in.

Since I am (finally) internalizing that there is no use in trying to control anything, I have now space to experience the order/energy/algorithm, which is beyond my understanding, but is making things move (don’t ask for an explanation, please). I just need to provide life with a nudge and the rest is taken care of … The Symphony of Life … I am in awe at the synchronicity and multidimensionality of events and the web of interactions. The examples in my life are too many, and maybe too menial, to list. I see the algorithm in action every day and am so proud to see myself watching life unfold, the good and the bad, welcoming the visits of my different parts, entertaining them, and sending them back home if needed. Spending more time with my Wise Self. So wonderful to witness my own life, eyes wide open, and experience it with a belly full of warrior strength, with joy and gratitude. I recognized during the lecture how I was living my life so diachronically and so unidimensionally, blinders on.

Now that I am more in touch with nature, with my body, my roots, I question (not too deeply, to tell you the truth) where I come from and the reason why I am here on this plane (feeling that there are other planes that I cannot grasp), I do feel that the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. I also notice that there are many small things that capture my attention intensely and I can feel their effect in my body (at a recent meditation retreat in the mountain, I saw myself in an ant carrying a big leaf, and I saw my need to ‘look up to the sky’ in a group of fireflies up in a tree). I feel how nature gives me answers in a different dimension. Wondering if I am resisting that I am opening my eyes to ‘God’s world’, just because of the word ‘God’ (my underline).

This Mindsight Intensive session has been the best I have taken so far. Or it just happened when I needed it most … speaking of Symphony of Life…”.

The numinous

We will address the meaning of ‘numinous’ in more detail below. Rudolf Otto coined this term to denote a complex psychological set of experiences that arise when we are faced with the sacred. This email contains a reference (‘God’s world’) to a numinous experience described by Dostoevski in ‘The House of the Dead’: Dostoevski records how one summer day during his term of imprisonment, while he was at work carrying bricks by the banks of the river, he was suddenly struck by the surrounding landscape and overcome with profound emotion:

“Sometimes I would fix my sight for a long while upon the poor smokey cabin of some baigouch; I would study the bluish smoke as it curled in the air, the Kirghiz woman busy with her sheep. … The things I saw were wild, savage, poverty-stricken; but they were free. I would follow the flight of a bird threading its way in the pure transparent air; now it skims the water, now disappears in the azure sky, now suddenly comes to view again, a mere point in space. Even the poor wee floweret fading in the cleft of the bank, which would show itself when spring began, fixed my attention and would draw my tears.“ Dostoevski then remarks that this was the only spot at which he saw “God’s world, a pure and bright horizon, the free desert steppes”; and in casting his gaze across the immense desert space, he found he was able to forget his “wretched self”.

Keiji Nishitani, the leading representative of the Kyoto School of Philosophy, whose work bridges Eastern and Western thought, comments on Dostoevski’s passage as follows:

“The things that Dostoevski draws attention to are all things we come in touch with in our everyday lives. We speak of them as real in the everyday sense of the word, and from there go on to our scientific and philosophical theories. But for such commonplace things to become the focus of so intense a concentration, to capture one’s attention to that almost abnormal degree, is by no means an everyday occurrence. Nor does it spring from scientific or metaphysical reflection. Things that we are accustomed to speaking of as real forced their reality upon him in a completely different dimension. He saw the same real things we all see, but the significance of the realness and the sense of the real in them that he experienced in perceiving them as real are something altogether qualitatively different. Thus was he able to forget his ‘wretched self’ and to open his eyes to ‘God’s world’.”

