Openness Energy Awake – Deconstructing Yourself
Okay, if you’ve not been here before, I’m Michael Taft. This is Deconstructing Yourself. We’re going to deconstruct ourselves together. I will lead an hour-long sit. You are welcome to take part in all of it, part of it or none of it—you can do what I’m suggesting—or not. You get to decide how much you want to do. After that, I will give some sort of deeply, profoundly edifying speech that you’ll certainly be remembering for the rest of your lives. And then we will offer a microphone around the group and see if you have any things you want to talk about, or reports you want to give, or if you want to stand up and profess your manifesto just written on Claude, you can do that. Then, at the very end, we’ll do about a five-minute silent sit. Okay, so that’s the program.
So let’s begin without further ado. Normally, we start out with some movement.
[guided movement]
From here, we’re going to do a little bit of pranayama.
[guided pranayama]
Good. Now, from this place, if you want to, you can join me in chanting a mantra.
[chanting]
Very good. Now just resting in that energy again. Just allow your mind to fall apart. Just fall open into space, into wide awake, wide open, spacious clarity, and awakeness. And in that place, just feel this energy and your body in simple presence. Simple natural presence. There’s really no technique here. We’re just resting outside of engagement with thought in simple presence. If you want to, you can have a sort of background awareness of the breath wave rising and falling—it gives you something to do, if you want to have something to do. But we’re not really focusing hard on that. It’s not a breath meditation. We’re just mildly aware of the breathing as we sit. Easy, relaxed, and open, resting outside of engaging thoughts. So thoughts can be there, but you’re just completely not paying attention to them. You’re feeling your body. You’re awake to the room around you. You’re alive and present in a completely easy, natural way.
Good. Now continue doing this, just sitting in openness, feeling the breath wave coming and going. If you want to do a little bit more advanced version of the same thing, keep looking at who’s aware of the breathing. Who is it that is meditating? Who is it that is sitting in natural openness? Same practice but with more of an inquiry emphasis.
Don’t get in a war with your thinking. Don’t struggle to stop thinking. We’re not trying to do anything at all to thinking. It gets to do whatever it wants. Thinking can happen on its own as much as it wants. We’re just not engaging. Attention is not going towards thinking. It’s being naturally present. It’s feeling the body, feeling the breathing, hearing the room, seeing the room, etc. But it doesn’t have to be some kind of big exercise or big technique. It’s just being awake. Again, if you want a much more difficult version of this, just keep trying to find who’s awake to this meditation. Find that awakeness, the source of the awakeness.
Good. Now, if it’s available to you, notice the energy behind the breath. The energy that moves the breath. This is not something we’re imagining or something we’re trying to make happen. It’s just there. If it’s there, and if you notice the energy behind the breath, or the energy that moves the breath, focus on that rising and falling rather than the breath itself rising and falling. You’ll feel a movement of energy up and down.
Very specific. Again, we’re not visualizing. We’re not trying to make anything happen. You’re just noticing that the breath is moved by a kind of energy. And they’re similar, but different enough that you can notice the energy itself just moving up and down with the breath. On the in-breath it rushes downward; on the out-breath it rushes upward.
Try not to have a narrow focus. Stay in the vast open space of awareness itself. Just noticing that this energy moves downward and then upward in this kind of vast sky. Once again, we’re not visualizing. We’re not trying to make anything happen. We’re just noticing it—if it’s noticeable. If it’s not, just stay with the regular breathing. And if you want to, you can ask yourself, who’s or what’s noticing this energy—and look.
Good. Again, being careful to not get all caught up in thinking. Just setting that aside, working with whatever level is comfortable for you. If it’s available to you, we can now begin to notice what’s behind the energy. What’s behind all that energy or what’s within it or around it? If we, very lightly, very gently and carefully, just notice that energy, you will notice that it’s nothing other than vast space, boundless openness. Wide awake. Just simply, naturally present —noticing boundless awakeness within, and boundless awakeness without. And that there’s actually no separation at all between them. There’s no boundary between the boundlessnesses. It’s one vastness.
