Coming from the Source of Everything
I’m Michael Taft. I think most of you have been here before, so you might know that we’re going to do an hour-long guided meditation. The hope is that you can sit still for an hour, so without further ado let’s just hop in.
Let’s begin tonight just by asking ourselves the question, what’s it like to be me right now. So, just ask yourself that question, and tune in: what is it like to be you right now? How’s your body feel?—and however it feels, just let it feel that way. Notice if you know you have a strong desire for it to feel differently, or look differently, or be different in some way, and just, to the best of your ability, just let it be exactly the way it is.
Tune into your emotions. Maybe you’re in kind of a neutral space, maybe you’re mildly aggravated, maybe you’re having some kind of life breakdown—who knows, but whatever your emotional state is, at least for the duration of the meditation, can you let it just be that way? That’s the way it is, that’s okay, it gets to be that way. And then, how’s your mind doing? Like all the thought stream, all the rumination, all the squirrel-in-a-cage type running around going on in there. How’s that going? And again, however it’s going, try not to resist it. Try not to control it, try not to attack it, or judge it. Just let it be exactly the way it is. So let’s see if we can do this radical—it’s actually a radical—thing, of just completely accepting our state of being right now, precisely and exactly where it is—just the way it is, where it is, right now. And just let ourselves accept ourselves in this moment, and notice that that might not be easy to do. Maybe one of the ways we are in this moment is super self-judgy, or really trying to change something, or whatever. But just to the best of your ability, let that part relax, and just tune into the mode of it is what it is right now, just is the way it is.
And then, from that place, let’s allow the thinking mind—which is one of the things we’re checked in with and are letting be that whatever way it is—let’s set that thinking mind aside, so that it’s allowed to just keep doing its thing. It’s allowed to think as much as it wants, it’s allowed to think about anything it wants, but we’re just not really paying that much attention to it. So, we’re setting it aside for the moment, and yet not controlling it, or suppressing it, or somehow trying to change it, but rather just allowing it to be there.
And you might say, well then, what am I doing with all the rest of my entire mind, which is normally all absorbed in that? Good question, for that’s what we’re going to be doing most of the meditation on. But for now, just the rest of all your mind—we could say the rest of all your awareness—just let it be present in the simplest possible way. Not present as some kind of complicated technique, but just present. If that’s a little too opaque, then I would say, well, feel your body. Notice the room, notice the sounds, notice how you feel. Again, we’re coming back to what it’s like to be me right now, but we’re just not engaging with thinking. That’s the only difference. We’re still letting it do that, but we’re just not tuning into that channel. Instead, we’re tuning into just being present. So let’s do that for a little while.
Just be present exactly the way you are, and if you notice that you’re very involved with thinking, you can give a little effort to being present. Just, on purpose, coming back to your body. On purpose, coming back to your emotions. On purpose, coming back to the sounds and sights in the room around you, and so on. In general, if you can, just relaxing the grabbing onto the thinking, and otherwise just be simply present, just simply present, naturally here, without too much technique.
It’s really important not to get in any kind of fight with your thinking, but just let it be there. You’re just not engaging. Now notice, when we’re not engaged with thought, our presence has a certain quality to it. And the quality, I would say, is openness—sometimes I call it spaciousness, or boundlessness, or meditating like the sky—but that all makes it sound like some kind of visualization, and it’s just a sense of openness. It’s not a visualization, it’s just when we’re not locked down in our thinking, we’re just more open to our senses—all around more open to a mood, an experience of spaciousness. So see if you notice that spaciousness, notice more openness, notice more of a sense of freedom in being that comes from simple presence.
If you find yourself back locked into thinking, just, very gently, let go of it. Come back to just being present, being present with sensory experience, but also, being present to just openness. Oftentimes, we look for openness in our sensory experience, but actually, the openness is the spacious field within which sensory experience all occurs. So instead of looking for a spacious experience, notice that all experience is happening within the space of awakeness.
