Shamatha Retreat with Alan Wallace 2012 (part 24)

0:02 Yeah. Report an error in the passage at 0:02 Highlight the passage at 0:02

0:21 Just do it. Report an error in the passage at 0:21 Highlight the passage at 0:21

0:49 Right. Good. Your question is very timely. I don't want to torture you for the next session. I'll give a longer response a bit later. But for the right now, try just hooding the eyes. Hooding. So they're mostly closed. Just a little bit of light coming through. So then you, especially if you're in the supine, then, you know, so you don't have a lot. Report an error in the passage at 0:49 Highlight the passage at 0:49

1:10 You're just like that. So there's hardly any, but a little bit of light coming. Or for the next session, if you want to just close the eyes, do it. Okay, for the next session. Let's do it that way. If you'd like to close your eyes right now, just, you know, don't sweat it. Don't torture yourself. And then we can come back later and discuss in more leisure, you know, why the eyes are open and then how can we get more accustomed to leaving the eyes open without having all these problems because you're not the first person. Report an error in the passage at 1:10 Highlight the passage at 1:10

1:33 And if you've accustomed yourself in the past to meditating with the eyes closed, then this is a big transition and so distracting and then the eyes can feel dry and then moving about and just enormously distracting. So for the time being, either leave them hooded or if it's still distracting, then just close them for the next session and we'll come back to this later. So, good, timely question. Report an error in the passage at 1:33 Highlight the passage at 1:33

1:54 And then I just wanted to share just a brief bit of news that I just read on the internet, a friend sent me, and that is some of you may be familiar with something called the Templeton Prize for Science and Religion. It's very, very prestigious and it's also very lucrative. They always make a point of making sure the monetary prize is more than a Nobel Prize. Report an error in the passage at 1:54 Highlight the passage at 1:54

2:13 No matter what the Nobel Prize is, they make up more for the Templeton Prize. And they generally give it out to brilliant physicists and other scientists and so forth and occasionally to some religious figure. Just got the news, they gave it to the Dalai Lama. I agree. I think it's just really all good because he has such been a terrific force in this area of just open-minded, non-combative. Report an error in the passage at 2:13 Highlight the passage at 2:13

2:39 And really the pursuit of truth. So I thought that was just marvelous news. And I learned also that my very dear friend, Richard Davidson, outstanding neuroscientist, he was the one that proposed him or nominated him. And then it went through and they have a whole bunch of reasons why they gave it to him. They were all really good reasons in my opinion. So on that note, let's come back to our contemplative hyphen scientific inquiry in the nature of the mind and developing the mind as a serviceable tool. Report an error in the passage at 2:39 Highlight the passage at 2:39

3:08 And come right back to the practice of settling the mind in the natural state. So please find a comfortable position. Report an error in the passage at 3:08 Highlight the passage at 3:08

· · · silence, 2 minutes

4:56 So let's just touch lightly on the notes here, on the bottom of page 9. I'm citing here a text that will be cited, I think, elsewhere later on in the Oya, quite extensively later on. It's a very large text. I spent years translating it called The Vajra Essence. I won't elaborate on it right now. Suffice it to say that it's one of the great classics from the Dzogchen tradition. Report an error in the passage at 4:56 Highlight the passage at 4:56

5:18 Or a great perfection tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. This one from about, this book, this came out in about 1864 or so, 1862, 1860s. Report an error in the passage at 5:18 Highlight the passage at 5:18

5:29 By one of the most accomplished Dzogchen masters, a teacher, a scholar, but above all a contemplative and a very accomplished teacher. He was just exceptionally skillful in guiding other peoples to other peoples to very deep stages of realization. His name was Dujum Lingba and this is his text, Vajra Essence. Report an error in the passage at 5:29 Highlight the passage at 5:29

5:47 So a lot more can be said about the text, but right now I'd just like to focus on this one excerpt where he states, those with unstable minds, what he's doing, this is right towards the beginning of the text, after a brief introduction, he goes right to shamatha. Report an error in the passage at 5:47 Highlight the passage at 5:47

