Alan Wallace Live From Phuket!

This afternoon may be the last podcast episode of Alan's lectures for this retreat. He started by returning to the hypothesis of saying that if we align ourselves with reality, reality will rise up to meet us. That is, if we devote ourselves with our heart and might to the path of Dharma (the word Dharma means reality, by the way), with a clear and strong motivation, all that we truly need rises up to meet us in a friendly way. He also talks about really understanding Dharma, and about transmuting everything that comes up in life into part of the path. Alan uses an analogy back from Dharamsala in '72, with the Dalai Lama's physician, to support the point that everything can be transformed into medicine with enough wisdom. He then talks about his personal experience with this radical hypothesis and way of viewing the world, showing that it has held true for him. It is important to note that you need to have the wisdom to see this, and it does not mean that your life will become nice and fluffy.Before going int

I know, I am quite the dramatic with my titles :)With a bittersweet feeling we have come to the last group practice of Shamatha for this retreat. To end majestically, we practiced the fourth method of Shamatha without a sign as taught by Padmasambhava. Preceding the practice, Alan shared some tips of what we can do to practice and ground ourselves in the midst of a flurry of activity around us. He first returned to his analogy of Schooner (Boat)/ Submarine/Jet Plane in relationship with the Shamatha practices, and then he shared one more drop of wisdom in the form of a brand new practice for us, combining Breath Awareness with Awareness of Awareness to create a deeply soothing yet vivid and engaged practice.After the meditation, Alan suggests keeping the attention engaged with something real in between thoughts and everyday, and finished by sharing a brilliant Tibetan aphorism to keep us out of trouble:"When you are alone, watch your mind. When you are with others, watch your mouth."This beautiful s

This afternoon Alan started by sharing a story about his first meditation counsel with Geshe Rabten, and the two topics that he suggested for meditation: Precious Human Rebirth and Equanimity. He emphasizes the importance of Equanimity and seeing through the "I-It" relationship with others (for more on this topic refer to previous episodes), and also highlights the importance of balancing the urgency that can arise from meditating on the precious human rebirth. He suggests not being shortsighted, and taking the time to develop the Four Immeasurables correctly, however long that may take, knowing it is the path. Alan then very poetically goes into the instructions for the practice, talking about ending one phase (retreat) but starting a new one afterwards, and to symbolize this the retreat will end on a new moon, a new start. For the practice, Alan instructs "seeing through" appearances and like a metallurgist separating the positive feelings from the negative feelings, looking towards the

This morning Alan starts by giving instructions on how to watch the opening game of the World Cup (Mexico-South Africa) on Friday, after being asked for permission to do so. He has a very interesting football-watching technique!On a slightly more profound tone, Alan is asked what to do with the whole topic of devotion when teaching Shamatha in a scientific context. He gives a very good explanation of how Shamatha can be practiced with no religious devition at all, with some devotion, and with immense devotion, and talks about each of these alternatives. He also talks about the relationship between devotion and trust, and relates this to how the Buddha never asked for postrations or any other act of devotion before giving teachings. A sense of trust is something that arises differently for everyone, and the point is to have this flourish from firsthand experience, rather than just believing everything you are told. This is very useful for anyone who might be having these sorts of doubts.We then go into the thi

As we approach the end of the retreat, the lectures are getting more and more information packed and so are these summaries. I will say as I always do; if you are new to the podcast go back to the first episodes!This morning we started by covering the importance and the difficulty, even for Tibetans now and in the past, of calming the mind through Shamatha practice. Alan speaks about the sad state of the modern view that reduces human beings into biological machines, where the brain does everything and we do nothing. From here, he mentions the popular but very incorrect belief that Buddhism arrived to the west "dead on arrival," and that achieving realizations or even Shamatha in modernity is impossible. It all boils down to your belief in yourself, motivation, and diligence. As HH. Dalai Lama said, practice like Milarepa and you will achieve like Milarepa. Too often we look for the "quick fix," and Alan emphazises that there is simply no substitute for cultivating real stability. Keeping

The story Alan narrates at the very start of this episode comes because there was a dog outside the teaching hall, and as we were coming in for the lecture he would try to get in between our legs, or at least just stick his head in. He clearly looked very determined and excited to learn about Mudita, and it was hard to get Alan inside the teaching hall sans-dog. Moving to the actual lecture, Alan explains today's practice, in which we cultivate empathetic joy towards others both in terms of hedonic pleasure and then of genuine happiness. Alan gives several examples of each, and notes, also with great examples, that we can learn to use the mind just like we learn to drive a vehicle. It can go from our worst enemy to our best friend. After the fairly silent practice [again, if you want more verbose practices refer to the beginning of the podcast series], we went into very interesting questions. The first ones were by Enrique, based on The Vajra Essence and returning to yesterday's point on achieving Shamatha th

