Free‑association, subtle energy, and intimations of spirituality

This talk was originally presented at the zoom conference hosted by “Confer” on 14^th November, 2020. The title of the conference was “Free energy, free association, and free spirit in psychotherapy. My presentation was — somewhat obviously — offered at this time when Karl J. Friston’s so-called “free energy principle” of brain functioning (which was launched around 2010) was coming into the apex of its influence … accordingly, this paper articulates some of my misgivings.

Abstract: As we use certain sorts of methods – for example, free-associative speaking and listening, meditation and movement – to explore all that occurs in our “mind” and in our “body,” we find depths that are surprising, often terrifying and often enriching. This is a wellspring of meaningfulness that takes us behind, beneath or beyond what may be encapsulated in our everyday modes of interpretation or even in the most sophisticated representations of our self, of others and of the universe we inhabit. This talk will discuss some of these ideas in relation to psychoanalytic and spiritual practices — perhaps with an excursion into concerns and questions about the applicability of neuroscientific findings and theories to the lived‑experience of these practices.

Text: The scope of these conversations today is vast and multidirectional such that, the closer I came to the time of this presentation, I became somewhat bewildered as to what I wanted to say on the bases both of my own personal experience and of the trajectory of my studies. To approach these topics comprehensively would be an act of encyclopedic scholarship, which — even if ventured by a polymath of inordinate erudition and ambition — would inevitably be slanted by his or her cultural context and personal experience. I am far from such an individual, so it seems even more salient that I briefly say, so to speak, “where I am coming from.” Emerging from a Quaker adolescence, I became enamored with certain aspects of dharma praxis as I entered adulthood and subsequently experimented with various forms of meditation — and yoga — from diverse lineages (Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh), along with various excursions into pupilage with Sufi and Daoist teachers. My principal training has been in the vajrayāna, with its modified and amplified practices of vipassanāmeditation that emphasize the embodied and esoteric character of spiritual discipline (specifically cultivating an awareness of subtle energy movements inside the body and outside of it).⁽ⁱ⁾ It is in this tradition that I was ordained as a sort of lay monk in late 1990s. Alongside all of this, a depressive breakdown as I entered my twenties led me to psychoanalysis, in which I trained and graduated in the 1980s. I have offered psychoanalytic treatment to adult individuals since 1975 and have been a Training and Supervising Analyst with the International Psychoanalytic Association for the past twenty‑four years. That said, within the world of psychoanalysis I am a maverick, not readily identifiable as belonging to any particular school, camp or fold, but somewhat known for my emphasis on the significance of an ongoing commitment to the free‑associative method as the since qua non of psychoanalytic praxis (which, by the way, Sigmund Freud also asserted several times in his published writings, but which has often been obfuscated or misunderstood in the course of his discipline’s history).

Having thus introduced what I bring to today’s conversations, I propose to offer you some abbreviated musings around three questions:

First, What is Spirituality?

Second, What might Psychoanalysis be?

Third, Does, or in what sense does, Neuroscience impact on psychoanalysis (in my sense of the praxis as a spiritual‑existential discipline) or, for that matter, on spiritual practices in general?

Let me offer some thoughts about the first question:

Interestingly, “spirituality” is not an autonomous item in Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion (spirit possession, spiritual discipline and spiritual guide are each featured, but not spirituality as such, except in the specific context of Christianity). But surveying the various ways in which this term is used, it almost always seems to entail a process of becoming, a movement in which living human beings are involved, are advised to be involved, or are called to be involved. In Judaism, think of the halakhic way with its 613 minyan hamitzvot, which — despite the legalistic interpretations to which they have been subjected — are foundationally ethical obligations. In Christianity, consider Yeshua’s farewell prescription, via et veritas et vita, “the way, the truth, and the life” as recorded by John, which is the belief that is fundamental to — for example — Paul’s ethical inspiration in his famous “Letter to the Corinthians.” In Islam, note that shari’ah (derived from both the Holy Qur’ān and theḤadīth)as the law we are admonished to follow, literally means “the way to the watering hole.” In East Asian traditions, dao is the term for “the route” both — as Lao Tzu taught — to the holistic natural order of the universe and to the realization of each individual’s potential. In the multifarious dharmic traditions of South Asia, some version of a threefold mārga (in Pali, magga) or path is specified (action, meditation, devotion). More specifically, Buddhism — in its various Mahāyāna lineages — teaches us bodhicaryāvatāra, the path toward an ideal of perfection.

