Deconstructing Sensory Experience & Nondual Practice, with Michael Taft Session 1

let's begin with a brief very brief meditation that will be silent welcome everybody to San Francisco Dharma collective the world's finest Dharma collective the world's only Dharma collective I think maybe I think a couple now yeah here in the heart of the Mission District so super stoked to be here tonight teaching this class I can't remember the name of because the name we came up with was something like you know deconstructing sensory experience and contacting non-dual awareness something like that but internally we've just been calling it hacking the stack so to me this is hacking the stack class so welcome to that you guys sure this mic isn't just a little way too loud a little way too awesome so welcome to the class I don't know the name of where we will be looking into this map of meditation experience how many people just raise your hand if you already listened to the podcast that describes this in detail oh not that many folks that's great so the good news is that you know I have like two podcasts where I talk about this topic but here we have quite a bit more time like more than double the amount of time to really go into the topic so I'm super excited about that because actually there's a lot a lot to say and to experience part of it will be experience all for you to just see what we're talking about here and to begin with the very first thing I want to say is this is just a map right the thing we're going to talk about the thing we're going to work with the thing we're gonna describe and dig into and all that is a map a map is not the territory a map is not the real thing a map this particular map is not somehow a model of reality or somehow the truth or something this is just like a thing that I've been using for years to help me understand what's going on in my practice what's going on in other people's practices and the more I kept denying that I was using a map because I'm just kind of characterological II against maps I think that at a deep level your meditation practice and your spirituality is very much like your art or your love or something it's it's you working with your life and your expression and your thriving so nobody can make a map of that and you know anyone who tries is kind of my basic attitude but as a teacher that's not that helpful you know it's a helpful attitude in one way to encourage you guys encourage folks to have their own experience but in another way when we're trying to gauge what we're someone's eye maybe what they're missing maybe what's coming next maybe something that is actually more helpful that they're missing stuff like that it turns out to be helpful to have an understanding of the territory and typically the the maps that are available already are not super helpful or I found things that were really really problematic about them and kept actually getting in the way or causing problems and so I wasn't too happy with those there are some you know very particular maps you can you can refer to that are like fifteen hundred years old and they're really cool in certain ways and they do have good stuff but they're also have their issues and which we won't go into that's a whole other class but I found myself kind of taking what I could from those and throwing out the rest which turned out to be a lot and instead kind of giving the model that my main Buddhist teacher shins and yang had kind of given me about how things were working and then expanding on that and expanding on that and then working through actual practice with you know live human beings for a long long long long long time like all day every day for well over a decade right so really working with hundreds of people about okay here's what's going on here's what's going on and I finally had to admit at least to myself that I was using at least the this ballpark map to kind of understand what was going on and then eventually I'm like why am i hiding this and I know why because print maps are problematic and maps introduce certain issues right like striving you know as soon as you show the map everyone wants to get to the final spot on it if they're in just for the record there is no final spot on this but there is like there's four levels and immediately all anyone cares about is level four like I'm the lead and I put it out there that's what I started hearing and I'm like yep there it is and that's an issue right like the rest of it doesn't matter somehow and how am I gonna get to level four and that's just like not that helpful with an attitude you know that's that's not what we're doing again practice hopefully is just trying to get to the end as fast as possible and so that's a big issue and so this element of striving is hugely important to be on the lookout for you have to of course have goals and you know just like anything else in life you can attempt to achieve those goals and yet in your the minute you sit down on the cushion those should be the furthest thing from your mind maybe the goal is helping you get to the cushion helping you get you know back to your every day but once you sit down sitting there going okay I'm gonna try to get to level four right now is you know not going to work right and there's really solid reasons why that doesn't work so that's a big reason to just throw maps out the window and forget about them another one is that many many many maps come with a lot of ideology built into them there instead of trying to just show the territory and more or less neutral manner they're trying to create the territory here's the stuff you're supposed to see and that can be cool too right there's there's something to be said for that but most of them don't explain that very clearly like this you know we're trying to show you a certain philosophical understanding instead usually the they're presented as like here's reality but that's it here's reality go find it and I think that that's a little problematic and so I can sit here and complain about maps for a very long time and I feel like I'm I can't I still can't believe I'm up here about to teach one but I will do it because it turns out to be helpful but I want I want to start out by saying the minute you start thinking that this is like somehow reality stop doing that right instead it's just showing you how to work with your practice and it's for the record not showing you how to work with any practice at all right it specifically meant especially going from one to four it's meant to work with the pisano practice right this is for mindfulness deconstruction type practice that's what it was designed for and for example if you are doing Shawmut uh don't do this is the wrong map you know you want to do something like the you know Bumi's or the TMI like ten level thing where it's talking about your level of concentration right specifically it's just concentration and you know that's what that's for this is not about your level of concentration