Now, in just a moment, we’ll do a little work with a seed syllable—one we haven’t worked with all that much—but we do sometimes—hom. Hoom is interesting because, of course, in Vajrayana, that’s a potent syllable of emptiness—cutting through to emptiness—and also cutting through delusion. Kind of the same thing, but also in nondual Hindu practice it’s a syllable of Shiva which is, of course, the groundless ground of being. So, in a way, this syllable in both traditions is considered to be quite powerful for cutting through all those layers of story, and crud, and baggage, and difficulty. Cutting right through—in an absolutely compassionate way—directly into simple being.
So let’s do a little bit of chanting of Hoom from this open spacious presence. As usual, we’ll just do continuous chanting of it. I’ll take a breath whenever I need one, you take a breath whenever you need one. I have my pitch, but you can sing at your pitch, because we’re just chanting. If we were to spell this seed syllable it would be H O O M. We’ll do this for a couple minutes, and I want you to just ride on that energy of the sound that’s continuously cutting through delusion, cutting through all the stories, cutting through all the unconsciousness, cutting through all the fear-based distraction, cutting through all the woundedness, cutting through all the traumas, and just brings us into the presence—right brings us into the presence.
[chanting]
Good. Now, just continuing to sit in this simple presence. Feel that energy of cutting through, the opening up, the dispelling of all the unconsciousness and delusion and ignorance and just opening up to what’s beneath—all the layers and layers and layers of story, and distraction, and unconsciousness, which is just the bright, clear, light of awakeness itself. Awakeness before any story, awakeness before any personality, awakeness before even the body, before even the body. Awakeness itself, to whatever extent possible, just sit with that. It might come and go—the sense of that being there. Of course, it never actually comes and goes, but we get distracted again—back into the material and then come back. But it’s always there, so it’s easy to come back to. Just this sky-like, clear, bright awakeness that accepts everything, rejects nothing, has been utterly pure since before the beginning. And within which, all experience arises, and all experience is made, including the experience called me, including the sense of the body, including the sense of the emotions, the sense of the mind, the sense of the personality. All of that is constructed within awakeness.
So just let go of the construction. It doesn’t mean it’ll go away, but let go of engaging with it, and focusing on it, and identifying with it, and just come back to this primordial “I,” the primordial identity of just existence itself. We can sometimes just be it directly, other times the layers are too strong. So just notice, it’s not thoughts, it’s not emotions, it’s not the body, it’s not the world around you. It’s not your personality, it’s not any idea about anything. It’s not any imagination of anything. It’s where all that stuff comes from, and within which all that stuff arises. And so instead of sitting there trying to figure it out, just let go of all that, and notice what’s beneath all that, directly—which is just awakeness, wide awake, quiet, openness.
It’s not really something we can notice, because it’s what’s noticing, but still. What’s beneath all those things, which we might call manifestation, is the unmanifest, it’s potential, intensely powerful, massively energetic, utterly creative, and yet not any particular thing at all. Yet, when we rest as that, we rest as a mystery that can never can never be known. It’s a radiant, brilliant, utterly joyous, creative mystery.
Just let go of everything else, and just be unmanifest, unknown, unfixated, primordial potential—infinitely larger than the entire universe, within which the whole universe is nothing but a speck, because the potential is always so much larger than the manifest. Resting there is weird, because there’s nothing to hold on to, there’s no place to lay down, there’s nothing to fixate on, there’s no north star. There’s nothing to hang onto, so resting there can feel like just falling through space until you recognize the space is so large that falling is meaningless. It’s just a vaster stillness than you’re used to. Literally unimaginably vast. If it’s too uncomfortable to be that unfixated and unmanifest, just feel your breath—that’s there, too—the breath will come and go. But keep one toe in the primordial pool of chaos, from which everything is born, and if you can just be that primordial pool. Chaos in the sense of unmanifest, not disorganized, but just potential.