If spirituality is a mode of becoming, it is legitimate to ask: Toward what? Here certain sorts of telos, to borrow Aristotle’s terminology, are invoked — spirituality is a movement toward the “supreme end of human endeavour,” which is often also expressed not only as telos but also as a return or recovery of an original condition held by humanity in the semblance of the one‑and‑only “God” (Elohim, Abba, Allah) or as a core of our inner “godliness.” Here there are significant divergences.

The “supreme end” may be, so to speak, external to the individual’s life passage, and usually is conceived as such in the Abrahamic traditions. There is the Jewish eschatology of the “end of days” (aḥarit ha-yamim), Christianity’s promise of “coming to join with the Father” through belief, the Qur’ānic descriptions of ākhirah, a finalitywherein the conduct of one’s life will be judged.

But the “supreme end” may also be, in some sense, internal to the individual, even to the individual understood as erotically embodied. Recall that in the Gospel of Thomas, Yeshua is reported to have said “The Kingdom is inside you and it is outside you” and also “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you”). Recall that the mystical 13^th Century Sufi poet, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī advises us to “remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you.” And the tantric sage, Sarahapāda (also known as Rāhulbhadra), who left his studies at Nalanda University to find enlightenment through consorting with a lower caste woman, teaches us that “within my body are all the sacred places of the world, and the most profound pilgrimage I can ever make is within my own body.”

This inward directedness of spiritual praxis is particularly characteristic of traditions that are, or can be conceived as, a‑theistic, in which it is almost always tied to a vision of the interconnectedness or infinitely “dependent origination” of all beings — past, present and future (for example, this is extensively articulated in the Buddhist doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda). Despite the plethora of devotional deities in what is commonly called Hinduism, ātman (the essential individual “self,” as articulated in Vedantic, Jain and Buddhist approaches in the theravāda lineage) and anātman (the essential individual “non‑self,” as the focus of Mahāyāna practices) are manifestations of Brahman (which, under various terminologies, is a metaphysical, ontological, axiological and teleological notion for the binding unitary force or essence underlying all the diversities that exist in the universe). In an important sense, “God” (as a suprahuman or supernatural figural image), the highest power to whom an individual might pray, and with whom a worthy individual might one day meet, is not referenced. Somewhat similarly, without such a figurable “God” (or any tangible deities), the Dao celebrates the concession of the nameable to the holisitic flow of that which cannot be named. Likewise the “supreme end” of Buddhist spiritual practice, at least as taught by Gautama, is the realization of our inner Buddhahood and, even when it has supposedly been full attained (as in the notion of samyaksaṃbodhi, or in Pāli sammāsaṃbodhi), this path is notably for its ethicality and, in a certain sense, for its practicality (as Jack Kornfield quipped, “after enlightenment, the laundry” — samyaksaṃbodhi is not a transcendence from the quotidian).

More of all of this — at least indirectly — when we come to speak of a radicalized mode of psychoanalysis. But before we go there, three points might be noted.

