Pointing Out through Metaphor – Deconstructing Yourself
Streamed live on Sep 25, 2025
Guided Nondual Meditation by Michael Taft
I’m Michael Taft, and we’re going to do Deconstructing Yourself tonight. That’s a one-hour guided meditation, as usual. I’ll just say, if you’re not used to sitting on the floor cross-legged for an hour, or you never do that, and it just seem seems like a cool thing to do, you might want to sit in a chair right now, because if you’re not used to doing it, it can be very uncomfortable. And an hour is longer than you may think.
Other than that, I’ll be talking through the whole meditation, offering, suggesting stuff you can do with your awareness, and you can follow along with that—or not. You know, if you don’t feel like doing the meditation that I’m leading, don’t do it. You know, it’s your mind. It’s your experience. Do what works for you. And, at the end, I’ll give some kind of talk, and then we will pass this thing around and see if you guys want to talk about your experience, or have something to share, or if you have something on your mind that you want to ask me, or whatever. And then at the very end, we will do a very brief silent meditation. As I always say, that’s the meditation chaser. Just the whole evening, right?
[guided movement]
In the Hindu sphere, it’s Navaratri, right? The nine nights of the goddess. So in honor of Navaratri and the various goddesses, the bija syllables we’ll do tonight are the four seed syllables of goddesses. So just follow along, but we’ll do them in order, not one after the other. We’ll spend some time on the first one, and then spend some time on the second. The bijas are: AEEM, HREEM, SHREEM, KREEM, KLEEM. Okay, it’s easy. Actually, we’ll start out with OM.
[chanting]
Good. So just rest in natural presence outside the thinking mind. Just be present, and notice the afterglow of that bija syllable chanting. We invoked all the wisdom goddesses during the festival of the goddesses, so you might feel a little extra charge there. That energy is very present, and let’s just continue in this place where we have set aside the thinking mind entirely. We’re not turning it off. We’re not trying to stop it, or slow it down, or speed it up, or make it do this or that. We’re just setting it aside and not engaging. So, there’s no struggle there at all with the energy of the mind. Just not engaging.
If you find yourself engaging, just relax, and let it go, and come back to just simply being present. There isn’t really a technique for being present. It’s just what happens when we’re not lost in thought, right? Naturally feeling our body, naturally hearing the sounds, seeing the sights of the room around us. Naturally present. And since awareness like that, presence like that is just on, there’s not really anything to do. Just stay uninvolved with thinking. So let’s rest like that a little bit. Remaining uninvolved with thought. Just resting in the natural spacious openness of awakeness itself.
And if—for whatever reason—that’s just a little too unstructured for you, if you need a little something more to hang on to, you can just notice the coming and going of breathing. We’re not focusing hard on it, or trying to grab onto it, or drill into it or anything, but just, while remaining present, notice that the breath wave is coming and going. The breath wave is rising and falling. So remaining utterly uninvolved with thought, even if lots of thoughts are happening. Let’s just rest like this for a little while together. Anytime you find yourself getting re-caught up with thinking, just set it back down and come back to simply being present.
Okay, good. Now, I’m just going to suggest a metaphor for sitting. That will help us notice some things about this natural presence and our own effortless being. So, first of all, I’d like you to sit like the sky. Remember, we’re not being involved with thought. So, you immediately go to how “Do I sit like the sky? I’m going to try to be the sky. I’m imagining the sky. I’m going to do something to try to pretend to be the sky, or like some Midsummer Night’s Dream kind of thing”—Don’t do that. Just notice the openness and spaciousness of presence. That vastness and free quality of presence. And it’s not really something we’re looking at. It’s not like, oh, it’s over there. As I said, sit like the sky. Be the openness. Be the spaciousness. Be the vast boundlessness.
And if you’re trying hard to be that right now, just drop that because it’s already there. It’s just some aspect of experience that can be noticed. There’s nothing to do. Our natural presence is tremendously open, boundless, free, unobstructed. You don’t have to do anything to sit like the sky. You just notice the skylike quality of your own presence. We’re not imagining or constructing—just awake. Just present.