Good. Now resting as this boundless openness that’s wide awake, naturally wide awake. There’s nothing we’re doing to be boundless. There’s nothing we’re doing to be wide awake. That’s just a given. Allow the activity of thinking that’s been going on in the background, and that we’ve all been completely un-engaged with. Notice this activity as a kind of energy activity. The thought is just the hamster in the wheel, is just kind of spinning. Or, the thought goes, it speeds up, it slows down, it stops, it speeds up, it slows down, it stops. There’s just activity. We’re not concerned with the content.
You’ve understood the content probably since you were a child, so you’ll probably still know what it is. It’s not that you somehow don’t know the content, but we’re not really engaging with that. We’re just noticing this revving of the engine of thought that it naturally does—it’s just doing its thing. And I want you to notice that as a kind of analog to the breath. It’s different because the breath is very sinusoidal—it has this nice rhythm, and the thinking activity can be a lot more discontinuous—staccato and arrhythmic—but still it has these bursts of energy, and then quiet, and then energy, and quiet.
So, from this place of vast openness, natural presence, tremendous wakefulness and clarity, just notice the kind of babbling brook, the sort of energetic component of thought and let go of imagining that it’s happening anywhere in particular. We’re in boundlessness.
If you keep having this image that it’s in your head, that’s okay. But notice that’s just another thought. It’s not really happening anywhere. What’s the center of a black hole right there? There isn’t one. Normally, we’re kind of tightly gripping onto the thought, trying to force it to make sense, or grab a hold of it, and take it in different directions. Here, we’re completely letting it be free. And if you let it be free like that, you’ll start to notice that it’s actually
entirely fundamentally organic natural kind of energetic expression.
When we’re not gripping onto it, the friction in the mind starts going down to zero. And there’s just kind of this free flow of activity, not bothering anybody or anything. And anytime you notice yourself grabbing on, or tightening up, or crystallizing, or somehow trying to pin it down, just let go. Come back to just natural openness.
Good. And if you like that, feel free to just hang there, observing that, letting that freely flowing river of thought do its thing without any impedance, any gripping, any tightening, any controlling. It’s just utterly natural. But if you’d like to go a little further—this gets pretty challenging for some folks—notice the energy behind the thinking. It’s the same energy that’s behind the breathing. It’s just prana. What’s moving the thoughts? We’re not imagining it. We’re not generating it. We’re just noticing that there’s a subtle but powerful force that is allowing the thoughts to move. It’s like a wind, and the thoughts are like sailing ships.
Notice when we’re experiencing this thought energy without impeding it, without hanging on to it, without trying to imagine it or control it, thoughts become like writing on water. They’re just completely relaxed—and they disappear. There’s nothing to hang onto, and no one to hang on.
Who’s even trying to meditate? Who is meditating? Just look—see if you can find that individual. All you find is vast spacious awakeness with no friction, no impedance, no constriction at all. It’s just boundless awakeness. And now notice that this energy behind the thinking is nothing other than space itself. openness, boundlessness, same as the energy behind breathing. They’re the same boundlessness, same as the boundlessness without, is just fast openness which is expressing itself as thoughts and breathing and sights and sounds—and everything else. There is no separation at all. It all arises together and all subsides together.
What is it that’s aware of all this? Look, find it to find the thing that’s aware. Whatever you find, what is it that’s aware of that? Whatever you find, what is it that’s aware of that? Eventually, you’ll see that there is no thing that’s aware. There’s just awareness. And the idea that there’s a thing that’s aware is just that—it’s just an idea. And that’s just a movement of energy that is nothing other than vast openness and awakeness. So just like breathing is an expression of awakeness, and thoughts are an expression of awakeness, let’s do mantra again as an expression of awakeness. This time we’ll take one of the bijas out and do the more classic version of the same mantra. It’s a little shorter.
