Deconstructing Yourself

In this episode, I talk with Jessica Graham about her book Good Sex, the #MeToo movement, the power of self love and acceptance, a beginner’s guide to spiritual awakening through sexuality, mindful masturbation, aspects of puritanism in Buddhism, the meditative way to work with "love drugs," and much more.Jessica Graham is a spiritual teacher, sex and intimacy guide, and author. Jessica began studying meditating in earnest a decade ago and started teaching soon after. Jessica is also passionate about exploring sexuality and helping others heal, evolve, and awaken sexually. She is the author of Good Sex: Getting Off without Checking Out .Jessica is also an award-winning actor and filmmaker. And, of course, Jessica is the author of many of the articles on the Deconstructing Yourself blog.Read Jessica's series of posts on Mindful SexVisit Jessica's website You can support the creation of future episodes of this podcast by contributing through Patreon.

Thomas Metzinger and Michael W. Taft discuss having moral integrity with yourself, intellectual honesty in the pursuit of spirituality, the overlapping goals of science and spirituality, the possibility of a fully secularized spirituality, neurofeedback and virtual reality, mortality denial, the simulation hypothesis, and a whole bunch more.Thomas Metzinger is full professor and director of the theoretical philosophy group and the research group on neuroethics/neurophilosophy at the department of philosophy, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. He is the founder and director of the MIND group and Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, Germany. His research centers on analytic philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. He is the editor of Neural Correlates of Consciousness and the author of Being No One and The Ego Tunnel.Thomas Metzinger’s website.A video of Metzinger’s Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty talk.Read an inte

In this episode, host Michael Taft speaks with spiritual teacher and author Hameed Ali, more often known by his pen name, A. H. Almaas.Almaas is the creator of the Diamond Approach to Self-Realization, which is a contemporary teaching developed within the context of both ancient spiritual teachings and modern depth psychology theories. Almaas has authored eighteen books about spiritual realization, including the Diamond Heart series, The Pearl Beyond Price, The Void, The Unfolding Now, and The Point of Existence.Michael writes: I met Almaas at his office in Berkeley, where we sat down for a comfortable chat about attachment to the nondual viewpoint, a way of awakening that he calls the “unilocal,” the role of instinct in the spiritual quest, the essential activation of continuous awakening, integrating awakening with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, and much more. He’s a fascinating guy with a lot to say, and so I’m very happy to present to you the episode that I call “Reality Let Loose.”Find out m

Culadasa talks with Michael W. Taft. After decades of Buddhist practice, Culadasa exploded on the scene a few years ago with his groundbreaking book The Mind Illuminated, an incredibly comprehensive guide to meditation. It’s an erudite mixture of neuroscience, traditional Buddhist practice, and Culadasa’s own ideas about how to gt the most out of practice. In this episode we talk about his definitions of attention and awareness, how his system compares to that of his friend teacher Shinzen Young, how the meditative brain works, dealing with aging and death, and much more.Learn more about Culadasa and his teaching at culadasa.comShow Notes0:15 – Introduction and overview 2:30 – Culadasa’s system vs. Shinzen Young’s: stability of attention 7:55 – Sustained attention and effortlessness 10:20 – Culadasa’s system vs. Shinzen Young’s: sensory clarity and peripheral awareness 19:55 – Mindfulness as the optimal interaction between attention and awareness 22:55 – Conceptual overlays and the lower limits of conscious p

What do the neurocorrelates of enlightenment, the activation of the posterior cingulate cortex, and the extinction of craving all have in common? They relate to the work of Judson Brewer. Jud talks with Michael W. Taft about his brain biofeedback machine, the neurophenomonolgy of effort vs. non-effort, the feedback loop of reward-based learning, working with the black hole of anxiety, self-referential thinking as a kind of addiction, and much more.Judson Brewer is an MD-PhD and a thought leader in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery”, having combined nearly 20 years of experience with mindfulness training with his scientific research.A psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions, Brewer has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments. He has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI. His work has been funded by the National

In this session, host Michael W. Taft and radical dharma author and practitioner Daniel Ingram discuss the Fire Kasina practice, meditation and magick, working with archetypal forces and entities, Daniel’s description of a fruition experience, siddhis and visionary experiences, Daniel’s wizarding worldview, and much more. We also discuss the second edition of his classic work Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, as well as his new book on the Fire Kasina.Daniel Ingram is an emergency medicine physician and long-time dharma practitioner. He famously exploded the Buddhist world when he declared himself to be an arhat and published the seminal text Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: an Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book in 2008. He is also the main force behind the radical Dharma Overground website, which he founded together with Vince Horn, that specializes in a brand of unusually-frank discussion of meditation practice.You can learn more about Daniel at his website, www.integrateddaniel.info.You ca

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 notes1:43 – 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 ju

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 notes1:43 – 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 ju

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 Notes0:25 Introduction and overview1:52 – Vince talks about Buddhist Geeks, his interest in mindfulness and his teaching project at meditate.io3:45 – Vince's meditation and teaching background, working with somatic practices and vipassanā, and his time at Naropa University8:16 – What's exciting and interesting in mindfulne

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 Notes0:25 – 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

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 Notes0:25 – 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 lim

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 Notes0:48 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: ma

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 Notes0:48 Introduction and overview4:00 Deconstructing “mindfulness”11:47 Kenneth’s new mindfulness practice15:02 Mindfulness vs. checking the box; auditor vs. meditator23:58 Is mindfulness enlightening?30:03 Defining engagement and the problem with prescriptions31:52 Sense doors and applying mindfulness to thoughts36:06 Alternatives to meditation for experiencing mindfulness and awakening42:37 Is there a “right” way to experience awakening?47:25 Getting to a 100 percent attention52:45 Liberating working memory from the feeling of being the observer55:06 Concentration hacking: making experi