Finding the Stillness and Peace of Who You Really Are
Streamed live on May 8, 2025
Guided Nondual Meditation
Okay! Welcome to the Alembic and Deconstructing Yourself. I’m Michael Taft. Do we have any new people to the Alembic here tonight? Oh, two, great! Welcome, welcome. In case you haven’t heard, the Alembic is an alchemical vessel where mind and matter meet for transformation. That’s what we’re here for—except a vessel of people instead of glass or whatever.
We’re going to do an hour-long guided meditation, which you are welcome to partake in, or welcome to ignore, and just sit and do your own silent meditation if you wish. So to begin with let’s move our bodies together a little bit.
[guided stretching]
Just find a really nice spot where your spine feels just right. Not stiff, not tight, not rigid, relaxed, open, and yet upright and balanced—just right. And in this place, let’s do a little bit of seed syllable chanting together. The one that I’m inspired to do with you tonight is Hum. So if you spell it in English, it should be something like h-o-o-m, but there’s not really an “m” at the end. It’s more like a nasalization. We just don’t have a letter for that. Sometimes people spell it “ng,” but that’s too much. So you can say HOOM if that’s too hard, but really sort of like HOONG.
This is a seed syllable that comes from ancient shamanic practice of dispelling negative energies—dispelling demons. But of course, in the deeper, or later, or, let’s say, more esoteric interpretation, it’s dispelling our ignorance, dispelling our delusion, dispelling our lack of clarity. It becomes the seed syllable of seeing emptiness clearly, seeing the actual nature of our experience—brightly, clearly, and profoundly. Okay, so let’s do Hum together.
[chanting]
Good, very good. Now just feel the energy of that seed syllable, which is dispelling delusion, dispelling ignorance, dispelling our habitual gripping onto the elements of experience as solid and lasting, and somehow essential. And instead, noticing the impermanent, continuous flux, and appearance and disappearance of all phenomena. Both what we might conventionally term external, but also the phenomena that we think of as ourselves—the flashing in and out, the continuous arising and disappearance of the sense of me as a person. And just let the Hum work on you that way for just a few minutes here while we also do some pranayama. If you know how to do alternate nostril breathing, go ahead and do that now, using the seed syllable HOOM internally—of course don’t say it externally while you’re doing your alternate nostril breathing.
If you don’t know how to do alternate nostril breathing, just make your hand like this, so your two middle fingers are together. Then, holding it like this, close your right nostril with your thumb. Breathe in through the left nostril. Close that left nostril. Breathe out through the right nostril, which you now open. Breathe in through the right nostril—nice full breath. Close that nostril. Breathe out the left. Repeat—in through the left, close it, out through the right. In through the right, close it, out through the left.
And while you’re doing that, just focus on your third eye and the seed syllable Hum. So let’s do that together for a few minutes. This is not just time for your mind to wander and think about what’s on Netflix tonight, but rather to really feel the energy of this very balancing, tonifying, energizing, pranayama—and also this powerful seed syllable. If you want to make it more powerful—only do this if it feels right for you. If you want to make it more powerful, make the out-breaths about twice as long as the in-breaths.
We began on a left nostril in-breath, so keep going through the cycle until you get to a left nostril out-breath, and then come to an end. Just sit for a moment, feeling the effects of that throughout the whole body. Let go of any voluntary tension that’s still there. Feel the body opening and relaxing. Don’t fight any involuntary tension. This is not time to stretch, or do yoga, or do neck exercises or something—that’s for later. But for now, just sit still, and if there’s any tension that you can let go of just by wanting to let go of it, then let go of that.
Now open your eyes, and, with a soft gaze, look in front and take in the entirety of the visual field at once. So instead of looking at the center of your visual field like you normally do, see the whole of peripheral vision as well as the center. It’s like you’re getting an even, smooth, spread of the entire visual field at once. The whole thing—the middle, the edges, everything in between—all equally seen at once. And then just notice the space, the fact that your visual field does include a whole bunch of space. So you’re seeing the whole visual field with a relaxed gaze, noticing all the space.
And then just become aware that the space doesn’t end at your eyes. That same space is present within you. The external space and the internal space are one big space. For some people you can imagine bringing, or breathing in, or somehow enveloping that external space, and bringing it in. But really you can just directly notice that external space and internal space is just one big space.
And notice that that one big space doesn’t have any boundaries. It’s not like your head gets in the way. There’s just one big vast boundless openness. Sit with that. This is not a visualization, it’s not imagination. When you stop visualizing, and imagining, and being all involved in your thoughts, what’s present is spaciousness.
