Deconstructing Yourself

Culadasa talks with Michael W. Taft. After decades of Buddhist practice, Culadasa exploded on the scene a few years ago with his groundbreaking book The Mind Illuminated, an incredibly comprehensive guide to meditation. It’s an erudite mixture of neuroscience, traditional Buddhist practice, and Culadasa’s own ideas about how to gt the most out of practice. In this episode we talk about his definitions of attention and awareness, how his system compares to that of his friend teacher Shinzen Young, how the meditative brain works, dealing with aging and death, and much more. Learn more about Culadasa and his teaching at culadasa.com Show Notes 0:15 – Introduction and overview 2:30 – Culadasa’s system vs. Shinzen Young’s: stability of attention 7:55 – Sustained intention and effortlessness 10:20 – Culadasa’s system vs. Shinzen Young’s: sensory clarity and peripheral awareness 19:55 – Mindfulness as the optimal interaction between attention and awareness 22:55 – Conceptual overlays and the lower limits of conscious perception 32:50 – Attention selects objects from peripheral awareness 35:00 – The interactive role of attention and awareness in maintaining mindfulness in daily life 38:30 – How strong mindfulness affects emotions, wholesome and unwholesome behavior, and the practice of virtue 43:50 – The importance of the Eightfold Path post-awakening 47:20 – The Ten Fetter, Four Path Model: characteristics of paths and the dropping of fetters 59:49 – Spiritual development does not end at Fourth Path 1:01:57 – Old age, sickness and death are part of the Great Adventure You can support the creation of future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.  

What do the neurocorrelates of enlightenment, the activation of the posterior cingulate cortex, and the extinction of craving all have in common? They relate to the work of Judson Brewer. Jud talks with Michael W. Taft about his brain biofeedback machine, the neurophenomonolgy of effort vs. non-effort, the feedback loop of reward-based learning, working with the black hole of anxiety, self-referential thinking as a kind of addiction, and much more. Judson Brewer is an MD-PhD and a thought leader in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery”, having combined nearly 20 years of experience with mindfulness training with his scientific research. A psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions, Brewer has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments. He has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, American Heart Association, Fetzer Trust among others. Check out Jud’s recent book, entitled, The Craving Mind. In this TED talk, Jud describes how to “get out of your own way.” Show Notes 3:37 – Has Jud found the neurocorrelates of enlightenment? 4:40 – The Default Mode Network and science, the PCC – Craving and tanha – Details of fMRI experiments 5:57 – Trying, Flow and PCC activity, contraction vs. expansion 9:36 – Jud’s own practice in the scanner, metta, calibrating the scale of exp/con 20:45 – High concentration vs. effortlessness – no force necessary – 7 factors of awakening 28:54 – What has Jud found? Excitement vs. happiness – a learning tool 30:30 – What we see with experienced meditators / Best use of his neurofeedback technology 36:09 – Michael’s experience in the device 38:30 – Neurophenomolgy effort vs. non-effort, and the feedback loop of reward-based learning – the perpetual Skinner box of relative rewards – anger vs. kindness 42:30 – Addiction – allcohol, cocaine, smoking – smoking tastes bad when you pay attention 45:50 – Paying attention to eating – Joie de vivre – PCC and digital therapeutics – apps 53:24 – The trickiness of the black hole of anxiety – Unwinding Anxiety app 56:20 – Do we have to practice abstinence or not? – Is addiction a disease? 1:00:27 – Jud’s new book, The Craving Mind 1:01:37 – Self-referential thinking as a kind of addiction – Instagram addiction 1:04:05 – Meditation from the Lab – Dependant Origination (PDF Download) – Siddhis     You can support the creation of future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.  

In this session, host Michael W. Taft and radical dharma author and practitioner Daniel Ingram discuss the Fire Kasina practice, meditation and magick, working with archetypal forces and entities, Daniel’s description of a fruition experience, siddhis and visionary experiences, Daniel’s wizarding worldview, and much more. We also discuss the second edition of his classic work Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, as well as his new book on the Fire Kasina. Daniel Ingram is an emergency medicine physician and long-time dharma practitioner. He famously exploded the Buddhist world when he declared himself to be an arhat and published the seminal text Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: an Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book in 2008. He is also the main force behind the radical Dharma Overground website, which he founded together with Vince Horn, that specializes in a brand of unusually-frank discussion of meditation practice. You can learn more about Daniel at his website, www.integrateddaniel.info. You can download a free PDF of The Fire Kasina book here. Show Notes 00:25 – Introduction and overview 2:10 – Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha 2, its purpose and release 4:55 – The fire kasina: what it is, what happens as concentration increases, and how it provides immediate feedback on the strength of concentration 8:01 – Fire kasina’s benefits beyond concentration: insight, crafting your reality, fusion of śamatha and vipassanā 12:57 – The awakening components of fire kasina practice, fruitions 17:28 – The ontological status of deities seen during fire kasina practice and the meaning of joint powers experiences 22:50 – Daniel’s fire kasina experiences and teaching the practice to others 29:42 – The line between madness and meditation 35:30 – Siddhis, synchronicities, and the collective unconscious 40:22 – Daniel’s cutting edge in practice and use of magick 51:24 – Dzogchen and the post-magickal 59:19 – Deconstructing sensory experience into fruition 1:10:44 – What meditation teachers get wrong: lack of warning about potential dangers 1:21:49 – The cross-pollination and experimentation the internet affords the meditation scene 1:24:51 – The Fire Kasina, a book with Shannon Stein You can support the creation of future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon. Listen to more with Daniel Ingram.  

