Nondual Meditation
I’m going to lead an hour-long guided meditation, which you are invited to come along with me. On the other hand, if you don’t want to do it, then just use this time in a group meditation to do your own meditation, or—and this is kind of the blended model, you follow me in the guidance until you reach a spot that you like, and then just stay there while I move on with the rest of the guidance. You stay there, and just keep doing that. All of these things are fine. What you do in the privacy of your own mind is your own business. I will offer a guided meditation if you want it. Other than that, if you’re seated on the floor, and you’re not used to being on the floor for an hour, it might get really uncomfortable. I’d rather you, instead of trying this out for the first time, and doing floor pretzels the whole time, you might want to just get in a chair. So, I’m offering that. Other than that, let’s begin.
Very first thing I’d like you to do is just drop everything, and then look at what’s left. Check-in with what it’s like to be you right now. How your body feels, how your emotions are doing, how your mind is. We’re not really meditating on it, you’re just noticing it. How’s it going in there? It’s not a question to answer good or bad, instead, you answer the question by looking. What’s it like to be you right now? Look. Look—feel your body, feel your emotions, think your thoughts, and just notice what that’s like, without trying to change them, judge them, control them, make them go away, make them sacred, make them anything. We’re just noticing what they’re like. We’re just being there with them, with no agenda to change them at all. Even though we are not changing our thinking, we’re letting it do whatever it wants.
To the best of your ability, don’t really engage with thinking, just let the body be there, let the emotions be there, let the thoughts be there. We’re simply allowing, allowing, allowing, and notice that the mood here is one of letting go of fundamental aggression against ourselves—this need, desire, duty mantra, that we must change—we’re letting go of that. Instead, seeing if you can just allow yourself to be exactly the way you are right now.
Again, we’re not really focusing on any particular thing with concentration, or something like that. You’re just feeling, and thinking, and just being there, and letting it be the way it is. So let’s do that for a little while together, with the fundamental mood of non-interference, nonaggression. Just let it be the way it is.
Okay, good. Now, from this place of radical self-acceptance, where you’re allowing yourself to be just the way you are, continue allowing the thoughts to do whatever they’re doing, but set aside any involvement with them. So the thoughts are still doing their thing, but you’re just not going to pick them up. Just let them do their spinning without engaging with them in any way. So, we’re not interfering, we’re not trying to suppress them, or make them go away, or make the mind to be quiet, or anything like that. All you’re doing is—to put it slightly inaccurately, not paying any attention to them. Instead, allow your awareness to be like the sky, just real open, not narrowly focused down on anything.
If you want to pay attention to something, then, for the moment, just let it be the simple rising and falling of the wave of the breath. The breath wave rises and falls of its own accord, and awareness is aware of it without any effort. We’re not narrowly focusing on the breath, we’re just wide open. Imagine if you were laying in bed, and you put your hand on your belly, you could feel that without focusing on it, feel it perfectly well. There’s that feeling of that hand, and doesn’t take any concentration at all. In the same way, just feel the breath, without engaging with thought. If you do engage with thought, then just leave the room—I’m kidding, if you do engage with thought, just notice that you’re doing that, and let it go. And, if you engage with it again, and you notice you’re doing that, it’s okay, just let it go. Just keep letting it go, coming back to a skylike mind, just noticing the rising and falling of the breath wave.
As you’re doing this, again, without struggling in any way, or efforting to achieve something, see if you can let go of trying too hard. Let go of forcing anything, let go of struggle. Just relax and open, let go of intentional tightness, intentional struggle, intentional forcefulness, and see if there’s any ease available in the system, any already existing sense of settled-ness, or peacefulness, or looseness, or openness.
If you feel like you’re falling asleep, just sit up straight, open your eyes. It’s really hard to fall asleep if your back is straight. Always before you drift off, you’ll start slumping, so if you don’t slump, you won’t be able to fall asleep.
Now, from here, I want you to tune into the already existing sensations in your body. That can include the breath wave, but it can include nice sensations, painful sensations, medium sensations, every kind of sensation, and you can either feel the whole body at once, just arising in that sky of awakeness. Or, you can individually tune in, without too much focus, just a more relaxed focus—never more narrow than like a basketball. Just start noticing, in a really relaxed, open, way, these body sensations. What does it feel like in your belly—not that you want to answer that in words, just tune into your belly, or tune into your upper back, or whatever, and just feel these areas, in the simplest possible way.
