Fall 2014 Shamatha, Vipashyana, Dream Yoga

Alan first comments on the text once again and explains some of the symbolism involved. He then continues to explain how the formless realm, the form realm and the desire realm are connected: That out of the formless realm emerges the form realm, and out of the form realm emerges the desire realm. He adds that once one is dwelling in the form realm one can see the desire realm that acts almost like a holographic display. You can then manipulate the five elements in the form realm and thereby their displays in the desire realm. However, once you practice the Thodgal phase of Dzogchen, visualizations of the Buddhas come up - whether you are Buddhist or not, that does not matter. After the meditation Alan explains three terms that are central to Dzogchen practice: What they all come down to is giving up everything and thereby “winning” everything. In such an approach you thus take the fruition as the path. After the meditation, Alan answers two questions: 1. Concerning the pointing-out instructions: What does i

Alan announces that the format of the sessions will be changed a bit in that he will simply give the commentary first, then we should meditate in silence. As we are meditating, we should not specifically focus our attention on what we just heard but simply let our awareness rest in stillness. Very often - in Alan’s experience - this is a good way of letting ideas develop on their own. After the meditation Alan comments on the ups and downs of the quality of our attention. He explains that 1) this is normal in a Shamatha retreat, 2) that stability and stillness will increase with practice, 3) that real stability and stillness in meditation will only be experienced as soon as one has achieved Shamatha, 4) that Shamatha, however, only guarantees stability and stillness as long as one is alive - so when you die, you are lost again. Therefore, only breaking through to your ground awareness offers absolute stability and stillness. Meditation starts at 19:12

Alan introduces a novel but utterly traditional approach to the mindfulness of breathing practice we’ve been doing to develop relaxation, stability, and vividness. After the silent meditation, Alan recounted the story of the wandering ascetic who encountered the Buddha shortly after his enlightenment. If the 32 major marks characterizing the body of a Buddha were there from there own side to be perceived, why did the ascetic pass on with a sarcastic remark? We must grapple with our habitual reification of both a self and phenomena in order to make any progress in Vajrayana or Dzogchen. The break for the silent, unrecorded meditation starts at 20:27

Found on page 125 of Natural Liberation, the morning’s meditation session is a review of Padmasambhava’s pointing out instructions for examining the nature of primordial awareness. Alan then discussed the meaning of the statements that primordial awareness transcends categories of existence and nonexistence; birth and death; singularity and multiplicity and thus is free of extremes. It is also free of “bias and partiality,” but this impartiality is vastly different than the attempt of modern science to view the uni-verse from a “God’s-eye view.” Meditation starts at 5:20

Alan references different buddhist schools of thought regarding what happens when a sentient being, who has realized nirvana, dies. After exploring the Pali canon, he looks more widely and brings us back to our current meditative practice: pristine awareness (rigpa). Following a brief explanation of the text in ‘Natural Liberation’ (p.125) there were two questions: - one on nyam - and one on being lucid in dreamless sleep. Meditation starts at 01:05

This session continues the pointing out instructions from Padmasambhava, to cut through the substrate to pristine awareness (rigpa). Alan gives a preface to the meditation, explaining the ‘eight extremes of conceptual elaboration’ that Padmasambhava uses, and that identifying rigpa is a process of elimination. He also touches on that for something ‘beyond speech and thought’ there is so much written about it, and how to approach the guidance. The later part of the session takes the idea of the mind as empty, and when you emerge from shamatha, appearances are illusory even while engaging in a physical world. Alan quotes suicide statistics, suggesting that many choose suicide due to being enmeshed with the mind. They are betting their lives on the belief that the appearances to the mind exist inherently. Let your awareness be still between sessions. We are on the move, that’s what it means to be a sentient being. Whereas rigpa is still: not because it is held still, it is still because it is beyond time. I

This session starts off with meditation. Following the meditation, Alan elaborates on the relationships with lamas and spiritual teachers. The closer we become to them, the more we identify with them. Therefore, the more we can identify with them with regards pristine awareness. If we purify our minds and maintain pure visions without reifying and making projections, we will be able to identify rigpa in ourselves. Alan reinforces again the importance of the preliminary practices and purification of the mind. The more we fertilize the soil of our own mind, the easier shamatha and vipashana is going to be. There is a sequence in the spiritual path. Before entering the vajrayana, it is crucial to train in foundational practices of the sravakayana such as the four noble truths, the three higher trainings of the path: ethics, concentration and wisdom. Further on, it is vital to engage in bodhisattva’s practices such as the six perfections, the view of emptiness and so on. In this way, there is no sectarianism a