Remember, we’re remaining entirely uninvolved with thought and just setting that aside. Next, I’d like to invite you to sit like a mountain. Sit like a mountain. Noticing the stability and groundedness and solidity of presence. Presence is tremendously stable. There’s also a kind of beauty and nobility in it, which we can see in the mountain as well. Our uncontrived, unconstructed, spontaneous, presence is elegant and noble. But the minute you try to make it like that, now it’s contrived. So sit like a mountain and notice that stability. This is not the stability of phenomena. It’s the stability of presence. Phenomena are unstable, but presence is stable.
Anytime you find yourself drifting off into thinking, come back to presence. When we’re getting involved in thought, we’re getting wrapped up in a dream, and instead, we just want to stay right here, present, wide awake, sitting like a mountain, noticing that stability and groundedness, and even a kind of nobility.
Good. Next, I invite you to sit like a mirror, or we could say, maybe, the surface of a lake. Either one. I’ll call it a mirror. Sit like a mirror, totally uninvolved with thought, utterly wide awake and present, perfectly reflecting all that occurs. Not cracked or broken or scratchy or faded. Perfectly clear reflection of all experience. Wide awake, wide open, very stable, very clear, uninvolved with thought. You’re not picturing a mirror or imagining a mirror. You’re just noticing that all experience is perfectly reflected like a mirror.
Not getting embroiled with the reflection, not trying to change it, not trying to control it, not trying to suppress it or amplify it. It’s just perfectly reflecting all experience. Remaining utterly uninvolved with thinking. Just staying present to the spaciousness, to the stability, to this perfect mirror-like reflection.
Good. Now, sit like the sun in the sky, noticing the bright luminous quality of presence—the glowing, shining, radiant quality of presence. Experience is bright whether it’s visual or auditory—or any sense. All the senses are bright, clear, luminous, radiant, glowing. Notice that quality. Again, not as something you’re looking at, but as something you are. Your presence is. This awake, boundless, presence is very bright, very clear, luminous, radiant. Be the radiance, the openness, the stability, the perfect reflection. This luminosity is continuous. It’s always awake. It’s always bright. Even when it’s night on Earth, the sun is still shining bright.
Good. Remaining completely uninvolved with thought. Sit like an ocean. Even if the surface of the ocean is wavy or ruffled, the deepness of the ocean is very quiet, very peaceful, very relaxed, very still. It’s comfortable. It’s at ease, resisting nothing. Just notice that quality of peace and ease. Be that quality of relaxation and gentleness.
Good. Now, simply resting as presence, which is luminous and spacious and bright and stable, mirror-like and restful. Notice there’s nothing to do. There’s no way to manufacture that. That just is what it is. We’re just noticing that about it.
But now, up until now, we’ve been uninvolved with thought. And now just notice that all the thought that is there is like wind in the sky. So we have this vast open still sky, but there’s wind now—and the wind just moves. The wind goes here, the wind goes there. It changes direction. It does whatever it does. And we’re just awake and present with that movement without trying to grab on to the wind at all. We’re not trying to stop the wind, or do something with the wind, or change the wind. We’re just allowing it to just do its thing without becoming involved.
Wind just blows in the sky and the sky is not disturbed at all. Does not bother the sky at all. A stable, open, luminous, clear, bright, relaxed, presence. There’s more than enough room to allow the wind to move here and move there without any bother at all. We don’t need to make the winds of thought try to do anything. We’re not trying to make them still or focused or stop or go—or do anything. They just get to be whatever they are, without us engaging at all, without us bothered at all. Wide open, wide awake, naturally present, naturally bright. Winds of thought just blow around, not bothering anything.
Good. Now, just staying present with our own luminous, open, clear, bright, natural, presence. Let’s just allow just one of these seed syllables to come up. We’ll do SHREEM to end here. Remaining present, remaining clear. The winds of thought can come and go, but we’re not engaging. There’s just the SHREEM manifesting from the openness.
[chanting]
Okay, very good. Let’s end that there.
