PHILOSOPHY
The nature of the self is pure awareness, pure witnessing, unaffected by the presence or absence of knowledge or liking. Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. They exist because you believe yourself born to die. Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person. —Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Full-blown awakening means to notice clearly that everything you experience is a brain-generated virtual representation arising in working memory. —Michael W. Taft
SOURCES OF SUFFERING
Evolution also loads human consciousness with the default operating system of perceptual realism, i.e., things are as they appear: objects and people are materially real, perceiver and perceived are distinct, and a separate self with volition and agency exists.
Maladaptive instincts and naive realism—combined with biopsychosocial trauma, e.g., systems of social and economic oppression, religious shame, physical pain and illness, sexual and psychological abuse—give rise to most forms of human suffering.
ANTIDOTES TO SUFFERING
From Maladaptive Instincts to Equanimous Reponses
Freud theorized that our behavior is marked by Wiederholungszwang, or repetition compulsion: We repeat what is familiar, even though it may be harmful to us. For this reason, we often stay trapped in unhealthy habits, patterns of thought, and relationships. Evolution has optimized our brains to continuously scan for threats and opportunities, but this biological survival mode can lead us to feel anxious, distracted, restless, impulsive, and fearful.
As a result, we can engage in repetitive cycles of behavior that are harmful to ourselves and others. Psychodynamic psychotherapy, which involves bringing unconscious attachment patterns and drives to the light of consciousness, can bring healing awareness to our repetitive cycles so we can begin to build patterns of meaningful change.
Psychedelics can facilitate breakthroughs from maladaptive patterns by depatterning over-worn networks in the brain, allowing for fresh creative connections to be formed. Meditation is also immensely helpful in transforming our relationship to distressing thoughts and feelings from one of distracted reactivity to clarified noticing, presence, and equanimity. These qualities of attention allow us to act with more wisdom and more in accordance with our values, moving from reactivity to responsivity.
From Biopsychosocial Trauma to Integrated Healing
Trauma is ubiquitous and multifarious—taking the forms of oppression, violence, pain, and abuse. And trauma takes its toll at every level of human experience: somatic, intrapsychic, interpersonal, family, group, institutional, sociocultural, and ecological. All of these levels require healing, release, restoration, and balance.
Psychotherapy is ultimately a limited intervention because by itself it cannot produce larger structural and societal changes. But psychotherapy can help an individual to build a healed relationship with their mind and body, and to go forth as a healed and healing presence in their community.
In the mind, trauma often exists as a narrative of irreparable brokenness and inadequacy. Narrative therapy is a powerful modality in which wounding cultural and family stories (“You’re inferior; you’re a failure”) can be recontextualized as fabrications, rather than as truths—thus freeing up space for new growth.
Narrative therapy aligns well with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which emphasizes cognitive defusion: recogizing the nature of self-talk as passing appearances in consciousness, rather than as rigid facts about the self. Cognitive defusion is best practiced during meditation. By watching thoughts and feelings arise and pass nonjudgmentally, we rest as the sky of awareness in which the ever-changing weather appears, instead of identifying with and trying to control the weather.
Meditation also provides opportunities for somatic healing of traumas stored in the body. Shamatha and vipassana techniques can release tension and help us shift from stuckness and avoidance to an embracing and curious nonresistance toward all somatic experience. Metta or lovingkindness practices can awaken the heart to compassion for oneself and others.
Psychedelics can also play a dynamic role in healing from traumas. MDMA in particular is gathering a strong evidence base for treating PTSD. During an MDMA session, increases in oxytocin, prolactin, and serotonin induce feelings of safety, calmness, and connection, while a decrease in amygdala activity dampens fear responses. These neurological changes can increase the effectiveness of psychotherapy and accelerate healing by allowing trauma to be processed without triggering overwhelming fight-flight-freeze responses.
From Perceptual Realism to Nonduality
The illusory experience of self and world as materially real and dualistic serves the survival purpose of keeping us from being struck by a bus, for example; however, if it is our only mode of operation and we do not grasp the illusion, then we can experience ourselves as separate, alone, and incomplete—and experience the world and others as threatening.