Just allow all thoughts to be set aside. There can be as much thinking as there wants to be. You’re not trying to control that, You’re not trying to stop thinking. You’re not trying to make thoughts go away in any way. They’re completely welcome, you’re just not paying attention to them. Instead, you’re resting in this sense of boundless space which is present when you’re not stuck in your thinking.
Sometimes I call this “sit like the sky,” and I just say it metaphorically. Sit as if you are the sky. But then people ask me, Michael, how do I be the sky? And then it’s the same thing—you are boundless, cognizant, openness when you’re not stuck inside your thinking. All you have to do is allow yourself to become completely uninvolved with thought, and then the spaciousness is there. So just notice this spaciousness, and you may keep coming back to the full visual field.
This isn’t about staring, or not blinking, or something. Once you get a sense of the space, you can let go of the eye thing, and just rest as boundless awakeness, which we might also call simple presence. You’re just sitting in natural presence, simple, natural, openness.
Notice there’s nothing you have to do to make this come about, except not be involved with your thinking. So I invite you to sit in simple natural openness.
If that’s too unstructured, then you can notice that the breath wave rises and falls within this openness, and follow that breath wave very lightly. Not focusing on it. Not concentrating as such, but just noticing that in this tremendous openness—this sky-like awakeness the breath wave is rising and falling—very easy, very naturally.
And of course, each time you notice yourself getting all caught up in thought, you just very gently set those all back down again, and come back to resting as openness. Don’t get in a big fight or struggle with your thinking. Just set it down, and don’t engage.
Done well, meditation takes very little effort. It’s not a big fight or some kind of tightness. It’s just relaxed openness, without engaging with thinking.
If you’re tired, sit up straight, open your eyes. If you’re used to meditating with your eyes open that will help. If it’s helpful, you can notice very naturally that in this vast space outside of thought, the breath comes and goes. That can be helpful—to just notice the breath coming and going—but we’re not drilling down into the micro-phenomenology of the breath or trying to get every femptosecond of the breath, we’re just very naturally noticing it.
Good. Now, continuing to just rest as natural openness, natural awake presence. Feel all of body sensation. Feel everything that falls under the title of body sensation—everything from your feet to your head, front to back, left to right, the whole inside of the body, the whole outside of the body—all the sensations of the body. Just feel all of the whole thing at once, and feel how all those sensations are arising in this awake space.
We tend to imagine that the awake space is somehow arising in the body, but it’s the other way around. The body sensations arise in awake space. So just feel that there’s this openness, this sky-like awakeness, and within part of that sky there’s body sensation happening. It arises and passes. It comes and goes. It does its thing within this space of awakeness.
Continuing to rest as the awake space, just notice that the body sensations arise within that, pass away within that. And, notice further, that within the body sensation, behind the body sensation, beneath the body sensation, the awake space is utterly still. As much as the body sensation is moving and changing—and arising and passing, and wiggling here, and squiggling there—behind it, and within it, and beneath it, and around it, and ever separate from it—is this utterly, perfectly, still, space that is immovable.
Noticing the three-dimensional field of body sensation as waves, shimmering, pulsing, activity against this spacious total stillness. And the spacious total stillness is awake. You’re not in some other location looking at spacious stillness from some privileged inside spot. The spacious, vast, open, boundless, stillness is what notices. If you’re falling asleep, sit up straight and open your eyes. Stay awake.
Continuing to relax and let go, and relax and let go. Just find total repose as spacious stillness—vast, boundless, wide awake, but utterly immobile. You may notice that not only are the body sensations arising—coming and going—in this boundlessness, but, of course, all that thought activity that we’re not paying attention to, is also just arising, and dancing, and passing away, in this natural boundless presence.
The still, wide, awake openness is the space where body sensations and thoughts find their expression. It’s where they happen. Be the space—allowing the body to arise and express in the space, and all the thoughts to arise and express in the space, while remaining utterly uninvolved. Notice the coming and going of all the external sound—the hum of the fans in the room, the creaking of chairs and bones, the sounds outside the room, my voice, other sounds—are coming and going in this vast, boundless, stillness, which is also utterly silent against this, within this, beneath this, enormous silence. These sounds are coming and going, arising and passing. Be the silence and the stillness that is awake to the coming and going of the sound. The spacious stillness that is awake to the coming and going of thought and body sensations. And don’t grab on to any of it. Just rest as still silent awakeness.