Again, to the best of your ability, not engaging with thinking at all, but just simply feeling. If we were all sea slugs, we’d be really good at this, just feeling, with no engagement with thought at all—just feel those body sensations. They might be hot or cold, they might be painful or pleasant, or neutral. The sensations can feel like physically large or physically small, they can be in the middle somewhere. They can be intense, or gentle, or somewhere in between. This is the way we want to encounter these sensations, not as ideas like that is my left buttock, but rather, it’s hot, it’s cold, it’s big, it’s small, it’s painful, it’s neutral, it’s pleasant—but, of course, all without words, just feeling.
If you had one of those buckets of Goo, where it’s like a bucket of snot, and then there’s all kinds of sparkles, and plastic beads, and various objects in it, and you close your eyes, and you put your hands in, and you just feel it. You’re not trying to think about the words, you’re just feeling it. That’s what we’re doing with our own body sensations here, we’re just feeling them—but you’re feeling them with a lot of curiosity and interest, a lot of openness and clarity. What? Oh, yeah, just feeling it, feeling it. Let’s do that together for a little while.
Letting go of any engagement with thought, and just feeling. You may notice that sometimes it’s uncomfortable. Not all the feelings are that good, and so when you’re noticing—let’s say you’re meditating on some painful sensation, you just keep relaxing your stance towards that sensation, let the sky of the mind just be open to the sensation, even if it’s painful. You’re not resisting it, manipulating it, editing it, trying to make it go away, trying to make it turn into a positive sensation, trying to make it dissolve into empty confetti, or something. Just sit with it, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Remember, you can always sit up straight and open your eyes if drowsiness is hitting. Feeling the body, feeling the body, feeling the body. Notice that you come equipped to feel everything in the body directly.
If you notice that you’re having this mental image of beaming your attention from your head to somewhere in your body, that’s just a totally pointless fantasy. Lots of people do it—it’s not a crime, but it’s actually just some thought you’re engaging with, so, if you can, feel the sensations inside the sensations. That doesn’t take any effort. You’re wired to do that, but it does require sort of letting go of this very false mental picture that you’re beaming your attention from your head. So, again, feel the sensation from inside the sensation. Feel the texture of it, feel the size and shape of it, feel all the qualities of it. We are able to have tremendous sensitivity, tremendous finesse, in detecting all the little qualities of these sensations, and that’s the game here, we’re getting into the qualities of sensation in a nonverbal, non-conceptual, way. Not thinking about it, just feeling it, but feeling it like an artist, feeling it like a sculptor, feeling it in all its detail, and quality, and beauty.
Don’t resist any sensation, don’t judge, or control, or try to push away, any part of any sensation. Let them all be there, at least for the duration of the meditation. Even if it’s, oh, my neck hurts, and if I just moved it… Just let your neck hurt just for a little while. You can stretch it after we’re done. If you’ve built up a bunch of tension doing this, and you’re trying real hard, just relax. It’s okay, you don’t need to try real hard. Awareness is aware—that’s its nature.
Okay, good. Now, you can either stay here and continue doing this, or if you want to, you can notice something a little deeper about these sensations in the body, which is that all these qualities about sensation are all continuously in flux. All the sensation in the body is continuously different. If you’re staying in your mind, if you’re engaging with thought, the sensations will seem stable, because your mind keeps putting the same label on them, but if you’re actually engaging with body sensation itself, it’s continuously different. The location changes, the size changes, the three-dimensional shape changes, the textural quality changes, the density changes, the relative painfulness, or pleasantness, or neutrality, shifts, and shifts, and shifts. All the qualities that you’ve been noticing shift continuously. None of them is ever the same from moment to moment.
If that’s not available, then just stick with meditating on the qualities of body sensation, just feeling it. But, if in feeling it, it’s very clear that they’re just changing, changing, changing, changing, changing, let go into that let go into that changingness, and allow this way of experiencing to shift from these different qualities of sensation being foremost, shift from that into the changingness is foremost. It’s as if all of body sensation is a continuously changing river of sensation. Never the same river from moment to moment. Always changing, always vibrating, flexing, waving, shimmering, shifting, and so on. Tune into that changingness.