Dharma Talk
So, you know, what are we doing in that meditation? As I said, what we’re not doing is sitting there trying to imagine. You know, I’m gonna pretend to be the ocean, or something, and here’s the fish, and here’s the whale sharks, and all—like some transatlantic vents or something. No, nothing like that, right? That’s not what we’re doing. It’s that it’s suggestive of, for example, the ocean, like I said, of deep rest and peace. Deep, deep, deep, deep. ease and relaxation. And you, just instead of trying to make yourself relaxed or stretch or anything like that, it’s effortless. You just look at the quality that’s already there. For example, relaxation, or if we’re meditating like the sun, the quality of luminosity, right? The quality of brightness and clarity that’s already present in awareness. So, we’re just pointing at aspects of our natural mind, pointing at aspects of our already present being. You don’t have to make them up or imagine them or kind of gin it up and generate. It’s just there to look at. Except we’re not looking at it because it’s not separate, right? It’s not a thing over there—you just be it, or notice it.
We kind of fall into a long-term habit of imagining that we’re a thing over here that looks at other things over there. It’s a habitual stance. But the more you do certain types of deconstructive meditation, where it just becomes obvious that that’s hallucination—that’s a kind of imagining. I’m imagining that I’m a thing over here looking at other things over there, or hearing things out there, or whatever.
We’re always building that split in our mind. It’s a habit, but it’s not fundamentally real. That’s not actually there. It’s just imagination. And so, it might be hard to let go of that habit at first. And so, it might seem like you’re looking at those properties. So, the stability like a mountain over there, or the luminosity like the sun, is over there, or whatever. And maybe you can still kind of notice it, but eventually you’ll see that it’s what’s looking, so to speak. What’s looking is stable. What’s looking is bright and clear. What’s looking is spacious and open like the sky. What’s looking is relaxed like the ocean. What’s looking has this mirror-like quality of perfect reflection, without distortion, or marring, or breaking the image.
And so, really, what we’re doing there is—not pretending to be anything, not trying to cultivate or build up something—It’s just noticing the properties of our own natural presence. And because of this continuous hallucination that I’m someone over here looking at things over there and blah blah blah, we kind of lose touch with these very basic properties of our own being. We just lose touch with it. It never goes away. It never disappears or somehow diminishes or whatever because that’s what we are.
So it can’t go away. But what can happen is we kind of get distracted from it. Especially if we think we’re looking, our attention loses focus a little bit, right? And that wide open, wide awake, bright, clear presence—we sort of get lost in, you know, Minecraft or something. We’re just busy with Minecraft, and we kind of forget this thing. And then, because of the way there’s a split between how we fix stuff in the world, how we get stuff done, and how we come back to our own nature, right?
When we want to get stuff done, like these days, if I want to get something done, I might get Gemini Deep Think to tell me how to do it. I want to build this thing. Give me the step-by-step instructions, or I’m going to go on YouTube, and watch somebody do it, and there’s a how-to, and that you go from here to there, and there’s instructions. And so, very, very, naturally—for totally reasonable reasons—when we want to come back to natural presence, we go, “how do we do it, what are the steps I’m going to look at? I’m going to follow the steps, and you see you can do it.” That’s not wrong. That’s not a mistake—Except it doesn’t work, right? It doesn’t actually work, because that’s like saying, “How do I get the sun to be bright?”
Every possible thing you do is just a distraction from the sun being already bright. How do I get the wind to blow? It just does that because the sun is bright. It just does that. Right there. Anything you try to do—it just gets in the way. Doesn’t mean we can’t do stuff, because some of the practices we do are about more or less calming down all the distraction. For example, one that was really influential for me—I’m very very bad at all this, and it’s taken me decades and decades of banging my head uselessly against a wall to kind of get anywhere—which is one reason I can teach it, because people who are good at it have a hard time teaching it, because they didn’t have a hard time doing it. But, from decades of sucking at it, I can tell you all the mistakes you can make, and how to avoid them.
One of the things you can look at, for example, that is helpful, is: you can very carefully watch yourself creating the illusion of being separate. That’s something you can see happening. It’s an imagination that you bring up all the time. I’m over here. All those all you guys are over there, and I’m talking to you, and looking at you, and it’s like a thing you’re doing in your head. But, you know, you can do techniques to see that happening live. Normally, it’s just happening, and you’re lost in it. But every once in a while, you can kind of watch that happening and you go, “Oh, oh.”
