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

61 Great Loving-Kindness, and The One Way to Cheat Death

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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, 26 Sep 2014

Before the meditation starts Alan talks about the practice we did yesterday, that is great compassion. He underlines that the first question in this meditation - why couldn’t all sentient beings be free from suffering? - is a provocative question and not at all meant as a rhetorical question. Basically, people can suffer mentally and/or physically. Dharma of course offers a solution to the first type of suffering. However, as what concerns physical suffering e.g. caused by aging, sickness and death there are two strategies to deal with it. Option 1 is you find an effective treatment and then you are hedonically better off. Whether that is in the form of a pill, or physiotherapy or reaching the stage of completion, at which point you can change the constitution of your body down to the molecular level, doesn’t matter much. Option 2 is the one you need when there seems to be no effective treatment in which case you need to either release all grasping onto the pain you experience as intrinsically yours or (if you go even deeper) realize the emptiness of the phenomena you conceptualize as “pain” and then withdraw the conceptual designation. Despite the pleasant outlooks that both options offer you will still die at some point…unless you realize rainbow body - the only possible option to cheat death! In a nutshell, this is possible due to the fact that all phenomena are effulgences of rigpa and by realizing rigpa you will be able to reverse the process. Thus, matter will “melt” right back into primordial awareness, which leaves you with no body that can die (put like this it really sounds like a piece of cake, right?). Whereas different types of rainbow body can be distinguished (high, medium and small), these are only different in their appearance but not in their experience of Enlightenment, which is complete and absolute in all cases.

Meditation starts at 37:30

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