6:01 Again, the message is very clear. First make your mind serviceable, and now do everything else for the next 400 pages. And so he cites a couple of other techniques, visualization techniques, as I recall, refers to them. But then he comments, and bearing in mind he's living in eastern Tibet in this vast, it would be kind of like your outback, but 14,000 feet higher, vast, open, this is the high steppes of eastern nomadic Tibet, the region is called Golok, incredibly wild, I mean absolutely raw, very sparsely populated. Report an error in the passage at 6:01 Highlight the passage at 6:01

6:37 And that's where he lived, he was coming from a nomadic family, and just surrounded by people with their yaks and so forth. I've been up to that country. It's very intense in a very spacious kind of way. So he's speaking to nomads. He didn't travel around that much. He's living out there as a nomad, speaking to nomads in the mid-19th century. And he's saying, those of you with unstable minds. Report an error in the passage at 6:37 Highlight the passage at 6:37

7:04 Nomads have been watching yaks for the last 30 years. Those with unstable minds. And then he refers here to traditional Tibetan medicine, which is deeply rooted in Indian Ayurvedic medicine. Where we speak of three humors, wind, bile and phlegm, or vata, pitta, kappa. And so people of a wind constitution, or people who are predominant in the wind humor, they often have rather angular features, they're often rather slim, or at least not chubby and round. Report an error in the passage at 7:04 Highlight the passage at 7:04

7:36 Often the elbows and so forth, the cheekbones kind of are protruding. They tend to speak quite quickly. Their mind tends to be very, very active. They're often very gregarious, social, like dancing, laughing, talking and so forth. So air element implies, when we speak of the wind humor, which is closely related with the air element, it implies motility, lightness, a lot of motion, activity. Report an error in the passage at 7:36 Highlight the passage at 7:36

7:57 And so such people tend to speak quickly, think quickly. And that's whether you're Tibetan, Brazilian, American, it doesn't matter. It's just universal for the human species. Some people are more predominant there, others to phlegm, others to bile. I won't explain the other two right now. But he's saying in terms of your physiology, if you are of the type that is more dominant in the wind, or the vata, it's called vata in Sanskrit. Report an error in the passage at 7:57 Highlight the passage at 7:57

8:24 So if you either have an unstable mind, relatively speaking, or if you're prominent in the wind constitution, or among your nomads, if you have a coarse mind, Then in terms of selecting a suitable object or method of shamatha, what you folks should focus on would be not a mental image, because that's going to lock you in. Report an error in the passage at 8:24 Highlight the passage at 8:24

8:47 You're probably going to get really wound up tight, and even if you really push it, you can go psychotic. I mean, that would be an extreme case. But you'll really easily very get... Very easily get very contracted, tense, stressed out by trying to take this very kinetic mind with so much energy frothing around and trying to just lock it in on a mental object and say, stay. Report an error in the passage at 8:47 Highlight the passage at 8:47

9:06 And it will, but it's going to be shuddering, so to speak, and going to kind of a meltdown, unless you can really find some very deep way to relax. So if one has a deeply devotional purpose, a person, that might do it. Having such devotion for Tara, Manjushri, Padmasambhava, whoever it may be, maybe that will soften and loosen and lighten up so you can do that practice effectively. Report an error in the passage at 9:06 Highlight the passage at 9:06

9:28 And lots of Tibetans were very, very devotional. Some people, of course, in the modern world as well. But overall, if you have a wind constitution, it's going to be hard for you just to lock onto one stationary object and keep that continuity. So what does he suggest? He says, those with unstable minds, those with a wind constitution, those with coarse minds, what should they do? They should relax and let thoughts be as they are, continually observing them with unwavering mindfulness and careful introspection. Report an error in the passage at 9:28 Highlight the passage at 9:28

10:00 So the Buddha suggested mindfulness of breathing for such people, in the Dzogchen tradition suggesting this method, and one can see that, to my mind it's kind of obvious, it's a very skillful means. Because it is selective. I want to emphasize this is not open presence, open awareness. It's not just choiceless. It's just being equally open to anything that comes in. If one does that, that's fine. Report an error in the passage at 10:00 Highlight the passage at 10:00

