Deconstructing Yourself

Scientist, programmer, and author David Chapman talks with Michael W. Taft about metarationality, emptiness and form, nihilism, tantrism, dzogchen, Kegan’s stages of development applied to meditation, vampire romance novels, and the importance of being able to switch reality tunnels.

David Chapman is a writer, computer scientist, engineer, and Buddhist practitioner. He’s been practicing Vajrayana Buddhism in the Aro Ter tradition for 20 years. David is a leading proponent of metarationality—a subject we’ll go into in some depth in this episode—and writes about it on his website Meaningness.com.

Show notes

1:43 – What is metarationality?

2:45 – What happens when you run off the edge of the map?

4:44 – Pattern and nebulosity, emptiness and form

6:45 – Story of scientist Barbara McClintock, and epicycles

13:30 – Donald Schön & design creativity

14:37 – Ways to deal with system failure, Nihilism

17:28 – Timothy Leary & Robert Anton Wilson, switching between reality tunnels

20:22 – Is metarationality just a larger rationality?

22:15 – David’s vampire romance novel, Ken Wilber’s novel Boomeritis

23:38 – What does metarationality have to do with meditation and Buddhism?

24:27 – Seeing the relationship between thought and reality

27:57 – Metarationality as a signpost of deep awakening

30:31 – Dzogchen and Advaita – are practices of view simply indoctrination?

32:17 – Metarationality as a path beyond postmodernism

33:09 – Fundamentalism as a huge LARP, Eternalism vs. Nihilism

36:06 – Spiral dynamics & Robert Kegan’s stages of adult development Link to Wilber/Kegan dialog (Warning: behind a paywall)

41:20 – What a Kegan Stage 3 group looks like in American Buddhist sanghas

43:23 – Transitioning to Stage 4, examples in relation to Buddhist practice and sanghas

44:22 – The edge of the map and the lack of support for Stage 5 in Buddhist communities

46:22 – Kegan Stage 4.5, rejecting systems for their limitations, and how to get to Stage 5

47:25 – The importance of intersubjectivity

49:20 – Future echoes of David’s teaching of metarationality

50:21 – Engaging metarationality in ways that don’t involve meditation, Bongard problems, and the word “intuition”

54:33 – Vipassana techniques for generating intuition

57:43 – Do we need gurus/lamas to transmit deep understanding?

1:04:20 – Students covering up their teacher’s crimes

1:05:33 – The desire to be metarational and the dangers of self-diagnosing your Kegan stage

1:07:54 – David’s background in artificial intelligence and philosophy

1:10:19 – Is AI dangerous?

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In this episode I talk with mindfulness teacher and co-founder of the Buddhist Geeks project, Vincent Horn. Vince is part of new generation of teachers translating age-old wisdom into 21st century code. In this session, Vince and I discuss the radical sense of experimentation, the Great Unbundling of the Dharma, ways the mindfulness and awareness practices complement each other—which is turning out to be something of a theme on the show lately—, the perhaps greatly exaggerated reports of the death of Buddhism, what Buddhism and meditation can offer the Silicon Valley worldview. as well as a scintillating juvenile foray into enlightened scatology.

Learn more about Vince at Buddhist Geeks.

Show Notes

0:25 Introduction and overview

1:52 – Vince talks about Buddhist Geeks, his interest in mindfulness and his teaching project at meditate.io

3:45 – Vince's meditation and teaching background, working with somatic practices and vipassanā, and his time at Naropa University

8:16 – What's exciting and interesting in mindfulness now, radical experimentation in the new generation, the unbundling of the Dharma

11:38 – Playing with the core meditative elements (concentration, inquiry, etc.) of different traditions

14:45 – Defining mindfulness and awareness, and how they work together

24:45 – Has Buddhism weeded out all meditative dead-ends or is experimentation and knowing for oneself useful? Can we discover things that haven't been done before?

28:22 – Technology and making sense of what practice is while rapid change is occurring

30:34 – Scatology: literal and figurative shit

33:50 – Human relationships: self, other, and “individuality first” in practice

37:00 – The co-construction of reality, and social noting

42:15 – Meditation's reinvention in the 1800s and 1900s, and the arising of noting in response to colonialism

44:54 – Is Buddhism dying?

49:33 – Silicon Valley, immortality, and Ray Kurzweil

57:36 – The juice of the unknown and a shift in the way we know things

1:04:40 – As many types of nonduality as dualities

1:07:16 – Vince and Emily's teaching synergy, one-on-one teacher meetings

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Meditation teacher Shinzen Young and host Michael W. Taft talk about the relationship between mindfulness practice (as it is usually defined) and nondual-type practices (or non-practices, if you like), the way that focusing on the details of experience relates to focusing on awareness itself, micro-sessions & nano-nirvanas, the thinness and lightness of the screen of awareness and much more. Learn more about Shinzen Young at Shinzen.org.

Show Notes

0:25 – Intro

4:12 – How does Advaita/Nonduality relate to Mindfulness?