So, there is stuff to do that helps. But in the end, all you’re doing is coming back to what you actually are—and always are, and could never not be. And just giving up on being lost. Or, even put more clearly, pretending you’re totally lost. Imagining continuously creating a story in which you’re lost and need to be found. All of that is bullshit, right? You can never be lost from yourself, right? That’s a contradiction. It’s right there.
And if you want some guidance, if it feels like you’ve still got to do something, or, “how do I find the thing that’s never been lost?” You know, there’s the old metaphor. It’s such a traditional metaphor, but it’s a great one. It’s like, hey, there’s a snake in my room. How do I get rid of the snake in my room? There’s a snake there. It’s dangerous. It’s going to bite me. It’s poisonous. I need a machete. I need a hook. I need a cage. I need, you know, something. Put the snake in the bottle somehow. And it turns out the snake is a rope. It cannot hurt you. There’s nothing that needs to be done. But people are like, “But how do I get rid of the rope?” It’s like, no, you’re done. It’s a rope. There’s nothing to do. But still, you know, if you—because I certainly do all the time—need a reminder. We need some—because we’re so into the imagining of being lost, that it’s like we can’t find the way home.
Sit like the sky, because our actual natural mind is spacious. Sit like a mountain, because it’s stable. Sit like the sun, because it’s bright and luminous, clear and sit like the ocean, because it’s peaceful, relaxed, deep, right? These are just pointers at what’s always there. Okay? And then, at first, we set the mind aside because that’s all the churning fantasy, right?
But, of course, that’s part of it too. So eventually we notice, okay, well, that’s just like wind in the sky. It can do whatever it wants. But it’s not ever actually disturbing the sky. It’s not ever actually blowing down the mountain, or somehow putting out the sun, or whatever. It’s just harmless wind in the sky. Okay? So, it’s all pointing to what we already are. You don’t need to make any of that up. You don’t need to make any of it happen. It’s just breadcrumbs back to yourself, right? Little ball, little very short string in the very minor labyrinth of being lost from oneself a little bit.
Okay, that’s what I have to say about that.
Next, we do the ritual where we have this talking object. And just two things: We’re going live to the Internet, so know that anything you say will be preserved forever, like a dinosaur fossil 100 million years from now. They’ll find what you asked. So just know that. And then, remember to be mindful of speech, because everyone is a sangha here. We just meditated together. So let’s be mindful. So if you just want to talk about your experience, or share a question—anything like that—raise your hand.
Q&A
Q: Hi Michael. First of all, thank you. That that was a a very beautiful meditation session, and I felt that the metaphors were extremely lucid for me, and that with each passing metaphor, I started seeing it less as something that was as you said, less of something that I perceived and more something that I embodied, something that’s inside of me.
MT: Wonderful.
Q: Yeah. There was something that you said at the end of the mountain, or towards the end of the mountain metaphor, you said, when we brought attention to the stability of presence, you said this is not the stability of phenomena. This is the stability of presence. And then you said phenomena are unstable and presence is stable.
MT: Yes.
Q: That resonated with me, and I’m wondering if you could expand on that. What makes phenomena unstable?
MT: Well, obviously, they come and go, right? They change, stuff arises, happens for a while, goes away. Even while it’s happening, it’s different now, different now, different now. So the very clear, obvious, experience of any phenomena is that it is impermanent—it changes a lot. We just know that about stuff—even phenomena like people come and go, are born and die, etc, etc. So everything does that.
Q: I think it’s very easy—and I fall for this sometimes, to be fooled into reversing that, because, you know, when you when you think about it you—just speak for myself, if I need a sense of stability, or even just the illusion of stability, there are certain phenomena which can seem reliable, and can seem stable. And then, at the same time, presence can feel ephemeral, right? Presence can feel tied to the surroundings and subject to all of the various vicissitudes of life.
MT: 100%.
Q: Furthermore, at times, it can be hard to always be aware of one’s presence. I don’t know, maybe maybe not.
MT: Is it?
Q: Maybe it’s something you can get better at, but..
MT: Are you present right now?
Q: I do feel present right now. Yes. Yeah. Okay, but I guess I was wondering what when you don’t feel your presence, but you still need a sense of stability, is there anything that you turn to?