Remember, you’re not imagining the changingness, or somehow imagining flow—that’s engaging with thought. Instead, you’re just tuned in enough that it’s super obvious that everything’s just different, and different, and different, and, different. For some people, some of the time, it will just feel like the qualities have taken on this very pleasant changingness. For others, it will start to feel like energy in the body. So, deeply, deeply, deeply, tune in to the changingness, without engaging with thought, feel everything changing, everything flowing, everything pulsing, everything vibrating, everything in flux, in change.
It’s very interesting, because, typically when we’re stuck in thought, we imagine that the body is rather static. It’s like a car, or something, the parts are just the parts, and they’re there, and they’re not moving, or changing. But that’s not what the experience of a body is like at all when we set thoughts aside, and just feel the body. When we just feel the body, the way it feels itself it’s a vibrating, pulsating, shimmering, fluxing, shifting, field of energy. That’s what it feels like.
I’m not saying that’s what it is or something like that—I’m saying that’s what it feels like. But, notice, when you experience the body in that way, something—or some things—will start to just release or let go. Certain flavors of feeling stuck can become unstuck, because it’s really hard to be stuck when everything’s a river.
Resting as wide open sky-like awareness just feel this vibrating, shimmering, pulsating, throbbing, shifting, open, energy of the body—it’s alive. It’s not some dead machine or equipment, it’s alive. Letting go of any engagement with thinking, we’re just setting that aside. The thoughts get to do what they want to do, but we’re not hanging out with them.
Okay, good. Now, if this is working for you, feel free to stay right here, or continue doing whatever you’ve been doing. As our engagement with body sensation as continuously changing deepens, it becomes possible to notice something really interesting—centrally interesting, important. In this way of working, which is that if you’re staying with a sensation that’s continuously different, in what sense is that the same sensation? In what sense are you dealing with an object at all? The more that you stick with this continuously changing, flowing, moving, shifting, expanding, contracting, sine-waving, experience, the more difficult it becomes to hang onto it in any way. There’s no hook to hang your hat on.
Previously you could have the mental concept, which is a thought. You can have the mental concept, for example, that’s the feeling in my shoulder blade. There it is, I’m meditating on the sensation of pain in my shoulder blade, that’s the thing I’m staying with. But then, we let go of thought, and we notice that the sensation is changing, changing, changing, changing, changing—it’s just a flow of sensation. There’s no thing there. There’s just an experience, and the experience doesn’t have a label. All the labels you were putting on the experience, like the refrigerator magnet poetry you’ve been putting on the refrigerator, the magnets got degaussed, and they all fell to the floor. There’s no more labels able to be put on it. It’s just experience with no-thingness.
So, notice, if you can—if that’s not available, that’s okay, just hang with the changing, or hang with the qualities—wherever you’re at. If you can, just notice that all of body sensation just kind of opened up. It’s just like a bunch of experience occurring in a vast space of awakeness—in fact, in that sky-like mind that we started out with. There’s just the sky of awakeness and mirror-like experience flowing in it, with nothing to hang on to at all. Nothing to hang on to at all just, vast openness, and awakeness, with experience flowing in it like reflections in a mirror. You cannot grab onto the things reflected in a mirror, they’re just vivid appearance, with no thingness. Vivid feeling with no thingness to the feeling.
It’s as if the entire body is transparent and permeable. There’s no boundary to it that we can find. It’s wide open. All of body sensation is like a mist, transparent, vivid, shining, utterly different from moment to moment, tremendously light. Every time any part of it seems to come back into thingness, just notice it’s changing-ness again. Then, as you tune into that more deeply, notice that you can’t actually find a thing there—you just find the vivid reflection of continuously changing experience.
Good. Now, look at the mirror. What is this mirror of vivid experience? Look at it. Let the mirror of vivid experience see itself, not as some kind of imagination, which is just a thought. We’re letting go of thought. Just let it see itself. There’s nothing to see, and yet there’s a mirror of vivid experience. But as much as you look, you can’t really find it. But the looking does something. Of course, there’s no actual turning around involved, there’s no looking backwards, or something like that, because it’s in every direction. Allow this awakeness, the sky of awakeness, to just be awake to itself in this utter stillness and openness. If there’s anything at all that you are, it’s that skylike awareness. That’s the mirror of all experience, the non-thing that knows. Be what knows.