Theoretically, there may be an underlying material world beyond the pale of consciousness, but we never have experiential access to that world, because our entire experience unfolds subjectively in the luminous realm of consciousness. Since we have no direct empirical evidence of matter, its very existence is a kind of mythology. The entire perceived universe and its contents—planets, galaxies, plants, animals, people, thoughts, sensations, memories, bodies, brains—are all just constructions and formations within consciousness, which is ultimately aconceptual and without a center or perceiver.
Nondual awakening—the experiential realization that all experience is unfolding in and as boundless consciousness—dissolves the perceived solidity of the self, as well as the perceived boundary between self and world, often leading to a tremendous sense of freedom, unity, stillness, and wonder.
But having a threshold-crossing moment of recognition is only the beginning, and it is ultimately nothing special, just another experience arising in consciousness that immediately fades into memory. All experience is inherently nondual, so even a mystical moment of recognition is no more nondual, wondrous, or ineffable than taking out the trash or brushing your teeth. The division between mystical experience and ordinary experience is yet another dualistic construction of the ego.
After the recognition of nonduality follows the process of integrating awakening into every moment of experience. And there are many pitfalls along the way. A common one is numbing out from emotional reactions and challenges in a process John Welwood calls “spiritual bypassing.” Additionally, when the boundary of self and world collapses, some can get stuck in the nihilism of “I am nothing,” whereas others get attached to the grandiose narcissism of “I am everything.”
The middle path between these two dualistic poles entails noticing that awareness is effortlessly manifesting on its own, and that “you” don’t have control over any “thing.” Negating the self to nothing or inflating the self to everything are still unconscious efforts by the ego to maintain control and to defend itself against the fundamental inconceivability of awareness, which is perceived as a threat.
The recognition of nonduality is unpredictable. Some people report spontaneous awakenings without any prior practice, whereas others meditate for thousands of hours and never awaken. Early research suggests that nondual awakening is correlated with specific neurological patterns that may someday be comprehensively mapped, and perhaps even generated on-demand using ultrasonic or other forms of neuromodulation.
In the meantime, meditation and psychedelics appear to be the most reliable and time-honored tools for releasing humans from the grip of the separate self. Neuroscience research demonstrates an overlap in both meditative and psychedelic states involving the reduction of activity in the Default Mode Network (DMN), which is responsible for self-referential, ego-driven mind chatter.
When the DMN hushes, the boundary of self and world softens, and glimpses of nonduality are more readily available. Psychedelics can also provide a taste of nondual phenomenology. For example, a sense of bodily dissolution or other hallucinatory sensations can reveal how all phenomena in consciousness are ultimately malleable constructs without any durable, solid existence.
Nondual awakening is just one part of a larger arc of development that also includes psychological healing and social action. Recognizing nonduality is not the end, but the new beginning of a more honest and intimate embrace of life in all its messiness. This embrace includes learning to let go of fear-based patterns of defensiveness and control, and to act with moment-by-moment compassionate wisdom in our crisis-ridden world.
MACRO-HEALING: FROM EGOISM TO ECOISM
All of human distress is ultimately rooted in identification with the body and the fear of death. This is the bad dream of dualistic experience. Phenomenologically, awakening is like becoming lucid to the dream, realizing the luminous virtual nature of all phenomena in experience, including those constructed into “self” and “world.” Each moment of lucidity can bring with it waves of immense peace: the ultimate relief of waking up from the ultimate nightmare.
We are not the body. We are the boundless consciousness in which the sensations of “body” arise. Awareness cannot experience the end of awareness, and so “death,” as we ordinarily conceptualize and fear it, is merely a collection of thoughts and sensations arising in the timeless now about a non-event in an imaginary future.
In social work, we talk about making social change at the individual/micro level, the institutional/mezzo level, and the structural/macro level. It is no understatement to say that our world is currently facing a political, economic, and ecological crisis. My personal belief is that the ultimate root of this crisis is the ego’s identification with the body, which leads to patterns of annihilation anxiety, control, domination, and disconnection from ourselves and from nature.
I’m heartened by the psychedelic renaissance and the new flowering of consciousness that extends an invitation to shift our ethos from destructive egoism to a larger socio-ecological interconnectedness.
As a coach and therapist, I work at the individual level, but all systems are interconnected. My hope and personal mission is for my healing work with clients to send out small ripples of peace, presence, and wakefulness to help heal our world at mezzo and ultimately macro levels as well.