Let go of every assumption and every expectation. This is the same part of experience that we visit in deep dreamless sleep, except here we’re awake to it rather than in a kind of forgetting, but it has that same property of vast, spacious, open, potential. There’s nothing there. Rest as that. Notice here we’re below all the difficulties. Any kind of emotional problem, any kind of physical problem, any kind of mental problem, any kind of any problem, is downstream from this. There’s no problem here.
Good. Now, notice that, of course, this primordial, spacious, openness, wide awakeness, is, in one sense, incredibly still, because there’s just no manifestation at all. But in another way, it’s bursting with energy, because it’s giving birth to manifestation continuously.
And so, notice, from this space of complete mystery, complete profundity, complete potential, the sense of energy that moves the breath. It’s not the breath, but it’s what’s moving the breath—it comes out of that space. It energetically vibrates into manifestation as the breathing process straight out of this void. So feel the breathing as coming directly as Shakti—as energy—from awakeness itself, and feel how the breathing process isn’t just the lungs moving, it’s radiating through the entire body with all that energy. The whole body expanding and contracting, every cell vibrating, pulsating, rippling, celebrating this source energy that’s radiating through. Let’s hang with that for a little while.
Remember, when I say body, include your head and face—the whole body. Not only does the energy radiate through the whole body, but you can feel it moving in waves up and down the central channel.
Notice further, how this energy, this vibrating, pulsating, energy from the source, from this potential, becomes the feeling of the whole body. It’s not that it’s somehow a feeling in our body, it’s that the energy becomes the sensations of the body. It’s almost as if the flying sparks of energy from the source start to die out and become regular body sensations. And then there’s another wave of vibrating energy. Just notice that directly. And how, without engaging with thought the body, never congeals into some kind of object, but instead remains energized, open, boundless, radiantly healthy field of experience. Nothing holds still long enough to become an object.
Good. Noticing that the entire boundless energy experience of body is just one little tiny corner of the vast space of openness. I’m coming back to the radiant energy in this potential, the radiant energy in awakeness itself. Coming from the mystery itself. See if you can notice the energy, or the activity, we might say, that turns into thinking. It doesn’t start out as thoughts like pictures and words. It starts out as just energy that turns into mental activity, and eventually the activity becomes perceptible as just action in the mind, energy in the mind—waves or vibrations in the mind. And it’s open-ended—it doesn’t land. It’s like writing on water. It’s like the trail of a bird through the air—it just keeps disappearing. It’s made of nothing but radiant energy, and doesn’t land anywhere or stick at all. Just mental activity, arising in the vast, vast, space of awareness, and it doesn’t land anywhere at all. That’s just a continuous stream of vibratory energy.
If you try hard, and tighten all around it, you can make it turn into words and pictures, but if you relax and open, you’ll see it’s just flowing energy that doesn’t stick, doesn’t bind, doesn’t congeal, doesn’t crystallize, doesn’t freeze. It just moves, and it’s utterly beautiful, and natural, and free. It doesn’t land anywhere, it just moves, and shimmers, and vibrates, and continues on and on—the boundless space of awakeness.
Feel how the stream of thought is just like a burbling mountain stream. It’s clean, it’s fresh, it’s continuously moving. It never stops, it never lands anywhere, and it is utterly refreshing, clean, clear, unfixated, utterly natural, utterly beautiful.
Good. Now, maintaining presence as the source itself, as the wide awake, wide open, mystery itself, feel the energy coming out of that. Feel the energy pouring out of this, the core radiating out of the center, and notice some of that becoming our personality, becoming that person that we think we are, becoming our sense of liking this and not liking that. And, coming from this place, and not coming from that place, and having this kind of background, and not that kind of background, and having this opinion, and not that opinion, and being this politically, and not that politically—and all that stuff.