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 read his new book, entitled, “The Science of Enlightenment.” Also here is a pdf of Shinzen’s Periodic Table of Happiness Elements. Show Notes 0:25 – Introduction and overview 2:38 – Defining mindfulness, and what mindfulness teachers can improve on 15:20 – Fulfilling the ethical duty to inform students about the possibilities and challenges of deeper meditation work 20:05 – The Dark Night and DP/DR, and the amount of guidance students need to integrate emptiness 25:24 – Addressing student concerns about becoming derailed or idle if they make spiritual progress 28:24 – Clarifying what the Dark Night is, what it might look like, and how to address it prophylactically and remedially 51:31 – More about what mindfulness teachers can improve on 1:19:28 – Frosting Shinzen’s buns by shutting down a meditator’s no-self experience 1:26:06 – Being careful not to set up barriers that keep people away from practice   You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.  

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 notes 1:43 – 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.  

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 meditate.io Show Notes 0:25 Introduction and overview 1:52 – Vince talks about Buddhist Geeks, his interest in mindfulness and his teaching project at meditate.io 3:45 – Vince’s meditation and teaching background, working with somatic practices and vipassanā, and his time at Naropa University 8:16 – What’s exciting and interesting in mindfulness now, radical experimentation in the new generation, the unbundling of the Dharma 11:38 – Playing with the core meditative elements (concentration, inquiry, etc.) of different traditions 14:45 – Defining mindfulness and awareness, and how they work together 24:45 – 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 occurring 30:34 – Scatology: literal and figurative shit 33:50 – Human relationships: self, other, and “individuality first” in practice 37:00 – The co-construction of reality, and social noting 42:15 – Meditation’s reinvention in the 1800s and 1900s, and the arising of noting in response to colonialism 44:54 – Is Buddhism dying? 49:33 – Silicon Valley, immortality, and Ray Kurzweil 57:36 – The juice of the unknown and a shift in the way we know things 1:04:40 – As many types of nonduality as dualities 1:07:16 – Vince and Emily’s teaching synergy, one-on-one teacher meetings You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.  

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 You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.  

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 Notes 0:25 – 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 you You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.  

Pragmatic dharma teacher Kenneth Folk and host Michael W. Taft look at suffering machines, ways to suspend the necessary conditions for suffering, The Terminator, state chasing, and getting the cosmic joke. 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. Books by Thomas Metzinger: Being No One and The Ego Tunnel .  Listen to a DY podcast with Thomas Metzinger here. The actual paper we discuss can be found at: Suffering. Show Notes 0:25 – Introduction and overview 1:52 – Thomas Metzinger, machines and suffering. Can machines think? What if they could suffer? Consciousness, ownership, negative valence (bad feelings), and realness—“CONR”—as necessary conditions for suffering 11:19 – Suspending one CONR condition at a time to prevent suffering 13:37 – Suspending Consciousness, and nirvana as a state of unconsciousness 22:57 – Suspending Ownership through “who am I?” inquiry and other anattā practices that target the sense of ownership 26:32 – Suspending Negative valence through jhāna (and the fragility of this possibility), and going into sensations deeply enough to lose the sense of pleasant and unpleasant 32:25 – Suspending Realness through paying attention to characteristics in continuous flux 34:40 – Is there one right way to be enlightened? 39:07 – The show Westworld (major spoiler alert until 42:57) 44:20 – Affecting multiple CONR categories at once, how this kind of cross-training is helpful 47:27 – Getting the cosmic joke 59:20 – If it’s all a cosmic joke where do CONR interventions come in? What about equanimity? 1:03:35 – Kenneth’s own story about stream entry and equating the cosmic joke with attainment 1:11:21 – The difficulty of engaging with the Zen version of getting the cosmic joke 1:13:09 – Reviewing CONR You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.  

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 Notes 0:48 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.