16 - Q&A

B. Alan Wallace, 17 Jun 2019

Anonymous

Regarding the 3 elements required to reach the small stage of the first yoga, what is the distinction between the 2 elements of some realization of emptiness and identifying rigpa? Regarding the uncommon preliminaries, what is meant by pure view? What are its effects on whom? Why pure view for sangha brothers and sisters, why not for other beings as well? Does having a pure view regarding sangha brothers mean we will automatically be friends and want to hang out together over coffee and scones?

Mary

When you were talking about the animals and sentient beings, my first thought was that the reason they don’t have to liberate is because they don’t have culture and parents, they haven’t had all that conditioning put in to them. I don’t understand or I always wonder why did pristine awareness get itself in this pickle of being stuck in the human brain?

Nancy

I’ve got a question regarding Maitripa, and regarding the term “without recognition”. Taking the example of your grandmother, suppose you observe an image of your grandmother; it arises as you’re following your thoughts and it’s followed by or overlaid with language: grandmother. And then an emotion arises. Is this lairing of mental events that are all related to the original image, recognition? If there’s a physical response, say tears, like in the same example the grandmother image came up and then you’re going down this kind of road and then you’ve got an emotion that arises and then you’ve got a physical manifestation of tears. It seems to me that the emotion is a subjective mental impulse, be it sadness or loss perhaps or deep love, are the tears an indication of grasping or desire?

Ken

For shamatha meditation, do you recommend the tongue on the top of the mouth posture? I was just under the impression that it goes a little deeper than that, I think that Vairocana recommends that posture. And also if you’ve seen certain cats like feral cats and other animals, they do that to kind of sense certain energies.

Ana

This is regarding the awareness of awareness meditation. I just had a question on the last meditation we did. You reminded me of merging the mind with space. Are they not the same? Is awareness of the space of the mind, watching the events of the mind, not vipashyana already?

Rick

You mentioned yesterday that in Tibetan language they don’t have the possessive past, present, future verb to have, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an “is”, “has”, or “will be”? Today you gave the instruction: do not look out, look in. My question had to do with looking out, reification happening is not good or not where we want to head. But in some practices, there’s mantra practice with eyes closed, there’s no visual input. And there are some practices where the instruction is to keep the eyes open. I’m just wondering if there’s more you can say about eyes closed or open.

Elis

From your book The Attention Revolution, you mention the steps for improving attention and also that you need a teacher, and when do you need that, and how often do you need to see your teacher? And also I was meditating and focusing my breath, but I would like to know if I could focus on my heartbeat?

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