although to you know put grass down the map it's you certainly are probably gonna have a higher and higher level of concentration but that's not what it's trying to show you okay it's more trying to do the thing that the possum is trying to do which is to show you the emptiness of phenomena to show you the no self impermanence aspects of phenomena okay so that's what it's for interestingly I found out as I was working with it more you can you can use it in Reverse to do certain types of non-dual practice and that's just a bonus it's just a weird thing I found out and I'm like oh that's fascinating and we'll work with that later on in the class but the main thing is if you're doing Vipassana this is going to help you get like what's going on and how to go deeper okay so it's very very very practical and the attempt is to have as little ideology in there as possible although everything has some ideology in it but you know just in the way it's constructed at all but much more trying to just help people meditate better we live a pasta okay so I'm going to stand up now and I'm going to draw a map and just feel by pain as I do that and just for the record I mean this is Michael Taff Dharma right you can't find this map in a Buddhist textbook but you can find things that are very very similar and of course it's made to integrate with that very very well but it's not like I'm drawing a thousand-year-old map or something so first we'll do a nice ohm in the cinema script not the usual Sanskrit ohm but there's a Siddim ohm just be kind of ritualized here and I'll put the title which is a map of deconstructing sensory experience in whoops the pasta okay that's really the name because it's not specific it's not a map of meditation or a map of reality or a map of what you're supposed to see or something it's like if you're doing the pasta on a sensory experience here's how you deconstruct that okay so that's why it has a long name and there's a lot of extra names I could put in there and I'll put part of the extra name is and an interesting way of working with non-dual practice very non-standard way but interesting nonetheless okay so that's at least a beginning of a name for the map it's probably much longer than that in Sanskrit so level one here we go all ready everybody ready we'll just call it concept it's really would be conceptual or whatever but for reasons you'll see I have to make these nouns level 2 phenomena or will say phenomenon level 3 is a vibration and good-o level for which everyone will now take as their ultimate goal in life please do that immediately awareness because I don't know how to make this awareness level into an adjective that's why these aren't vibrational phenomenological and conceptual because I don't know how to call it awareness ole so just to have nice a nice list where all the elements are the same part of language they're all nouns conceptual phenomenological vibrational and the awareness level okay those are the four levels of this map tonight we're really going to be focusing on these two next week these two like well because you know there's a lot more to say about phenomena so we'll do tonight these two next week these two the next week these two and last week we'll do those super cool fancy reverse the stack move okay so we're really zeroing in on these tonight which I will explain now so this is a map of deconstructing sensory experience so when we say that we mean not only any sensory experience but also things that in Western culture probably wouldn't be considered sensory experiences at all like thinking or mental pictures or something that's all considered sensory experience you know if you see the outside world that's a visual experience but picturing the outside world in your mind that's considered a mental sensory experience still a sensory experience in the way I'm going to talk about this okay so if we take anything that happens in your senses any sight any sound any smell any taste any touch turns out humans have a bunch of other senses likey you're monitoring your own blood salinity level right now and stuff like that blood sugar level also we have all kinds of senses vestibular starts and stuff like that but though you know these big senses we're going to talk about those kind of experiences and also then the mental version of any of those remembering a sight remembering a sound imagining a smell imagining a taste something like that all of those in this way of talking we're just going to say they're all sensory experiences so in terms of like Buddhist theory the pasta theory what makes what what is a valid sensory experience for investigation with the pasta anybody good guess but know anything that's if it's a sensory experience it's valid to investigate with a pasta so any possible thing you can experience ever you can investigate with a pasta my right except for maybe the very most bottom level of this which there's a question about whether that's an experience at all but getting there as part of the thing so everybody clear about what we're talking about which is any experience of anything ever at any time including mental experience that's all clear right that's what an sensory experience is the way we're talking about it but pasta that just means investigating that very clearly right and what the pasta theory tells us we're gonna find that those experiences are empty essentially they're going to be have these properties of non-self and of impermanence and usually something like unsatisfactoriness so this map really focuses on the no self and impermanence qualities particular those are the ones that are important for emptiness right okay so let's think of a sensory experience we could have I'm going to just pretend for a moment that were let's see here we're looking at an apple I like to draw apples for some reason so we're gonna do an apple and this particular Apple is something that for now we are having the expensive experience of looking at this is only a simulation of an apple but still close enough okay everybody with me so far Apple will even give it a shadow back mood tonight make it seem a little more 3d okay so this is a thing you know you're sitting there looking at an Apple right seeing it with your eyes that's a sensory experience and this Apple is going to be our friend for the rest of the class because this is going to help us to describe everything that I'm talking about the conceptual level that's an apple right and in fact we can just say that you know we're not even concerned that it's red it has a green stem and leaf it's got a shadow it's basically round etc etc if we go to the highest level of the most like complete abstraction we would just kind of erase this all just imagine I'm doing this over the whole thing and just write Apple Oh big meta tag so the fact that it's like grasp and crunches when you buy it it and it's sweet in your mouth fills with juice and it's like that shiny red but it's also kind of green and yellow and