Notice it’s just continuous waves of vibrating energy that never actually land anywhere. We pretend that so much of that is so fixed, but, from this perspective, it’s utterly fluid, utterly changing, utterly unfixated, uncrystallized, unmanifest—pure energy, pure activity. And so, far from trying to get rid of our ego, or nullify our ego, or destroy our ego, we’re experiencing it here as pure waves of energy from the source itself, but never fixating, never landing anywhere. Never becoming any definite thing, but always moving, changing, shifting at the deepest levels. As much as we try to fixate it, it is unfixate-able. It’s like trying to build a building out of wind. It is mere appearance within this vast openness of potential and awakeness.
But, notice, it, too, is made of energy and awakeness. It’s beautiful, it’s natural, it’s powerful, it’s an expression straight from the core of being, but never a rigid, fixated, thing. Simply a voluptuous dance of being itself. When we try to hold on to it, or identify with it, it’s like freezing it in some kind of ice, and it’s a flowing stream, flowing straight from the heart of being itself.
Good. Continuing to come from the core, to come from the source, to come from radiant awakeness itself, the unmanifest, the infinitely, boundlessly, spacious, notice that this energy of awakeness is loving and joyous, it’s previous to manifestation, it’s previous to all problems. Its mood is exuberant celebration, creative joy, and love without limit. It does not say no to anyone or anything. And so, tune into that love and joy, and feel the energy of it. Feel the energy of it radiating out from this deep, mysterious, void. Radiating out as pure energy into all manifestation, because this is the primordial potential from which all manifestation arises. And so, from here, our joy radiates to the very limits of the universe and far far far beyond, into even the potential. Feel that joy, and share it with all creation, all manifestation, all beings, and even nonbeings, everywhere.
It’s not even that we’re sharing it. It’s that they already partake of it, and feel it radiating back from all of creation, back into the source, back into your very being. Deeper than thought, deeper than the body, deeper than any constructed thing. Back to the unborn, the unconstructed, the unmanifest, the primordial potential, and just effortlessly be that love and joy.
Maybe your thoughts and feelings are filled with something really not like that, but notice that the thoughts and feelings are coming from energy, and that energy beneath them is loving, and joyous. It’s giving birth to the entire universe in every moment. Feel that directly—that is what you actually are. Feel the beauty, and the nobility of that level of love and joy. It’s extremely majestic, and natural, and gorgeous, and there are no limits.
Good. Now, again from this primordial source feel the energy radiating out as the seed syllable Hoom. This time, again, of course, dispelling delusion, recognizing the unconstructedness, the uncrystallized nature of everything, but also, Hoom as celebration. Hoom as joy itself. So join me here.
[chanting]
Okay, let’s end the meditation there, and let’s let’s dive in. Let’s see what you guys have to say. Any reports? Anything that’s coming up? Anything you want to share? Maybe questions or things you’re curious about?
Q: Hi. I have a question around the meditation instruction from the beginning, which was around, set your thinking mind aside, and just kind of let it do its thing. For the various types of meditation that I’ve tried, I struggle with this open monitoring kind of do-nothing style. I do better with either focusing on the breath, or going in the direction of piti, or doing thought labeling. So my question is around…
A: Notice, we did go to each of those things. We went to the breath, we went—I didn’t call it piti, but we went to energy, but we didn’t start there.
Q: Yeah, my question is just, when I get that instruction, should I try anyway, or should I try doing something that I find works for me?
A: It’s up to you. I mean, in the long run, always do what works for you, especially day by day, especially in your practice at home, especially as your core thing that you’re doing—do what works. But, you know, you’re here once a week doing a guided meditation. You might want to try some other stuff out, and eventually you’ll notice that if you can get the sense of resting in the rest of experience, in all the parts of experience that just aren’t the thinking, it’s quite easy to just let it be there. I didn’t actually say open monitoring or anything like that. I was just saying be present, which is not “do nothing” it’s different, right? And so it does become interesting, because we’re not fighting the thinking, we’re not trying to control it, we’re not trying to change it, we’re just letting it be there, but we’re just not giving it air time. So it’s a thing you can learn to do that’s quite interesting. It’s less—on a deep level it ends up over time being less tight. but it can be frustrating until you get used to doing it, okay?
