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

24 Tiptoing Into Identifying Awareness

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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, 04 Sep 2014

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 practicing this from the perspective of a sentient being. There is no effort involved, no modification or fabrication, and it involves not doing anything. There is a dimension here that is always rigpa, and it never falls into marigpa (unknowing), it never wandered in samsara. From that perspective there is nothing to be done, but from the perspective of a sentient being we have a lot of work to do.

Questions: Q1: Regarding the long quotation from Karma Chagme Rinpoche in A Spacious Path to Freedom (“What do you mean you can’t…”), and that will be included on the webpage for download very soon. Q2: In regards to the translation of the Compendium of Practices chapter 13, which is translated by Alan right now so it will still take a bit of time, we will receive it later. Q3: Regarding the intensification in the oscillation of Awareness of Awareness. Q4: In intense practice of Mindfulness of Breathing the mind isn’t very sharp anymore. Am I getting old? Q5: During meditation it feels like sounds are passing through my body. Well, that could be The Who again…

Meditation starts at 01:02 min

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