This morning, Alan said he would squeeze out every drop of knowledge he had left about this first method of Awareness of Awareness, so if you listen to the previous episodes on this stage of practice you will be extremely well rounded! Alan starts by detailing an all to common problem: thinking that we are doing the practice incorrectly when we are actually doing it correctly, and reacting by tightening up our attention and trying harder, resulting in fatigue. This is followed by explaining how to gain satisfaction from stability, relating it to visualization practice, and setting our expectations correctly.From there, we briefly explore the possibility of achieving Shamatha within Vajrayana instad of using the practices that we have covered in this retreat, and while it is certainly possible, the difficulty is quite high and there are many pitfalls.As a final point before the meditation, Alan shows how this practice is a very smooth transition from the Settling the Mind practice from yesterday (Monday), talk

This afternoon Alan started by pointing out the modern tendency of being very harsh and strict with ourselves, and the need for Compassion. He then proceeds by diving down to the very root of suffering, considering the hypothesis that all mental afflictions stem from the grasping and reification of "self" as separate, autonomous, and self-existant. He aludes to the Vajra essence, showing how the symmetry of the substrate is broken and the sense of "self" coagulates and differentiates itself from the space, followed by the arising of appearances also as "other" and finally as the mind activates it conceptually imputes objects from those appearances we directly see. Using a few other examples, we see that it is pretty evident that all suffering comes from the reification and grasping of self, me and mine. The only thing left for us to do is investigate this hypothesis, bringing wisdom and compassion together into practice.After the meditation, we have a brief comment by Alan about

This practice got separated from the previous episode for continuity purposes. As you might expect, we return for the final time to the practice of Settling the Mind in its Natural State. Spefically, we start by attending to the spaces in between mental events, and after a while we go deeper and without breaking the continuity we observe the space from which mental events arise, in which they are present, and into which they dissolve. Alan briefly reflects on achieving Shamatha by observing the substrate, by observing space, and explains his reasons behind breaking this Shamatha practice into parts (attending to the foreground, and today to the background). As you probably expect, his reasons make a lot of sense. So enjoy this Settling the Mind practice, for the last time in this podcast series!By the way, if you want some practices with more explanation behind them, you might want to check the meditations from the first week. This is the fourth time we come to this phase in the Shamatha cycle so Alan is usin

In this morning session, Alan really woke us up (interpret that as you will) by making an addendum to this Sunday's bonus episode where we had a "speed drive" through different ways of viewing reality from the Buddhist point of view. Alan only had two minutes left for Dzogchen, so this morning he went deeper into an explanation of this culminating Great Perfection. This episode is crucial to understanding the Dzogchen view.Alan first briefly recapitulates on the path to Arhathood from the point of view of the coarse and subtle mind, and then using a strong metaphor from dreaming he explains what Dzogchen has to add to that view. I would feel dirty trying to summarize the beauty of this explanation because I really don't want to mess with Dzogchen teachings.You will notice that I edited the meditation on Compassion out of the podcast and skipped straight to Alan's words after the meditation. This is because he picks off right where he left off, talking about the dangers of taking Dzogchen practice (a

Yes, this is an ambitious title but as always the podcast episode does not fail to deliver the goods. However, I really won't even try to summarize all of Buddhist Philosophy in two paragraphs. I know I always say that but really, this time there is just no point and not enough space for me to do that. However, I will give you a few things :) The lecture started with what to do when we encounter strong negative emotions, attitudes, and mental states after the retreat, and this was weaved with a question about the relationship of Chitamattra and Dzogchen. Instead of giving a brief conceptual comparison, Alan rolls back and looks at a sequence of ways of viewing reality, fully engaged with a way of practice. He works with Sanskrit-language based schools: Vaibhashika, Sautrantika, Chittamatra, and Madhyamaka, and ends with a brief overview of The Great Perfection (Dzogchen).Alan makes this very relevant regardless of personal interest in Buddhism, and clearly explains the ways of viewing the physical, appearance

For this short bonus episode, I extracted a question that Elizabeth said was maybe unanswerable, about the very beginning of ignorance and delusion (and samsara for that matter). But we all know by now that Alan always has something up his sleeve.He starts by talking about the problems that can arise when we misniterpret the Buddhist view that "samsara is beginningless". Infinite past lifes would mean infinite chances to achieve Bodhicitta, to go into meditation retreat for 60 years, to achieve enlightenment, etc, which would mean that we probably failed an infinite number of times. Not very motivating! So Alan gives a very sharp and amazing answer to this "unanswerable" question, which is both completely aligned with the Buddhist notion of a beginningless samsara and extremely logical, drawing from everyday examples such as thinking and dreaming. To illustrate his explanation, Alan draws on a short parable from the book "Naked Awareness" by Karma Chagme (although in the recordin

In this afternoon practice, we focused not so much on the blatant form of suffering as we did yesterday, but on the underlying causes. In the introduction, Alan reflects on how little we really know about suffering in modernity, and how we build our hapiness on very weak foundations of delusion, attachment, and craving. Even if we have good luck and we are hedonically happy, the foundation of that happiness is just a time bomb, and sooner or later it will go off and we will suffer.In this meditation, we experiment with cultivating compassion first for ourselves, freeing ourselves of attachment and craving. These afflictions are terribly deceiving, because they seem pleasant, get us hooked, and never fail to dissapoint. As always, we then expand this yearning to include all beings, and keep breaking down the barriers for our Four Immesaurables.After the meditation Alan pulled one of his amazing acts and and brilliantly summarized pretty much all of Buddhist philosophy in 45 minutes. I took this out and it will

This morning we returned to Settling the Mind in its Natural state, this time observing the foreground of events arising within the domain of the mind. Alan quotes two plays from Shakespeare ("The Tempest" and "As You Like It") which relate with uncanny precision to what we have been covering in this retreat. Enjoy the mostly silent practice!Some of you may recognize today's image as the painting "Miranda," (by John William Waterhouse in 1916), depicting a scene from "The Tempest."

