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

74 Supercharging Your Practice

×

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.

Subscribe to this course

Subscribe with your favorite podcast app or RSS reader:

RSS

Please support our work

If you appreciate this website please give generously to provide us with the funds to keep it online, to support aspiring yogis, and for the other services provided by the Santa Barbara Institute.

Donate to Santa Barbara Institute Give a gift to Alan Wallace

B. Alan Wallace, 03 Oct 2014

Alan started the teachings today with the question of how we know whether we are practicing dharma or not. After all, you could e.g. do shamatha just as a technique for relaxation. What makes it a dharma practice is when you have a definitive sense of emergence from samsara, coupled with a vision of the path that will lead you all the way up to liberation. If we want to further empower, to supercharge our practice, we should practice from the viewpoint of being indivisible from our root guru. After the silent meditation we went on with the Natural Liberation. Padmasambhava describes the method of apprehending the clear light of realization, which is equivalent to the vertical aspect of pristine awareness, leading into the depth of reality. Then he introduces a method for apprehending the visionary clear light of experience, and that corresponds to the horizontal aspect of pristine awareness, fathoming the breadth of reality. By doing this method one can become aware of the physical environment while being deep asleep. Alan compares that to out-of-body experiences of brain dead people, who can also have a clear apprehension of their surroundings, witness conversations going on etc. Then in a second session Padmasambhava explains a method that lets you fall into deep sleep with an energetic boost, by visualizing a red bindu within the central channel at your heart, and apprehending the clear light by this way. Alan then comes back to the question how much Buddhist background one needs in order to do such practices. According to his own guru, Gyatrul Rinpoche, it is sufficient if we are intuitively drawn to such practices, have faith, aspiration and a deep yearning to practice. After all, how do we know with what karmic seeds we were born with, we might be really qualified to practice this without even knowing our qualifications. Question: Q1: In empathetic joy the near enemy is frivolous joy, the remedy is loving-kindness. Could you explain that?

Silent meditation cut out at 14:08 min

Download (M4A / 30 MB)

Transcript

This lecture does not have a text transcript. Please contact us if you’d like to volunteer to assist our transcription team.

Discussion

Ask questions about this lecture on the Buddhism Stack Exchange or the Students of Alan Wallace Facebook Group. Please include this lecture’s URL when you post.