If your eyes are open, notice that all the sights and sounds of the world around you are colors and shapes and patterns and highlights and shadows and textures that are simply painted on total darkness, that are arising within and around and above a screen of total darkness. There’s just this light show happening. Be the darkness, the silence, the space, the stillness, in which all experience arises. And that is the room—that’s the playhouse—in which everything arises.
Notice that the stillness, and spaciousness, and silence, and darkness, is boundless—tremendously more vast than the sights and sounds and body sensations and thoughts—just resting as natural presence in natural presence. Utterly awake, noticing all experiences arising against this backdrop.
But here’s the funny thing. The body sensations are not separate in any way from the stillness. I’ve been describing them that way so that you notice the stillness, because we don’t spend much time noticing that. We just notice the body sensations. So sometimes we have to just look at the stillness, feel the stillness. But now, notice that the body sensations that arise within the stillness are not separate in any way. There’s not two things there —stillness and body sensation. There’s just both. Notice that now. There’s not two things there. Thoughts and stillness, or thoughts and silence, they arise together. There’s not two things there. The space, and silence, and the sound, all arise together. There’s not two things there—the world, the visual field of the world around you, and the utter darkness behind it—they both arise together.
Notice that directly, without imagining, without thinking about it, without creating anything. Just notice directly that the vast, still, silent, darkness, and all the experience—the sights, the sounds, the thoughts, the emotions, the feelings—all arise together. Different, but not separate.
Notice, there’s no separate sense of self here. There’s not “me” as some kind of defined person within this. There’s just thoughts and feelings suspended over an infinite, wide awake, abyss. A vast groundlessness that is scintillating, and shimmering, with wide awakeness and love, never separate. See it clearly. Don’t back off from that vast groundlessness. That’s Hum.
It will completely swallow the sense of self, and then give birth to a whole new one, over and over, effortlessly. Be the groundlessness that you’ve always been, since beginningless time. Born-less, death-less, boundless.
Seeing clearly is what that seed syllable Hum is about. Remember, the sound Hum cuts through our delusion, cuts through our ignorance, cuts through our unconsciousness, cuts through our fabrication and reification. So, let this vast, open, groundless, abyss radiate forth the wisdom, the clarity, the seed syllable.
[chanting]
Okay let’s end that there.
Dharma Talk
So, again, this is not an exercise in imagination, or creative visualization, or somehow making something. In a way, it’s the opposite. Just stop making anything on purpose, and just notice, in your own experience, that all the stuff keeps kind of arising within this spacious stillness, silence, darkness. And that what we’re calling our body, and what we’re calling our mind, and what we’re calling self and world is somehow appearing within that. But, again, not separate from it, but rather the expression of it. Not ever separate. Not somehow less than, not somehow the fallen, dreamlike, delusionary, Maya that keeps us away from our essence, but, rather, the exuberant delicious expression of this underlying or enveloping spacious, silent, stillness, darkness.
But it’s not something to imagine. It’s something that you just aren’t remembering to notice. Because what everyone tells you to notice is all the stuff that’s happening. And so, good, notice all the stuff that’s happening—nothing wrong with that. But every once in a while, remember to notice the backdrop. What’s underneath all that? What’s this? To use a super clumsy—but not that bad of a metaphor, the screen on which it’s all appearing. It’s right there. It’s very noticeable.
And, furthermore, that backdrop, the spaciousness, the boundlessness, the timelessness, the openness of it all, is much bigger—much, much bigger. The whole world, the whole universe of our experience is like a single pixel within this vast field of open awakeness. So the potential is much larger than the manifestation. Don’t believe me, just look. If you just look, you’ll notice that you are it. It’s what’s looking. It’s what’s noticing. It’s what’s seeing. It’s what’s being. But that makes it sound like the manifestation, the experience, the thoughts, the feelings, the lights, the colors, the sounds, are somehow different than that—which they’re not. They’re never separate.
So, it’s hard to talk about, but super easy to notice. If you just keep looking, it’s right there. The most obvious thing in the world—that you’ve kind of been trained away from noticing. It can be a little discomforting at first, to notice that you’ve been imagining that I’m a body, and I have this background, and I come from this place, and this is my name, and these are my likes and dislikes, and all that. But that all of that is just ephemeral foam on this total groundless abyss. When I say groundless abyss everyone goes into nihilism, but it’s—wide awake. It’s an exuberant, loving, abyss—but it’s different than this fixed identity.
