Dedicated to liberation in all its forms, Deconstructing Yourself is passionate about fearlessly investigating, attempting, and questioning all things to do with awakening, meditation, mindfulness, brain hacking, consciousness, neurofeedback, and more.
Your host Michael W. Taft interviews some of the most interesting thinkers, authors, and teachers around, as well as other offerings. In this hard-hitting, radical, and fun podcast we look at secular post-, non-, un- Buddhism, Vajrayana, nondual Hindu Tantra, philosophy, the neuroscience of the sense of self, neurofeedback and the consciousness hacking movement, aspects of artificial intelligence, entheogens, and much more.
If you’re looking for fresh directions, free from dogma and conformism, think of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast as the radical cafe where you can hear from the most interesting luminaries either from the outside edges of dharma, or a fresh take from more traditional teachers. If you’re interested in more, check out the Deconstructing Yourself website at https://deconstructingyourself.com.
Meditation teacher Shinzen Young and host Michael W. Taft talk about the relationship between mindfulness practice (as it is usually defined) and nondual-type practices (or non-practices, if you like), the way that focusing on the details of experience relates to focusing on awareness itself, micro-sessions & nano-nirvanas, the thinness and lightness of the screen of awareness and much more. Learn more about Shinzen Young at Shinzen.org.
Show Notes
0:25 – Intro
4:12 – How does Advaita/Nonduality relate to Mindfulness?
7:45 – Shinzen defines modern mindfulness and the component parts of contemplative practice (concentration, clarity and equanimity)
9:51 – Michael’s simplified working definitions of mindfulness and advaita
10:37 – Shinzen asserts that mindfulness and advaita converge towards the same thing, under his own understanding of mindfulness
16:08 – How to investigate one’s own awareness through mindfulness; Shinzen’s quadrants of practice 20:50 – Appreciation practice (“note everything”) or “regular mindfulness”
22:54 – The arrow of attention
26:31 – Classical mindfulness in the Burmese tradition: penetrative awareness and working with the arrow of attention
31:48 – Outside time and space: what the arrow of attention reveals
34:06 – Shinzen defines primordial awareness in materialist, reductivist terms: the sound that’s not sound 39:15 – Are nondual experiences externally real, or do they reflect only subjective experience?
45:05 – Shinzen’s conjecture: connectivity vs thingness; cones of association
51:38 – By what criterion is connectivity assumed to be fundamental to reality, not only subjectively experienced?
56:55 – How appreciation and self-inquiry practices converge
1:01:01 – Reconciling the fruits of mindfulness and nonduality: differences in perception and language vs. differences in experience
1:06:25 – Deconstructing the arrow of attention in a nondual setting
1:07:50 – Micro-cessations vs lights-out cessations; the lightness and thinness of the ordinary
1:11:55 – Shinzen’s many-layered experience of cessations; the sphere of experience and the void
1:18:08 – Bigger cessations
1:19:38 – Disambiguations: what does it mean to be feather light and paper thin, and what are the characteristics of micro-cessations?
1:23:56 – The lightness of immediate experience
1:29:30 – Outro
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