Michael Taft leads a guided meditation at the San Francisco Dharma Collective, demonstrating how to contact vast, spacious awareness. Then using that awareness to do vipassana.
This technique completely flips around the usual method of doing vipassana, bringing an experience of crisp, clear, bright, vivid, equanimous that is utterly effortless.
Meditation lasts one hour, ending at about 1:01:00
Then dharma talk and Q&A.
leaves photo by hiroki1987311
Hi Michael. Just finished this practice. Similar to what I normally do in seated practice in the style of U Tejaniya. I can see how awareness is the same as what’s being known. My first question is: what is the role of attention in selection of what will be known in the vastness of possibilities of what could be known (what selects what is known). I can see that there is no “I” selecting what will be known. And second question is: where does wise and unwise attention become involved? Is this just a natural dispassion to abandon what is painful and causes suffering? Thanks! Sandy
I like these questions, Sandy. The first one actually has several possible answers:
a. Just let awareness choose, however it does that, or
b. Nonduality/duality doesn’t have to be binary. You can slip into just enough dualistic awareness to choose, and then slip back into pure awareness, or
c. You can decide in advance what the object will be and stick to that.
As for the second question, in terms of Theravada, yes, that is how we would describe it. But from another viewpoint, you could say that we are discovering the liberating aspects of all that is arising.
Hope that helps.