Deconstructing Sensory Experience & Nondual Practice, with Michael Taft (Session 2)

let's see if we get any sound sound sound sound sound sound still trying to get sound starting that's starting to happen there and think do we have sound do we not have sound how about now is that happening it's still not happening how's that are we happening are we happening okay the other side so test test test us just so that all looks fine right test test test chaos at the dharma collective what's that I know except for it the the Internet oh it's the net the netizens will be left out that's right the medicine net asanga and the meta song of our vital start doing a sound check just keep meditating okay [Music] are the speakers turned on yeah okay just us just us toast testing okay it does not seem to be thing tell me where you want there yeah that's always a wise move testing testing testing meditation keep meditating just a few more minutes and then we'll just forge ahead sure oh we got sound all right testing your equanimity how's the volume for those in back okay I have a major request can somebody nuke that please so that I can get somebody please just microwave that so we can get going I really really appreciate it thank you very much tell me when we're live Antonio to the world we're streaming all right after that wonderful blissful and exciting Fiasco we are ready to go and you can hear how hot the mic is right it's just on the edge of feedback the whole time that's always really Pleasant fills me with equanimity and a sense of peace so just breathe that in so I see a ton of new faces here tonight which is great welcome everybody you're getting dumped into the middle of a class so last week was week 1 of a four-week class this is week 2 so if you are completely confused you have no clue what I'm talking about just hang in there and remember that week 1 is available online you can watch it to get caught up okay because these classes go so fast going back and reviewing all of week one would I think be overall deleterious to the forward movement so I'm just gonna dive in and do my best to bring everybody with me okay and if again it just causes you to feel lost and upset then you know meditate on equanimity with feelings of loss loss being lost a tad upset good so this is the class called I call hacking the stack thank you so much I deeply appreciate it which has another name which I believe is deconstructing sensory experience and non-dual meditation very you know unambitious title but essentially we call it hacking the stack and the idea is that we are using a four-part map and last week I gave my giant disclaimer about why Maps totally suck and you should never use one and never believed one and throw out all maps and tear them up after burning them and throwing the ashes into the ocean so just know that you like maps and meditation are just vile and now we're going to continue with this map this map teaches you how to work with your sensory experience to go deeper into pasta so it's not a map of reality it's not a map of all types of meditation it's not a map of you know like spiritual growth or something like that this is simply how you work with a pasta meditation to go deeper and deeper and deeper and it sort of shows you four basic stages so the four stages this is the entirety of review of the review ready Stage one encountering sensory phenomena conceptually Stage two encountering sensory phenomena phenomenologically Stage three encountering sensory phenomena as vibratory wave phenomena Stage four encountering pure awareness that's it those are the four stages last week we covered one and two pretty well this week we're going to cover more about to the phenomena phenomenological stage of really encountering details of sensory experience and we're so we're kind of doing more on this stage two and then moving into stage three okay so there you go that's your review hope everybody got all that you know and if not we'll be covering this quite a bit so I'm sure you'll pick it up as a little bit more of a view this is a question put out there to the class what is a valid object of the pasta anybody what's it particularly any sensory experience right exactly any sensory experience so we tend to think of a pasta as being only about let's our body sensations of breathing or maybe body sensations generally like body body body or maybe like the sound outside or something but no it is literally any sensory experience and in the Buddhist way of talking about it sensory experience includes your mind like thoughts and various types of thinking so any of that is a valid object form apana meaning we can do this thing we're describing of slowly deconstructing our way down the stack of sensory experience even with things like thoughts so don't think that this don't assume that this just applies to feeling your body sensations of breathing or something it applies to everything and as you'll see tonight that becomes a big deal right a very big deal so I'm going to just write some stuff on the board to help with the class tonight we've got our four levels every time I write this I have to take a deep breath because maps are no good but totally necessary good those are our four levels and last week we talked quite a bit about the conceptual level and that this is this is not somehow like a value Laden map it's not that the conceptual level is bad and we've got to get rid of concepts and we're just trying to get down to that awareness and this is why I keep criticizing maps because as soon as I put that up there and I did this same thing when I first saw maps like this you all you all most people think about is how do I get to level four and everything else that's that you know that's where I'm trying to get and that's just not the case we can do really powerful interesting useful stuff at level one even in meditation right not just in our lives and our work and all that but also there's conceptual meditations like we did last week but eventually if we want to dig down and do the deconstruction thing get into sensory experience start to you know really kind of like put the tendrils of our attention down into the real delicious loamy soil of sensory experience we've got to go into the phenomena right so rather than just the idea about it or the word about it or the meaning or like the tagcloud associated with the object we're getting into the details of the sensory experience of the object last week I talked a lot about apples right into an apple on the board and you know talked about like the details of sensory experience of an apple the various colors the shine on it the shadow the sound of your mouth crunching into it the sound of the wind touching the leave the way it would taste in your mouth if you bit into it the way it would feel in your hands all that kind of stuff that's the beginning the very very beginning of getting into the phenomena of the Apple write out what an apple means not the history of Apple's none of the conceptual stuff just the right in the moment