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

38 Is Dzogchen the unique domain of buddhists?

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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, 12 Sep 2014

Alan gives an alternative approach to guru yoga: asking us to give up our sense of being a sentient being, and releasing the sense of the guru as a sentient being. Meditation continues Padmasambhava’s citation of tantras.

After the meditation Alan picks up on John Wheeler’s quantum universe concept that all constructs are coming out of semantic information (and also rely on the ‘one that is informed’, the information and the referent). Not only can the universe be considered an information processing system, but so can ‘man’. This brings us to an empirically based view relative to the observer/participant. Parallels are drawn to madhyamika through the intersubjective invariant. Placebo (subject expectancy) effects are potentially explained through the information and processing model. Throw in some Stephen Hawking, strange loops etc and eventually Alan asks “what if Dzogchen is not the unique domain of buddhists?”

Meditation starts at 17:16

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