Courses / Fall 2014 Shamatha, Vipashyana, Dream Yoga, and the Experience of Pristine Awareness in the Great Perfection Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism /

14 Awareness of Awareness or Warming Up for the Marathon

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Fall 2014 Shamatha, Vipashyana, Dream Yoga

B. Alan Wallace
21 Aug 2014 – 16 Oct 2014
Thanyapura Mind Centre, Phuket, Thailand

This eight-week retreat will focus on three of the six transitional processes, namely:

  • the Transitional Process of Living, with teachings on śamatha and vipaśyanā,
  • the Transitional Process of Dreaming, with teachings on dream yoga, and
  • the Transitional Process of Meditation with teachings on Dzogchen meditation.

All these teachings will be based on the text The Profound Dharma of The Natural Emergence of the Peaceful and Wrathful from Enlightened Awareness Stage of Completion Instructions on the Six Transitional Processes, an “earth terma” of teachings by Padmasambhava, revealed by Karma Lingpa in the fourteen century.

The English translation of this text has been published under the title Natural Liberation: Padmasambhava’s Teachings on the Six Bardos, with commentary by Gyatrul Rinpoche and translated by B. Alan Wallace.

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B. Alan Wallace, 29 Aug 2014

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 threshold to awakening, what’s your universe like? From outside you are just located somewhere in Chicago or Phuket, but from the inside you are actually in Akanishta. As you shift your citta, your perspective of viewing reality to rigpa, you shift your whole universe and all the appearances within it. But if you only get a glimpse of rigpa, i.e. by way of instructions being pointed out to you, you slip right back into your ordinary perspective afterwards. So what is obscuring rigpa? The substrate consciousness is obscured by the five obscurations. Rigpa itself is obscured by different layers, like the layers of impure appearances that we see due to our impure vision, then the grasping onto the sense of identity of being a sentient being, the cognitive and afflictive obscurations and on the basis of all of this, the wandering mind.

Meditation starts at 15:19 min

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