sensory experience of the Apple right at this phenomenological level meaning what it is like in the senses underneath the conceptual level so I will write a word using English letters but it's a word from the pali pali language the religious language of early Buddhism and this word is you have to boot Tadasana remember th is in pali don't sound like the it's just pronounce it like a tea for now you got to boot Tadasana and sometimes we might add in Viana there so what does that word mean can everyone see that you have to boot Tadasana Pali words look like German words or whatever it's like they just tend to slam like lots of lots of nouns together docena basically means to view to look at to understand that would be cognate to the Sanskrit word darshana right so to see something to understand it and this means as it is I mean that there's a lot of various English translations and sometimes whoops put this in the wrong spot there we've got our tilde in a and a we add that in it's not only to understand it but to know it right you have to put me on Adama so usually this is translated as seeing things as they are okay so the idea is we're gonna drop out of the conceptual level we're gonna drop out of ideas about things and instead just contact them as they really are now the whole idea of this deconstructive stack model is that each layer we're actually dropping more and more constructs the highest level of construct we're calling concepts but we're even going to drop the the constructs around the phenomenology and eventually even drop the constructs around the vibration so in one way of looking at it we could say we're never really seeing it as it really is until we're down at four but at another way of looking at it we're seeing it as it really is more and more clearly at each of these levels okay and there's this idea that you hear a lot about in the possum of like naked seeing or Fair awareness where you're just there with the object in the sensory experience without adding anything on to it now that's in one way of looking at it kind of impossible you're always going to add some stuff on to it but the idea of this stack one way of understanding it is each layer down we're adding less and less onto it kind of getting doing less processing of the information and and less categorizing and massaging of the data and as we go down we're letting go of that letting go of that until there's as little of that as possible so this is this idea of seeing things as they really are you got two booted us now or seeing and knowing things as they really are so this is a huge concept in Buddhism right very very important if we take it like as a religious or spiritual concept you know you're going to do of a pasta on any sensory experience and eventually see the truth of you know the three marks of existence and see let's say dependent co-arising and all that stuff as you're looking at it it remains to be we can discuss a great length whether that those ideas themselves represent concepts that we're adding on or not but that would be the idea you know we're as we're going deeper and deeper and deeper into our experience of anything we're seeing it more and more clearly and less and less as an idea right everybody getting this and again like I said last week this is sort of meditation move number one like from your first day of meditation to the day it starts to work the day it starts to work is the day you're starting to go into the phenomena because before that unless you're doing conceptual meditation analytical meditation you're going to keep just bouncing off the concept of let's say body sensation you know yep that's my body that's my leg that's my leg that's my leg you know that's not a good meditation and you're gonna feel really bored and restless and confused because sitting there knowing that's your leg isn't helping and if you did like a little more analytical type meditation with it you'd be like well there's my leg joint and there's you know a muscle you could start to really feel all the individual parts and label them but notice how that's already getting a little bit tiny bit more phenomenological because it's like oh this thing that I was labeling leg is actually made of these various parts and I can feel the parts individually so even sinking in more deeply conceptually we're already starting to lightly go into this second level and remember these are not discrete levels it's really just a big continuum I'm just giving it names to help you understand the continuum and we could move those around quite a bit so instead of going you know that's my leg that's my leg or even these are the parts of my leg we when we move to level 2 we start to go oh those those are the sensations of the leg and and now without words it's like remember like where does it feel like it's located how big does it feel like it is what's the feeling of the three-dimensional shape which might be incredibly different than your mental concept of how it's supposed to be shaped you know and we go with how it feels the textures the density the pressure the temperature all that kind of feeling quality stuff when we're working with the body sensation right that's getting into this second level and that's like again that's when meditation the pasta style meditation really gets moving right when you start digging in like that and remember we're doing this for every other sense gate to listening you know instead of just going that's a car that's a bird that's somebody's sneezing that's somebody you know walking we're just hearing the sound in a very very you know sound of the sound krispy what what's it what what's the texture of the sound what's the intensity of the sound the volume the way it's kind of like changing subtly all that you're getting into this you know the sound of the sound or the feeling of the feeling right that's the phenomenological level and what's so amazing about this is it's like the antidote for our current culture right our current culture is tagcloud world everything is simply an idea about something and that turns out to be really efficient and really fast and also really aggressive and empty theirs in the negative sense of empty it's very hard to get any nutrients or any kind of sustenance or savoriness out of a bunch of concepts right whereas you know bite into the cake and actually taste it and now you're getting some sustenance you're getting some savoriness because it's a carrot cake it's not just sweet its savory and you're getting you know experience so we're getting pushed culturally more and more up into concept land with everything and so beginning to be able to contact things phenomenologically is hugely I'm going to make up a word here I think antidotal it's usually what's the real word for that palliative to this you know condition of conceptual you know trying to live up only in the mind you know like from the neck up entirely kind of thing and maybe even because their sense is in your you know tongue and nose and stuff it's almost like up here so being