it's got highlights and shadows and the sound of the slight like paper-like quality of the leaf all that is not present at this level nobody cares about that it is an apple it's in a way it's a very lossless or a lost full way of looking at it right we lose a lot of information especially that kind of like incredible sensory information right we're just stamping apple on there so you can see that in a way that's very lossy right that's not that interesting and it's kind of a major major reduction Brendon can you play that Bach concerto that everyone plays in every movie listen to this with your eyes closed as for a moment world's most famous cello concerto you will recognize it instantly because you've heard it in over a hundred and fifty movies you absolutely you know sumptuous gorgeous piece of music that makes you actually believe that human beings can do something beautiful and that's all that was music right that's it just some music if we put on you know 50 cent I'd be music to same experience it's music right so you can see that some information gets lost there on this conceptual level at least at the very highest most simplistic version of it this is what I call meta tag world wait for it dharma centered blackboard that white board that really is loud and meta tech world is where most of us are these days alright it's it's a really really common way to go through your day you just you know that's my car there's the house and just working through the world conceptually right and you know there there's this thing I want and it's called this and there's this other thing I'm trying to get rid of and it's called that and everything is just way up on this like level of total abstraction so something I want to make clear about this is it sounds like I am really normative right now right like I have a lot of valued judgments but it's just the way I'm describing it to begin with actually each of these levels is incredibly useful right and incredibly powerful not only for what it's usually used for in the world but we can even do meditations at each of these levels that are very worth doing so I'm emphasizing how lossy and kind of crappy metatag world is right like we're born with senses that are incredibly rich high resolution really great for enjoying stuff and this is just eliminating all that right it's just like that doesn't even exist but what what's good about it anybody yes with a more complete conceptual structure yes what else we have to talk about stuff conceptually again that's richer than what I'm describing but yes something even more basic it's extremely efficient right if I stop and like smell the petrichor of the wet earth on my way to work and then pet a squirrel and then like lay back and have this you know like that's not gonna work out very well for me I mean I'll probably be having a good life but it's there it's it's very demanding of cerebral cortex time it really causes your you have to be engaged every moment with everything if you aren't doing this but when we're doing this we're very focused on what's important right now and what can we get done so it has real value in the world and you've probably noticed that this is what we're trained to do right for the most part depending on your job but even if you have a job where you're like an artist or something where you have a lot of training in this still you have to work on this level all the time now to do your marketing and to do your budgeting in to you know manage your Instagram account and all that it's it's something that in the last 20 years has like mushroomed into most people most of the time are dealing with this and when you get online and you you know you see all the heuristics like how did how to bake the perfect this or how to choose that or whatever it's really based on the efficiency of this right it's just trainer just how it's the quickest way to make decisions in some kind of conceptual zone so it's been really interesting as a meditation teacher and just as someone who's lived long enough to see it change its to watch this become like such a big part of everybody's life way more this way than we were even even a 10 years ago but especially more than like 20 years ago usually the first thing anybody says about a movie these days is like sort of a like some kind of cultural critique it has too many of these kind of people or not many of this kind of people or whatever no matter which part of the political spectrum you're on it's talking that way completely conceptual very few people it used to be you'd start out and be like the SH the cinematography is gorgeous here's why I did it is really really getting into that level and we still do that but it's interesting this is always first this is what matters in art now is just you know what's that yes it's money so it's been a fascinating cultural shift now what can we do with that meditation wise invoke asana I'm always going to be trained to push you down the sack for the most part and in in any of a positive class there at least trying to put you here you know that's what they want you to make that move out of the conceptual into the phenomenological right let's see what quickly what's the phenomenological well that's what I was describing the crunchiness of the Apple its redness greenness yellowness and in fact that it's kind of every color the fact that when you look at it it's not exactly round it's got all these interesting lumps the sound the paper like rustling of its leaf the way your mouth floods with sugars and and water when you bite it all that stuff that's the phenomenological level this sensory experience level right it's deeper into sensory experience at that point you don't you know it's almost don't matter right because they the proliferation of words to try to describe all that gets unwieldy so that's the phenomenological level and that's where Vipassana is trying to get you to go first eventually they're trying to get you all go to go all the way down the stack but in most Dharma centers in America this is where everybody's trying to go you know anybody ever done the raisin exercise raise your hand if you have done the infamous raisin exercise what's the reason exercise you take a single raisin and you eat it as slowly as possible while doing intense mindfulness on you might look at it first actually look at it smell it feel it in your hand roll it around then you eat it as slowly as possible having this like kind of like orgasmic experience with this reason in your mouth right that's the reason experience Experion and it's like kind of the first teaching of a certain kind of a pasta and they're trying to get you to understand you were calling that a raisin but there's this whole other thing you can do with it right and back when there used to be like humanity's in the school and stuff that's what they were trying to teach you like that your senses were interesting music was interesting language is beautiful stuff like that so [Music] that's