My student’s sentence encapsulates a thorny topic: “Wondering if I am resisting that I am opening my eyes to ‘God’s world’, just because of the word ‘God’.” The separation of what we deem to be secular (from Latin ‘saecularis’ = ‘worldly’) from the sacred (holy, connected to spirituality, religion, or God) is by no means a reflection of reality, but a mind construct. It is the result of a particular awareness mode we automatically ‘slide into’ as we leave childhood to grow into adulthood. This mode is our ordinary waking consciousness (including nighttime dreams), also called the field of consciousness, which envelops us like water envelops fish. We assume that this is the only available awareness mode we have and that the world revealed to us when we wake up in the morning is reality. Neither is accurate. The way we ordinarily experience life and interpret reality is a mental construct, a controlled, albeit useful illusion, created by the brain’s energy processing. The brain pares down energy flow absorbed through the senses from its environment to a bare minimum, in order to create in our central nervous system manageable information flow our organism can then efficiently use to ensure survival. As rich as this tapestry of day-to-day lived reality seems, it is just a construct or representation of reality based on this measly trickle of processed energy and information flow. This reality construct of the field of consciousness is furthermore only based on existence, ignoring that all existence arises from and disappears into non-existence. If we train our minds to open to a vast hidden potential lying in wait to be discovered and activated, more profound awareness modes are available to us and deeper healing becomes possible. Tapping into this potential allows us to see ordinary waking consciousness and its reality constructs from a far larger context and perspective, which significantly contributes to diminishing our suffering.

The field of consciousness and its maps and menus

The structure of this field of consciousness is characterized by concepts connected to emotions. The organism’s overall energy flow gets processed by the brain in extremely complex ways. This results in thoughts and concepts, which then get woven into clusters and associations in the form of narratives after having been imbued by emotions. We call this information flow. What is unique about information flow is that it is energy pointing beyond itself like a map pointing to a territory or a menu pointing to a meal. This very act of pointing contributes to a deeply engrained conceptual split between subject and object we call duality, which is a hallmark of the field of consciousness. After all, if something points, it starts somewhere and points to somewhere else. In our case, the pointing starts with the subject which points to something else, the object: ‘I’ (the subject) own a ‘house’ (object), ‘I’ see a ‘flower’, and so on – perceiving our very existence from the standpoint of ‘me’ the subject, immersed in a world of objects.

In this world of duality, even the ‘subject’ ‘I’ or ‘me’ becomes an object I can describe and comment on. If you were asked who you are, you would come up with a list of ‘things’ such as ‘man, woman, body, teacher, dancer, husband, wife, son, daughter, responsible, free spirit’, etc. In other words, you would come up yet again with a whole list of objects, unable to name the subject who names it all. Thus, the subject pointing to itself turns itself into an object of its own pointing. So even the ‘I’ in the sentence ‘I own a house’ is experienced as an object that is observable to me. The real me as the pure subject remains forever elusive. This split of reality into a world of duality often takes us so far as to almost completely erase any awareness of a connection between me the subject, and the world of objects around me. This is how, for example, the emotionally abusive husband of a recent patient of mine, can tell her with full conviction that her unhappiness in the marriage has nothing to do with him, that he is perfectly normal, and that she is the one who needs help.

To be clear, the thought, concept, or word ‘table’ is not the wooden 4-legged object it points to. Like the map or the menu, it is a pure construction in our mind. Thoughts and narratives are not reality presenting itself, but re-presented reality. They are not the territory of life experience we live in, the meal of fully embodied living, but only the map of the territory of reality we use in order to orient ourselves, the menu of the meal of lived life. Take any thought, any concept, any name, or any story, they are all about reality, like the finger pointing to the moon as they say in Zen, not reality or the moon itself. In other words, the conceptual world we live in and project onto reality is a virtual world of aboutness, an energy flow in our organism that has been processed by the brain to such complexity that it ends up pointing beyond itself.