10:24 That can be valuable. I'm not criticizing it. It's not shamatha though. You'll never achieve shamatha by having your awareness just wide open and non-selective. Practice for a thousand hours, a thousand years you want to achieve it. Because the very nature of shamatha is not to be open to all sensory impressions from the desire realm and so forth, but rather to be In the practice of shamatha, whatever kind of shampana method you're doing, you are channeling your awareness purely into the mental domain. And then within that mental domain, the activities of the mind, the javana that I mentioned earlier, they subside. Report an error in the passage at 10:24 Highlight the passage at 10:24

10:57 And your mind, your coarse mind, or I think we can say simply your psyche, because it's exactly what psychologists study, your psyche dissolves. And it dissolves into an underlying continuum of consciousness, the substrate consciousness. Well, if your attention is equally attentive to, equally interested in, any appearance that comes, there's just no reason it would ever come channeling into the mental and that it would subside and then dissolve in the subterranean consciousness. Report an error in the passage at 10:57 Highlight the passage at 10:57

11:25 It just won't happen. Why would it? And so there's value in keeping it open. There are other practices for which that's exactly what you should do, but not shamatha. Not shamatha. Shamatha, you want to dissolve, you want to bring it, it's almost like going back to your baseline. It's really like a scientific experiment. You've got all kinds of things happening. Okay, but what's the baseline? What's that? Identify that and now we can see, okay, here's something arising from the baseline. Report an error in the passage at 11:25 Highlight the passage at 11:25

11:50 Here's back to the baseline and so forth. But you have a point of orientation. Baseline is a good word. Your substrate consciousness is the baseline for all activities of the mind. In dreams, the waking state, wholesome, unwholesome, everything. The baseline, it keeps on coming back like a homing pigeon. Report an error in the passage at 11:50 Highlight the passage at 11:50

12:08 This is the nest it keeps on coming back to. It's like a yo-yo. All this comes back to when you fall deep asleep and so forth and so on. And in the Buddhist worldview, it's the baseline that you come back to every time you die. Back to then. And then after you die, then you have the bardo. Out of your baseline comes all your bardo experiences. But then you're conceived and all the bardo experiences go back to your baseline, back to the substrate consciousness. Report an error in the passage at 12:08 Highlight the passage at 12:08

12:33 And now again a psyche emerges out of the substrate consciousness in the formation of a fetus and it's getting heavily configured by the kind of nervous system that it's developing. So you develop visual awareness, your frontal cortex, ability to think, imagine, analyze, imagine and so forth, the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Report an error in the passage at 12:33 Highlight the passage at 12:33

12:52 All of this you're configuring the psyche that is emerging out of the substrate consciousness. So the shamatha kind of strategy is There are so many types of meditation that are very worthwhile doing for exploring the nature of reality, getting to the root of suffering, experiencing tapping into the deepest potentials of consciousness. Report an error in the passage at 12:52 Highlight the passage at 12:52

13:12 But before you venture out into all of that, if you want to be quite linear about it, then first of all establish your baseline. Get back to the primal. Get back into that which is not already specifically human. And this relates to kind of a very central theme in all of modern science. And I mean all of modern science, tracing back to Copernicus Galileo. Report an error in the passage at 13:12 Highlight the passage at 13:12

13:31 And that is, they were clear, Galileo in particular, he was very clear that what he was seeking was a God's eye perspective of reality. The medieval scholars, philosophers and so forth, they were very well aware that when we look with human eyes, we listen with human ears, as we did just in the last session, that we're always getting an anthropocentric view of reality. Report an error in the passage at 13:31 Highlight the passage at 13:31

13:51 Because we're looking at the human visual cortex, human eyeballs, not the eyeballs of a lizard, a bumblebee, a bat, an alligator and so forth. They all have their own, you know, their own, O-centric view, depending on their species. And we're just one more species. So what we see is not really what's out there. That's what we get processed by the visual cortex. Report an error in the passage at 13:51 Highlight the passage at 13:51

14:09 It's a human perspective on the visual field. And likewise for all the five senses. This is well known in the medieval period. But bear in mind Galileo and all of the other founders of modern science, without exception, they were all deeply religious people. And not generically, they're all Christian. Report an error in the passage at 14:09 Highlight the passage at 14:09