First, there is wide variation in opinions as to the need for mentorship on the path of spiritual discipline — the role of the Rabbi, the Pater Spiritualis, the Imām or Shaykh, the Arhat, Guru or spiritual guide — and as to the character and conditions of this role. Is the psychoanalyst an educator, a therapist, or merely the facilitator of a process who acts as the gentle, nonviolent adversary to the patient’s resistances to this process? Also note that in some traditions the guide may not exist as a physical presence, but rather the hallucination of a benevolent celestial intermediary, an angelic spirit. The guide may even be a text, as exemplified by the Granth Sahib being held as the last guru, the eternal Guru´s Bani or spiritual authority, in Sikhism. Yet in psychoanalysis, the presence of the practitioner is essential — here I would emphatically add that no one, who believes the discipline can be practiced by the book, actually understands the depths and the power of psychoanalytic praxis (for very sound and profound reasons, to be a psychoanalyst requires, first and foremost, being a psychoanalytic patient).

Second, we need to be mindful of a possibly crucial distinction between spiritual lineages that prioritize “right” action and/or attested belief and/or devotional ritual on the path of spirituality, versus those that emphasize meditational or contemplative praxis. One way or another, the former approaches involve the promulgation and adherence to moral codes, whereas the latter engage a process of ethicality. There may be “spirituality” without conviction in relation to “right” action, belief or devotion, but there is surely no spirituality divorced from an ethical momentum towards beings that are in the process of becoming. I am aware that this distinction is both complex and controversial, but if one lacks dogmatic belief in a particular version of the supreme, it surely becomes feasible, indeed prudent, to measure spiritual practice in terms of its ethicality, rather than the orthodoxies of religious teachings with their contested versions of the absolute and their competing assertions about morality. This becomes especially significant when we consider how it might be possible to consider psychoanalysis as an amoral — nonjudgmental — praxis, the necessary ethicality of which inheres to the way in which it opens discourse to listen to that which is other and otherwise. Such a spiritual and existential praxis contrasts perhaps with the ways both in which religious institutions invariably propound rules of conduct and/or belief, and in which educators and therapists cannot but adhere to the reproduction of their moral and ideological contexts.

A third and final note: In what I have said thus far, spirituality has been framed as an individual movement of becoming. As an aside that I do not think is directly pertinent to the consideration of psychoanalysis — although here I am going to open up grounds for potential disagreement — some indigenous spiritual traditions conceived of spirituality communally in a manner that is quite unfamiliar to the North Atlantic and many Asian hegemonies, and here I am thinking specifically of spiritual belief in African and Oceanic cultures, although these proclivities are to be found within every continent. In what follows, however, I will touch on the communality of subtle energies that might pertain to the psychoanalytic “duet‑for‑one” and, by implication, Sigmund Freud’s own clandestine beliefs in telepathy.

So let us now turn to the second question as to what psychoanalysis might be:

In my 1993 book, I argued that psychoanalysis must be considered not so much within the frames of traditional shamanic healing or contemporary therapeutic techniques, but rather as incorporating and going beyond that which is effected by shamanic or psychotherapeutic practices. This argument was based on a 1984 book, in which I tried to demonstrate that a de‑repressive praxis (which includes and goes beyond the reappropriation of the suppressed) cannot be comprehended within the assumptions of subjectivistic, objectivistic, or hermeneutic epistemologies. In a more recent trilogy — three books published by Routledge in 2013, 2016 and 2019 — I amplified my previous thesis that psychoanalysis is foremost and fundamentally a spiritual‑existential discipline, by arguing further that it is an ontoethical discourse (a notion admirably discussed by Elizabeth Grosz).⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

That is to say, Freud’s account of psychic life cannot be accommodated within the egological logic of phenomenology, within the conventions of subject/object relations in which the former accrues knowledge that is correspondently, coherently or pragmatically about an object domain, or within the rhetorical traditions of hermeneutics that require language to be seen as — in Martin Heidegger’s words — the “house of being.” The brevity of this presentation disallows any rehearsal of these arguments.