Let’s just switch now to taking and giving practice, Tonglen. You are allowed to use your imagination here, so on the in-breath, breathe in the suffering of beings—any beings, it can be particular beings, or some beings, or all beings, but take in the suffering, the pain, the difficulty, the disease, the tragedy, the grief, the agony, the despair. Breathe that in, with all its discomfort, and on the out-breath, breathe out every good thing you’ve got, all your joy, all the pleasant sensations, all the good things about life, all the things you hang onto, all that you’ve got. Just breathe it out, and give it away, like the last day of the world, hang onto nothing.
Breathe in the difficulties, problems, pain, suffering, illness, terror. Breathe it all in, without holding back, at all. Then breathe out all the good stuff, all the good stuff you’ve got, and just give it away to all beings, with joy—here you go, here you go. Here’s relief, here’s kindness, here’s joy, here’s health, here’s sweetness, here’s comfort. Here’s all the good stuff—love, being seen, being cared for. Here, I give it all to you, and I’ll take all your pain, because that wide open sky of wakefulness is so big, it can handle any amount. It’s so big, it has endless kindness, and joy, and all the rest, to give. So just feel that beaming out, beaming out, on the out-breath, and on the in-breath, taking in all the sorrow, all the pain, all the despair, all the rage, all the injustice, all everything. Just breathe it in, take it, take it, take it, because the giant sky is undaunted. Then, from that infinite reservoir, just beam out all the good stuff, holding nothing back for yourself. Give it all the way, all the way, all the way, all the way, all the way. Give it all away, beam it out, send it out. You’ve got more than enough to spare.
Chanting: Om Mani Padme Hum
Now, for the next half hour, just sit in that stillness. No? Okay, let’s end that there.
Dharma Talk
So, knowingly or unknowingly, you just went through the stack sequence, which is a stage sequence that leads you through how to do vipashyana. Going from, in this case we were only using body sensation, but you can do it with any type of experience. Going from simple contact with an experience into its impermanence, and eventually into its emptiness. We go through several stages there, and it’s not really something you can make happen, meaning, if the impermanence part is not available yet, you’ve just gotta keep meditating for days, or weeks, or whatever, until it becomes available. If the openness, emptiness, spaciousness, no-thingness, awakeness, quality is not available yet, then just keep meditating, and eventually, it becomes available. You can’t skip to the end of the pregnancy, you’ve got to go through every day of it to get a baby. You’ve got to go through every part of the sequence to get to the emptiness part. You can’t really jump. If you do jump, then you already knew how to do that. So, either way, it’s unskippable.
Just to go through the formal stages. We did this on body sensation, but you can do it on anything. You can do it on thinking, you could do it on external sight, or sound, you could do it on emotions, you can do it on smells and tastes, or anything else. That is the first step. I call it the conceptual phase. You’re still thinking about the object. I did my best to move us beyond that very quickly by saying, don’t engage with any thinking. It’s very hard to meditate on an idea of a body sensation—you can’t really hang on to thinking about it. You can imagine, at first, you’re like, that’s my elbow, that’s my elbow, that’s my elbow, and, really, 95% of what you’re doing is thinking, and feeling a little bit of elbow. So, that’s first base, when you’re just starting. Then, if you do that enough, with good instruction, you’re going to keep going towards the qualities your elbow, so the feeling in my elbow, it’s a little painful, and it’s tingly here, and warm there, and there’s a little bit of coolness there, it’s kind of tight and constricted in this one part, and sort of gloopy and expansive in this other part, and there’s a couple parts I can’t even feel. Every once in a while there’s kind of a jab of discomfort-like quality.
You’re not doing all that talking in your head, but I have to communicate it to you in words, so that’s what it feels like—these various qualities of feeling my elbow. So that’s the second stage, or second base, or second station—you’re into the qualities, which, in sort of a precious way, we could call the phenomenological or the phenomenal level. That’s where you’re starting to actually meditate properly, you’re into you’re actually in the experience, not thinking about the experience.
So, it’s pretty straightforward, I don’t want you to think, salt, salt, salt, I want you to taste the salt. So, that’s the difference between stage one and stage two. For a lot of people, if you haven’t done a ton of meditation, that might be where you’re at for a while, and, yet, still, that’s where it’s starting to work. You can really feel this is different than sitting there thinking about it, you’re in it, and it will start to feel—even if the sensations themselves are not pleasant, the stability of attention on the qualities is quite pleasant. You’ll get that feeling of meditation, there’s a sort of containment.