able to contact phenomenology that way is crucial it's really interesting the arts are very good at teachings and you can use art practice to help you to do this kind of meditation better so for example drawing right there's a book I often mention and recommend to people called from the 80s but it's continuously in reprint since the 80s because it's such a popular text called drawing on the right side of the brain raise your hand if you're aware of this book yeah it's just a fun book about how to drop but what the exercises are is moving from level 1 to level 2 with drawing because what people do that makes their drawings terrible is they're drawing things conceptually oh I know a table has four legs so I make a square and draw four lines and it looks like right but you've got it conceptually the table or a cup like you tell most people drawing a cup they kind of do an icon of a cup and it looks really bad and so the whole premise of this book is to teach you to see the things as they really are rather than your idea about them so do you do a whole bunch of exercises to for example see a table as you really see it rather than your concept of a table using negative space exercises or turn it upside down all kinds of stuff that break your conceptual ideas about table or about cup or about a plant the the most unbelievable transformations are when you she has like beginners do plants because at first they're just drawing the kind of flower you did when you were 3 because that's concept flower and instead she has people do like negative space drawing right we're drawing the negative space you don't have any concepts about what the negative space is supposed to look like so you actually can see that as a phenomena you're not there's not a concept in your mind of what that space is supposed to be shaped like so you draw the negative space around the leaves and the petals and it's it just instantly looks great because you're actually drawing what's there so that helps those kind of exercises with sight and with sound and a lot of what we would think of as sort of like somatic embodied meditation exercises are very very very good for helping you to get into meditating at this level right make sense and just to be super unbelief I'll be very very on a list put it that way very later Buddhists you know living here in the Bay Area Somali a training right Somali a training is going from concepts to phenomena it's training you to drink wine or there's even whiskey Somali A's and stuff god knows how I would know that and you know the whole idea is to learn to taste every little component of these beverages by being super mindful of the smell and taste right and even doing interesting exercises like you know they give you bottles of pure smell or bottles of pure tastes this is just cherry this is just leather smell this is just charcoal or whatever and you get really used to the perfectly pure taste or smell of that thing and then you begin to be able to distinguish it you know glass of a drink and so that's those kind of trainings in any in any sense gay we are really good for helping you to meditate more deeply and conversely working with meditation at this level is great for art it's great for any creative thing and also just more deeply both art and meditation at this level are wonderful for enjoyment of life right actually you know being present for you know just to be so cliche being present for the sunset over the ocean you know something that I see every single day especially as a teacher are people who work very very very very hard to have a good experience to generate a good experience like go on a vacation or go on a retreat or do something they work all year to get that thing and then they go on it and are incapable of enjoying it or even kind of noticing it right they're so caught up in their mind they can't actually be present on the beach they paid 2,000 bucks to go to or whatever and that's a tragedy right that just should never happen but we have trouble dropping out of concepts because we're really locked up in there and most of our jobs are about that how do we work with this you meditate you do art type things enjoyment of the senses type things that keep anchoring you back in the present moment sensory experience on the phenomenological level right so before I go bend this into something really interesting and weird and we do some meditations any questions about this overarching concept we covered it a lot last week good okay so remember I said that any sensory experience counts we can do this with any sensory experience and that in Buddhism we're going to include our mind as a sensory experience so this leads to some pretty weird for example we can meditate on thinking and we can also do phenomenological meditation on emotion which isn't actually in the mind in this way of thinking about it but still in in our society our body we don't have comparatively a ton of concepts about it we mainly just kind of ignore it unless it's in pain so coming into the phenomenological stuff with the body is about kind of you know deciding it matters and then paying attention to it in that way it sounds like we just got all extra feedback e again but things like the emotions and things especially like thinking we have a tremendous amount of concepts about right it's very very rare that we would for example have an emotion and not bring along and in an intense truckload of ideas about that emotion in fact talking to you know your average North American and you say let's say it's someone you know this isn't just a social niceties or you're asking someone how you doing you're really asking how are you doing and they might say something like I'm angry and then their will follow like five minutes of why they are angry this happened and that happened and then I did this and then they did that and this is going on over here and it made it like this so in other words the very first thing they said I'm angry is the answer to the question and the rest of it is a concept about that that really in a way doesn't matter and another way of course it does but that's all ideas about the anger if we were to examine that same emotion as a phenomena the answer would be really different super different it wouldn't be this happened and that happened and I'm like this bear like that and then you know these other people said this it would be how are you feeling oh I'm angry and like my eyebrows are tense and furrowing and my jaw is really tight and clenched my throat is closing and these muscles here are getting really ballsy and tense and I can feel my heartbeat in my forehead and I might even be seeing some red and my shoulders are hunching and my fists are getting balled up you know so and my diaphragm is tense and my breathing is getting fast and you know that's the answer to how are you feeling that's the phenomenology of an emotion in the body right it's a experience notice that none of that talked about why none of that talked about who did what or who deserved this or my