So, at first it’s a little bit like Wylie Coyote ran off the edge of the cliff, and now you’re running on air. And there’s a xylophone sound before you fall. But the weird thing is, you never fall. There’s nowhere to fall to. But the moment it happens, it’s really weird. It can feel like vertigo. It can feel vertiginous. It can feel nauseating, and it can feel like you’re falling—all those things. But that’s just a reflexive reaction, and it might happen over and over. But eventually you recognize, oh, you can’t fall into it. You are it. And even if it seems like it’s going to swallow you up, you are it. And you give birth to another exuberant creation in the next moment. Even though I’m contrasting all I’ve experienced with this stillness and silence, and all that—it’s not. It has as much movement and noise and color and all that in it as it does silence and stillness.
Q&A
Anyway, maybe there’s something you want to talk about with me. I invite you to raise your hand and speak if you’ve got something you want to say, to give a report about your experience, or ask me what the fuck I think I’m talking about, or what do you mean, or whatever.
Q: What do you mean by it’s obvious?
M: It’s the most obvious thing in the world, because it’s the most general thing. The awakeness is the one thing that’s part of everything, and so it’s unmissable. It’s the canvas of all paintings. It’s the paper on which all the words are written. But how many times do you open a physical book and look at the paper? You’re just trained to look at the words. And so, in a weird way, you never see the paper. The paper is required for there to be words there, and you’re always seeing it, but you kind of subtract it, and just look at the words.
But when you think about it, the paper is totally obvious. But you kind of subtract it out of your mind. So that’s what I mean, it is totally obvious. It is not hard to see, you’re just not used to giving it room in your mind or something. You just don’t focus on it. The minute you get what I’m talking about, you’ll quit trying to imagine something, and you’ll quit trying to somehow make this thing happen.
I keep saying, don’t do that. Don’t do it. But everyone does it anyway. You’ll just see it, because it’s there. And I just keep saying, just look, it’s there. But instead, everyone imagines and imagines, and tries to do this and tries to do that—which I also did for decades—because it’s just hard to understand. But I mean, literally, just look in the same way where, if I said just see the paper, and you’d be like, well the words say. And I’m like, no, just see the paper. No, cut it out. See the paper.
And eventually you just go, you mean you really just want me to just? Yes! Oh, well, that’s totally obvious. Yes, it is totally obvious. But we’re trained not to see it. But once you start kind of seeing it, feel it, notice it, hear it—whatever. Once you get that, then it starts to be something that you can tune into more and more. And then experience starts to change quite a bit. So that’s what I mean when I say it’s obvious.
Q: So it can be considered an experience, not just some senses, right?
M: So some teachers get really persnickety about what constitutes an experience. Well, with an experience, we need an experiencer, and an experienced—all of which could be technically true, but I rather just say it’s an experience. Even if there’s no experiencer, or thing being experienced,
the thing itself, the moment itself, is an experience. So we can play in that way. Sometimes that’s helpful. I tend not to do that. Okay?
Q: So I was just wondering, there’s this aspect of just stuff. Does this noticing have any relation to the fifth jhana? Which I do not have very much—or any—experience with, but when you read about it, it will say like there’s just lots of space. Is that a way of putting your mind in a place where there’s just not the stuff. So you don’t have anything else to pay attention to? Is there a relationship there?
M: People ask this a lot about the fifth Jhana, which is space. All of these are very very specific meditation objects that I would say are loosely related. But you’re actually doing something different when you’re doing that stuff. You’re trying to focus on an object—even if the object is space all around—you’re focusing on it. Whereas I keep saying be the space. Be the awakeness. You already are that, so notice—that’s a very different stance. In one, you’re kind of saying, I’m here, it’s out there, and I’m going to look at it. At least it’s often done that way. And here, I’m giving a different kind of instruction around it, Okay? So I’m not going to say they’re totally unrelated, but I would say, how we’re conceiving of them is quite different.
Q: Do you recommend that
M: Hey, if you want to do Jhana, do Jhana—that’s great. Jhana’s are cool, Jhana’s are powerful. But it’s also a big side quest. It’s not like, oh, I’m going to go do some Jhana and then come back—that’s years of real effort, and it’s a different thing. Still useful, still powerful, still beautiful, but how many lifetimes have you got? Maybe infinite.
Q: Hi. I’d like to ask something about the tonglen practice.
M: Sure.
Q: When I read about it, I was like, okay, meditate and then inhale negativities, exhale positivities, and I felt some accumulation of negative energy. [abrupt end to recording]
(Note: Apologies for the unscheduled cut-off. Phone battery died.)
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