Then, the third stage, or third base, or third thing, we go into is really noticing all those different qualities—it’s hot here, it’s cold here, the size is like this, the shape is like this, there’s a scratchy part here, and a smooth part there. If you’re really paying attention to those, they’re never the same, they’re shifting, shifting, shifting, shifting, it’s growing, it’s shrinking, it’s getting warmer, it’s getting cooler. The itchy part is moving around, the stabby part sometimes isn’t stabby, or whatever, it’s never the same. I’m describing this as if we’re only talking about body sensation, but this is true for every sensation. At a certain point, that changing becomes foreground. Instead of the qualities of the sensation, just the fact that it’s changing, changing, changing, changing, becomes the interesting part, and that’s deeper. That’s a much more profound thing to be noticing.
That’s impermanence, it’s there, it is being impermanent, and that can feel like amoeba stuff, but it can also just feel like energy. For a lot of people it just feels like, wow, piti, there’s energy in my body. If I feel bones, they just feel like vibrating energy. So, it can be either way, it’s not like one is better than the other, but certainly, people feel it differently, or have different types of experience with this impermanent quality in the body, and in any other sensation. It’s very odd, because at that point, there’s no concept left of the body—or, maybe very, very, little, but almost none. It’s really hard to think of it as a car, a machine, and it’s got metal skin, and it’s very defined. It’s more like this weird, fog bank, amoeba thing that you could put your hand right through. It’s just doing its fog bank, amoeba, thing. That’s the third place, the place of vibration, of flow, of impermanence, whatever you want to call it.
Then, lastly, we get to home base, or the final, the fourth station, fourth level, which is, if something is continuously changing like that, how is it even a thing? That’s the last thought that might be there, the last little bit of concept, is that it’s a thing, as opposed to other stuff. But, if it’s always changing, you can’t put a label on it anymore. It’s different all the time, and so that seems kind of abstract, but when you experience it that way, it’s not abstract. There’s still an experience there, but there’s no thing there.
Formally, that’s called emptiness, but when you hear that word, emptiness, in English, it sounds like you’re saying there’s nothing there. Empty would be “there’s nothing there.” If the cup is empty, it means there is no tea, but the word doesn’t mean it’s not there. It means that the total experience is there—you’re still tasting the tea, it’s hot, it’s got bergamont flavors, it’s bitter, so there’s a total experience there—and it’s not there at the same time. There’s no thing. So, the metaphor is that it is like a mirror, where if I held up a mirror to you all right now, it would show the whole room, and it would show every detail, and it would show every strand of every hair, and it would be a vivid experience—certainly quite different than nothing. But you couldn’t touch any of those people. It’s there but not there, that’s the flavor of it.
Because the last concept got dropped, the concept of there-ness, that the thing is there. When that drops, that’s good. It becomes really hard to get real fixated on stuff, or real caught-up, or real crunchy about it. It starts to be very, very, releasing. So, that’s if we’re talking about the so-called objects there. The last thing we did was, metaphorically, look at the mirror part—not the reflections, but the thing that’s reflecting, i.e., that space of awakeness, which isn’t a thing, either. But, it’s awake, and it’s a space in which everything’s experienced. That’s interesting. Let the mirror see itself.
Try to do it again, right now. You have experiences—a big reflection in a mirror of wakefulness. Let that mirror of wakefulness look at itself, right now. You can’t really find one, but it’s certainly there, so even that has got that weird empty property. It’s both there and not there. But, do you notice, when you let the mirror look at itself, so to speak, something shifts. It’s like you drop in, or something.
That’s the stack model, and this is the universal translator key. If you’ve been doing vipassana style meditation, or mindfulness meditation, or any of the standard stuff, and want to shift into nondual type meditation. What I always heard was, those are two different things; you can’t shift one into the other; what you did in one is no good in the other—and that’s utterly and completely false. Instead, you just do what I just showed you to do. You take your mindfulness skills, or your vipassana skills, and you just do what traditionally you’re supposed to do with vipassana, and you go deeper and deeper into the openness and emptiness and spaciousness of objects, and so-called objects, and see that “there but not there” quality, and be the mirror, even though in another way you can’t find the mirror. Now you’re working in nondual territory, so your vipassana practice was not wasted at all, and it’s like riding a bike. If you haven’t done it in a while, it didn’t go away, you just get back on the bike, and you’ll remember. Maybe you’re kind of out of shape, and you’ve got to do some riding to get your muscles back, but you didn’t forget. It’s just doing the work.