As we have seen, the field of consciousness is one encompassing construction of energy flow that manifests as cognition connected to emotions, like the map of a territory or the menu of a meal. Both map and menu ‘point beyond themselves’ to the territory or meal respectively. Nowadays in the age of augmented and virtual reality, our maps have evolved to an extreme degree as we can populate our maps with photos and videos of the mapped regions, or even visit virtually in the comfort of our sofa. However, no matter how you slice it, no matter how augmented our maps may be, they will never be the territory we map. Going to visit Paris will always be a fundamentally different experience than virtual visits. Reading the item ‘moules frites a la marinière’ on the menu will never satisfy your hunger, no matter how succulent it sounds! Unwittingly, this is exactly the world we live in: A constructed map of reality, a menu of real experience, without much access to real reality. I recall the mind-bogglingly sad comment of a resident of Las Vegas, who in all earnest commented on how lucky they are in Las Vegas because they have all of Europe right there and don’t need to fly all the way to Europe to see the Eiffel tower or Venice.

Everything within that mapped world, even the subject ‘me’ who allegedly observes everything, including myself, get mapped as an object of our observation ‘out there’. This is called the far side of being. Within the inescapable field of consciousness, in which everything is named, through the naming process itself everything becomes part of the far side of being. I am here and the table is there, on the far side of me. Even when I look at myself, the elusive ‘I’ is somewhere not to be found, while the ‘myself’ is there on the far side. And so it is with God; whatever you may ever say about God, it is always and inescapably a map of a reality we cannot access from the vantage point of the field of consciousness. God is always on the far side, as we well know from the way we live and speak about it. God is in church, but not in a casino; the spiritual realm is over there where I am not, never right here where I am; spiritual life is in the afterlife, never right here in this life; God is in a monastery, not in a science lab; despite Jesus’ well-known invitations to all of humanity, non-Catholics are frowned upon when they take communion, maybe because the catholic God is head of a more exclusive club than the infidel pagan club. If I write about physiological processes in the body, I allegedly don’t write about spirituality – in short, God is sacred, yet forever intangible; Golgi is not sacred, and unfortunately for most people, the sacred is never here, but always on the far side somewhere else.

For my student, whom I would characterize as, shall we say, a rational humanist (I don’t know whether she would see herself that way), using the word ‘God’ entails too many distorting connotations for comfort, causing resistance to using it. With religion, some people associate belief, dogma, doctrine, the irrational, and even magical thinking, which is for them not a particularly appealing way of using their minds and coming to terms with existential concerns. Does it have to be like that? Are God and Golgi possibly much closer related than one might think?

The invisible cage

Coming back to our field of consciousness, here is the rub as Hamlet would say: We have this unconscious habit of confusing the map with the territory, the stories we live by with the reality we live in. Within this awareness mode, the only one most people are ever familiar with, everything is named, and we erroneously come to believe that what is named, is known. We were conditioned to that from a very young age when we began to develop language. Remember as a young parent your little munchkin, age two or so, pointing to something and you responding with “flower, dog, sky, etc.!” Or at a slightly older age being asked “what is that?” and your response “a bird, a car, a book, etc.” And then later “what is this man doing?” and you say “he is eating an apple”. And lastly the oh so annoying ‘why?’ stage, annoying because most of the time you did not have an answer: “Why don’t dogs have feathers?” “(God knows! ….)”. Anyway, you named the whole world for the child, and with these names, you wove whole narratives, in the end proudly gloating to other parents about this little genius you now have in your household, who knows how to read ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ at the age of four.

This process, as you can certainly recall, was invested with strong emotions of parental approval and child pride, reinforcing the message that having the menu will satisfy your hunger. Naming the objects of the world came to be synonymous with the belief that knowing the names means that we know what the names refer to. In addition, we came to presume that just because we have seen something before, we now know what it is, because it has the same name – yesterday’s flower in my backyard is the same as today’s flower at the store … just a flower. Our mind associates everything with names and every name with other names. When we see things again, we can then just use the old familiar names, and the more we converse with these names that we weave into stories, the more we mix with their content, get to know them and become more intimate with them. Before we know it, we have grown into an invisible, transparent virtual bubble of name and narrative associations, through which we see the world, believing that what we think and have associated with words, names and stories, is reality – and that, is one of the most profound illusions of human existence.