what most of a pasta is trying to get you to do and of course in this class we'll be talking about that however I'm going to make good on my word and talk about not only the fact that the concept level is super important for life in terms of us you know just doing anything at all and understanding what we're doing and having a job and stuff but you can do great meditation on the conceptual level anybody know of any you could start my damico philosophy and and and there is a way to do that as a meditation even more simply you could do analytical meditation which would use my JAMA ko philosophy right so analytical meditation I'm not going to write that on the board but we'll do that in a minute any kind of let's see if I was to say let's talk about where anything came from we're gonna do a meditation on where anything came from we'll do that in a minute that will be an analytical meditation so I'll just set that aside and say I'll guide that in a minute another one would be a really typical one would be dependent co-arising meditation so anything that's happening as if from the Apple noticing how that's dependent Leko arising or thinking about that another really common faux pas so no one would just be thinking about how other people are suffering and how you might relieve that suffering you know that's like an analytical meditation that is totally on the level of concepts a really common one in American society that's super useful is the stuff you do in cognitive behavioral therapy that entire therapy is like one long analytical meditation so for example you're going to look at your thinking and notice a cognitive distortion in other words conceptual distortions so if all you're thinking is black and white and you keep noticing you're saying I I I always screw up and I'm never good you're going to in cognitive behavioral you're gonna go well that's is that true really always every single time you've never even like gone to the bathroom right well okay I sometimes do things wrong and I sometimes you know get it right actually and are you all you know so you go in there and you every single thought you have especially the loop that's the negative looping dogs you do analytical meditation on them and that turns out to be incredibly powerful for fixing stuff that's wrong with your mind and like those cognitive distortions are very disturbing and they're the reason they're called distortions is they are incorrect usually because they're too extreme right so that's another example of a conceptual meditation that is actually incredibly powerful and useful everybody understand what I'm saying okay now we'll do one this will not be a long meditation no usually these kind of conceptual meditations in Buddhist history are done to help you learn and deeply understand and kind of soak in and steep in Buddhist philosophy right the one we'll be doing tonight is is slightly less classic than that but you'll get the idea and it's powerful actually so this meditation has one simple question and that is well let's ring the bell so the question you ask yourself in this meditation is where did I come from okay and so you can go and do that on your own but I'll guide it mildly and just say well there's the obvious immediate answer which is most people had parents of some sort and so we can say you came from your parents there was probably a father and a mother and those people combined to make you at least the beginning of you but then there's all the food you've eaten since then like is there really any atoms in you that were there when you were born who knows so it could be all the food you've eaten since then all the air you've breathed and the structure of your brain would even include all the stuff you've ever learned and learning including just you know talking to people watching movies all that is included in the structure of your brain so all that is part of where you came from and then in a conventional sense we would talk about like where you grew up or the place or many places where you know the little person slowly grew to become a larger person and so the culture and attitudes and other people you were around and accidents and events and maybe illnesses and diseases and [Music] sunshine or if you're like me frigid snowscape or whatever that was part of your upbringing is all part of where you came from and part of what they had who you are now so notice that's a pretty broad and ubiquitous kind of field of things that you're arising out of but to really to really go there you then have to say well where did those things come from where did your parents come from and of course the easy answers well my grandparents their parents but then you have to include all the same stuff like the food they ate the place they were places they grew up the situation's they grew up in the things they learned the ways their genes might have been influenced by cosmic rays all that so you have to include all that stuff and where all that came from and then if we really start thinking about you know where your grandparents came from and we kind of take a bigger view it's like well actually they came from primate ancestors and eventually we can trace that back to like tree shrews little like kind of like possum like things that arose after the big bear after the comet that killed the dinosaurs the meteor they killed the dinosaurs but speaking of dinosaurs that's where your family came from - that's where your parents came from also and eventually we work our way back to very basic forms of eukaryotes and then then we make the big step back into even prokaryotes like single-celled organisms and as we know the atoms for the primordial soup that gives rise to single-celled organisms come from stars because they're heavier atoms that are just found floating around in the early universe and so they have to be manufactured in the hearts of stars so your family came from stars literally you come from a star literally but where do stars come from well the best we can say is the Big Bang and then no one knows before that so it's just sort of ends up at a question mark but notice that the easy answer well I came from Michigan or I came from my parents that's like really really really that's like metatag world like the simplest possible concept but even on this conceptual level if we start digging in things get very complex and rich and deep very very quickly and this is it just going in one direction I'm using kind of a Western materialist scientific direction to talk about it just because we're probably all pretty familiar with that but we could analyze where we came from you know as a as a dependent co-arising expression in the moment we could do a lot of different ways of chopping this up but notice that no matter what you're experiencing you're experiencing this loud shirt you're experiencing you know the temperature in the room you're experiencing an apple you're experiencing a pod in your mind whatever you know to really understand where