And so, if, for example, it’s easier to just focus on your breath, and that takes you away from it, then when I’m saying just rest in presence, then take some elements of that presence. For example, the feeling of breathing, and give it a little more attention, till you start feeling yourself coming into a more stable place. But what’s interesting is, in the long run, we’re not looking for any stability like that—not stability in the mind, not stability in the breath, not stability in any body sensation, not stability in anything like that, because the awakeness itself is utterly stable already. And all those things are inherently impermanent, things passing within awareness. So any object we can have as a meditation object fails us in the end. It doesn’t mean it’s not useful, we can use it for a while, but, in the end, it will fail you, because it’s going to keep changing. Whereas, coming from the awakeness itself—that doesn’t change, that’s just awake. And so, we could say, instead of trying to find stability in something passing by on some kind of TV screen, We’re just the screen itself—is the real stability. So that’s what we’re going towards in the long run, is that the awakeness itself is the ultimately stable thing, even though it’s groundless, it’s still empty, but it’s awake. So that’s why, over time, you want to lean into that kind of stability.
Q: Okay, thank you. I think for me, I think it’s just related to how much I practice, and now my practice is pretty unstable, and so my mind is very quick to…
A: Yeah, yeah, so, under those conditions, we can borrow some apparent stability, even if it’s, in the long run, not [stable], but it’s much more apparently stable object like the breath or something we can borrow some stability from that, and get a little get a little more calmed down.
Q: Cool, thank you.
Q: Hi. On your most recent podcast, you were interviewing Andrew Holocek. He was saying, it’s almost like we have this homing beacon we send out, because we’re always saying, where am I? Am I okay? Like all this stuff is just like making sure we know where we are, and I was feeling tonight very strong suspension of disbelief—like very difficult—and I was lost in thought for a bit. But one thing you said that really snapped me out of it was when you said the object is changing so quickly it can’t even become an object. That helped me see from picturing awakeness as something like me traveling into interstellar space, or being able to see into multiverses or something—which is very hard for me.
A: That’s not it—that’s imagination, which is great, but that’s not what I’m talking about when I say spaciousness.
Q: Yeah, so that made it feel close, that made it feel much more easy to connect, because sometimes it seems like it’s easier to feel the energy body, or the breath, even very close observable things that can get me inside of thinking, but to connect them can be hard.
A: Yeah, sometimes it is, and you know it’s just interesting, because each moment is different. Each time you come in here is different, right? So, riffing off the earlier question, we just start finding what works, and how to work with this in a way that—at least on average—is kind of hitting it for us a little bit. And then, as we tune in, then we can start to tune better and better. The thing is, it’s, in a way, way easier than that, because this really is the awakeness really is at the bottom of everything. So kind of no matter what doorway you fall through, no matter how distracted, no matter how upset, no matter how discontinuous—it’s right there. It’s all coming out of the source, right at that spot, too. And so, as you notice this more and more, you trust it more and more, and just let go into it more and more. So, instead of the reaction, instead of being like, oh, it’s really [eeh] so I’ve got to struggle out of that, it will be more like, I’m really [eeh], so just relax, because you’ll sink in.
Q: When you said the things are changing so fast there isn’t time for an object to form, is that what you said?
A: Something like that, yeah, I would say something like that. I don’t remember, but something like that. And the thing is, the point is that the mind slows it down and then puts a label on it, and pretends a thing is there, but that is not happening, things are whipping by.
Q: Yeah.
Q: Hi. Thank you. You mentioned at the beginning, when we were doing the seed syllable, that it’s related to Shiva. I’ve been playing with that guy lately,
A: He’s a fun guy.
Q: Yeah! Okay, I could talk about him, but I’m curious what you have to say about his properties? Can you describe him?
A: Okay, I spent the whole meditation describing him.
Q: Okay, yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Okay, cool.
