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nondual miracle

The Miracle of Existence

Try to find to whom the experiences are happening. All you can find are sensations arising in space and feelings moving through timeless openness. All of it is the appearance. What knows the appearance? And notice the vast, spacious, stillness, silence and darkness that’s right there. It’s right within every experience, and around every experience, and together with every experience. You don’t have to imagine it or visualize it or anything like that. It’s right there. There’s no avoiding it.

nondual liberation

Self-Liberation of Thought and All Experience

And if you sit with this for a little while, you may notice something odd, which is that the flow of body sensation in space is not really very different than the flow of thought in space. They’re not exactly the same thing, but they’re not that different either. And you may notice the same thing about sound arising, or sight happening, and experience all together.

Stay with the Grief

Stay with the Grief 

There are important opportunities coming up. Midterm elections, marches, strikes, school board meetings, conversations with neighbors. It’s going to be sad, and enraging, and terrifying—even disgusting at times—but our practice has trained us to handle all of these feelings and keep our heart open and our head clear. And an open heart with a clear head and the willingness to take action is not nothing.

Pranab

Michael Taft Interviewed by Pranab

Host Michael Taft is interviewed by Pranab Sachithanandan about Michael’s Stack Model for deconstructing sensory experience, his “adapter kit” for accessing nondual Vajrayana methods without years of preliminaries, why mantra and visualization are legitimate samadhi tools, how depth of practice maps across the sense gates, a chronic pain patient on a morphine pump who found relief through meditation, the humanities as qualia training, why the “Buddha industrial complex” leaves out people who don’t fit a single tradition, and the power of building sangha outside it.

Pointing Out

Deep Relaxation into Nondual Openness

And so to come back is to open up, not to reawaken in your prison. There is no prison, you know, when just dropping the box drops the bars to the cell. So, keep coming back, keep coming back, keep coming back, keep coming back. And if you do that enough, you’ll start to notice something really weird, which is—you’re actually never not back. You just sort of got distracted from it, but you were always there. And that might seem obvious as a concept, but as an experience, it’s weird, because you realize that, even going down the rabbit hole, even getting lost, even getting sucked into what we think of as distraction, is happening in total awakeness. And so what’s going on there, when you start to recognize that—and this is not prescriptive, I’m not saying do this—I’m saying this will start to happen on its own, where you’re like, “oh, I’m never not there.” Then, what’s really occurred is you’ve switched out of imagining you’re the mind itself. You switched out of imagining that you are just a physical being. You switched out imagining that you are a robot on a rock, and instead you’ve started to recognize you’re actually awakeness itself in which all this is appearing, and that is, at least in part, coming to wisdom. Right? You’re starting to see things as they really are.

nondual energy

Nondual Energy in the Central Channel

From this place of awake space, uninvolved in thought, breathe in and feel the energy coming into the belly, and making the belly quite energized on the in-breath. And then, on the out-breath, instead of going out the front of your head, the breath goes out the top of your head, about a foot up, and becomes pure awakeness. So breathe into the belly, energizing the belly, energizing and relaxing at the same time. Warm, radiant. And then, we breathe out the top of the head, above the head, it’s like a bright sun of total awakeness. Feel that powerful, radiant, warm, energy in the belly. And then it becomes luminous, bright, clear awakenness, awakening mind. It has a light above the head. You can just feel that, or if you’re good at visualizing, you can do that, too. If you want to, begin with breathing in through the belly, and you can just use the seed syllable OM there, breathing in OM, and then, as you breathe out, up the central channel into this light of awakening above the head, use the seed syllable Hreem.

nondual meditation

Awake to Your Own Awakeness

Who or what is it that’s making an effort, or trying to do something, or trying to find something, or trying to see or hear something? What is efforting? What is it that is doing the effort? Find it. It seems to be really obvious until you actually try to pin it down, and then it vanishes. It just vanishes, and you’re left with wide awake presence. Simple, natural, conscious, spaciousness, in which everything is experiencing itself. Nothing fixates, nothing congeals, nothing crystallizes. It’s just open.

Pointing Out

Pointing Out through Metaphor

Sit like the sky, because our actual natural mind is spacious. Sit like a mountain, because it’s stable. Sit like the sun, because it’s bright and luminous, clear and sit like the ocean, because it’s peaceful, relaxed, deep, right? These are just pointers at what’s always there. Okay? And then, at first, we set the mind aside because that’s all the churning fantasy, right? 

nondual wholeness

The Paradox of Wholeness

The thinking mind is not separate from the still silent spaciousness – they co-arise. It’s only skillful means to temporarily pretend that we can separate them. But in a deeper way, we notice they are never separate. The still silent spacious mind gives rise to the thinking mind. The thinking mind is just the co-creative joy of the silent awakeness. They’re never separate. Notice that now.

Awakened Nature

Your Awakened Nature Is Right There

Good. Now notice what’s underneath the stillness or inside the stillness. There is no ground there at all. It’s not that it’s nothing, because it’s not nothing, but there’s no thing there to hold onto. It’s spacious, it’s boundless. It’s spacious and boundless in every direction. There’s no floor, so that, in this stillness, and in this openness, you can’t find anything to hang on to at all.