Alan starts the morning session commenting briefly the earlier fairly elaborated discussion on this whole reductionism of our existence to just brains, to being animals or robots. Alan invites us to start a revolution and not fall into the domination of people. Trust your own experience. In a world dominated by materialism, Tina Turner sings: “we don’t need another hero”. This really resonates with dzogchen. We don’t need to look outside again for a buddha. Rather than waiting for another hero to whom pay homage, Alan encourages us to discover the inner buddha inside ourselves. Padmasambhava is not manifesting physically but he does so by way of speech. Dharma speech is the greatest gift. Alan continues talking about the only suitable motivation for dzogchen, which is bodhicitta. Further, he elaborates on what underlies great compassion and the sublime importance to realize pristine awareness. Alan mentions how amazing it is that three great yogis have just passed away in the last week abiding in the clear

In the teachings Alan elaborated once more on the topic of seeing ones teacher as the Buddha, sharing some stories about his early times in India which relate to that topic. It is easy to see the really great lamas, like the Karmapa or H.H. the Dalai Lama as totally unlike ourselves, we can imagine them as being Buddhas. But if we see our ordinary lama, who is giving us the everyday teachings, in a different way, because after all they seem to be almost like us, we have just missed the point. Then we practice simple idolatry. We have to see them of being of one nature, all from the same source. Then we had a clarification regarding how to deal with upheavals that come up as a result of the practice, and the comment from Dudjom Lingpa in his Sharp Vajra of Conscious Awareness Tantra is not to reify them, otherwise you will get stuck. The grasping onto them as inherently existing is the problem, not the upheavals themselves. Regarding todays practice, what we have to do here is to release the notion of practici

If you don’t listen to this podcast, you will miss the celestial music that spontaneously manifested in our auditory space, only The Who knows from where! After that musical intermezzo we continued our search for the mind from yesterday, at the end of this session foraying into identifying awareness, even pristine awareness, which will be the dominating topic from this afternoon on. In his teachings Alan highlighted the necessity to come out of the peace of shamatha to arouse the mind for the inquiry of vipashyana. As the Buddha himself found out after he had mastered the deepest levels of samadhi, when he came out of it again, his mental afflictions were still present as before. So you only reach the pinnacle of samsara in the deepest samadhi. If you want just peace, you are wrong here, vipashyana is meant to be upsetting. Then we came back to yesterdays topic of this psychotic split between ones views and ones everyday behavior. If we don’t bring Buddhism into the 21st century, this same split takes place i

In an enormously compelling and emotional talk Alan once again tackles how scientific and contemplative communities have tackled “the hard problem”, that is how one can explain the relationship between qualia and its neural correlates. Alan first looks back on the 8th and the 14th century to show how Tibet was once a barbaric force that was then completely transformed by Buddhism. This brought about an immense contemplative culture and tradition that now reaches our Western/modern civilization by way of e.g. Gyatrul Rinpoche teaching Padmasambhava’s text “Natural Liberation” to everybody who is filling to listen with faith. All the while the European civilization was in relation to its philosophical tradition still nowhere! That it didn’t exactly “get better” in Europe shows the dominance of behaviorism in the 20th century and scientific materialism. Furthermore, Michio Kaku’s book “The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind”, which sounds very promising and is

If you believe that the mind is the brain and you’re unwilling to change your opinion, you should not listen to this - otherwise your world view might be shattered. Alan gives a brief historical overview of how the mind was viewed in the scientific community from the 1900s up to today. Starting with William James the mind was off to a promising start: James emphasized radical empiricism and was therefore open to include introspection in psychological research. However, soon after his death John B. Watson, a pioneer of behaviorism, declared that psychology should never use, refer to or in any way work with the concept of consciousness. He simply banned it without giving any empirical reasons for doing so - and people believed and followed him. Later people such as B. F. Skinner argued in the very same vein and such views still dominate academia and the press today. Luckily, there are also some fresh voices out there, such as John Searle, Christof Koch and Paul Ekman, who all (to varying degrees) allow for c

Just as we can answer the question, “Is Michael in the room?” by seeing only his face rather than every part of him, we can examine the mind by looking at an individual mental appearance. In the foundational vipashyana practice of the Four Applications of Mindfulness we pose three questions as we examine mental appearances: 1) Is it static or changing? 2)Is it a well-spring of happiness or is it bound to be unsatisfying? 3)Can I discover an inherently-existent “I” in the appearance itself? We do Vipashyana practice at this stage of the path, because after leaving the meditative equipoise of shamatha, we continue to reify our own minds, which is the greatest obscuration of rigpa. Meditation starts at 58:43