Suffice it to suggest that the discovery of free‑associative discourse leads Freud to conclude:

First, that there is a repression‑barrier that ruptures the psyche (partitioning the representational, whether conscious or in some sense suppressed, from energetic traces of meaningfulness, held in our erotic embodiment, that actively and disruptively impact our representational theatre);

Second, that these “energetic traces of meaningfulness” are ubiquitous throughout our embodiment, albeit (Freud believed, under the influence of Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois‑Reymond, and others) contained endogenously within the monad’s body and operating “between” our psychology and our biology (more about this when we come to the challenges of contemporary neuroscience, although we might note in passing that Helmhotliz’ “mission” was to advance physiological science against extant philosophies of vitalism);

Third, that the “time of the mind” is not linear, but a pluritemporal weaving the historicity and historicality of representations together with (by way of the processes of Nachträglichkeit) an unconscious that is, in Dominique Scarfone’s terminology, always “unpast”; and…

Fourth, that these three free‑associative discoveries (of repression, of polysexuality, and of pluritemporality in psychic life) entail oedipality as a statement as to how, universally, the repression‑barrier is the intrapsychic inscription of the incest taboo, which may (or may not) be an ethological “modal action pattern” (with “innate releaser mechanisms”), but which is certainly deeply inherent to the symbolic structuration of the representationality of language.

So let us consider the psychoanalytic fundament of free‑associative discourse, not as a data‑gathering technique in the service of a primarily epistemological endeavour, but as an ontoethical praxis of being‑becoming that opens the patient’s discourse not only to representations that are other than those which are readily accessible to reflection, but also to a meaningfulness that is otherwise that the representable. This brings us to free‑association as working and playing with the erotic energies of our embodiment, and also perhaps to intimations of the sublime that occurs — to borrow somewhat illegitimately from the title of Clayton Crockett’s 2007 book — within the interstices of our thinking.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾

If we can relinquish the conviction that is widespread and — I believe — profoundly mistaken that the “aim” of free‑association is to arrive at interpretations then we can consider its spiritual momentum as a form of contemplation or meditation (here I am not going to dwell on the common confusions of these two terms). Again for the sake of brevity, let us sidestep those methods such as the recitation of a mantra or shingon (in the Japanese tradition), as well as the sāman, musical chant or use of specific vibrational sound (such as the ritual use of the didjeridu), all of which aim to induce what might be called an altered state of consciousness in the service of spiritual movement. Let us also skip over the fashionable techniques of guided visualization (although we may find it has some profound links to free‑association in terms of its erotic embodiment), but I will bypass visualization, that is, either as an avowedly spiritual practice or as a katathym‑imaginative therapy (which, by the way, has been shown to yield beneficial effects on the psychoimmunological system). Rather, I will focus what seems to me to be free‑association’s closest kin, vipassanā meditation, and let us now sketchily consider the relations between them.

