Alan Wallace Live From Phuket!

This afternoon Alan starts by quite briefly explaining this balance between fluidity and structure in the equanimity practice, and after the instructions we set off in a pretty much rich but silent session.After the session Alan had two juicy pieces of paper with multi-questions written on them. They cover a lot of practical content, such as the characteristics of the Shamatha stages and how to use them correctly, the characteristics of the different types of exitation and laxity. how to maintain motivation in the practice (dealing with the issue of "progress"), how to be really 100% sure that you are doing "Settling the Mind..[]" correctly, and more. The next question deals with conceptual designation, and starts with "how were atoms first conceptually designated" and later turns into an analysis of conceptual designation, appearances, and how we can never actually see the referent of appearances (so yes in a way we never see the "real" world, just appearances that ari

This morning we return to the third phase in the classic Awareness of Awareness teachings of Padmasambhava. In the introduction, Alan explains how this phase helps create a very 3D and spacious quality to our awareness, which is a very good warmup before settling in in tomorrow's practice. Alan clearly explains the practice with his characteristic eloquence and then we dive right in.Following the practice, Alan spices it up with a little bit of cosmology for good measure, relating the practice to a microcosm of how the universe may be operating, and giving a great analogy of breaking through to pristine awareness (rigpa). And today's sky photo was taken by me a few days ago... I hope I hadn't used it before! Duplicates will probably happen.

This afternoon the meditation was 100% silent. Even the introduction lasts around 20 seconds!I cut out the 24 minutes of silence in order to make this a smaller download. You can click pause and do your own Empathetic Joy meditation! For reference, go to the previous podcasts. After the meditation we had a power outage which cut out a chunk of a very interesting question. The power came on and off a few times, and I cut the long parts when the power was out (and thus we had no recording). Among the questions covered in this podcast are: Not fusing mental events with the referent (Alan gave a VERY clear answer, very useful for those practicing Settling the Mind[ ]...), some clarification about the acquired sign in Breath Awareness (and more on this air-element symbol), and then a long question about many aspects of Shamatha, both practical, historic, and theoric, and finally from that question arose Alan's description of his proposal: A Buddhism Renaissance, coming back to the core teachings and not simply &qu

Today's practice, the second out of the four Awareness of Awareness methods that we cover in our cycle, is a very deep penetrating practice, encroaching upon VIpassyana territory. Alan starts with an introduction on the practice and its implications, relating it to the short discourse by the Buddha to the wandering ascetic Bahiya.After this sublime practice, the outro deals with the Buddhist middle way (warning about drawing false conclusions from this practice) and then with "I think, therefore I am" and its shortcomings, which include the reification of ourselves and of all objects (which gets us into tremendous knots and loops).Here is the brief Bahiya sutta, with the invaluable instructions that the Buddha gave Bahiya: http://bit.ly/aalIo8 [as Alan said, perhaps someone will read this and, not unlike popcorn, become free! if you become free, please send us an email! :) ]And this sunset was captured by Sara here at the Mind Centre!

Alan starts this afternoon by detailing some of the possible "side effects" that could happen during intense practice of Shamatha, in the sense that when we are trying to make our mind so focused an unified, it can sometimes become quite small. He also talks about how sometimes we keep hurting ourselves with our own memories of unpleasant events (making them real again) even dozens or hundreds of times after the original event. The Empathetic Joy practice we do afterwards is a remedy to both of the above condition.After the bright and uplifting practice, Alan adds some footnotes from this morning, focusing on Galileo and making a very interesting and sharply plausible hypothesis as to why the start of probing into the mind in the west took 300 years. We then continue yesterday's question of death and continuity of conciousness in the period between lifes (bardo), relating it to dream yoga. We have two more very brief questions afterwards and end with two minutes to spare!This photo (by Malcolm) is o

This morning Alan promptly warned us that he was feeling a little bit feisty, which resulted in a great historical introduction with examples of how subjective experience has been mistreated and eventually completely disregarded by scientists and philosophers. It includes some fun quotes like this one from John B. Watson in 1913, "The time has come when psychology must discard all references to consciousness," and moreover "belief in consciousness is attributed to superstition and magic." It can be clearly seen how this "virus" of scientific materialism just erodes common sense and sadly is becoming more and more prominent.Aaaanyways, after the spot-on introduction we move into the first practice of Awareness of Awareness of this cycle, observing the limpid luminosity of our very existant consciousness, thereby going against the grain of the entire 20th century!The outro contains some more goodies about the terrible damage that the ideological dogma of materialism regarding conci