To be sure, naming to map is not a bad thing. It is what brains do in order to be able to turn amorphous energy flow into useful information bits we can own, manipulate, play with, and creatively combine in myriads ways. It becomes problematic when we (1) confuse named reality with real reality, (2) erroneously believe that knowledge coming from this naming process is knowledge of real reality, (3) allow the left brain to dominate our lives through this naming process, and (4) miss out on living the uniqueness of present-moment experience and real reality by being imprisoned by the constructed world of names that can only capture averaged experiences.

The structural limitations of our senses

Let’s get back to Golgi for a moment, my imaginative mascot for scientific, physical reality. Our external senses of touch, sight, sound, taste and smell receive different sections of the total spectrum of energy from the universe (called exteroception). Our organism receives the universe’s energy through our external senses in ways that are restricted by the specific human neural architecture. For example, a vulture has a different neural architecture, and therefore can receive olfactory energy to a much more sensitive degree than we can: It can smell carrion from a mile away, an impossible feat for us. The same applies to our eyes which are incapable of registering UV light or x-rays, and the energy we absorb through nutrition and air, or through our internal somatic senses when we ‘feel’ our body (called interoception). Whichever senses receive energy (exteroception or interoception), or processes absorb and release energy (nutrition, air, skin), the energy is fundamentally always the same: Mostly (to keep it simple) electromagnetic waves and electrochemical processes. Our senses, however, are architecturally limited in how large a chunk of the whole energy spectrum of the universe they are capable of registering.

Emergent properties

While our organism exchanges energy with its environment, another parallel exchange process unfolds simultaneously courtesy of our nervous system, which includes peripheral nerves, the autonomic nervous system, the spine, and the brain with its neurons and glia cells. The electrochemical energy received through our external and internal senses gets processed by the central nervous system in mindbogglingly complex ways. This energy processing is the construction of new energy patterns that emerge from the body. What is so extraordinary is that these resulting energy flow constructions we like to call ‘information’, and which we experience as thoughts, are a form of energy patterns that ‘mysteriously’ point beyond themselves. I say ‘mysteriously’, not because of some kind of hocus-pocus lurking in reality, but simply because we don’t yet know exactly how that happens. It happens though in the same way as a multitude of cars gives rise to traffic with its own laws; the complexity of energy flow processing gives rise to cognition with its own characteristic of pointing beyond itself. By ‘pointing beyond itself’ I mean quite simply that the word ‘dog’ is not the dog itself; it is merely a thought that points to something else than the thought itself, in this case, the dog. We summarily call these emergent energy constructions ‘mind’, but a closer look at them reveals what I have already described above: In ordinary, unexamined life, what we call ‘mind’ moves mostly within the field of consciousness, this invisible bubble of stories we mistake for reality. And mind, for that matter, obeys different laws and principles than the physical world, even though no other extraneous substances or notions about energy than the ones we know so far through physics, are required to make sense of it.

Re-connecting

Here is my potentially surprising claim: It is perfectly reasonable to see God and the sacred through science, and the secular physical through God. They are in fact one and the same. What differentiates the secular from the sacred is not content, but the degree to which we know the human mind. The same activity, let’s say carrying bricks on a construction site, can be secular or sacred depending on how we approach it and end up experiencing it. That difference is achieved not by slicing reality into secular and sacred parts as our naming mind likes to do, but by expanding our awareness beyond the field of consciousness. My student’s God then does not have to be resisted, because God does not have to remain a menu item, superficially mapped out by a name attached to associations that get projected onto an unknown reality ‘out there’ on the far side. Instead, it can be fully embraced as real reality manifesting itself directly, which we now know is beyond names, words, and stories – the nameless, timeless and unknowable. The notion of religion could become rehabilitated to its original Latin meaning, re-connection (from Latin ‘re-ligio’) with a depth of awareness not found in ordinary waking consciousness. Religion can evoke strong aversion if it is misunderstood as a socio-political organization responsible for providing a collection of dogmas designed to make people feel good and control their attitudes, behaviors, and morals. This is not to say that being part of a community that engages in shared rituals cannot be deeply inspiring. But when we explore the cracks and gaps of our ordinary waking consciousness and begin the journey beyond it towards the development of further awareness modes available to us, religion can move beyond being the depository of thoughts about deeper reality, and instead become a branch of the discipline of mindsight that can teach us how to let real reality be revealed to us, which is what the notion of ‘God’ ultimately points to.