reaction their reaction none of that's there this is just present moment how does it feel in this case in your body right again we could go to other sense gates but that's what the anger feels like as an emotion and check out how different that is that's an experience and it's really contacting at a very very high sensory clarity in your body in the present moment dropping you out of the concepts entirely so what's fascinating about this is how powerful that is for improving your life immediately because 95% of what's horribly uncomfortable about an emotion is your ideas about it I shouldn't be having this I need to do something I need to do something to get rid of it I need to do something about the thing that triggered it I need to say this I need to do it but they're prepared I put that concept concept concept concept concept all of it is way up here just going right that's where all the suffering is the actual feeling in your body is just kind of uncomfortable and it's not even that much more uncomfortable than like you know I have a tummy ache but you don't see people typically unless they're real hypochondriac all going oh my god I have a little tummy ache you know a little indigestion what am I gonna do about it Who am I gonna talk to gotta go to the doctor gotta go you know there are some people like that but that's not really you know your typical reaction to oh my old tummy ache it's just yeah mild tummy ache so what so as you contact even extremely what we would normally consider very upsetting emotions understand 95% of the upset is way up there in the ideas about it the idea that it shouldn't be there the idea that you have to make it go away or do something whereas if you drop into the feeling and don't do anything about it it's actually you almost always not always but almost always no big deal at all in terms of the pain of it or the suffering of it the actual physical experience of that emotion is just no big deal and I don't know about you but given the choice between a giant freakout about an emotion and being like milds anger I would choose the latter same experience you know and of course that doesn't mean you don't figure out what's wrong eventually or you don't do something about it but you would be doing that kind of stuff from a place of real equanimity with this emotion not just reactivity so working with dropping out of the conceptual level into the phenomenological level with emotions is like life-changing meditation thing number one like if you can get that meditation has already you know paid its way in your life you will already be glad you learned it you will never stop doing it forever if you can get this one thing so we're going to do this as a meditation let's take questions first everybody understand it yes it's amazing to me because everyone asked questions like that right it's a totally normal question and it's because we have this idea she's asking what how do you know what an emotion feels like what's it mean to drop into an emotion in your body and that is a totally normal question in in society right now and what's fascinating about that is the assumption is that emotions are somehow a mental event right and since our kind of basic idea of psychology these days is cognitive behavioral we think of emotions as like decisions we're making consciously and their mental events now no one would deny that emotions are triggered by the brain but the experience of an emotion is in your body like I said your brows are furrowed your jaw is Tyson throat's closing up your shoulders are hunched that's anger right the rest of it is ideas about anger or what's making me feel angry but the anger is that super revved up body state so that's what I was describing very very detailed Lee is what an embodied emotion is like right and so you know you you can learn to notice embodied emotions of every kind and then eventually very subtle like there's a lot of very tiny subtle emotions going on in your face and so on does that make sense exactly because so the question is do you express the emotions and the idea here is that there's a difference between contacting it deeply and then doing something about it okay so what this is describing is contacting it deeply being with it not trying to make it go away and if it's a positive emotion not trying to grab on to it necessarily but just being with it and then finding room for it to just allow that phenomena to be there okay then after that the response like actually what you do becomes conscious becomes a decision maybe after you said it does feel appropriate to cry great you know but for most people there's no gap there they feel the emotion they react I'm enraged so I punch something you know like it's just mechanistic so the idears there's it's the Viktor Frankl quote right between stimulus and response there's a gap that gap is our freedom and this is exactly what this is about it's like you've got the stimulus of the emotion happening you're just being with it and then the response come can come from a different place after the meditation but during the set you are simply being with the feelings in the body does that make sense yeah yes that crying would be something that's like I can see how crying would be response especially it was a display expression it might just happen involuntarily it could be yeah but usually you'll notice that there's a runaway chain of thought and feeling thought and feeling thought and feeling and and so it's getting mixed up with the concepts they're often not always there's no hard line there so we're you know response and reactivity very different yeah in a way remember like in Asian languages meditation the result of meditation is not enlightenment there's no enlightenment word the two words are either awakening you're gonna wake up to what's really going on things as they really are or you're going to be free freedom right is the other word moksha or several of MOCA other words is the freedom from that mechanical reactivity you know if we look at the true you know the tragedy of human existence is like my grandparents beat my parents and my parents beat me therefore I will beat my children and that's called life right and it's just this mechanical response or like family Systems Theory well the dad beats the mom and the mom beats the older kid and the older kid beats the younger kid the younger kid beats the dog right that's family Systems Theory right there you know rolls downhill I'm a youngest child in a big family so I always felt that one very poignant Lee right that's all just mecan't the mechanics of samsaric horror right like it's just reactivity the domino effect of just passing the pain along forever right it's it's the opposite of freedom and that's what reactivity is whereas if we can be with our uncomfortable feelings we build up some space we actually start removing dominoes from the chain there's space in there and actual responses can happen instead of reactions this is how we break this cycle of reactivity that's so damaging right and