Both vipassana and free‑association (in the specific way I have written about its significance) are anti‑narratological, in the sense that they cultivate some sort of a deconstructive wariness about the practitioner — meditator or patient — getting attached to the stories that tend to assail our consciousness. Thus, unlike the North Atlantic practices of “waiting worship” or Holy Communion in the manner of Quakers, in which a community sits in silence until a member speaks the word of God from within, vipassanā and free‑association involve significantly different methods of listening. In vipassanā, which developed out of both Theravadā and Mahāyāna traditions, one typically sits comfortably with the spine vertically aligned, legs positioned so that energies gather around the pelvic girdle and perineum, the jaw neither tucked down nor pulled up, and the eyes closed. One then directs consciousness — perhaps it would be more precise to say “awareness” as this is not consciousness in the reflective sense — to follow the rhythm of the in‑breath and the out‑breath. Inevitably, especially if one is not yet adept in this method, one soon drifts into narratological daydreaming and, when this happens, one is encouraged not to admonish oneself, but gently to redirect one’s awareness back to the breath. What often occurs — at least as one becomes more adept at this strange method — is that the “narratological imperative” (as I called it in my 1993 book) gradually loses its grip on our consciousness and reflectivity recedes. With this, there is often the experience of an awareness of eery images and feelings of space opening within — perhaps more precisely an experience of spatiotemporal expansiveness, and with this an awareness of renewed movements of subtle energy usually but not exclusively along the axis of the main chakras occur (as are more compellingly stimulated by practices such as kuṇḍalinī yoga. Sometimes, almost as a defence against this kinesis of energies within, dissociative phenomena are reported, but this is not the specific “aim” of the practice; if anything, this freeing of energies within and without the meditator’s erotic embodiment is indeed the“aim” of the practice (I put “aim” in quotation marks because this is, in an important sense, what has been called a “pathless path”). With ongoing commitment to vipassanā practice, there is usually reported not only a pervasive calming, but also a profound and energizing process of “realization” (sometimes called “insight,” which is confusing given the psychoanalytic equation of insight with interpretation). This is often framed as a realization of self and universe as matters of impermanence (anicca) and of the ubiquitous nature of suffering (duḥkha, in Palidukkha), as well as the non‑self (anātman, in Pali anattā) or emptiness (śūnyatā, in Palisuññatā) of our existence. This might be considered the sublime that greets us at the interstices of every thought and of every breath, its realization approached by having the stream‑of‑consciousness follow the breath and relinquish its attachment to thinking in the ordinary sense.

In the classic method of free‑associating, by which I mean a praxis far more specific that the widespread definition of this procedure merely as a matter of “free talking” or “uncensored story‑telling,” one lies as comfortably as possible, with the spine horizontally, legs and pelvic girdle positioned loosely (approximately in the haṭha yoga position of śavāsana or “corpse pose”), the head resting on a cushion such that the jaw is neither tucked in or thrown back, and the eyes preferable closed or unfocused upon a blank ceiling. All this in the presence of a qualified psychoanalyst who listens. In this presence, one is invited to speak aloud the stream‑of‑consciousness. This is, of course, an impossibility. Not only is this stream multileveled and volatile such that it outpaces our capacity to vocalize it (whether in words or other utterances), but also resistances to its vocalization are immediately encountered.

Resistance (Freud’s Widerstände) is a clinical term that has come — most regrettably — to have pejorative connotations. But in one sense, resistances are effectively our egotism’s assurance against the realization of a certain sort of energetic experience of spatiotemporal expansiveness — a movement of the subtle energies of our being‑becoming that intimate the ultimate vacuity of all the stories we construct about self and other. Such an intimation is not epistemologically proveable, rather it comprises an ontoethical awareness. Both the patient and the psychoanalyst listen both to the flow and to the interruptions in the flow of the former’s free‑associative speaking, but it is the latter’s role, as a sort of spiritual facilitator, not to confront the patient’s resistances in any adversarial fashion, but rather to address them in such a way as to invite the patient to relinquish them — to invite them into their dissolution. Almost invariably, in this free‑associative mode, the patient’s embodied sensations “join in the conversation” (to use Freud’s words about his patient Elisabeth von R). The patient’s awareness opens to what are experienced as movements of embodied erotic energy. In a 1913 paper, published by the International Forum of Psychoanalysis, I suggested specific methods that invite the patient to breathe into, or to visualize breathing into, these embodied messages and, very frequently, this is profoundly opening of further movements of free‑associative freeing.

Obviously, there is more to psychoanalysis than this. There is the “workplay” of a transferential relationship of unparalleled intimacy, safety and freedom (as Adam Limentani articulated it). The significance of this, as transference, is — I believe — that although it is intense and passionate on both sides of the relationship, the “duet‑for‑one” maintains some sort of consciousness of, in the words of Leonard Cohen (although he was referring to democracy), “the feel that this ain’t exactly real, or it’s real but it ain’t exactly there.” My central thesis here is that free‑association is a mutual experience of freeing, that it involves subtle energies, and that in this it must be appreciated as spiritual‑existential praxis.