The mirrored door

When we explore ordinary waking consciousness more closely, we quickly come to realize that it contains gaps and cracks. ‘There is something wrong in the state of Denmark’ (Shakespeare). Oedipus is blind to the fact that he is the cause of a plague ravaging Thebes, having unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. We tend to be blind to the fact that our endless suffering cannot be eradicated by improving the nightmare of ordinary waking consciousness. We must wake up from it and doing so is not easy.

The field of consciousness is like a mirrored door we do not recognize as a door. We strut in front of it, endlessly looking at the prison of constructed reality reflected back to us, narcissistically admiring the power of our own constructions without appreciating their limitations and destructive aspects. We do everything we can to push away and ignore the underbelly of existence, which amounts to nothing more than trying to improve the world of nightmares. Strikingly, this also applies to much of the Western mindfulness meditation industry, which for the most part exclusively focuses on aspects of the field of consciousness, depriving us of seeing the mirrored door as a passage that opens to the dormant potential of two further awareness modes we usually never tap into.

I am reminded of a cartoon I saw decades ago in my youth. It depicted the human condition. You saw three obviously unfriendly and disgruntled giants walking in single file, one behind the other, all three of them stooped forward holding their heads at about waist height. On top of them, along their horizontal backs ran an unsteady-looking train track, upon which a tiny passenger train was driving along. You clearly would not have wanted to be in that train, as one of these moody giants could have stood up straight at any moment and thrown the whole train into oblivion. The underbelly of existence is non-existence. We may occasionally touch upon it intellectually, but beyond that, we avoid it like the plague by staying within the ‘safe’ confines of the golden cage of existence, our ordinary waking consciousness.

Everything that exists appears to be coming into existence at some point in time and disappearing out of existence at another point in time. From the perspective of the field of consciousness, everything – and I mean everything – comes and goes, is born and dies, appears and disappears. Even the eternal God of religious institutions imagined to be beyond the cycle of birth and death, exists in endless time, and since time is something that exists, endless or not, it is bound to arise and disappear. In short, from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, death is inevitable, and we mean here the decomposition of our embodied existence. But death is so distasteful that ordinary waking consciousness cleverly designs stories of survival in the form of thoughts we believe in and that seems to make us feel better: The rainbow bridge, paradisiacal places we will rejoin our loved ones, notions of eternal souls, or seeing our loved ones all around us wherever we go in their decomposed chemical form of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, potassium, sodium, etc. as it gets recycled into the natural world. There is nothing wrong with these stories of survival, except that for many people they do not suffice and lead to limited results with regards to their attempts at decreasing suffering in their lives. They miss recognizing the mirrored door as a passage and limit access to the full awareness potential we all have.

Nothingness

The necessary awareness jump we need to take to open the mirrored door is to surrender to annihilation, nullification, or nothingness – arriving at a dead end and falling off the cliff. That is not easy and can create a lot of fear. It is therefore imperative to have the appropriate mind training to take that step without causing harm. In opening that door, we enter the mystery of the numinous introduced above. This mystery is not understood as something otherworldly but in the sense of its Latin roots meaning ‘obscure’. It is about meeting a wholly other aspect of reality never seen before, typically experienced with blank wonder and stupor. It is entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life and evokes a reaction of silence. We begin enlarging our awareness to include the awareness mode of the field of nothingness.

At first, we meet the nullification of the world, during which process we learn to surrender to nothingness. However, for a time nothingness is still seen from the perspective of an enduring self, and therefore continues to partially remain within the field of duality. What that means is that ‘nothing’ still survives as ‘something’ we are aware of. The thing we are learning to surrender to is called ‘nothing’. As we eventually realize that this inevitable nullification of existence also applies to the constructed self, it also dissolves into nothing, and no vantage point remains from which to see nothing as something. At that point the breakthrough to the next most encompassing awareness mode occurs, the field of emptiness.