Today as the title suggests we combined Compassion and Loving kindness into a practice of Tonglen. Furthermore, we incorporated the four modes of enlightened acvitity, using each one where needed, and in the visualization we let the light or energy sent out with the breath take the form of whatever is actually needed in the situation (not just necessary a generic light of compassion/loving kindness) and tinted it with the respective enlightened acvitity color. Whew!After the mostly silent practice, we went into a diverse Q&A session which got very interesting and set the stage for tomorrow's talk on death, the bardo, and dream yoga.Among the topics for the Q&A are the length of sessions and how to manage it for the greatest benefit, the great question of "Time," specifically the relative qualities of time and how they can and do manifest daily in our Shamatha practice. Of course this also gave Alan the chance to go into the explanation of time in the substrate conciousness, and in the innat

In this morning's introduction, Alan talks about how the mind is very capable of healing itself, and how the purpose of settling the mind in its natural state is to observe it vividly while not doing things that will prevent the mind from healing. He also talks about talk therapy and medicine, highlighting how they are can be crucial in some cases as a preamble to meditating.Afterwards we have the practice, consisting of a short introduction and then silence. Enjoy!This picture of our Mind Centre's "san phra phum" is courtesy of Sara!

This is a short followup (I promise! It’s actually less than 15 minutes) clearing up some points from the previous episode. I took two fragments from the next day and mashed them together for this podcast. It is absolutely necessary to listen to Part 1 before listening to this. In this first fragment B. Alan Wallace briefly returns to the topic of information flow, meaning-to-meaning communication (instead of achieving means through chemicals and brain correlates), and relates this to the placebo effect, specifically to how it is a blatant example of the mind’s capacity to heal itself and heal the body although modern science prefers to wrap itself up in tight conundrums and knots rather than accept this fact.Then I cut to another fragment from the afternoon session in which B. Alan Wallace clears up some more points about the stream of name and flow and the mind-body problem. He details the hypothesis of the flow of consciousness (information), energy, and space as existence before the mind and body duality.

Ok, this is what a lot of you have been waiting for, and with very good reason! Get your thinking hats on, turn off your phones, get a nice cup of tea, clear your schedule, and bring forth your scientific aspect. In this podcast episode, B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D., will be delving into topics such as the nature of information, mind and matter as a derivative of information, the placebo effect, its connection to the flow of experience/information in relation to human existence, and oh, why not: quantum cosmology (just to name a few).This is the main episode, and I will add a second episode with two semi-short followups from the next day.I will not do any paraphrasing of information here, but I will try to list a few of the topics that come up in each part. Keep in mind that I will only list the main topics (not the topics in between topics), and perhaps not even all of them. This superanswer stems out of a question from Noah, who asked Alan to clarify a point from a previous day in which he mentioned that the info

In this request by Nick W, Alan breaks down the Four Immeasurables in an extremely clear synopsis of how they interrelate, their faux facsimiles (which may look very similar but they work in the opposite direction), and how to clearly distinguish them. Alan ends with a beautiful and remarkably accurate metaphor of a charriot pulled by four great steeds, in which he illustrates how the Four Immeasurables work together and help balance each other.Alan's talent in compiling so much knowledge and explaining it so clearly makes this a great short episode for anyone, new or experienced in the topic of the Four Immeasurables! The picture is very much related to (and embodies) the topic.

Today we came back to the meditative cultivation of Compassion (to use the correct phrase) and had an introduction directly related to the practice in order to have less words interjected afterwards. The introduction also talks about the three levels of suffering: blatant suffering, suffering of change, and suffering of conditioned existence. After the succinct practice Alan gave yet another add-on to the bonus that will go out on Sunday. I will add it to the Sunday podcast but I left it here anyway. There is also an assorted Q&A session including posture, information, mundane questions (such as where to find Dharma books for kids) and more deep, religious questions (such as dream teachings), and the buddhist perspective of sleep paralysis. Oh, and lest I forget: Alan recites some Simon & Garfunkel.(I sure know how to market these podcasts don’t I!)Enjoy! (along with this photo from our talented photographer Daniela).

Today we practiced settling the mind in its natural state with an emphasis on observing the background, the "stage" of the mind. As Alan mentions, this acts as a whetstone (knife-sharpening stone) for our vividness, increasing the resolution and sharpness of our mind. The mind can also be viewed in HD!The outro was unexpected and mind-blowing. It will be part of Sunday's bonus but I won't cut it out, it came out very spontaneously and it will leave you longing for it to be Sunday.Some of you might recognize the picture of Galileo’s telescope... It is relevant both for the analogy of sharpening what we perceive and for the outro of this podcast!