if you do nothing nothing good in your life proactively like you you know don't found a hospital or don't you know whatever but you still just broke the chain of passing on the damage you would have done something amazing for the world right it spreads out from you in all directions just the domino effect of doom is is not happening after you right so it's a big deal so thank you for your question about reactivity yes and then just experience and that's what I do sometimes I can just hang out without experience but never go to something else versus having an intention to investigate some texture damage which is a half of field so that is almost kind of like an activity or an intention as opposed to just feel it and experience it you're asking about like how effortful it is yeah and so in this case we're going down the stack it's effortful and you know you are doing active investigation now I would say that's not that much different than just hanging out with something with very good clarity you're not necessarily asked you're definitely not asking mental questions in in verbal ways so you're just being with it but really exploring it remember of a pasta means one of the translations of that word is seeing clearly or seeing through things but another third translation that is very important is essentially analysis stripping it apart deconstructing it right so you're getting into the details in a very structured way or be constructive way okay it's between you know schemata style meditation and vasana right right with ramen till we're not investigating like that for pasta we are definitely investigating okay so let's try this for a minute so phenomenological meditation on emotion we will do this relatively briefly so there's two ways into this one you know you're feeling an emotion you just know you're happy right now go find it in your body oh it's in my face around my mouth I can feel that in the smile I can feel the uplift in my chest and you just explore those the way we explored body sensation last week the feeling of the location the feeling of the size the shape the texture the pressure of the density all that but also just the raw emotional quality of it right because there's a add-in factor in there when it's an emotional body sensation it's got it's got emotional valence it has a flavor so that's one way you know you're having an emotion go find it in your body and then investigate that sensation another way of doing this is to scan your body you know you find something that feels emotional the next question is always how do I know it feels emotional and my answer is how do you know that salt is tastes salty right it's a quality so you will know when a sensation feels emotional because sorry to do this to you it feels emotional you can easily notice ones that don't for example probably the sensation in your knees is devoid of emotional qualities at least in knees the typical locations for emotional tight body sensations are the belly the chest the throat in the face we tend to have a lot of emotional sensations there so find that feeling of emotion that quality of emotional body sensation and just be with it notice because of our society because of a whole bunch of reasons you want to go why is that there what do I do to get rid of it what what what do I have to go do you can thank capitalism for that they're gonna sell you the Cure but what we want to do instead is just feel it letting go of concepts about it over and over again just come back to the embodied experience you may be surprised to discover that you have a hard time knowing what you're feeling well guess what this is how to know what you're feeling the challenge with this is not so much to do the phenomenological investigation you know feeling the feeling of the emotion some people it takes a while to learn to do that but for most people you can contact it they don't have to be big by the way they can almost always their miniscule tiny little wisps of this and that I often hear well I don't feel any big emotion I'm like notice you put the word big in there doesn't have to be big it could be in your face it can be a twinge and your eyebrow can be a tiny little tension in your throat all kinds of stuff feels emotional good so that's just a little tiny experiment with that any quick reports or questions so maybe you noticed sitting with an uncomfortable emotional flavor is not something we tend to do a lot of but it's actually pretty easy very few emotions very few negative or difficult emotions are you know incapacitating ly painful or something some could be but it's very rare usually they're incredibly mild unpleasant but mild and it's all the ideas about it that are driving you crazy up regulate up regularly what am I going to do do do-do-do what's wrong what's wrong what's wrong it's all that idea level and that is generating a secondary emotion of anxiety right so that's where all that that's where we're just adding to our suffering so it's really interesting that you can do this one little move of just dropping into the phenomena and like free your life right suddenly anxiety is no longer controlling every moment of your day or trying to get rid of that guilt or shame is not controlling every moment of your day because what if you just sat with it and interestingly sitting with them also tends to help to resolve certain emotions very very interesting there's a lot there you know emotional meditation we could do a whole year on it but I just want you to see the difference of dropping from concept into phenomena there's a big deal and what would we call that in this case what what quality about our emotion are we getting when we're dropping out of the concept what's that we're going into the phenomenological level but what quality are we building in ourselves equanimity right which just means the ability to be with it right just you're not resisting it you're not controlling it you're not all ten stranded I'm not gonna do anything you know it's not like that it's just okay just sit with it with it with it and you know what's the fourth jhana right you got all these intense jhanas of all these different things what's the fourth one equanimity and it's from that fourth jhana that you you know according to some sutras that's where the Buddha got awakened getting into equanimity and then doing Vipassana right what's the fourth brahma vihara we've got all these things compassion loving kindness sweetness we've got those three balm of relevance the fourth one opaque Oh which means what equanimity right and it's the same thing that equanimity is extremely powerful state thanks for saying it in Sanskrit I like Sanskrit but we're doing Pali right now Oh Becca right so a queendom a very very powerful thing to develop so we have equanimity with body sensations of emotion it starts to massively open up your feeling of pleasantness of existence right all your emotions aren't the world's biggest problem that must be solved immediately you know the weather is happening emotions are happening so