18 Settling the Mind in its Natural State

B. Alan Wallace, 12 Sep 2013

What is the object of mindfulness in the practice of settling the mind in it’s natural state? Most people don’t get it, it’s good to know what you are attending to because your words are guiding your practice. The answer is the space of the mind and whatever arises within it. You still have an object even if nothing arises. Previously we have emphasised the events in the space of the mind but here we shift the emphasis to the space of the mind itself.

Post meditation: “Regard all phenomena as if they we dreams”. Alan talks at length on this line from the seven point mind training text, analysing the assumption that the world is really out there. Here is a brief summary-extract:

It’s important to see where out feet are, we are not in Tibet thousands of years ago, but living in modernity and carrying this massive metaphysical baggage: that the world is really out there, everything was there and then we arrived. Even with the instruments of technology, what we are getting is information, which is not physical and yet we think metaphysical realism, but the physical we never actually see. As Werner Heisenberg said: “What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our nature of inquiry”. John Wheeler calls it the strange loop, the entire physical universe as we understand it arises in dependance on information, it does not exist prior to or independent of that information, but information depends on human beings which are physical gathering that information. What Wheeler doesn’t say but what has to follow is that there is no information without someone who is informed or something about which you are informed. Those three things. You can’t have one without the other two. If you take one away, the other two vanish into thin air, that implies the other two are not really there by their own nature. In other words, we are really really really participants in this universe.

Meditation starts at: 12:14

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