Deconstructing Yourself

Daniel Ingram, an emergency medicine physician and long-time dharma practitioner, discusses the Fire Kasina practice, meditation and magick, archetypal forces, fruition experiences, siddhis, and his wizarding worldview. They also touch on the second edition of his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and his new book on the Fire Kasina.

Meditation teacher and neuroscience consultant Shinzen Young and host Michael W. Taft talk about what mindfulness teachers are getting wrong, Shinzen’s Periodic Table of Happiness Elements, informed consent for awakening, effective strategies for dealing with the Dark Night of the Soul, and the phenomenon that Shinzen calls “Enlightenment’s Evil Twin.”Learn more about Shinzen Young at Shinzen.org.Also here is a pdf of Shinzen’s Periodic Table of Happiness Elements.Show Notes0:25 – Introduction and overview2:38 – Defining mindfulness, and what mindfulness teachers can improve on15:20 – Fulfilling the ethical duty to inform students about the possibilities and challenges of deeper meditation work20:05 – The Dark Night and DP/DR, and the amount of guidance students need to integrate emptiness25:24 – Addressing student concerns about becoming derailed or idle if they make spiritual progress28:24 – Clarifying what the Dark Night is, what it might look like, and how to address it prophylactically and remedially51:31 – More about what mindfulness teachers can improve on1:19:28 – Frosting Shinzen’s buns by shutting down a meditator’s no-self experience1:26:06 – Being careful not to set up barriers that keep people away from practiceYou can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Scientist, programmer, and author David Chapman talks with Michael W. Taft about metarationality, emptiness and form, nihilism, tantrism, dzogchen, Kegan’s stages of development applied to meditation, vampire romance novels, and the importance of being able to switch reality tunnels.David Chapman is a writer, computer scientist, engineer, and Buddhist practitioner. He’s been practicing Vajrayana Buddhism in the Aro Ter tradition for 20 years. David is a leading proponent of metarationality—a subject we’ll go into in some depth in this episode—and writes about it on his website Meaningness.com. Show notes1:43 – What is metarationality? 2:45 – What happens when you run off the edge of the map? 4:44 – Pattern and nebulosity, emptiness and form 6:45 – Story of scientist Barbara McClintock, and epicycles 13:30 – Donald Schön & design creativity 14:37 – Ways to deal with system failure, Nihilism 17:28 – Timothy Leary & Robert Anton Wilson, switching between reality tunnels 20:22 – Is metarationality just a larger rationality? 22:15 – David’s vampire romance novel, Ken Wilber’s novel Boomeritis 23:38 – What does metarationality have to do with meditation and Buddhism? 24:27 – Seeing the relationship between thought and reality 27:57 – Metarationality as a signpost of deep awakening 30:31 – Dzogchen and Advaita – are practices of view simply indoctrination? 32:17 – Metarationality as a path beyond postmodernism 33:09 – Fundamentalism as a huge LARP, Eternalism vs. Nihilism 36:06 – Spiral dynamics & Robert Kegan’s stages of adult development Link to Wilber/Kegan dialog (Warning: behind a paywall) 41:20 – What a Kegan Stage 3 group looks like in American Buddhist sanghas 43:23 – Transitioning to Stage 4, examples in relation to Buddhist practice and sanghas 44:22 – The edge of the map and the lack of support for Stage 5 in Buddhist communities 46:22 – Kegan Stage 4.5, rejecting systems for their limitations, and how to get to Stage 5 47:25 – The importance of intersubjectivity 49:20 – Future echoes of David’s teaching of metarationality 50:21 – Engaging metarationality in ways that don’t involve meditation, Bongard problems, and the word “intuition” 54:33 – Vipassana techniques for generating intuition 57:43 – Do we need gurus/lamas to transmit deep understanding? 1:04:20 – Students covering up their teacher’s crimes 1:05:33 – The desire to be metarational and the dangers of self-diagnosing your Kegan stage 1:07:54 – David’s background in artificial intelligence and philosophy 1:10:19 – Is AI dangerous?You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode I talk with mindfulness teacher and co-founder of the Buddhist Geeks project, Vincent Horn. Vince is part of new generation of teachers translating age-old wisdom into 21st century code. In this session, Vince and I discuss the radical sense of experimentation, the Great Unbundling of the Dharma, ways the mindfulness and awareness practices complement each other—which is turning out to be something of a theme on the show lately—, the perhaps greatly exaggerated reports of the death of Buddhism, what Buddhism and meditation can offer the Silicon Valley worldview. as well as a scintillating juvenile foray into enlightened scatology.Learn more about Vince at Buddhist Geeks.Show Notes0:25 Introduction and overview1:52 – Vince talks about Buddhist Geeks, his interest in mindfulness and his teaching project at meditate.io3:45 – Vince's meditation and teaching background, working with somatic practices and vipassanā, and his time at Naropa University8:16 – What's exciting and interesting in mindfulness now, radical