Alan gives an introduction on what we actually meditate on when "meditating on the 4I." That is to say, the object of the meditations is always sentient beings. In today's powerful practice, we work on separating the person from the mental affliction, which goes hand in hand with eliminating our sense of contempt towards the person (even if the acts themselves are truly deplorable). Alan mentioned it was one of the more turbulent practices, because the above can be challenging! This practice is designed to overcome that delusion.Afterwards we had a great question from Noah, our resident asker of juicy questions, about information. It will be up this Sunday along with a great explanation on the Four Immeasurables which is long overdue!

This morning's introduction was about our sense of control and possession of our bodies, our minds, and "our" thoughts. We often believe that our thoughts are actually ours, when we can't even control them.In the following meditation, we go into the headquarters (or heartquarters!) of our own mind and release control of everything except our awareness of it.Another great local photo from Daniela!

Today we had a very deep practice on Compassion. The introduction contains great examples as always in order to turn our minds towards the cultivation of compassion, to make real the suffering of others and to unveil our innate compassion, with the boldness, courage, and vision to realize what is happening, attend to the world of possibility, and aspire "may there be freedom." This will leave us poised for action and ready to come out of meditation and do some good in the world.The outro talks about the peril of classifying ourselves as "not a loving person" or "not a compassionate person." Being more reserved does not mean being less compassionate. Alan talks about the obscurations that these feelings bring, and how to peel off the crusts and reveal the compassion that we do not get from anyone, not even from the meditation, because it's already there. The meditation just blows the dust of our eyes.You may notice that this podcast is quite short. Unfortunately my poor laptop was

This morning we practiced Settling the Mind by coming in through the senses with the phrase "In the perceived, let there be only the perceived" as a preparation for observing the mind. After a short introduction on the practice in which we touched briefly on the very interesting fact that the appearances that we see are not of a material nature in themselves. Anyway, enjoy the practice!On a side note, Alan is happy to announce that the videos are now available from the “Science and Buddhism” colloquium at the University of Oxford, sponsored by the Physiology Department and the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford, the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, and the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, March, 2010. The videos are accessible here: http://www.voicesfromoxford.org/B-S-Introduction.htmlThe videos are on a menu to the right and they can be downloaded!

In this episode, we keep working more deeply with the Four Immeasurables. As always we have our introduction which includes an answer by HH. Dalai Lama from a Mind and Life conference saying that what moves us or motivates us to do anything at all is caring. Alan then breaks this down and shows how all of the 4I stem from this basic caring, and also shows how they are deeply entangled together. For example, empathetic joy is "built-into" compassion, as it arises when the suffering is alleviated. After the meditation, we go into an open mic Q&A session which has several questions focused on Awareness of Awareness, and then Ilse shares an experience which spurs Alan into talking about conciousness in the bardo.The last 60 seconds (literally) are a brilliant explanation of "information" and how it only stored/retrieved/exists with reference to the person storing it or accessing it. A computer analogy was obviously present and then related with conciousness in the bardo and from life to li

This morning we had a brief followup on the concept of the loss of the sense of self. Afterwards we went directly into the practice, which you may notice was quite silent apart from the initial sets of instructions. This time it's about going deeper and using our own faculties of mindfulness and introspection without Alan reminding us to do so.This also means fewer words from me (compared to my essays from yesterday)! So back to the cushion I go! Enjoy!

Ah, the Ngöndro (preliminary) practices. If you ask how many you have to do (without the proper context and preparation), you will probably be sorry to hear the answer: 100,000. Of ALL OF THEM. With these good-humored words and other examples, Alan reproaches the "how much do I gotta do" approach to the preliminaries and sets off on a very enlightening explanation of the very valid reasons for the preliminaries and the context in which they are immensely beneficial and meaningful. He also points out when they are not yet of most benefit (especially to us modern people or to people just starting in the path of Dharma) and explains why.In the end, Alan gives a short, concise, and brilliant personal answer (based on how the Buddha taught his disciples) to the preliminaries of Shamatha which left us all tremendously inspired. I won't ruin and pollute the surprise of what his answer is so it will suffice to say that if you have doubts, problems, and/or restlessness about the preliminaries or want to clea