Glen Svensson, 15 May 2020
Session 13: Resting in awareness (probing)
In todays session we continue with the practice of resting in awareness, this time with an added element of inquiry. Glen quotes Padmasambhava from Natural Liberation when speaking about the two modes of practice, which are either first being introduced to the view and then meditation, or vice versa. Padmasambhava states that the superior method is to first do meditation in order to be directly presented with the view of pristine awareness. Otherwise, our intellectual view of pristine awareness can become an obstacle in our meditation.
In the meditation we are presented with questions such as “who is the one who is observing,” “who is the one who is releasing the mind,” etc. Therefore, this meditation is structured as both shamatha and vipashana.
Meditation starts at 18:16
According to Tsongkhapa there are six pre-requisites in order to achieve shamatha, which are: a supportive environment, having few desires, being content with what we have, having few activities, pure ethical discipline (social, environmental, and psychophysical), and dispensing with compulsive ideation. The outer preliminaries help to cultivate the internal pre-requisites. The most important pre-requisites, according to Tsongkhapa, are pure ethical discipline, seeing desires as disadvantageous, and dwelling in an appropriate environment.
Also, regarding the 6 paramitas, each previous perfection is needed in order to cultivate the following. For example, to cultivate ethical discipline one must already have a sense of generosity. By following that line of thought, one must have cultivated the first four perfections in order to accomplish the perfection of samadhi.
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