Clearly, there are some crucial differences between vipassanā practice and free‑associative discourse. With the former, one notices the pull toward subvocal thinking or narratological daydreaming (for want of a better term) and then refocuses one’s “attention” yet without this being an act of studious concentration (the writings of Jonardon Ganeri are helpful in sustaining such distinctions). In the course of this, meditators often report a shift from narrative thinking to visualization, particularly in the expansion of spatiotemporal awareness of what is within. By contrast, there is a double significance to free‑associative discourse being vocalized aloud and in the presence of a free‑associative listener who is adept at addressing the resistances to ongoing free‑association — an emphasis on addressing the impediments to further meditational movement. There is much that could be said about this, but — in short — I believe there are some important differences between an endeavour that seeks to release oneself from the imprisonment of narrative and one that seeks more intentionally to address the impediments to such release.

Let us now consider how neuroscientific findings might impact these considerations:

There are three issues around which our conversations might revolve. First: The question as to what we mean by “energy.” Second: The thorny question of translatability — or more precisely the hiatus in translatability — between the discourse of lived‑experience and that of neuroscientific findings (data and plausible hypotheses). Third: The equally prickly, but vital, question of what we mean by something being “free.” I am going to await the proceedings of the 14^th November to present my ideas around these issues, but in anticipation:

1. Is there room for scepticism around the easy way in which contemporary science has — since Claude Shannon’s pioneering paper of 1948 — equated information with energy? It is noteworthy that Freud subverted many of the metaphysical binaries that have governed science since its conversion from (as Alexandre Koyré described it) scientia contemplativa to scientia active and operativa. That is, the revolutionary conversion that occurred — depending on how you frame it — in the course of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries in the North Atlantic regions and that, by the 18^th and 19^th Centuries seemed to have definitively moved humanity from spectator of, to master over, nature with the hegemony of mechanical‑causal explanation and consequently the impressive rise of technology. I have wanted to examine the way Freud was not only seminal in bringing this mode of science to the examination of psychic life (as the “biologist of the mind” from Frank Sulloway to Mark Solms), but more radically as harbinger of an implosion of the metaphysics, the analytico‑referential epistēmē of the modern era. As we well know, Freud challenges cherished dichotomies such as normal/abnormal or rational/irrational, but is it not also possible that there is also an overlooked challenge to our binarism of material and immaterial — an ontoethical challenge to the foundation of epistemological enterprises?

“Energy” is an odd notion. Jennifer Coopersmith has diligently and entertainingly tracked is history (within the North Atlantic purview) from René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz to Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman, and she concludes with an interesting riff on the problematics of its definition. She writes:

“In one sentence, energy is: the ceaseless jiggling motion, the endless straining at the leash, even in an apparently empty space, the rest mass and the radiation, the curvature of spacetime, the foreground activity, the background hum, the sine qua non.”^(iv)

What interest me is the possibility that the precepts of the analytico‑referential epistēmē have systematically precluded consideration of a mode of subtle energy that is not demonstrable, yet in some way palpable within our lived‑experience. I am aware that this can be dismissed as an anachronistic return to vitalism.^(v) That is, rather equivalent to some sort of hopeful/hopeless assertion of string theory in the face of loop quantum gravity. But, every indigenous culture that has been studied has propounded a notion of subtle energies that would seem to defy ostensible evidence: prānā in the sanātana dharmic traditions of South Asia, qi or ch’i in the daoist traditions of East Asia, lom in the sen‑sib system of Southeast Asia, and it has many other names all over the world (in ancient European doctrines as much as in North American, South American and Oceanic cultures). I am still open to the idea that this is what Freud was intimating when he wrote in 1913 about psychic energy by asserting that “we cannot avoid ‘Trieb‘ as a boundary notion for what mediates the psychological and the biological … psychoanalysis operates in a realm between psychology and biology.” Could this not indicate something more ontoethically significant than a Markov Blanket (specified by abstract mathematical principles that are impressive, but in a sense entirely without support in terms of lived‑experience)? After all, Freud accepted telepathy, albeit in a clandestine manner, and thus he betrayed his Helmholtzian convictions in the endogenous operation of energy, calling into question the interoceptive and exteroceptive division.

