Alan Wallace Live from Phuket!

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 starry picture is a still from David.

In this episode, Alan talks about something that probably bothers many of us, and he calls it "A Sacred Tension." It is about our decision to either dedicate our time fully to contemplation, to mundane life, or somewhere in between both. This is very valuable for those of us having these types of doubts.

I stripped out the silent meditation (so you know the drill: pause, set your own 24 [or more!] minute timer, and then press play again), and left in a brief outro. I would like to say that the stats that Alan mentions are now almost double! I'll share some stats with all of you towards the end of this podcast series.

Thank you all for tuning in =)

This morning Alan started by saying that he would like to let us choose our own Shamatha method, for these next few days and perhaps for the rest of the retreat. If so, then I will only be podcasting the long afternoon sessions.

But for now I left this one in anyway.

Alan also talks about the "gears" of our practice, upshifting and downshifting, and gives a brief outro on the importance of remaining engaged with reality.

Enjoy this silent practice with us!

This great photo is by Sara.

This lovely afternoon we went back to the practice of Loving Kindness, using the phrase from T.S. Elliot in the title. We went straight into meditation.

After the practice, we had assorted Q&A from several people, on many topics. Alan talked about "practicing well" regardless of how well the practice is going, and there are other pieces of golden information scattered throughout.

I would also like to let you know that after receiving several emails offering donations, I added some links to donate to the Santa Barbara Institute for Conciousness Studies to help fund future podcasts. For those viewing this on the web click on the big arrow to see the subsite, and for those viewing this in iTunes go here: http://bit.ly/bnxSR5

All of the profits will go to ensure that they can keep running podcasts in the future when I am not around. So don't worry, I don't want to make any money from you (and neither do they!)

This picture of the surrounding jungle was provided by Sangay!

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 arise from our substrate). The talk was filled with physics, history, several jokes, open questions, laughter... Alan really had us cracking up today. However, (as always) he managed to leave us dazed with brilliant insight, so that we all walk out of the meditation hall absorbed in thoughts and bumping into things (ok maybe not the latter).

Enjoy as we did!

The picture is very much related as we approach the celebrations for the Birth of the Buddha (in several East-Asian countries such as Thailand).

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 "riding the wave" of tradition and losing touch with the true wisdom.

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 of our Buddha statue in the teaching hall, happy to see us undertaking this long overdue adventure into the mind with such a wise and ideal guide (to his left, not in the picture)!

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 concioiusness is doing, and calls for contemplatives of the world to unite.

And as you could have expected, we are back to sky photos for Awareness of Awareness, this one taken by Sara!