Padmasambhava’s first vipashyana meditation is found on page 115 of Natural Liberation. Alan invites those listening to hear these words as the actual speech of Padmasambhava. To examine consciousness we need first to improve the signal to noise ratio with shamatha practice so that we can identify clearly the object of our investigation. It is important to immerse ourselves first in the examination and then afterward find the words to report our discoveries to our teacher. It is vitally important to do this practice with the eyes open. There is a discussion in Dzogchen practice of the hollow crystal kati channel. This channel is different from the central and side channels described in other tantras. It originates at the heart and terminates at the pupils of the eyes. Inside the hollow crystal kati channel at the heart is the bindu of internal space which manifests as external appearances to visual awareness. The hollow crystal kati channel becomes central to the later stages of Dzogchen practice. Medi

aka: An insiders approach to understanding reality Alan continues teaching from the text, beginning with the preface before heading into the meditation and the gentle transition from shamatha to vipashana. Following the meditation, Alan discusses the contemplative laboratory concept, and the desire to bring His Holiness’ vision to fruition - breaking down the barriers between contemplative traditions (beyond Buddhism) in the name of research. Alan likens mundane vipashana to science in that it is asking questions. The subtitle of this podcast is explained through how Himalayan practitioners refer to themselves as ‘insiders’ (looking inwards for answers). He (Alan) asked us to strip down our consciousness and make a discovery, reminding us that we are on the ‘fast track’ and there is no time to waste. There was one question relating to being stuck inside the skull, in which Alan references a 1960’s TV show and a soap box in Hyde Park in his reply. Meditation starts at 19:42

This session begins with the 7 line prayer of Padmasmbhava and on into the meditation. Alan clarifies the two excerpts he discussed yesterday from ‘The Vajra Essence’, and ’The Enlightened View of Samantabhadra’ regarding the placement exam of merging mind with space and the paths that beings of various capacities should take. Listen out for the wonderful response Gyatrul Rinpoche gives Alan when Alan talks about giving up teaching and focusing on meditation (a response we are all happy Rinpoche gave). Meditation starts at 05:33

In this session we are finishing off the instructions of Padmasambhava. Alan goes right into meditation and the central theme is releasing the mind into space. After the meditation session Alan finishes reading and explaining the section on shamatha from Natural Liberation. He continues giving advice on how to practice in between sessions by way of maintaining awareness of space. Alan quotes Shantideva and illustrates how his thoughts resonate with dzogchen. In this practice we are giving up everything for the sake of nirvana. We are giving up everything we are attached to and everything that we identify with. We surrender all at once by releasing the mind into space! Alan goes back to the book Vajra Essence and explains the procedure to be followed by the three types of beings according to their capacities: great, middling and inferior with regards the practices of the Great Perfection. To conclude the session Alan comments on what Dudjom Lingpa said regarding people encountering these profound teachings.

Alan gives advice on the practice of meditation regarding what to do when the mind feels so cluttered and agitated and how to overcome negativity. He emphasizes the importance to not make a habit of frustration in one’s meditation practice. Alan comments that a disturbed mind is a symptom of unbalance and disturbance of the prana system. Alan strongly recommends to work with the supine position until we master it. He further comments on a technique to stop the chitchat. Further on, Alan elaborates on the approach we are taking from Padmasambhava to meditate first, and later on it comes the view. In the trajectory of shamatha, which is based on relaxation, stability and vividness, we increase brightness and approach the unmediated clarity and luminous of awareness of substrate consciousness. With this practice of shamatha we may break through to pristine awareness and lucidity. It becomes a radical shift in the way of viewing reality from a lucid and awakened state (rigpa). Further on, Alan elucidates the two

In this meditation we send the awareness out into space, starting with the space above, then to the right, to the left and downwards. This method of shamatha without a sign, where we release awareness into an open expanse without any target (again to be done for just one day), is like warming up, the stretching before the final marathon of merging mind with space that should be done until shamatha is achieved. Then we go through some Sanskrit vocabulary that often comes up in Dzogchen teachings, like cittata, tathata, tathagatagarbha etc. We then compare the Western definition of “universe”, which means one (uni) world out there that exists independently of the observer, with the Dzogchen perspective of multiple worlds, one universe for every sentient being. And each universe arises in dependence upon a consciousness, it arises from the karma of the sentient being. So it actually reflects the consciousness, changing with it. When reaching the culmination of the path and you are just about to cross the thresh

We continue with yesterdays practice of Awareness of Awareness enriched with the probing into the agent of that which is inverting and releasing the awareness. The theme of todays teaching was the question of whether we have free will or not, which kept Christian theologians busy with quarreling for centuries, and then also philosophers and more recently cognitive scientists. In order to answer this question, “Have I free will?”, we must define what “will” is, what “free” is, what it means to “have”, and all this finally leads us to the question of todays meditation, what this “I” really is. When we ourselves in this experimental philosophy probe into the referent of this word, we first find our own mind, the psyche, that’s limited in its freedom by mental afflictions. When we completely release our own body and mind, we then come down to the substrate consciousness, which is full of karmic propensities and therefore also not really free. So if we release even this, we finally come to realize our own buddha-