Questions or comments about that?
Q&A
Questioner 1: I feel like I got to emptiness.
Michael: Good. Now just do that a lot.
Questioner 1: I’m struggling with the mirror metaphor, which was the mirror seeing itself.
Michael: It’s just the other side of seeing the emptiness of objects. Now, what’s seeing the objects? It’s the same thing.
Questioner 1: Yeah, the mirror thing is confusing me, because when I’m not here…
Michael: When you’re not here, are you still having an experience?
Questioner 1: Yes.
Michael: Look at that experience. Can you look at the experience?
Questioner 1: I thought that’s what I was doing.
MIchael: Good, good, and then, what’s looking? That’s all that the mirror metaphor is saying, is, what’s looking?
Questioner 1: But that wasn’t there already?
Michael: It was.
Questioner 1: I mean it was, but it wasn’t, it knew it wasn’t looking, but it was. I don’t know, maybe it’s a problem of language.
Michael: It sounds like a problem of language. It’s simple. Right now, are you having an experience? Okay, what’s having it? Look.
Questioner 1: It’s harder when people are looking at me.
Michael: Hint, you won’t be able to find a thing that’s having experience, but you’re still having an experience. That’s the emptiness property of the awareness itself, and that’s cool to look at. Does that make sense?
Questioner 1: Not really, but I’m okay with not really getting it.
Michael: Okay, there’s nothing to get. It’s just saying, are you aware? Now look for what’s aware. It’s pretty easy, but you can struggle with that as long as you want.
Questioner 1: Yeah I’m okay with the struggle.
Michael: Struggle away. The same property would be, what’s aware of struggling?
Questioner 1: Okay, thank you.
Questioner 2: Thanks, hi. I’m curious about doing vipassana from head to toe, the Goenka version. That is what I’m used to. You’re taught in that method to not go from one sensation to another. This is very different.
Michael: Do the scan the way you’re used to doing the scan, but, eventually, it will be helpful to let go of that kind of thing, and just be able to feel the whole body at once, and stuff like.
Questioner 2: Is there a specific thinking behind one or the other?
Michael: Two things. One, eventually you’re going to be doing other sense gates, and you can’t do that kind of thing with them.
Questioner 2: What are sense gates?
Michael: Body sensations are not the only sense that you can meditate on. Try doing scanning with sound. You can sort of do it, but it’s kind of meaningless, and so it makes it hard to do those other sense gates if you’re stuck in that sort of thing. Then, furthermore, that sort of thing is kind of a rigid system that you’re applying with your concept, and eventually you’re just going to let go of it, so it’s not really a problem you have to get rid of, but it will start to get in the way after a while.
Questioner 2: Thank you.
Michael: Even though we can totally make use of our Goenka practice history, and the fact that we’ve got really good vipassana muscles. But, it doesn’t mean we’re not going to learn some new tricks, too. Nothing is wasted, but we’re going to learn some new stuff.
Questioner 3: Thank you for the meditation.
Michael: You’re welcome.
Questioner 3: I, similarly, started in vipassana. One issue that I’ve had in doing the more direct, non-dual, approach, is that, once I’ve had the experience of the impersonal nature of experience, it becomes an idea in the abstract.
Michael: Sure, and you either don’t engage that idea, or, when you get better, deeper, clearer—we do it here all the time. You’ve done it with me a bunch, we’re going to bring up ideas and see the emptiness of those. So one way or another, what seems to be a problem is seen to not be a problem. Let’s go through the stack. First, it’s an idea as a concept, which is what it is when you’re meditating on thought, but then you go into the phenomenology of the verbal thought, which, for example, sounds like blah blah blah blah blah. It’s just some sound. It’s the remembered sound of monkey lip slapping. So that’s the phenomenal quality of mental talk, and then we notice that thoughts are really fleeting blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, they’re just whipping by, they don’t come from anywhere, they don’t stay anywhere, and they don’t go anywhere. So there’s just this thing happening, and then there’s nothing to hang onto there. So that concept that seemed like it was in the way, is just seen as this mirror-like reflection, not a problem at all, okay? Does that make sense?