again we don't tend to think of this as a thing you can even meditate on in that way but absolutely that's what you do dropping out of the conceptual into the phenomenological very powerful and of course just to harken back to last week doing the concept thing in an analytical way like with a therapist or something going through it conceptually and understand the wise and and you know when's and what to do is that's all useful and powerful and interesting and effective so it's not like that's wrong but you know notice that that's a kind of conceptual meditation that's also building equanimity and also building solutions and stuff it's again not just pure reactivity so there's some interesting stuff there quick questions about emotions yes yes ISM is labeling conceptual or is figuring out the right label conceptual we talked about it last week so it can be the case that sitting there trying to name it gets real concept e so in the vanilla form of the way I teach this meditation like the default form you don't label it as a particular emotion you just call it emotion that way you know the label is as as unconcerned as possible you're just contacting the feeling there's a special exercise where if you just happen to know what it is you can sit there and label the type and if we go back up to conceptual meditation a little bit you can then begin to label emotions and learn them yeah and so again this is a gradient and so we're not trying to banish every bit of concept you can't really do that but what we can do is not try to hang out in the figuring it out and in fact if you were going to do that kind of meditation like we're gonna we're going to distinguish between fear and excitement fear and excitement you would have a third label of not sure so instead of grinding you could just go I'm not sure about that one and keep going right so there's ways to make it less of a thought experiment and more of a feeling experience good okay yes is noting necessary noting is never necessary but neither is it always it's never bad either you can have a deep deep deep bass meditation while still noting because it's it's not like this long thought process right you already know the words so don't you know the word isn't gonna wreck your meditation could help you just be in the rhythm of it maybe it's just arising but so what's the purpose of being afraid of it arising right we're never afraid of thoughts okay alright and that is the perfect segue to the next thing which is the weirdest one it blows everybody's mind put a helmet on to keep your brain inside your skull right now because I'm just going to you up okay this is this is just it right and that is not only can we do non conceptual in quotes meditation and on body sensations of emotion but as I said we can do non conceptual and meditation on thoughts what anybody has everyone's brain still in their head let me see it again you can do non conceptual meditation on thoughts right how do we do that what does that even mean doesn't that sound like I'm saying we can do non conceptual meditation on concepts what you guys don't seem adequately mind blown right now I'm not noticing any total decompensation responses or scribes or anything you know I know it's like the equanimity is too great that's it no we do not just label it a thought that's dismissive labeling which is the way you do vApp asana on something else I'm gonna be meditating on my body sensation of emotion over here a thought is arising I either totally ignore it or if it's very persistent I might dismissively label it but to kind of nudge it away right so that's dismissive labeling great technique but that's not what I'm describing I'm talking about oh the pasta on the thing how does it work yes [Music] correct so thoughts are made of language or pictures language guess what is just a bunch of sounds and mental images mental pictures of things are just some colors and shapes and textures so again even making mental talk into words is already bumping yourself up into concepts now you popped out of the womb you know like with a you know just absolute turbocharger in your brain to learn words so it's not like that's just gonna go away that was like the first thing your first job in life but you can still learn to encounter thought as sound in the present moment so most meditation especially if a pasta is gonna teach you oh my God if I thought you know I can hear Eckhart Tolle oh right now like you know if it's you know you're thinking about the future of the past you just screwed like you must come back to the holy present moment right and somehow thoughts are illegal or thoughts of the future in past like time travel thoughts are illegal or whatever and so there's a whole part of your totally natural experience that's just firewalled off and you're supposed to stop your mind from thinking and to me this is just ridiculous right why is that illegal what's so bad about thinking I just don't get it and in fact if you begin to do phenomenological meditation on your thinking you will discover that it is incredibly pleasant as a sound experience or incredibly pleasant as a visual experience outside of its concepts or outside of its meaning and in fact it's not really that different from breathing or you know your heart beating or whatever it's just there's an organ in your chest that's beating there's an organ in your head that's doing its thing it's just not that different in fact it starts to feel really smooth and natural and nice and I could go on and on and we'll another time but we're gonna do this quickly because it's already almost nine these classes go way too fast so what I want you to do will will let go of mental images and just work with mental talk the idea is simple don't try to think but don't try to not think that's simple in other words don't do anything with your thinking but listen to it number two you're going to understand the concepts so just it's not that suddenly you're not going to understand you know English in your head or whatever language you're thinking in but even with that try to listen to the sound of it which is like you know wah wah wah wah wah wah like the parents in a peanuts cartoon and it just has this rhythm of speech and it's loud and it's soft and it's consonants and it's vowels and it has Tom bruh in and so on right so we'll just do this for a few minutes each time you find yourself getting caught up in the meaning come back to just listening and if there's no sound then you just listen to the silence okay [Music] each time you find yourself caught in the meaning of the words just come back to listening just hear the sounds as sounds good [Music] so again you know we could do a nice long year to just on that kind of meditation I certainly love it it's one of my favorite meditations just sit with the effortless spontaneous arising of mental image and mental talk and it becomes very very very soothing and it's like an inner fountain of just natural spontaneity and freshness right there's everything beautiful about it as