[chanting]
Okay. Very, very, very, very slowly and gently, let’s let go of the conceit that we’re meditating at all. And just notice that as you shift gears, the only thing that really shifts is your attention. The vastness and the awakeness and the clarity is always there. It doesn’t go away when you stop sitting still. It’s not some kind of special state that we’re talking ourselves into. It’s always there. The special state that we talk ourselves into is called just not meditating, just walking around, where we’re gripping down on certain thoughts and going into an absorption on them. It’s kind of an unconscious absorption into our own stream of storytelling. But this vastness, this awakeness, this energy, this clarity is what’s going on continuously. It’s never not available.
Now, the mantra we were doing, especially the second version, that’s a really famous goddess mantra from a text called the Devi Mahatmya, the greatness of the goddess—sometimes called the Chandipath. The story is, as usual, there’s a demon that’s wreaking all kinds of havoc. The gods are hapless and helpless, and they can’t do anything about it. So they call on the goddess to do something about it. She manifests in a tornado of fury called Chamunda, usually depicted as a lady with about 17 weapons on the back of a tiger. And she basically kicks the ass of this demon. So we can use mantras like that—you can read the whole text aloud as a practice. It’s considered to be a protective practice.
I can hear all the haters going, “That’s a dualistic practice. What do we need protection from? That’s ridiculous.” Probably I’m the only one thinking that, but the haters. It’s interesting, because in the context of non-dual practice, there’s always something that we need protection from, and that is our own ignorance, our own unconsciousness, our own checked-out-ness. Another way of putting it is, our distraction from that wide awake, clear, bright, spaciousness, that’s always there—that’s what we really are. So, when we do practices like that, you can feel the intense energy, very sharp energy, of those mantras. It’s very sharp—the “vicce” is a synonym for namaha, which means, I bow to. So, the seed syllable then I bow to Chamunda. But the idea is that all that mantric energy is dispelling the delusion, dispelling the ignorance, dispelling the unconsciousness, dispelling the distraction, dispelling the nonsense, the storytelling, and bringing us back to the central, natural—really only fact there is—which is wide awake, wide openness.
Interestingly, that text is the first time the goddess Kali ever appears. She comes out of Chamundi as even the fiercer form. and of course, Kali makes her appearance in Vajrayana as well as a central character. So it’s a powerful text and really interesting. But the important part is to remember that when we’re talking about all this protection and all this energy and all this kind of super fierce powerful taking on of these forces—the forces are the forces in our own unconscious—just delusion, distraction. Even our own material, that needs to be clarified, that needs to be let go of, that needs to be uplifted, that needs to be transformed, or, in a deeper sense, doesn’t need anything, at all except to recognize its own awakeness.
And so we can do mantras like that and understand that about them. They just keep pointing back to the awakeness. But beyond understanding it, you can even chant it like that, and you’re just listening to where the listening comes from. What’s aware of the mantra? So try it. Just recite the mantra and try to find what hears it. What recites it? What’s aware of it at all? So you just look, and then you’re doing the actual activity, the mantra dispelling all the nonsense, and just looking directly at the awakeness. Of course, you can’t see awakeness because awakeness is what’s looking. But you can just let go of the seer and the seen, and just have nothing but the seeing. Let go of anything but the awakeness. And then the mantra is really doing what it says it’s doing. And if the goddess Chamundi gets in there and helps out a little bit that’s okay too.
All right. Let’s see if you guys have anything you want to share, speak about, or ask about.
Q: Hi, Michael.
MT: Hi. Welcome back.
Q: Thank you. I really felt a lot of energy coming up in my body, and something came to me—the kind of passive and active way of moving for living. And I was thinking about existentialism and Taoism. One seems to be more allowing things to happen and the other one seems to be more the superman—you have the power. And I was thinking that they don’t seem to be contradictory, but within me, there is something that’s shifting in between these two. And I was trying to visualize it as like fog with different colors coexisting altogether and kind of just activating in the same space. But it’s kind of hard to know that energy. It’s kind of floating and observing. It’s like I have the awareness, but I don’t know what to do with the energy to feel right and feel balanced in life.