7:45 – Shinzen defines modern mindfulness and the component parts of contemplative practice (concentration, clarity and equanimity)

9:51 – Michael’s simplified working definitions of mindfulness and advaita

10:37 – Shinzen asserts that mindfulness and advaita converge towards the same thing, under his own understanding of mindfulness

16:08 – How to investigate one’s own awareness through mindfulness; Shinzen’s quadrants of practice 20:50 – Appreciation practice (“note everything”) or “regular mindfulness”

22:54 – The arrow of attention

26:31 – Classical mindfulness in the Burmese tradition: penetrative awareness and working with the arrow of attention

31:48 – Outside time and space: what the arrow of attention reveals

34:06 – Shinzen defines primordial awareness in materialist, reductivist terms: the sound that’s not sound 39:15 – Are nondual experiences externally real, or do they reflect only subjective experience?

45:05 – Shinzen’s conjecture: connectivity vs thingness; cones of association

51:38 – By what criterion is connectivity assumed to be fundamental to reality, not only subjectively experienced?

56:55 – How appreciation and self-inquiry practices converge

1:01:01 – Reconciling the fruits of mindfulness and nonduality: differences in perception and language vs. differences in experience

1:06:25 – Deconstructing the arrow of attention in a nondual setting

1:07:50 – Micro-cessations vs lights-out cessations; the lightness and thinness of the ordinary

1:11:55 – Shinzen’s many-layered experience of cessations; the sphere of experience and the void

1:18:08 – Bigger cessations

1:19:38 – Disambiguations: what does it mean to be feather light and paper thin, and what are the characteristics of micro-cessations?

1:23:56 – The lightness of immediate experience

1:29:30 – Outro

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Pragmatic dharma teacher and host Michael W. Taft feel the power of the dark side, talk about nirvana, deconstruct the concept of nirvana, dive deep into the reality of death, look at the denial of death, and probably scare away all listeners.

Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. Learn more about him and his work at Kenneth Folk Dharma.

Show Notes

0:25 – Introduction and overview

2:20 – Preferring to be conscious or not conscious

5:28 – Avoiding eternalism and entertaining the possibility of death…or immortality

11:33 – The enjoyability of oblivion/nirvana (and establishing a definition of both)

19:15 – The Buddha presents a life extinction program, not a life improvement program

25:28 – Fear and denial of death, and rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic

33:15 – The relief of accepting the reality of death

34:48 – Enlightenment as a real-time report about what’s arising in experience

37:52 – The limitations of coming to meditation as a life improvement program

41:10 – Kenneth’s current practice assessing mindfulness, checking for tightness and temporarily suspending the self model

48:45 – The preposterousness of eradicating the self

53:41 – The Dharma Overground forums and posters having bad days after attaining some level of enlightenment

58:31 – How do know anything? Does Kenneth feel like he has any special or ultimate knowledge?

1:03:53 – Certitude is just another feeling on a level playing field with all others

1:12:10 – Awakening experiences invalidating each other: the second awakening erodes some of the truth of the first

1:14:10 – The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you

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Pragmatic dharma teacher Kenneth Folk and host Michael W. Taft discuss what it means to be mindful, various definitions of being mindful in the moment, the trouble with remaining mindful during an entire sit, and more.

Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. Learn more about him and his work at Kenneth Folk Dharma.

Show Notes

0:48 Introduction and overview

4:00 Deconstructing “mindfulness”

11:47 Kenneth’s new mindfulness practice

15:02 Mindfulness vs. checking the box; auditor vs. meditator

23:58 Is mindfulness enlightening?

30:03 Defining engagement and the problem with prescriptions

31:52 Sense doors and applying mindfulness to thoughts

36:06 Alternatives to meditation for experiencing mindfulness and awakening

42:37 Is there a “right” way to experience awakening?

47:25 Getting to a 100 percent attention

52:45 Liberating working memory from the feeling of being the observer

55:06 Concentration hacking: making experiences sufficiently interesting

59:27 Flow and how it relates to mindfulness

1:06:23 How important is the ability to concentrate?

1:12:04 Do you need clarity, concentration, or both?

You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Pragmatic dharma teacher Kenneth Folk and host Michael W. Taft discuss what it means to be mindful, various definitions of being mindful in the moment, the trouble with remaining mindful during an entire sit, and more.

Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. Learn more about him and his work at Kenneth Folk Dharma.

Show Notes

0:48 Introduction and overview

4:00 Deconstructing “mindfulness”

11:47 Kenneth’s new mindfulness practice

15:02 Mindfulness vs. checking the box; auditor vs. meditator

23:58 Is mindfulness enlightening?

30:03 Defining engagement and the problem with prescriptions

31:52 Sense doors and applying mindfulness to thoughts

36:06 Alternatives to meditation for experiencing mindfulness and awakening

42:37 Is there a “right” way to experience awakening?

47:25 Getting to a 100 percent attention

52:45 Liberating working memory from the feeling of being the observer

55:06 Concentration hacking: making experiences sufficiently interesting

59:27 Flow and how it relates to mindfulness

1:06:23 How important is the ability to concentrate?

1:12:04 Do you need clarity, concentration, or both?

You can help to create future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.