B. Alan Wallace, 14 Aug 2015

We take a brief break from shamatha with two vipashyana practices taught by Padmasambhava via Dudjom Lingpa in the Sharp Vajra of Consciousness Awareness. Probe into the body, speech and mind and determine which is primary. Alan discusses the 35 year period between 1875 and 1910 in which introspection was used to examine the phenomenon of the mind. This ended because many times the results were as hypothesized and there appeared to be a factor of “leading the witness”. The current scientific view is that matter is primary and consciousness is secondary. The implications of which is primary, mind or matter are enormous.

Meditation is on the Buddha’s teaching to Bahiya - in the seen there is only the seen.

After the meditation Alan provides a history of science from Galileo through Einstein and the Christian thought underlying it. He brings in Dharmakirti’s analysis of inference; how do we know things we can’t perceive. To infer the cause on the basis of an effect, at some point in time someone must have seen the cause produce the effect and the effect can’t be produced by anything else. Alan applies this analysis to the appearances we perceive. Alan ends with a quote from Andrei Linde from Stanford on the role of consciousness in the universe.

The meditation starts at 23:18

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