that came from you have to go back to the Big Bang over and over again as Carl Sagan used to say to tell someone how to bake an apple pie you have to go back to the Big Bang if you're really going to be as clear as you can be so just think about all those beings billions upon billions upon billions of beings all that nutrient the food the air think about the land the different like even the place that you grew up that the fact that before that was a city that was a let's say a field or something before it was a field it might have been rocks underground etc etc everything has been so many other things for so many billions of years that are conventional labels like this is me now in this place at this time it's all just a kind of shorthand that really obscures this ultra deep history and hyper complexity of interconnectedness that is actually going on so just sit with that for a moment and really kind of imagine it and feel into it good so that was an analytical meditation and even though that was kind of a modern science II science ish meditation analytical style meditation is as old as Buddhism itself it's something that is very very traditional it's not often taught in meditation centers but if you were let's say a Buddhist monastic a monk or a nun or whatever this would be very traditional you know to do more Buddhist philosophical type analytical meditations or whatever so never think that this conceptual level somehow is a lesser than it's we again we're trying to move down the stack for a certain reason but doing meditation at the conceptual level getting good at it is actually incredibly powerful and useful and it's wonderful for having a clear bright mind right and it can also help you work with certain aspects of your meditation practice you know I'm always angry and let's say you you know you understand that you need to accept and even love your anger and so on and at the same time you want to express that in a negative way less so you start thinking about how anger causes harm and think about you know lists in Buddhism of the negative aspects finger I mean you can go into a whole way of meditating on an emotion to kind of have a more a better conceptual understanding of why that might not be skilled for skillful for you to express in certain ways it might be skillful to express in other ways or whatever so very traditional and super powerful and again something we don't do enough of be fun to do a lot of those actually the closest we get at SF DC is Michael Owens class right it's really going in that direction when when we go into some of these soup Sutra discussions so that's awesome I'm going to take a drink of water so before we go into level to see on the first night you're already going to level two aren't there any questions no I'm gonna have to repeat your question so try to make it pithy yeah so can Brahma fahara practice or love what we usually call Metta meditation loving-kindness meditation fall under conceptual practice absolutely in fact the way I was talking about working with emotions we could just think about what's good about compassion and then start doing a full analysis of that or something and that would be really traditional so it's not literally Brahma for our practice right when you do it that way but you know especially if you're sitting there thinking through some of the parts of brahma vihara it partakes a bit of conceptual that's something thank you for reminding me it's something I want to say is none of these levels are absolute meaning they're not you know I was gonna say binary but what's the word I'm looking for they're not discrete yeah they're continuous thank you we're gonna get you know richer and richer into concept and you know begin to partake of the phenomenological more and more right and gradually it gets more and more phenomenological so part of brahma vihara as a concept could be picturing something and you know saying words about it but then eventually you're getting this good feeling and and that's pretty phenomenological so you know it crosses a boundary there and so something to always remember is that probably nothing is purely any of the we're just talking about kind of where a practice sort of is probably centered what else yes you mean the conceptual meditation seems similar to contemplation what do you mean when you say contemplation and what tradition are you coming from when you say ask that yes so the interesting thing about is this like contemplation I'll just get a little nerdy about language like you know this meditation language that we use comes from Latin Rite and like Church Latin and of course Christianity previous to the Protestant revolution had a tremendous amount of meditation in it and a very you know one out of eight Europeans at that time was a monastic one out of every eight people so there were a lot of monastics there's a lot of nunneries and monasteries and Abbey's and stuff all across Europe and so there's a super developed tradition of meditation but what's funny is we've got it exactly backwards in terms of the language if using liturgical not liturgical but if you're using like kind of a theological Latin the word for sitting there thinking about something is called meditation that it that's the only or however you say in Latin and doing like a wordless feeling of your body or whatever it that's contemplation and so they'd be got it backwards when they started applying it to Asian traditions and it's just a mistake so there's a funny thing in there to always remember that if you're looking at you know if you're looking at meditation thing for like son juan de la cruz or you know teresa of avila or something when they talk about meditation they're talking about analytical work and when they're talking about contemplation they're talking about you know wordless feeling of the heart or something it's just interesting but yes it would it would be you know there's a thing called lectio Divina right in in Latin what did anyone care to translate that but what do you do you read the scripture as a meditation right yeah or like I remember working with someone one time it was teaching me lectio divina and it's like you you know you read this passage about let's say the Passion of Christ and then you have to picture it very completely and in fact you might spend weeks picturing that one scene oh you know then they put the sponge of vinegar on his you know parched lips and you're like spending like a week picturing that and imagining it and feet like kind of embodying that experience so that's lectio divina and and that would be an example of that right so it's like this is a very common thing worldwide and it's also of course really where academics is supposed to go you know like if you're if if you're really involved in your math you know you would be doing a kind of lectio divina with your theorems or whatever so powerful stuff and yes I would say that we could distinguish it from the meditation version depending on