The Miracle of Existence – Deconstructing Yourself
Hello! I’m Michael Taft. This is Deconstructing Yourself. So, that’s what we’re going to do. And we usually do that by having an hour-long guided meditation. followed by a talk and after the talk, then we do an open Q&A—or discussion, or report, or whatever, with you all. And then at the very end, we’ll do maybe five minutes of silent meditation together. So, that’s how the program usually goes.
Sometimes it gets wildly interrupted by pterodactyls or accidental bell ringing or something, but that’s usually how it goes. So, remember, with the guided meditation, it’s all an invitation. You don’t have to do any part of it. If you just want to sit here and ignore the whole thing, and just because you want to sit in a group, great—as long as you’re quiet and still, you’re welcome to come meditate with us. Another option is to go as far along with it as you like, and then when you get a spot that feels right, but you don’t want to go any further, then just stay there. Or you can tough it out and go all the way to the end of the guidance—whatever you’d like. So, that’s how this works.
We usually start out with some movement. The same thing applies to the movement. Like I’m saying, let’s try this movement. Let’s try that movement. But your body is your body. It’s not my body. So, and you’re lucky it’s not my body—mine hurts. Do what works for you. Do what makes sense for your body. I’m just giving suggestions, okay?
[guided movement]
Okay. So just sit like an ocean, like an enormous, deep, deep, wide, ocean. There’s no tension anywhere in the ocean. It’s just this enormous body of water. It’s so big it doesn’t even have shores. And nowhere in this ocean is anything tight or tense. It’s all just open. And what I’d like you to do, is just feel invited to take your thinking mind, and just set it on the shore, or on the bottom of the ocean, or something, where you’re not going to interact with it. It can be there. It can think as much as it wants. It can do whatever it wants. We’re not trying to interrupt it, or control it, or worry about it, or try to do anything with it at all. It gets to do what it wants. But we’re just not really going to interact with it. Instead, once we set it aside, we just come into simple presence.
And simple presence is simple. The immediate question I get is, how do I do it? You just set your thinking mind aside and then come into presence. So it doesn’t take any thought at all. You’re just simply coming into natural open ease, outside of all that mental construction—which can still be going on. We just have total permission to ignore it and instead pay attention to, or naturally be with, our beingness, our openness, our oceanic presence. And from this place of openness and ease and spaciousness, let’s do some of the om mani mantra aloud together. If you want to, if it’s part of your practice, you can imagine a blazing illuminated light above your head. That’s the Buddha Amitabha. The Buddha Amitabha means limitless light, measureless light. And we just picture this incredibly loving light of kindness, and joy, and peace, as we chant the mantra of Avalokiteshvara.
[chanting Om Mani Padme Hum]
Very good. Now again staying completely outside engagement with thought or just simply resting in openness, resting in awakeness. Not checking out but rather checking in—remaining present, remaining here and awake rather than lost in the endless halls of thought. So let’s just sit in this simple presence and if you want to you can just be aware in a very relaxed way of the coming and going of the breath. Most important thing is to just not try too hard. Just stay relaxed. Stay at ease, loose, open, but very awake.
Try to breathe through your nose if possible. And anytime you find yourself re-engaging with thinking about stuff, don’t worry about it. Just really in a very relaxed way, just let it go again and come back to just being oceanic. The ocean is huge. There can be all kinds of stuff going on, but it’s so big that it’s just overall very relaxed, very chill, even with a lot of stuff going on. And as we’re disengaged with thought, it’s interesting that time is a thought. And without thinking, we just let go of time entirely. We’re just here in a timeless openness that is very natural, very easy, very relaxed.
Okay, good. Now, feel free to just continue that if you wish. But if you’d like to move along here, then what I invite you to do is simply listen to the sounds of the world around you. Not listening for anything in particular, or trying to label anything, or anything like that. Just listening as if listening to bird song or something. Just hearing all the different sounds, and feeling into the spaciousness and openness of the sound. We might say the silence and the sound together. It’s relaxed. We’re not trying hard to make something happen, or visualize something—or anything like that. It’s really about noticing that the sound is arising out of a background of total silence and returning to total silence, continuously, and that total silence is there within the sound the whole time.
Again, it’s not something to figure out, or try to boot up a bunch of thinking around. Just a simple noticing. And again in our oceanic, open, spaciousness, just let all the sound move through you, as if you’re transparent. The sound is just happening, and it’s not encountering any resistance, no impedance—it’s unobstructed, it’s unhindered. If you listen carefully, you can hear a boundless void right there, that all the sound is coming out of and returning back into. An almost unimaginably deep and vast silence that everything is arising from, and dying back into.