experimentation in the new generation, the unbundling of the Dharma11:38 – Playing with the core meditative elements (concentration, inquiry, etc.) of different traditions14:45 – Defining mindfulness and awareness, and how they work together24:45 – Has Buddhism weeded out all meditative dead-ends or is experimentation and knowing for oneself useful? Can we discover things that haven't been done before?28:22 – Technology and making sense of what practice is while rapid change is occurring30:34 – Scatology: literal and figurative shit33:50 – Human relationships: self, other, and “individuality first” in practice37:00 – The co-construction of reality, and social noting42:15 – Meditation's reinvention in the 1800s and 1900s, and the arising of noting in response to colonialism44:54 – Is Buddhism dying?49:33 – Silicon Valley, immortality, and Ray Kurzweil57:36 – The juice of the unknown and a shift in the way we know things1:04:40 – As many types of nonduality as dualities1:07:16 – Vince and Emily's teaching synergy, one-on-one teacher meetingsYou can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 Notes0:25 – 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 – OutroYou can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Pragmatic dharma teacher and host Michael W. Taft feel the power of the dark side, talk about nirvana, deconstruct the concept of nirvana, dive deep into the reality of death, look at the denial of death, and probably scare away all listeners.Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. Learn more about him and his work at Kenneth Folk Dharma.Show Notes0:25 – Introduction and overview 2:20 – Preferring to be conscious or not conscious 5:28 – Avoiding eternalism and entertaining the possibility of death…or immortality 11:33 – The enjoyability of oblivion/nirvana (and establishing a definition of both) 19:15 – The Buddha presents a life extinction program, not a life improvement program 25:28 – Fear and denial of death, and rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic 33:15 – The relief of accepting the reality of death 34:48 – Enlightenment as a real-time report about what’s arising in experience 37:52 – The limitations of coming to meditation as a life improvement program 41:10 – Kenneth’s current practice assessing mindfulness, checking for tightness and temporarily suspending the self model 48:45 – The preposterousness of eradicating the self 53:41 – The Dharma Overground forums and posters having bad days after attaining some level of enlightenment 58:31 – How do know anything? Does Kenneth feel like he has any special or ultimate knowledge? 1:03:53 – Certitude is just another feeling on a level playing field with all others 1:12:10 – Awakening experiences invalidating each other: the second awakening erodes some of the truth of the first 1:14:10 – The universe is under no obligation to make sense to youYou can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Pragmatic dharma teacher Kenneth Folk and host Michael W. Taft discuss what it means to be mindful, various definitions of being mindful in the moment, the trouble with remaining mindful during an entire sit, and more.Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. Learn more about him and his work at Kenneth Folk Dharma.Show Notes0:48 Introduction and overview 4:00 Deconstructing “mindfulness” 11:47 Kenneth’s new mindfulness practice 15:02 Mindfulness vs. checking the box; auditor vs. meditator 23:58 Is mindfulness enlightening? 30:03 Defining engagement and the problem with prescriptions 31:52 Sense doors and applying mindfulness to thoughts 36:06 Alternatives to meditation for experiencing mindfulness and awakening 42:37 Is there a “right” way to experience awakening? 47:25 Getting to a 100 percent attention 52:45 Liberating working memory from the feeling of being the observer 55:06 Concentration hacking: making experiences sufficiently interesting 59:27 Flow and how it relates to mindfulness 1:06:23 How important is the ability to concentrate? 1:12:04 Do you need clarity, concentration, or both?You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Pragmatic dharma teacher Kenneth Folk and host Michael W. Taft discuss what it means to be mindful, various definitions of being mindful in the moment, the trouble with remaining mindful during an entire sit, and more.Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. Learn more about him and his work at Kenneth Folk Dharma.Show Notes0:48 Introduction and overview4:00 Deconstructing “mindfulness”11:47 Kenneth’s new mindfulness practice15:02 Mindfulness vs. checking the box; auditor vs. meditator23:58 Is mindfulness enlightening?30:03 Defining engagement and the problem with prescriptions31:52 Sense doors and applying mindfulness to thoughts36:06 Alternatives to meditation for experiencing mindfulness and awakening42:37 Is there a “right” way to experience awakening?47:25 Getting to a 100 percent attention52:45 Liberating working memory from the feeling of being the observer55:06 Concentration hacking: making experiences sufficiently interesting59:27 Flow and how it relates to mindfulness1:06:23 How important is the ability to concentrate?1:12:04 Do you need clarity, concentration, or both?You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.