how much music you have on in the background how much distraction is going on because to do it like kind of properly you'd want to shut everything else off and just focus right anything else no I'm another question there no okay all right take a break real fast just four people have to go to the restroom do it and then we'll start level two I'll ring the bell in like three minutes so don't you we're good to go there in Tony Oh time out okay I am speaking in order to let everyone know what my voice sounds like and to test the levels of that voice in this sound system how's that it's always both so we've got an audio issue it is on yes good all right can we go all right let's say you just sat down it add an amazing meal someone had spent all day cooking it you maybe you looked up these special recipes you invited your best friends it's like this beautiful day everything is just exquisitely rich and gorgeous and your friends sit down and they're like let's get this over with as fast as possible or same let's say you know you're about to have an intimate experience with another person and they're like yeah can we make this as quick as possible you know it's just the you know it's not the richest kind of experience and I what what drives me crazy about a map like this as people are like how do I get too far as fast as possible and it's the same thing I'm like you know I get it but it's just the wrong attitude yeah dude stop that let's be where we're at and be with it and enjoy it and imbibe that and really like the present that's what it's about the whole trying to be fast thing and efficient is just not really part of the game and we're we're modern Westerners you know filled with the disease of capitalism and so we can't help but think that way but it's like and I think that way too right that's just our culture but like coming out of that as much as possible and trying to be with the where you're at is what this is about right so that said we're gonna rush to level two and remember that next week we'll do more level two so level two is phenomenological level which is a fancy way of saying like enjoying your senses noticing the sensory details rather than the idea of it so instead of stamping at Apple it's all the stuff I keep saying about an apple instead of just saying that was music it's like letting that concerto just you know ravish your ears right it's it's so rich there's so much to notice about that and just to be fair you could do the same thing conceptionally you could get into the concept of the Bach music which is extremely complicated really I mean it's no one that particular piece is known for its simplicity but there's like a 25 minute video online that just deconstructs how totally complex it is and how fascinating that is so it's not like the conceptual level isn't rich it's just rich in another way and we're like it's rich sort of like horizontally on that map and we're going vertically okay so what like if you go to like a lot of meditation centers they'll teach you the first day that raisin meditation I keep teasing them about so you're gonna take that raisin and you look at it you'll smell it and then you put it in your mouth and you try to chew it as slow is possible because there's a lot of tastes going on a sugary and it kind of feels rubbery and but also your saliva have like there's a lot happening there and they're trying to get you out of the conceptual and into the phenomenological right what's it like as an experience can you notice your senses and again in in our culture in our time we're very impoverished that way even though we have more sensory stimulating stuff than ever before it's like we kind of lost the whole idea of something being beautiful or something being rich in that way and we just go straight to the concept you know about it what do we think about it politically what do we think about it economically and all that which again all has its value in its place but we've kind of lost touch with the directness of our own senses and the richness of sensory experience and that's what initially meditation is trying to get you to do and so when people say meditate on your breath and the first day you're doing maybe you just got done with the raisin meditation and it's your first day of meditation you got taught that you did the raisin meditation now you're going to meditate on your breath and so usually it's spoken about like that meditate on your breath and that's already a concept right what's the breath you know but okay I'm gonna meditate on my breath and if you're really used to the conceptual and you're trying to touch the phenomenological you at least notice you're breathing in and breathing out in the most general way but if the instructors trying to really help you get phenomenological they're going to instead of saying the breath they're gonna say I want you to contact the body sensations of breathing because already that's a little clearer like how it feels in your body to breathe and then they're gonna give you hints like feel your belly rising and falling feel like your nostrils tingling as the air rushes in and rushes out feel your chest expanding and contracting you can actually you know depending on your sensitivity maybe even feel your lungs and then as they get a little more into it they'll start saying stuff like can you notice that the breath is oh the air of breathing is cold going in and warmer coming out because your lungs have your lifeblood has actually warmed the air and when you shove it back out your nose you feel that warmth right so they start to give you instructions that are already more phenomenologically oriented right like get into the feeling and that's the name of the game and we do it we can do it remember what's a valid sensory experience for the pasta anything so we can do it on any experience in any sense gait if we do it on a sound you know you're listening to the you know the easiest way to put it is the sound of the sound it's not the content of the sound it's the richness of the tones and the way it you know lands in your ear and it's sharp or it's round or it's real staccato or it's smooth all those kinds of things and I'm saying it in words to describe it to you now but of course you wouldn't be thinking about it like that you're just getting into the sound of the sound and the way that like a brash gong a brass a brash brass Gong sounds is different from let's say like an oboe right the quality of that sound is so different and then like a car crash outside versus you know like a song and so on that they're very very different types of phenomena and you are the goal is to get more and more into that and so kind of like day one for most meditation they're trying to get you to make that move at least a little bit but because of the way we're trained we're trained to stay up in in the concept pretty much all the time except for certain careers or certain hobbies you know we're kind of used to thinking thinking thinking