And listen, listen to the almost inconceivable miracle that sound is happening at all. There’s this rich, bright, luminous clarity of sound arising in the midst of all this vast silence. The fact that it’s even there at all is unimaginable, inconceivable, bright, vivid.
Good. Very good. Now, if you want to, we can do a thing with our open eyes. You don’t have to, but just in a very relaxed way, very chill, very easy. You just allow your eyes to open and take in the entirety of the visual scene evenly. So, normally we stare at the center of vision, but I want you to let your eyes focus on infinity so that it’s still sharp, but you’re seeing the entire visual field at once, with the peripheral vision as important or as attended to as the center of vision. So you’re getting the whole visual field in attention.
Feel free to blink and stuff. This isn’t about holding your eyes still, but just allow all that vision to pour in. Just pouring pouring in. And notice if you can, the vast blackness behind it all. The enormous void behind it all. It’s right there. You can actually see it. And miraculously, for no apparent reason, right in the middle of it is this vivid, bright, colorful light show of everything appearing. Astonishing, unobstructed, unimpeded, just happening. You don’t have to imagine anything or make something up. It’s just happening right there. Where’s it even coming from? And notice that all this light show is just arising out of nothing and then dancing in awakeness and then returning to nothing, continuously. The two are never separate. To whom is this even appearing?
Okay, very good. Now, let’s do the same thing—same sort of thing again. Remaining easeful, open, unengaged with thought. If you’re just sitting there thinking and thinking, it’s okay—the thinking can happen, just disengage. It’s not important. Come into experience. In this case, notice how your body feels. In this case, I’m using the body, the word body to include your head, face, and the rest of your body. The whole thing. Tune into the feelings of the body. And notice that within body sensation is this openness, this oceanic spaciousness that’s timeless and boundless.
There’s a tremendous stillness. A stillness so still that it can never move or be moved. And against the backdrop of this stillness, the feeling of the body is arising. Feelings of breathing, feelings of your legs and butt and your spine, and so on. Feelings of your jaw and your eyes, and just the whole experience of sitting there, the feeling of the body. It’s all appearing within this stillness and openness. And the sensations of the body move and change, and grow and shrink, and pulse this way and move that way. But all of them are just arising out of this stillness, dancing for a while in the stillness, and then dying back away into the stillness.
And again, just notice the miraculous, unfathomable nature of this experience of body sensation. It’s just appearing. It doesn’t come from anywhere or go to anywhere. It’s just there. We’re not doing anything to make it happen. And it doesn’t land anywhere. Who is this even appearing to? Who are all these body sensations appearing to? And these sights and sounds? Who are they appearing to? And if you say, ‘me,’ then notice that ‘me’ is just some more feelings, sights, sounds, sensations, and maybe thoughts in the same space.
Try to find to whom the experiences are happening. All you can find are sensations arising in space and feelings moving through timeless openness. All of it is the appearance. What knows the appearance? And notice the vast, spacious, stillness, silence and darkness that’s right there. It’s right within every experience, and around every experience, and together with every experience. You don’t have to imagine it or visualize it or anything like that. It’s right there. There’s no avoiding it.
Very good. Now contrast that with the brightness and vividness and luminosity of experience. The sound of the sound, and the sight of the sight, and the feeling of the feeling. The unimaginable miracle that all this is arising continuously—bright, vivid, clear, experience—without us doing anything at all. You don’t have to make it arise. It’s just happening all the time. A continuous unending miracle. Timeless wonder.
Notice, too, the feelings of being somebody are just bright, vivid, luminous. Sounds of thinking—mental images, feeling emotions, body sensations—all kinds of stuff vividly appearing, but never congealing into anything. Even the most mundane, boring, quotidian moment is nothing other than Shiva/Shakti dancing and making magic.
Let go of pretending to be a bodymind and remember your true being, your true nature. There’s this wide awake, wide open mystery that can never be pinned down or labeled or defined.
Good. Now notice that the silence and the stillness, and the spaciousness and the darkness, are not in any way separate from the sights, sounds, colors, textures, feelings, thoughts, and being. They’re not separate. They co-arise. They coexist continuously. The stillness and the movement are not separate. They arise together. The sound and the silence are not separate.
Very good. Now, into this spaciousness, into this openness, let’s allow the mani mantra to rearise again—completely unengaged with thought. Feel the energy of the mantra radiating from nothing and back to nothing. And, in between, blessing all beings everywhere with love and kindness and beauty and joy.