A: And we could say then, the energy part, and all that is or Samantabhadra/Samantrabhadri.
Q: Okay, because that’s sort of been my experience as I’ve been playing with him. I’m like, this feels like this stillness, or the groundless ground, or the awake awareness or the thing that’s always there. I’m like, oh, but that’s that guy, and then everything that’s manifest is Shakti.
A: But the idea that those are different, is, you know, just.
Q: Yeah, okay. Thanks.
Q: So I think that question was probably a good leadup to the report I have. I kind of popped into this kind of state, or this kind of experience during the sit that I’ve had a couple other times. Once while listening to one of your sits at home, and once while meditating blindfolded for many hours. I’ll be with this really deified energy movement throughout the body, where it’s just these big tumbling movements, and then at some point, it’s like everything—there’s almost the quality of, oh, we don’t have to do all that, and it’s like everything kind of smooths, out harmonizes. There’s a profound stillness that’s expansive, but somehow also womblike. There’s a honeyed quality to it, and it feels—I can’t tell whether this is something that I’m making or throwing in there, but a heart space.
A: It’s loving. Yeah, of course, yeah.
Q: What am I describing?
A: There’s different words we could put there, but I would just say, you had been focusing on the energetic part which is a little more [jrr] and and now you’re coming into the more harmonious restful part, which is what you just said, so I’m just repeating your words back to you in different words. But you’re kind of softening, and gentling into the more still aspect of it.
Q: Gotcha, yeah,
A: And that’s wonderful right, it’s super wonderful, and I think it’s interesting then to notice if the energy part feels not that way. And if so, start playing in between—like here’s the super stillness, here’s where the energy feels a little jumbly, but it’s interesting to play with. Because, of course, all of that is our awakeness, and so we can kind of hang out in any part of it, yeah.
Q: I think, as I transition between the energetic quality, it doesn’t seem quite separate from the energetic quality.
A: It’s not separate, it’s like it’s there, but it’s smoothed out, you’re just getting into a more smooth zone with it. You know we think about how Jhanas are described, they go from being really bumpy and chaotic to really smooth. It’s part of how our awareness of this stuff settles, so natural. Just hang out with how awesome that feels.
Q: Yeah, thank you.
Q: Hi, so I guess I have a comment on my experience after the first chant. I felt something I don’t think I felt before. I don’t remember what your comments were after that, but I felt like something salient around my solar plexus. Like my attention was centered there, and that my head and my senses, like my eyes were incidental. Like it was just an appendage. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like my head was an appendage.
A: Turns out, it is. [laughter]
Q: Yeah, so if you have any comments on that, that would be interesting. I’m also curious about the role of the chant, like how it modulates our attention, and what are the physiological aspects of chanting that work into meditation. I definitely felt like a change on the level of my physiology. So, curious if you have anything to say about that, too.
A: There’s so much to say about it. First of all, the first question gets to the heart of it, which is, we pretend that we’re locked in our body, and that consciousness is like a little firefly in a jar inside our head. So we’re constantly putting it in the jar in our head, but that’s not what’s going on at all. The head arises within consciousness, and so you just started noticing that. And the Hoom chant was helping you to do that. The Hoom dispels delusion, dispels reification, and, so, it worked. On the level of physiology, of course, chanting—that vibratory chanting—does all kinds of cool things, because it’s making nitric oxide build up in your system. So it relaxes all your cardiovascular system, it regulates your cardiovascular system, and so on, because of the way that it vibrates in your nose. So look up the science on that. It’s actually really solid, and really interesting. And, of course, the changes in breathing in other ways calm us down, but really, it’s not just the physiology of it. It’s the seed syllable that is powerful. It has an awakening energy, and it really works—so it’s magic.
Q: Thank you.
A: Okay, anything else out there before we sit? Okay, let’s just sit a little bit more, just just a few minutes, but this time I’ll shut up. Let’s be silent sitting together.
Okay, thank you, everybody. Thanks for coming out, we’ll see you again here next week.
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