This afternoon we went into a very practical and powerful practice on Compassion, focusing on the blatant, glaring, obvious pain that can arise in both the physical and mental domains of experience. Alan starts by giving a brief overview of this blatant suffering, and what can be done to cure it mentally, including praise for the pharmaceutical industry in relieving the symptoms. He then highlights how this blatant suffering is something we have all experienced, and how it really can take posession of our entire (untrained) minds and not let us focus on anything else.After this very useful meditation, we followed up yesterday's topic of Bodhicitta. First, Alan answered that it may in fact be possible to be a Bodhisattva without knowing it, and even be a Bodhisattva while preaching another religion or having almost all types of jobs. He also makes a reference to a study which suggests that babies may be undergoing past life recall sometime during their third trimester of gestation. This time Alan covers a diff

If you have been subscribing to the podcast, you are probably very familiar with today's meditation. We practiced Settling the Mind in its Natural State by first coming in through different domains of experience, following to the instructions that the Buddha gave to the wandering ascetic Bahiya. I have linked to them directly in the past so I won't do so here, however Alan paraphrases them very clearly in the introduction. Alan also gives a brief recap on a point about non-conceptual experience from a few days ago, and details a "smooth gradient" from being fully-fledged psychotic to being a Buddha. Shortly thereafter, we go into the practice with the prospect of becoming sane, first with respect to our own minds, then in our dreams, and then in all experience, thus becoming lucid in the waking state.Enjoy!This beautiful local photo is from Daniela!

The introduction to today's practice was tailored to us here in Phuket in the sense that we are coming out of retreat soon, but it can be applied by everyone. Alan talks about including the people we are going to see soon into our Loving Kindness meditation, and talks about the quite palpable effects that this can have on our relationships with such people in the (near) future. He includes his experience of this when dealing with Indian customs officers in Delhi, and if you feel skeptic about the effects of doing this meditation the best thing you can do is try it!(And then keep your eyes open). For what it counts, I can also vouch for this.After the meditation, which consisted of brief instructions followed by silence, we had a question from... Noah! So you probably know where this is going.The question contains several parts, all dealing with Bodhicitta, and actually becoming a Bodhisattva. Alan talks about the path to bodhicitta, including the importance of cultivating the Four Immeasurables, first at thei

In today's mindfulness of breathing practice, Alan started by talking about the causes and solutions for the all too popular phenomenon of the "energy going up to the head," and proceeded by applying the glass half empty / glass half full example in our practice. He emphasizes taking delight in the periods (as brief as they may be) when we recognize we are no longer distracted and have a little glimpse of being clear in the present. Before jumping into the practice, Alan shares a story from his early days in Dharamsala (60s, early 70s) in which he he was asked why it was that he was there practicing Dharma.After the practice, Alan gives a brilliant short talk relating mindfulness of breathing to going "cold turkey" from our mental addictions, and culminates in how we really can develop deep, underlying motivation to drive and hold practices like this one with inspiration and enthusiasm.This photo by Daniela illustrates this concept of motivation... This gigantic (will be the world's larges

This afternoon we started with a reflection on how many times we see people as just "flat images" or appearances arising to our minds. In the supermarket, subway, etc, we see them as obstacles or merely objects in our way. Today’s intro deals with seeing through those images and realizing that a real person is there, looking back, with their own hopes and fears, joys and sorrows. Alan also emphasizes the importance of starting with ourselves, and describes these Four Immeasurable practices as digging in search of water. At first, the practices can be very conceptual and we actually feel like we have to pour water on the ground to soften it and allow us to dig. But eventually, just following the practice, we break into the "ground water," which just flows out unimpededly and plentifully. With this metaphor in mind, we go into the practice thinking of tapping into our hearts, and opening the floodgates of our virtue and well-being.After the practice, we had several very interesting questions

This morning, Alan started by reading two short verses from the Dhammapada, (freshly translated by him last night) which are a very strong metaphor with the mind training we are doing here. He then talks about the importance of having a base in relaxation and training the mind from the ground up rather than tensing up and forcing it to quiet down. However, pure relaxaton will not simply cause stability to arise on its own, so Alan explains how a delicate balance is needed between effort and relaxation, and gives one of the core, indispensable teachings for Shamatha practice.After a breath awareness session, Alan further shows the relationship between the Dhammapada verses and our own mind training, and it's amazing how spot-on they are considering the fact that they have been around for 2500 years!This photo was taken by Sanjay just around the corner from the mind centre. The plants on the ground are the same pineapple plants from yesterday's photo!