2. The notion of subtle energies can, but does not necessarily have to, be taken to imply the existence of a “soul” dissociable from our erotic embodiment. As Margaret Boden discussed so admirably in her study of the wonky trajectory of William McDougall’s theories about human “instincts,” one can accept the stance of empirical reductionism, without accepting logical reductionism.^(vi) Indeed, for empirical science this is probably the only acceptable — parsimonious — position. Empirical reductionism merely implies that the mind has to have some form of material substrate; no psychic life without the operations of neurology. However, logical reductionism implies that the operations of the mind and those of the body must be intertranslatable; while this aligns with the ambitions of some over‑zealous neuroscientists, it is not a tenable position. Modes of discourse do not have to be intertranslatable in the way that French and isi‑Zulu (perhaps) are. Indeed, as I have suggested, the viability of psychoanalysis depends upon the notion of hiatus or rupture.

In this regard, notions such as “correlation” and “concomitancy” become slippery. Of course, it can be shown that altered states involve changes in brain functioning; here I am thinking of the remarkable research on brain functions during meditation (for example, the studies by Ritchie Davidson and many others).^(vii) But this does not mean that data about neural networks can be translated into the narration of representationality. Here the fashionable appeal of “neuropsychoanalysis” to the philosophy of “dual monism” (based on a questionable reading of Baruch de Spinoza’s Ethics, published posthumously in 1677) is legerdemain. To argue that mind and brain are “two aspects” of one recondite entity — as if they are like Portugese and Punjabi, emerging from a common proto‑linguistic stock. My point here is that such precepts pre-empt the very rupturing of lived‑experience that psychoanalysis exposes … granted, there are viable arguments around this point, but only if one assumes the unassailable virtues of Ockham’s Razor.

3. The term “free” conjoins the topics of today’s conversations. I have written about “freedom” from many points of view — but wisely left most of these scribbling unpublished. In the context of our title, “free energy, free association, free spirit,” it may have more inspirational value than substance. Sorry.

Over the years, I have tried to review the extensive North Atlantic debates about the notion, from the Greeks onwards, including the famous discussions from Erich Fromm to Isaiah Berlin about the difference between freedom from and freedom to. I have also tried to review South Asian philosophies on the topic, which tend to assert the inherency of freedom to existence itself. That is, freedom and determinism reconciled and united in the authentic ontological Being‑Becoming (in capitals) of the Supreme Ahaṁ Brahmāsmi, which is celebrated in the mahāvākyāni — the sayings of the Upaniṣad — and elsewhere. There are, as others have pointed out, intriguing connections here between ancient doctrine and contemporary physics. However, my rather irreverent (and, in all likelihood, philosophically unsound) conclusion is that it is, from the standpoint of lived‑experience, meaningless to speak of freedom as a noun. It is not, however, meaningless to speak of freeing as verb. Here, I think, spirituality and psychoanalysis have something profound about which to converse or converge. However, I remain cautious about the use of “free” in the fascinating mathematics of “free energy principles” — if for no other reason than that I am uncertain, perhaps confused, about its ontoethical implications.

i⁽⁾Vipassanā as such — independent of the vajrayāna — resurfaced or became more prevalent in Theravada Buddhism of South and Southeastern Asia in the medieval era, although it is traced back 2,500 years, as described in the Satipaṭṭhāna and Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutras, the “discourses on mindfulness” taught by Gautama. Its method was elaborated by various scholars in the Vimuttimagga (“the path of freedom, written in the 1^st Century CE) and the Visuddhimagga (“the path of purification,” written in the 4^th Century CE).