It is called that way because we then fully realize reality to be as it is, free from our confusion with the constructed maps about reality. There is no attachment left to the constructions of the field of consciousness. This does not mean that we don’t grieve the loss of our loved ones anymore, or that we stop paying our taxes. It simply means that we have stopped seeing existence as fundamental to reality, and instead have come to realize that everything is nameless, timeless potential in perpetual movements of coalescence and decomposition, so that nothing is ever born, and nothing ever dies. There is only movement and transformation, and that is our true identity. As they say in Zen, at the beginning of the journey (as we explore the field of consciousness) a mountain is a mountain (unidimensional view); in the middle of the journey (as we explore the field of nothingness), the mountain ceases to be a mountain (two-dimensional view); at the end of the journey (when the field of emptiness reveals itself), the mountain is again a mountain, but a profoundly different, now three-dimensional view of the mountain. When we started, we were awed by the magic show of the field of consciousness, believing that the magician has superpowers we could be jealous of not having. In the middle, we became disheartened by the realization that these are only tricks and the whole magic we saw was fake (the field of nothingness). In the end, we have been transformed by the power of the performance and can now fully enjoy the magic show, knowing that what we see is caused by a bag of tricks, allowing ourselves to admire the power of these tricks, and knowing that behind it all lies the timeless extraordinariness of the ordinary that is capable of such wonders.

Navigating the numinous

The moment we enter the field of nothingness, fundamental transformations occur, and they are not easy to navigate. Sooner or later, we encounter the fear of giving up our familiar prison walls, and that comes with many painful feelings of meaninglessness, despair, pointlessness, forsakenness, absurdity, sadness, depression, anxiety, and panic. This is the phase of the forty days or forty years in the desert and corresponds to the aspect of the numinous experienced as tremendous (from Latin = ‘awful, dreadful, horrible’). It provokes terror because it presents itself as an overwhelming power causing a profound sense of disturbance as we realize how wildly deluded our sense of reality within the field of consciousness is. We experience a certain shrinking, a sense of inadequacy to cope with such an enormous discovery, followed by deep humility. In Shakespeare’s words: “Under it, my genius is rebuked.”

Once we have worked through the nullification of not only the world but also the self, the second aspect of the numinous presents itself as the field of emptiness appears. It is experienced as fascinating (from Latin = ‘bewitch, charm, dazzle, enchant, captivate, enrapture, enthrall, beguile’). We now find a sense of wonder, awe, and love, of merciful graciousness, and a sense of glory and beauty as an adorable quality. We realize the blessing, redeeming quality, and salvation-bringing power of our transformation through the three awareness modes. As they say in Zen, we find ourselves to be able to be ‘free and easy in the marketplace’, which means experiencing peace and serenity independent of circumstance. This break-out from the field of consciousness through the field of nothingness (“forget about his wretched self”) into the field of emptiness (“God’s world”) is experienced as deeply liberating, calming, grounding, enlivening, and healing, causing suffering to melt like snow in the warm sun of deep self-awareness of reality.

Coda

Through all that, the work of chopping wood and carrying water (Zen) or doing the laundry (Kornfield) begins. This is the lifelong task of living one’s life as an unending process of noticing improvement on our transformative journey through the three awareness modes, inspiring others, and bringing soothing, healing love into this world. The beauty in all this is that it does not require beliefs, gurus, churches, dogmas, miracles, magical thinking, or otherworldly imaginations. All we need is the power of direct, embodied, present-moment lived experience, examined by the shared subjective reality of psychotherapeutic, meditative, contemplative, and philosophical reflective tradition, and grounded by the shared objective reality of science. All we need to do is closely examine our minds, and reality presents itself to us in its full glory, from Golgi to God. That is the greatest miracle I can think of.

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Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.