MT: Yeah. So what we want to do here is recognize that there’s nobody who’s actually manipulating the energy, that total story that we’re telling ourselves that we can manipulate it, that we can get in there, we can do this or that—and all of that. All of that’s just getting in the way. If it’s doing anything at all, it’s getting in the way. It’s just friction, because what’s really happening is, the energy is what’s moving us, and the energy is just doing what it wants to do. And so, the more that we can let go of the whole idea that I’m looking at it, and I’m doing something with it—and all that. Just fall open, and recognize that what’s been happening all along, from before the day you were born, is that the energy is just pouring forth and doing what it’s doing.
This is the direction. And when we start to do that, you’d think you might turn into some kind of amoral couch potato, but instead, what happens is you get tremendously active. Nobody’s doing the Tao, but the Tao does everything. It’s how everything happens. So, it’s just infinite energy. And so the more that you’re not caught up in a story of I’m the one doing it, the more that instead of being passive, it becomes tremendously active from the viewpoint of the energy itself. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but just keep looking for Who is it that thinks they’re manipulating the energy? And the more you look, everything you find, just ask yourself, what’s aware of that? You just keep asking. And it sounds like an infinite regress. It sounds like it will just be a hall of mirrors. You know, what’s aware of that, and what’s aware of that, and what’s aware of that? But your brain learns eventually. You, even for just a second, you’ll go, “Oh, oh.” and all the mirrors aren’t there. And then they might all come back, but then they’ll fall down again.
And you recognize it’s not a hall of mirrors. It’s just awakeness in every direction, with no center to it and no agenda of manipulation and control. It’s just like when we were observing when we’re not constricting around thoughts, it just becomes this flowing river of thought energy and thought activity. Our whole expression of our being is like an energy of just free activity. Does that make sense? Does that sound doable?
Q: Yeah. I was thinking about a sentence I read about true freedom is to be responsible to be who you are. I guess if you are the source of energy then find that root source.
MT: I would just say, realize you can never be anything but that. How could you be something else? And so all the trying and struggling and attempting and all that—just drop it. What is left is what you really are.
Q: Does it differ when you’re at a different age?
MT: I don’t know. But great question. I’ll just say I don’t know. Thank you, though.
Q: When you say I don’t know, well, it depends on your belief system, where you are coming from, what you aspire to—can go in two infinite directions. Yeah, but I like your “I don’t know.” Two things I really really enjoyed—and thank you so much, Michael. There was a moment where you asked us a question—and I can’t remember the question, but I felt like I got it right, in that moment it felt like, oh, yes. It was noticing the infinite, the vastness. It was just—yeah. I was feeling it, and it was in front of me. Yes. So it felt like a yes. Yeah. and it’s still there right now. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And then you said something else, and I so love that you said, there is no end to the vastnesses—that’s so liberating for me to hear that. Not that I don’t feel liberated, but it’s an invitation. It’s an exquisite invitation to go even deeper into this vastness. The fact that you say vastnesses, I’m like, yeah, it’s really organic for me to hear that. So, thank you so much. Yes.
MT: You’re so welcome. Is this the first time you’re at Alembic?
Q: Yeah.
MT: Welcome. Yes. Other folks.
Q: Hi. This is also my first time here.
MT: Welcome.
Q: Thank you. I have sort of a twofold share that I’m welcoming input on. Not so much questions. The last season of my life has been a lot of movement, a lot of change, going, going, going. And this experience gave me a really nice invitation to let that sit and find stillness. And I found that there was this constant urge to move my body and find something needed an adjustment. And so I was really grappling with this resistance to that, and letting that urge fall away, and also surrendering to my body, like really desiring to lean this way or stretch that way. So that was just something that was coming up as a matrix for me to move through mentally. And then the other thing, which also felt like a secondary sort of grid I was having to navigate, was a lot of the guidance in during the meditation felt familiar to me from past practices, from past teachers that I’ve sat with. It kept coming up as like an instruction manual from the past, and I was wanting to grab on to visualizations that I’ve done in the past. And it was so interesting because it was almost my default mode network was inserting additional instructions, additional visualizations. And again, there was that grappling with going with it versus sort of resisting it or letting it fall away. And I don’t know if there’s really a question in there, but I just wanted to sort of speak on, and invite input on that tension between going with it versus letting it dissolve. Yeah, it’s interesting because both of the things, the embodied thing and then the visualization thing.