a phenomena questions or comments about that meditation so song oh my god get that okay yes thank you for your report this is a wonderful way to work with mental talk or mental image pacta singh like this help you not get distracted by thinking notice you are still conceptualizing thinking as a problem that you're trying to not be distracted by in fact what you're what I want you to get is no you can you remember what's a valid Ramat object a sensory experience and in this case mind experiences are considered to be sensory experiences you can deeply focus on that right it's very powerful so but the answer to your question is yes chéri there's a peer like they are they silent to them just a download of the concept is flashed in my mind feels like there's not as much sensory experience - yeah so what happens if the thought is too fast to notice how you know you're having one right move very fast we can feel like we have to hang on to them to be able to look at the color and shape and texture know that I certainly did that for a long long time Shenzhen kept saying sensory clarity sensory clarity since your clarity so I'm like okay there's the image that I'm going to hang on to it and you know explore it that's not how you do that okay now just as a sidebar that's still a great meditation I mean if you can hang on to a mental image and explore it you're getting very focused right so it's still powerful meditation but in mental image meditation if they're moving fast you just notice what you can as fast as they're moving you're not trying to slow them down yeah yes so I have a lot of men to each other all the time don't start some crazy and yet when I tried to do that as soon as we started it went away until we stopped the medication and then it came back immediately sometimes when we pay attention to it it goes away usually that's because you're not used to paying attention to it and so once you get used to paying attention to it it will start coming back but it comes back in a different way so notice part of the situation that allows mental chatter to become annoying is that we're not really paying attention and so what if part of its annoyance is it's trying to get your attention and if you get if you give it some attention it's done it the message was received somehow or whatever that it's very common so actually pay [Music] it's a great great meditation right but thank you for the good phenomenological description right here's what it sounded like and felt like yes one more thing I noticed that I was noticing a lot more like the content of conceptual content and that kind of came along with and as I said you've been trained since birth to understand those sounds so you know it's not the case that suddenly they're gonna be all understandable and that's not the goal although I will say as you as your concentration gets higher your clarity gets better you're dropping down further and further into the unconscious mind it is often the case that all the mental talk turns to nonsense and it literally sounds like blah blah blah blah blah but I mean that's that's as much as you can hear of it and again that turns out to be very soothing and concentrating if we're not fighting our mind all the time just like with emotions if you don't think it's a big problem all the time and you in fact focus on it and have equanimity with it being there you're not trying to make it go away or get good ones 95% of the pain goes away or suffering let's say same thing with mental talk most of our problems with mental talk is for some reason I want it to be different or I want it to not be there and just drop that goal and the problem is solved right because it tends to be very very less disturbing when you're not trying to change it control it judge yourself on it etc so notice we haven't even got down into three and four just dropping from one to two with some of these phenomena will change your life will blow your mind although nobody's mind was blown in here it's because of the intense buddhafield of this building kept you all you know compassionately hanging together but just even one little drop move like that starts to make big big big big big benefits happen okay now I said this week we are gonna start working the level three so we're going to get ten minutes of level three here and you know obviously this class should be quite a bit longer but let's say we are contacting any particular phenomena we're contacting lots of qualities about that phenomena the texture the pressure the density the temperature the you know size the three-dimensional shape all that kind of stuff and our concentration gets really really good so that we're right with it you know it's moving along and the concentration is just with it there's no gaps in the concentration you will begin to notice that instead of like oh you know here's these qualities it's like you're tracking each of those qualities and they're all continuously changing so the three-dimensional shape is slowly transmogrifying those I'm talking about a body sensation as the example the three-dimensional shape is moving like a lava lamp type thing a spot in your body is suddenly moving a little bit it's actually growing and shrinking slightly the textures getting a little harder in one side and a little more gaseous on another side you know every one of those things you've been tracking is changing and as you start to why your concentration gets better and better the and you're really in touch with these qualities some like a phase shift happens where the number one thing you're noticing is just this changing this and it's not necessarily because you're trying to notice changing this it just when your concentration gets high enough it becomes the most obvious thing about it because all the qualities are the all changing and so a weird thing happens we're going to talk a lot about this weird thing but at first let's say we're meditating you're doing a visual meditation on a brick there's the brick you know and at first it's just ideas it's a brick it's red that's just the tag cloud of concepts but then you're really really going into you know concentration absorption on the qualities of this brick getting into every little nuance of the color the texture the you know every little chip and nook and cranny and the whole thing right all the details of the surface of this brick and you'll start to it'll get clearer and crisper and clearer and crisper and more and more absolutely perfectly clear and defined and sharp and then you'll notice it starts wiggling everyone still out and then it starts to become less clear because it's wiggling more and more and starts to be like staccato chopping and vision and stuff like that very much like trails and choppiness and stuff and the immediate reaction is I'm losing my concentration my meditation is which is everyone's first reaction to any change in their you know oh my god it's and yeah unless you just got brain damage it's probably not or unless you know a big thing just happened in your life in