thinking about it instead of experiencing it so usually though the will the attempt will be made to anchor you in the phenomena a little bit like at least count your breath right and when you think about it that's that that could be noting counting your breath is a kind of noting and the possible practice even all the way down to four is noting Alex was asking me about isn't noting conceptual well sure but what's interesting is it's a it's a conceptual practice that you can take all the way down to level four just because it's holy it's not like the noting contains a big concept it's just about anchoring your attention right and there's ways of doing noting practice that aren't verbal like you can do finger noting just tap your finger every time you note something is that conceptual it's doing the same thing and even if it is as I said every level contains the other levels at least a little bit these aren't discrete categories that absolutely exclude the other categories so noting is an example of a like a little tiny bit of concept that comes up with you all the way even though I would claim it's not even that much of a concept but again yeah breath counting or whatever it's just trying to get your most basic level of attention on the phenomena but what's that the real way to get your concentration on a phenomena like the powerful way the way that really is going to help you get deeply into the phenomena anybody investigation that's the name of the game in capacity but what are we investigating the phenomena the qualities of the phenomena so it's an interesting paradox but like if you want to get involved in something it's really hard to get involved with a label labels are boring Apple Apple I'm done right that's not gonna change I can stay attending to the word Apple and that's its own kind of meditation but that's a Shama to meditation that's not on this map right that's just focusing on something to focus instead if you want to start really getting into phenomena you do it by noticing details of the phenomena so I gave an example of details in the breathing right if you're doing any body sensation let's see if I can do the basic list it would be felt location felt size felt three-dimensional shape and then just put felt in front of everything temperature pressure density texture solidity all those sorts of things about any sensation in your body right and it's not like you're sitting there trying to think about that as a list of words or using your thesaurus to find the best description for this particular texture so the example I always give so pardon me if you've heard this example before but for investigating the phenomena of a body sensation imagine that I gave you a piece of carpet like a foot square piece of carpet but actually rough it's not a square it's some irregular shape and it's a shaggy carpet or let's say shag rug but it's just a swatch right the irregular swatch but imagine really long but then I've taken scissors pinking shears and randomly cut some of it to different lengths and then I put some Elmer's glue in there and maybe some honey and also some sand and some like very small pieces of broken windshield and maybe some wire and and then you close your eyes and you didn't have any of that description I put that in front of you and I say put your hands in that and feel it so right now just imagine doing that and what that exploration would be like tact alee some of it maybe there's some seashells in there maybe there's a you know there's there could be like some corkscrew pasta you know so there's a lot of a lot of textures in there and that's the beginning of how you get interested in a sensation because sensations are we're used to devaluing them especially body sensations and just being like yeah my that's my leg so what gets me around to the next you know thing I got to do fast but instead it's it's just the opposite we're gonna get cured oh there's the sensation that one part of my thigh and I'm gonna just feel it like I just had you imagine feeling that carpet but in that sensation over and over and over again at the highest level of resolution possible alright the highest level of detail you can get so let's do that right now yes not labeling anything if you're that that's it none of that you just feel it because otherwise you're back up in the conceptual meditation that would still be a worthwhile meditation but that's then your inward vel instead you're just imagine feeling that carpet all the different things you would feel yes yeah okay so we will note this we're going to do a body sensation I want you to pick one body sensation I encourage you to pick something kind of complex like let's say your right hip joint or maybe your trachea or something something where there's a lot of different weird shapes of the sensation going on and whatever but you can pick anything you want let's go and just begin feeling into that and at first especially if you're not feeling particularly concentrated you just contact the sensation very generally and we'll use one label and the label will be body sensation or you can shorten it to just body okay that's it it's just enough to keep you on the sensation as a focus object and again at first that's enough that's the beginning of the phenomenological but then your job is to heighten your sensory clarity and begin to explore that sensation in detail and all of us come with a gigantic cultural baggage that says this is a stupid thing to do why would I feel you know the itchiness in my knee for an hour no one's gonna pay me to do that so this is stupid and useless and furthermore uninteresting itchy knee that's it that's all there is to say about it so we have to kind of break through that membrane and the way we break through the membrane is to begin to explore the sensation remember just this is feeling first feel the location of it where does it feel like it is and then feel the size of the sensation this is a felt size you're not sitting there conceptualizing how big it really is in quotes or or how big it has to be based on the size of bodies or whatever that's not interesting at all what's unless you're up at the conceptual level what we're doing here is feeling how big it feels and for the record in a long meditation retreat sometimes your body feels like it's a hundred miles wide or something it's very common actually so you're just feeling how big it feels and then you can feel the three-dimensional shape hint it turns out bodies are three-dimensional so body sensations are three-dimensional we tend to conceptualize them as very flat but again that's up in concept land when you feel a sensation it's 3d for the most part especially if you're getting down into the meat you're not just staying on the surface of the skin if you're at any depth in the body the sensation is three-dimensional and that shape can be very irregular and complex and interesting to explore with the feelings and you'll notice you're probably making a mental image