MT: Notice, I didn’t have any visualizations at all. It’s interesting.
Q: But in both of those there was tension. What do I do? What do I do?
MT: And so you probably know where I’m going from there, which is just, can you observe that tension and just let it go, without making any decision? Whatever it thinks it’s deciding there is is just a bunch of friction, and knotting up—literal tension, grasping, and constriction, and tightening. What if it doesn’t matter? Or, what if the thing that—because I did a couple times—ask what’s doing this right now? What’s aware of this right now? Look, look. So what’s grappling? What is it? Who is it that’s grappling? Find the grappler. Find the decision wrestler, and notice that there’s nothing there except vastness—it’s just wide awake, wide openness.
It’s wide open, and that’s not like an abdication, because something will change things, it will go in one direction or another. It doesn’t stay in some kind of superposition. It’ll actually start moving one way or another. But it’s interesting to let go of being the controller, being the one who’s going to make this important decision one way or another. That’s what we’re aiming at—noticing the part noticing the decider, the controller, the constriction, the tension. All of that is just added friction, and it doesn’t do anything except make things less pleasant. Even if we’re in some kind of choiceless determinism or something, the one choice we have is, what are we awake to? Are we lost in our story of what I need to decide? Which, by the way, we all get caught in—I’m not aiming that at you specifically, we’re all like that. Or, can we notice, just let go of that fantasy—because it is a fantasy—and come into what’s actually happening. Just a question.
Q: Thank you.
MT: Yeah, thanks for your manifold report. Other stuff out there?
Q: Hi. I was just wondering, why it is that the things you say are absolutely absurd. Last week you were talking about—I can’t even remember, probably zooming out somewhere today. You were talking about space and energy—and it’s liberating to some, clearly it feels very important, but it’s strange to me that we don’t talk about it after we’re done here. We go and have a conversation there, probably we’ll talk about more ordinary things, and so I was just wondering even if I talk to you afterwards, probably we’ll talk about Hawk or someone, something like that. This is common, I think, in all domains where sometimes it’s like a status thing, where the people who are best at it don’t talk about the thing. Like the musician.
MT: I think you need to add, “deign” to talk about it.
Q: They don’t deign to talk about it, right. Exactly. Maybe that’s what’s going on here. I think I’ve read about llamas not talking about the dharma or something. Yeah. I’m just wondering whether there’s a reason for that. Maybe it’s also that talking about it actually takes you away from doing the practice or other things, like the infinite vastness.
[inaudible comments from another speaker]
MT: I’m positive you can find some folks who will talk to you about this. But, to take your question seriously, just as I’m saying you know, hey, when we’re done meditating, the awakeness is still there. I would say, even when the content of our conversation is not about that, it’s still about that. When even when we’re talking about my favorite topic, Magic the Gathering—not really—but we we could still notice that these other things are, I would
say, not only actually there and present, but central. So, it can be an interesting playfulness.
Q: I guess it feels like an advanced practice to do what you just said.
MT: Super advanced. Because it’s just so normal.
Q: Yes. And it would be nice to have sort of an intermediate level of just talking about.
MT: Yeah. I’m positive you can find some other weirdos to talk to in this sangha, for sure.
Q: Okay.
MT: Thanks for helping me retrocausally tune the Big Bang to make this all happen. [laughter] Seriously, let’s have about seven minutes of silent meditation together.
Okay, very good. Let’s end that there. See you next week. Come on back. Thanks everybody.
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