[chanting]
Just rest in ease and natural presence, doing nothing at all. Okay, let’s end that there. I just want to keep meditating, but let’s end the meditation there for now. It’s just getting good. Sit there for another half hour, but I said an hour. So, try to stick to the schedule.
Have you ever seen a brand new baby? Like sometimes you can meet a brand new person? I remember my son, they just handed him to me about one minute after he was born—less than that. Here you go. I took my shirt off and just held him. And he was yelling a lot, and crying and freaking out, but the sense of immense surprise—what even is this? Is just so overwhelmingly apparent. Of course, he was already awake in the womb—there’s sounds. But now it’s bright, and it’s loud, and it’s cold, and it’s open—just overwhelming experience. And I just remember holding him, and just like “What?” And then in the weeks and months following, you can just see them looking around like, “What is this?” Over and over again. We don’t really know when the light turns on. Does it turn on somewhere or is it always on? Or is there some moment when it turns on? But certainly it’s on. Even in the womb, the light is on. But in that moment of coming out, it’s pretty overwhelming. And I think it stays pretty pretty intense for a long time, because you can just see it—like, what is happening?
And then little by little we get used to it, sort of inured to the tsunami of luminosity and color and brightness and sound and texture and touch—and all the stuff coming in, to the point where we sort of just, yeah, it’s Thursday night. But really, it’s never any less shocking. It’s never any less of a total miracle. And it’s wild when you see a brand new person like that, just how utterly you get the sense of the total preciousness of a being, the miraculous nature of a being, the total purity and innocence of a being, is instantly totally obvious. And if you remain sensitive to that, you notice that that’s there in everybody else all the time. It’s not like that ever went away. It’s just that we’re not paying attention anymore. Just like we’re not paying attention to the vividness of experience.
I just get involved in my Twitter feed, or whatever. But that luminous presence that is primordially forever pure, and astonishing, and miraculous, is always there. You just look—it’s right there. It’s just where you’re placing your attention. And our society’s pretty good at teaching us to place our attention on very stupid shit. And now we’ve got entire stupid factories that don’t even need people to run them. And it’s just endless stupid shit to pay attention to.
But you don’t, at least yet, you don’t have to. Maybe soon they’ll make it so you have to pay attention to it or you get shocked or something, but for now, you don’t have to pay attention to it. This is the final freedom—that you can notice the vividness of your own experience, and the miraculous nature of each being. It’s not even just people—every being is like that. It’s like some comet or something. You can’t even believe they’re that bright and that rare, and that it’s all happening right now in your own experience. It’s like you can sit here and go, well, I’m in this cream colored room with a bunch of idiots, or—here it is—it’s like a firework show continuously.
And most people are like, here I am in this room and I’m an idiot, or I’m somehow a flawed souffle that collapsed in the oven somehow and can’t be repaired. And it’s like, no, it’s a luminous light show that never stops being perfect and pure. You can notice that if you want to. It’s right there. It’s not something you have to pretend or imagine or whatever. It’s right there. The miracle is unending. We think of miracles as being something that is rare, but it’s continuous and ubiquitous. But it doesn’t make it less. It makes it more of a miracle, not less of a miracle.
Where is all this coming from? Who is it even happening to? Just look.
So, we’ll switch gears, and if you want to speak, you can raise your hand and ask a question, or talk about your experience, or explain why I’m wrong—whatever you want.
Q: When I’m on retreat, I’m able to look, but here it’s like looking into the sun. It’s just too much. It’s too much. Like, it’s always too much like that. Like, I’m afraid of looking. Like, how can I not be afraid?
MT: Well, I mean, who is it too much to? Who is it that’s afraid? It’s like saying the sun is afraid of its own light.
Q: Yeah. It’s a terror of the light. It’s like making everything be gone.
MT: Let it all go. Let it all be gone. It’ll come back. Nothing bad will happen. You won’t disappear or go blind or whatever. You’ll just feel good afterwards. So just let go into that. Let the light just wipe everything out.
Q: Thank you.
MT: Can you do it right now?
Q: I don’t think so. I think I would scream and cry and be like moving in very strange ways.
MT: All of which is fine, but all of that is resistance. Just let go. Okay?
There’s an unusual level of stillness and silence out there this evening, which is great. Okay, we’ll do our silent meditation then. And so normally we just do five minutes, but now we’re going to do—as punishment [laughter]—12 minutes. This is just silent meditation. Feel free to flee if you don’t want to sit.
[bell ringing]
Thank you everybody for coming out to meditate with me tonight.. I’ll see you next week. Same time, same place. Thanks everybody.
Yeah.
Learn about nonduality
Join Michael’s mailing list and get notified of new offerings and courses.
Donate to help create more of these videos and more.