Questioner 3: Yeah.
Michael: Doesn’t mean you can do it right now, but, you will be able to.
Questioner 3: Yes, I think, when I’m contracted in my experience, and things feel emotional, or personal, or whatever, that sequence is hard to do.
Michael: Yeah, and that’s why we practice.
Questioner 3: I just resort to the abstract, the idea, and I think it becomes more of a dissociative..
Michael: Don’t do that [laughter] Not doing it just takes a lot of sitting there not doing that. So the pith instruction is: stop doing that. Instead, let it be hard. If it’s too hard, too sticky, either stop meditating and come back when you’re not [grr], or when you’re back up into the flow level. If it’s really gummed up, back up to the phenomenological level, where the water freezes back into ice. You can still say, this part is like this, this part’s like that. You still can meditate on it. If you’re so messed up you can’t even do that, because you’re just so angry, or whatever, then just sit there, and just sit there and breathe for a while. Or, go for a walk, or something, till you can. That’s what I mean by, just keep working it, keep working it, keep working it. Eventually, at least a lot of life will be digestible in this way. In Tantra, they call this the goddess digesting experience. What we’re doing, that whole stack, is the goddess digesting experience—all experience just gets chewed up and digested. It’s kind of an interesting image.
Questioner 3: Okay, that was great. No more butts. Thank you.
Questioner 4: First, thank you. I noticed the fabrication of some body parts during that meditation, and I’m wondering if there’s anything to do other than just let those go.
Michael: How are you using the word fabrication in this case? I assume you felt your body the whole time—all of that’s a fabrication.
Questioner 4: I felt like my attention was completely in the emptiness of the flow, and then suddenly, something would—it was almost like there was some kind of like manager or ego said, wait a second, there’s an arm there, or there’s a spine there.
Michael: That’s just habit, that’s instability, or that’s a crunchy coming up. To use that goddess digesting metaphor, it’s like that’s something to chew up over time, and eventually it’ll stop grabbing like that. Just don’t resist it, it is okay, and then we work with it.
Questioner 5: I think, for me, what was really interesting was, we were told to stop thinking and…
Michael: No, that was not what you were told. You were told to keep thinking, to keep thinking,…
Questioner 5: In my mind I was telling myself to stop thinking, and then with that what came up was, of course, thoughts. With those thoughts, I realized that what was keeping them around was attached emotions, and then those emotions were allowing those thoughts to linger for me. Then, in noticing that, to see the power in that, that allowed things to then, disappear. But then, realizing from afar, that they are still there, but I don’t have to remain in them. It was this realization of being able to think and not think. That was my journey.
Michael: That’s amazing. Yeah, and notice, what did you do with the emotions that were keeping the thoughts around? You saw oh the emotions are keeping the thoughts around, and then what was the next thing that happened there? As an outsider I was following you up to there, and then it sounded like you said, and then a miracle happened. So what happened right there, when you were seeing that the emotions were keeping the thoughts around.
Questioner 5: I’ve done this a lot, and I teach this. I acknowledge that this is happening, and I allow it to happen, I allow my emotions and my thoughts to take me. But I allow it to happen quickly, in a way, let them pass one by one, and then allowing myself to experience it made the experience so much swifter, less painful. It was something I could have viewed from afar. I could experience it, but not experience it. Then, that became something constant, and it became something again, far more abstract, that there is this mirror into my emotions and into my thoughts, but I’m not in them, and there is nothing being reflected or seen.
Michael: Yes, very good.
Questioner 5: I just wanted to share that, in giving it that power and acknowledging it, it disappears.
Michael: Very cool, and just the way you’re talking about it, I can see, they have done a lot of this. Eventually, especially if you’re here each week, you’ll notice that if I’m working with thoughts, we do go into the, now encounter the thoughts, and let them go—exactly what you’re describing, encounter it, and let it flow. You know it’s still there, but you’re not inside it. Things like that, so it’s working on vipashyana in thought. It’s a little more difficult.
Questioner 5: I don’t practice anything specific, it’s just as it occurs, and to allow it to flow, I don’t have names.
Michael: That’s great, yeah, thanks for sharing. Very, very, cool experience. Okay thanks for your thoughts and questions everybody. Thanks for coming out tonight and meditating with me.
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