Dedicated to liberation in all its forms, Deconstructing Yourself is passionate about fearlessly investigating, attempting, and questioning all things to do with awakening, meditation, mindfulness, brain hacking, consciousness, neurofeedback, and more.Your host Michael W. Taft interviews some of the most interesting thinkers, authors, and teachers around, as well as other offerings. In this hard-hitting, radical, and fun podcast we look at secular post-, non-, un- Buddhism, Vajrayana, nondual Hindu Tantra, philosophy, the neuroscience of the sense of self, neurofeedback and the consciousness hacking movement, aspects of artificial intelligence, entheogens, and much more.If you’re looking for fresh directions, free from dogma and conformism, think of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast as the radical cafe where you can hear from the most interesting luminaries either from the outside edges of dharma, or a fresh take from more traditional teachers. If you’re interested in more, check out the Deconstructing Yourself website at https://deconstructingyourself.com.
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episode 43: Reversing the Stack— A Nondual Practice Map, with Michael Taft
In this episode, host Michael Taft remixes his map of deconstructing sensory experience, and talks about how to use it to work in nondual traditions. Essentially the idea is to reverse the stack by starting out with Stage 4 (pure awareness) and then working your way up to stage 3, etc. Michael also spends some time talking about maps of meditation, problems therewith, and why he is already reworking this map after a short time.
Show Notes
0:25 – Introduction
2:11 – Michael’s reasons for opposing maps, and creating the Deconstructing Sensory
Experience map
5:05 – Critiques Michael has heard about the map since first presenting it, and his responses
10:13 – Brief review of stages 1-4 of the map
14:41 – The logic behind putting cessation as stage 5 in the previous map; why it’s now
removed from the map
18:19 – How each stage is useful and no stage is lesser than the others
21:13 – Description of stage 4, pure awareness; how this stage is viewed in other traditions
25:43 – Reversing the stack, using this model bidirectionally
29:56 – The observer trap and how reversing the stack overcomes this problem
34:34 – Outro
Note: this is only a map, only a model. Just like a menu is not food, this model is not claiming to be reality. It’s just a handy way to help you orient your practice.
This model doesn’t count for nondual meditations, high-concentration/jhana practice, etc. It is only to help you with your vipassana practice.
These are not discrete or digital stages. They are analog, and shade into one another. Each stage is desirable and useful for various things. No stage is somehow better than another.
In vipassana practice, however, we are usually attempting to tranverse the stack from stage one to stage four.
When doing nondual practices, we transverse the stack from bottom to top (4 -> 1) and do what we might call “nondual vipassana” or something akin to many Mahamudra practices—which is what this episode describes.
Level 1 - Conceptual - Thinking about sensory experience objects using words.
Level 2 - Phenomenal Object - Contacting the phenomenology of sensory experiences in the form of objects.
Level 3 - Flow / Change - Contacting the phenomenology of sensory experiences as vibration, waves, or change.
Level 4 - Pure Awareness - Noticing awareness itself with no content.
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