MT: Yeah, it’s a good question. So, of course, there is stuff that we can use. We can borrow some apparent stability. It’s not reliable, but it still might be momentarily more stable-seeming, right? So, really typical things are like, look at a rock. That’s a very traditional meditation. Here’s a rock. I don’t know who brought this, but there’s a rock here. It’s pretty stable, and we can just relax and gaze at it. It’s pretty stable. If we really get into the micro-phenomenology, you can start to see the instability also. But it’s fairly stable—especially if our mind is whipping around, just sitting with a rock and looking at it, we can borrow some stability to calm down a bit, right? And from there, remembering presence would be pretty darn easy, right? Because we would have calmed down enough to have presence be.
But eventually, it becomes stunningly obvious that presence is always available because you’re having an experience. If there is any experience at all, you’re present. But at first that might not be obvious. So yeah, doing those kinds of meditation on objects are totally recommended, and all the normal ones—even your breath, right? It seems to be, as long as you’re alive, the breath is there—even though it’s moving—it’s still got its own kind of stability. That’s how all that normal meditation with an object stuff works, so it doesn’t have to be hard, just something that is seemingly reliable enough to get us back to back to our own natural presence.
Q: Okay. Thank you. And then, one more question that just recently came to mind. I guess with presence, there’s a way that I’ve noticed that you conceptualize it, right, as something that’s radiant, as something that’s reflective, as something that’s open.
MT: You can make it into a concept and look at it, right? So the answer is: don’t do that, right? And if you notice yourself doing it, that’s all involvement with thought.
Q: But, aside from the practice of meditation, back to the question of stability. Do you find this concept to provide stability to you? Stability or comfort, or are those feelings associated with it contrived?
MT: Well, even contrived feelings can be comfortable. So, even that isn’t that bad of a thing. But I would just say, with some practice, it’s not that hard to notice that you can come back to presence anytime, anywhere, because it’s not a meditation. It’s not like you need to be focused. It’s not like you need to be in a special state. It’s not a jhana. It’s not an absorption. It’s just being present. Okay. So, that’s something that does take a little practice, right? I’m not going to say, oh, very few people can just do that. But it’s not that hard to learn to just find that stability. Because if you’re awake and walking around, you’re present. You just have to remember that. So that’s a kind of mindfulness. And, you know the original word for mindfulness, which is either sati or smriti, depending on what language you’re using, does just mean to remember. So we just remember to be present, remember to notice right? It’s just that kind of, “Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.” And then, after a while, that’s just continuous. Okay.
Q: Okay. Thank you very much.
MT: Does that make sense? Does that sound impossible? It’s really not very hard.
Q: Not impossible. Thanks.
MT: Other stuff coming up?
Q: Kind of a follow-up. Would you say that forgetting, pretending, and being deluded are distinct?
MT: Well, they’ve got three words there, and they probably feel pretty different, and so on, but with all three, you just come back to being present, right? So even if they do have the flavors of difference. I would put those flavors—I kind of classify those flavors as—there’s 10,000 things to be distracted by. And so that’s the full panoply of existence. But the remembrance is what matters. Whether you’re deluded, just remember. Let’s say you’re distracted, just remember. Okay?
Q: Thanks. Yeah.
Q: Thank you so much. Yeah.
MT: Thanks for making it out here.
Q: My pleasure. There is something about non-dualism that is hard for me to understand.
MT: You’re definitely the only one.
Q: Because while I’m meditating, or let’s take the sit, for example, there seem to be two things happening which don’t align. One thing is like basically you mention, okay, notice what is happening right now, notice your mind is like the sky. And there’s one part that feels okay now. You point out what to look at, or what to notice, and now I am here and now I’m looking at it. But often in non-dualism, we also talk about that there is basically not this lighthouse position of looking somewherem and you are just a thing. Yes. So how can you bridge these two ideas?
MT: Yeah, it’s a good question. And so, over and over again, my direction was don’t look at it, be it. Don’t look at it, be it. But for most of us, there will be a long time where you are just looking at it—which is a good step. That is the bridge. Okay, you’re looking at it. But the more you do that, now just relax and be it. Okay? So, it’s looking at it as the in-between step. If you can skip that step, that’s good. But if that’s the one you’ve got, then use that. Look at, okay, there’s the luminosity. I’m seeing it. Okay, now relax, and stop imagining that I’m separate from the luminosity. Just be the luminosity. That’s how you bridge it. Okay? So, don’t look at it. Be it. Okay?
