Feather Light & Paper Thin, with Shinzen Young

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 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 – OutroYou 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.