which case you know all other things are not equal some things disturbing your meditation but actually what is happening is not oh the clarity is going away it's actually the clarity got better it actually went up and you're beginning to notice that every quality you've been tracking is continuously changing and so the thing that seemed like an object remember the object I drew last week week an Apple and nice solid Apple it starts to be less solid in experience and as we'll see it starts to not even be that much of a thing after a while like Apple that concept starts you know even on the phenomenological level we're still saying that's this one thing as opposed to everything else and assuming it's continuing over time all of that is concepts right but in your own meditative experience like pure subjectivity you will start to discover not only is every part of that continuously changing but the whole idea of it being a thing at all is starting to drain away so these are the qualities of impermanence and non-self right it starts to seem like it's just continuously changing and that the it is much less of an it and a lot more like some kind of phenomena some sort of wave-like thing that's just a process and this is not like a concept you're layering on to it it's something you're noticing directly okay so that can be you know that's a enormous massive phase shift when that starts to happen deeply again these are this is a gradient they all seamlessly grade into the other but just like going from concepts to phenomena is huge you know we just saw how going from concepts to phenomena and emotions is huge going from concepts to phenomena and thoughts is unbelievably huge going from the phenomenological level to the vibratory level is like night and day change everything is different you know things aren't even things stuff is not lasting from one minute to the next everything is sand held in your hands wind in your hands disappearing it's a very very particular kind of experience and it basically happens because the the things we don't even normally consider to be concepts like the idea that it's the same object from moment to moment is a concept the idea that an object is separate from another object again not in external 3d reality but in our subjective experience is a concept and so dropping those and seeing what's really there at this very high resolution really high sensory clarity super focus concentration you'll start to notice that it's continuously breaking up and vibrating and doing this stuff sometimes very subtly sometimes really intensely and also the whole idea that that's somehow different than anything else around it especially when all the things around it are all vibrating - where's the boundary there isn't one right because it's all just vibrating together so that is a massive phase shift where you're starting to get into the real core or ideas of what the possum is about that things have this impermanent vibratory quality that they're not even things right and then you know typically with those two we would have the idea of dukkha or like unsatisfactoriness the idea that even the good ones aren't hanging around there you know vanishing and that has this certain quality to it so you know that's I would say things are getting real at that point you know you know you start you start to have very very very deep meditation right that is profoundly transformative in terms of your idea of the world and self and that's not always that pleasant right this going from stage 2 to stage 3 especially if it's fast can be where we get into Dark Knight type territory Duke Indiana Territory you know oh it was cool when all my problems were dissolving but when my you know love started dissolving or my sense of who I even am starts dissolving there was a couple things in there I wanted to hang on to loops so working with that becomes you know that's some some real stuff when you hear about people sometimes really having you know negative reactions to Vipassana it's typically you know one of the like the reason they're using either their conceptual mind or phenomenology to kind of keep their together I mean we're all doing that to some extent but some of us are working a lot harder at that and dissolving that to fast is like you know just you know I'm going 75 here and take my hands off the wheel you know it's a car wreck so you know moving into that in a compassionate steady easy way with a lot of guidance is important well you know just want to slam into that at 75 because it can be for some people that's a bad day right but in general the let the the increase of freedom and spontaneity naturalness openness all those qualities the super positive qualities we would associate with meditation start to metastasize there shall we say they get really big so let's do two minutes of meditation and then say bye-bye next week we'll go deeply deeply deeply into that [Music] to see if you could notice anything changing even on a mundane level external sound it's continuously changing mental ideation continuously changing the body continuously changing it doesn't have to be such a big deal or such a radical kind of change or vibration it can be very mundane your heart is continuously changing because it's beating your lungs are continuously changing because they're breathing in and out the external sound is just continuously changing very brief meditation yeah it's we gotta go unfortunately we'll dive into this very deeply next week I hope to see you then I love teaching this class so come on back so that I can have a good time and now it's San Francisco Dharma Collective announcements who's going to do those [Music] just ran our finances and expected as I must go we signed our lease but our expenses have gone out there averaging now about $400 a day whether we have a class or no class and so if you can give generously please do average donations in order to fund our teachers in order to keep the doors open are about $30 per person that said we're also starting to make a bigger push towards getting monthly donors the idea is that if you are a monthly donor it enables us to give more of the Donna during class to teachers so trying these different experiments trying around with different ideas you can become a monthly donor on our web right there's a link there to sign up you can also donate PayPal venmo cash check we take it all and we also are an official 501c3 so if you have a company that gives matching funds let us know we can help you figure out how you can get that information to your your company for that we have amazing since when you have some great stuff coming up this weekend we have some amazing stuff coming up in March check us out on the calendar on the website and feel free to talk to us after class if you have any questions thank you thanks I'm good

Channel: SF Dharma Collective

Views: 728

Keywords: meditation, map, vipassana, mind, non-dual, buddhism

Id: goZLwaUzaoQ

Length: 109min 41sec (6581 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020