of it that's normal but that's not that's a side effect that's fine that that's there but what you're doing is feeling and you're feeling with great detail so we did the location and we did the size we did the shape you can sit there and feel the shape for a long time and then try feeling the texture of it particularly remembering that it's 3d so the textures different at different points as if you had a bowl of oatmeal and there was raisins and and and walnuts in it and maybe some honey and cream and sugar the texture is going to be really different at different points in that bowl and so same thing as you feel into this body sensation notice that it has a lot of different textures and you may also notice that as part of that or a similar thing is that it has different densities and again this is the feeling of density we're not talking about anything that we don't care about someone going in there and measuring the density or something it's how it feels and so you'll notice that some sensations the whole thing just feels like a bowling ball or something it's just heavy and solid throughout kind of an even texture but a lot of them are like that a lot of sensations maybe one one end of it is heavy and sharp and pointy in very dense and then as you it's kind of long and as you get towards the other end of it it gets really diffused and almost like kind of like a gas or something it's very very wispy so I'm gonna leave you these are just hints about how to do this but I'm gonna leave you to explore now for about five minutes and just feeling this one sensation if you get bored you fail so go back and get interested in it again and look at more details good so that's how you do that of course next week we're going to talk about that a lot more there's way more to say about that but you know most of apostille meditators are somewhere in there because that's that level two is very wide there's a big variance from the beginning of that where you first noticed any sensation a little bit for a little while all the way down to where it starts to get you know each moment is a vast panoply of super rich ultra complicated and really deep sensation but notice that that's how you get interested in something right that's how you that's how it's fascinating enough to grab all of your attention as you're getting into the details and then the more you attend to it the more details you can see and then the more you have to undo it the more details you can see this level too is very much like just increasing the resolution on your TV over and over or your video player over and over and over right - just keep eventually it's at HD and then super HD and super double-secret HD you know it just keeps getting more and more vivid and rich and complex but it's when we think of things as labels and the labels are dismissive like it's a what the label serves to not think about it but that's when meditation is impossible alright that makes it really really hard if I'm using the label body sensations so I don't think about that and I can just kind of dismiss it that's it I'm just dismissing and you'll notice as you walk around people talk in a certain way that is intended to dismiss most things except this one narrow thing that they want to discuss right now and again that's in the name of efficiency but in meditation if you in general are working to get more into your breath sensation or doing a body scan type thing this is the path you want to really turn up the dial on the sensory clarity get into the richness of the experience as deep as you possibly can and then nerd out on that hour after hour after hour like that's what you do in a long retreat right you're just exploring the sensations as richly as complexly as possible your body your brain will help you do this right so if you're a piano player the part of your brain that is really responsible for controlling your hands gets fatter much much bigger so that it gets there's a lot more neurons for controlling your hands if you have to memorize a bunch of super complex physical locations your hippocampus gets really large because that's what's required in order to memorize spatial locations and so it physically gets bigger your brains just putting neurons on that task in the case of body sensation or really all sensation you have a pair of things in your brain called insular cortices those get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and in fact you can predict how long someone's been doing mindfulness meditation based on how fat their insula cortices are so it's it takes a while you're actually physically building a part of your brain you know all learning is just that but but if you do this a lot the resolution starts getting much bigger and it's not just because you're paying better attention is because you actually have a lot more neurons dedicated to the task and so they're just getting more information and so it starts to get hyper rich okay so I notice it is now 9 o'clock and that's our ending time so I'll just say if you gotta go feel free to leave otherwise questions was the the question is was that what Daniel Ingram's describing Daniel Ingram is teaching for pasta meditation so yes although I will say I tend to describe it spatially like I'm saying smaller and smaller bits of and Daniel tends to describe it temporally like he'll say faster and faster you know and Daniel is just kind of a fast guy anyway it's really so we just talk about it differently but it's the same idea exactly especially because our teachers are but we're best friends and so there's deep background of why we might talk about it in a very similar but slightly different way yes what else movie so no he's asking about dismissing the phenomena or describing dismissing the phenomena that's our habit that's just what our cultures like you know what's important stuff like your taxes you gotta really get in there with the details but you know it turns out that that's not that great for life what's great for life is getting in the details of your sensory experience right so maybe we should stop questions for a moment and do SF DC announcements before everybody goes so are you doing that or who is doing that this evening Brendan would you like to come up and do announcements we feed please donate they'll be you can do it for the FDC paypal venmo etc so if you're finding this interesting useful helpful or you just feel generous tonight please give to SF DC okay that's it for announcements but I will press you into volunteer thank you so next week we'll go into level two much more deeply and then we'll begin the very terrifying transition into level 3 that's what good that's where everyone gets in trouble so next week level 2 and level 3 mainly level 2 all right thank you [Applause]

Channel: Michael Taft

Views: 6,921

Keywords: meditation, mindfulness, vipassana, buddhism, dharma, nondual

Id: 52Ei9s8t2Sc

Length: 95min 45sec (5745 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020