Q: Yeah.
MT: Does that make sense?
Q: Yeah. Yeah. That’s also a bit like, I feel like what happened in the experience that somehow now this idea got dropped, but then I was thinking, like how is this then even working, since I came here through looking at it?
MT: Yeah. Well, we start where we’re at. We’ve got this hallucination going, but gradually the hallucination diminishes. It works. Yeah.
Q: Thank you, Michael.
MT: Yeah, thanks for coming.
Q: As I practice, and I guess I lose faith in the world and phenomena to deliver lasting happiness, I am noticing that I’m also losing my ambition, and my drive in a lot of ways that it used to show up for me. Which, in some ways, feels good, and feels like a more honest way of living. But I get nervous that it can veer into irresponsibility, and I’m wondering what to do about that.
MT: Sure. Remember that sometimes Buddhism is called the middle way. Have you ever heard of that term, the middle way? What’s it the middle way between? Do you know? It’s very specifically the middle way between two things.
Q: Was it like aestheticism and hedonism?
MT: That is what I learned in seventh grade for sure. It’s the middle way between aestheticism and indulgence. So yes, but that’s not the actual thing. The actual middle way is the Madhyamaka, it’s the middle way between eternalism and nihilism, right? And so most of us start out in some form of eternalism, and then as we learn, we kind of veer off into nihilism, and then eventually correct back into what’s between those two things. Some of us start out in nihilism and then have this weird waking up into eternalism—like what I’m becoming woo, ah—and then you know your skin catches on fire, and then you know eventually you come back into this in-between place. It’s not eternalism, and it’s not nihilism.
So you’re just kind of feeling the nihilistic burn there. And so don’t go too far in that direction. That’s a real early Buddhist way of talking. Oh, the world cannot be sad. You don’t have to do that. There can still be joy. There can still be beauty. There can still be wonder. All of that, right? It can still be empty, and all that can still be there. Doesn’t mean it’s nothing. Okay? Otherwise, all this would just be nothingism. And you might as well just be gone, never exist, right? But that’s not what this is. Okay. So, just notice, oh, I’m starting to kind of feel the nothingism burn. And that’s a sign, okay, I’m veering a little too far off into nihilism. And then if it starts to be like, ”this is going to save me,” it’s like, oh, went a little too far into eternalism. And we’re going to come back into this indefinable place in between those. Okay, does that make sense?
Q: Yes. Thank you.
MT: Yeah. Yeah. Any meditator goes back and forth between those extremes a lot, and it’s important to recognize them clearly. Oh, I’m getting emptiness poisoning or nihilism poisoning. Oh, getting a little too crazy with eternalism, right? And we’re just going to come back to this—because both of those things, eternalism—it’s all going to save me, and nihilism—there is nothing. Those are concepts. They’re just ideas. And what we’re doing is not a concept. Okay? That’s the whole thing. It’s not an idea that you’re building. Okay? So, it’s interesting. That’s why you can’t really say what it is because it’s not an imagination. Does that make sense?
Q: It doesn’t make sense in the way that, like you’re saying, that there’s not—there’s nowhere to land logically, where I’d be able to steer in one direction or the other. But I see what you’re saying.
MT: And what we do have is these guard rails, right? And so if you go too far to the left, veer to the right. If you go too far to the right, bear to the left, and then you start—Okay, there’s a thing in there.
All right, I promised you—we’re very late. We went on for a long time with these questions. Thanks for the questions, y’all. But, I promised you some silent sitting here at the end. So, we’re going to do some silent sitting.
So you get to do whatever you want during your silent meditation time. You can, in fact, be planning your shopping list, or whatever. But what I would suggest is just resting as natural presence there. There’s nothing to do. You already are that.
[silent meditation]
Okay.
Notice that when you’re done meditating, the presence doesn’t somehow evaporate, right? It’s not a special state that we make through meditation. It’s always there. So, anytime you want to notice it’s there, just look. It’s there.
Thanks for coming out, and we’ll see you next week. Okay, thanks everybody.
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