14:25 And they were utterly persuaded God created the universe, but he didn't create it from a human perspective. He created it from God's own perspective, which is transhuman, and not locked into human eyeballs and human ears, or for that matter, human language. So when we're processing, making sense of the world conceptually, we're doing it through Italian, English, etc., etc., but that's not God's language. Report an error in the passage at 14:25 Highlight the passage at 14:25

14:47 Those are human languages. But these were passionately religious people. Galileo was trained as a contemplative, as a youth. So he, like many of his peers, and Kepler was a theologian and Copernicus was a theologian, Newton was a theologian, wrote extensively on theology. They were after the God's eye perspective. And they recognized you're not going to get that by just looking and hearing and feeling and tasting with your human senses because it always winds up being anthropocentric. Report an error in the passage at 14:47 Highlight the passage at 14:47

15:14 So they wanted to somehow transcend what they call the veil of appearances. To leap beyond, to transcend the veil of human anthropocentric appearances and be able to view reality from God's own perspective, which would be the one objective perspective. And that's the source of the whole ideal of objectivity in modern science. It's God's perspective. That's objective. That's not human or male or female or Australian or American. Report an error in the passage at 15:14 Highlight the passage at 15:14

15:40 That's real. That's absolutely objective. And then, of course, they wanted to think God's own thoughts. They wanted to get beyond human language. And so they used technology, the combination of technology and mathematics. Mathematics, they thought, going back to Pythagoras, was God's own language. Not East, West, ancient, modern. It's transcendent, God's own language. And they wanted to use appearances as a springboard to inferentially go beyond the anthropocentric by way of what Europeans thought was man's highest faculty. Report an error in the passage at 15:40 Highlight the passage at 15:40

16:13 And that is reason. So to use reason, powered by mathematics, to transcend the anthropocentric view of reality and by way of reason then gain a conceptual view of reality from God's own perspective. And that was their aspiration. It was theologically driven, absolutely. That was the core, the engine that was driving the rise of modern science. So that's one way of approaching it. Report an error in the passage at 16:13 Highlight the passage at 16:13

16:36 Looking outwards with the increasing sophistication of technology. And then the increasing sophistication of mathematical analysis, and then having that sense that you're approaching a better and better approximation of a view of reality that's God's own view. Well, Buddhism never developed any technology. I mean, it's a prayer wheel. It's pretty well where we tapped out. That's as good as we got. Mathematics is pretty much arithmetic. Report an error in the passage at 16:36 Highlight the passage at 16:36

17:03 Addition, subtraction, really, I don't think they didn't get to algebra. Early Indians did, but the Buddhists didn't really play a significant role. The Jains did. They were really good at it. Buddhists don't need it. So didn't do mathematics, didn't do technology, but did the technology of shamatha. Report an error in the passage at 17:03 Highlight the passage at 17:03

17:20 But this yearning, and I think it's deeply embedded in the human soul, at least speaking metaphorically, this yearning to transcend our own limitations for transcendence. I mean, it's universal. Sociologists have studied it. Evolutionary biologists are trying to make sense of it. Report an error in the passage at 17:20 Highlight the passage at 17:20

17:37 Well, of course, this is true in Asia. It was true in classical India, ancient India. So here's one way to transcend an anthropocentric view. And that is, shut down every aspect of your mind that's human. Report an error in the passage at 17:37 Highlight the passage at 17:37

17:49 And that is, number one, your five physical senses. Shut it down. That's anthropocentric. You're locked in. But then shut down your language, your memory, your conceptual abilities of imagination, analysis and all of that. Shut it down. Shut it down. Go down to baseline, which is pre-human. Pre-human. It's not stupid. It's primitive in the sense that it's not configured as human, let alone configured as Australian versus New Zealander. Report an error in the passage at 17:49 Highlight the passage at 17:49

18:16 But it's primal. It's the baseline. And if you get there lucidly, by way of shamatha rather than just falling asleep, then once you get there, then you have all of those five jhāna factors at your service. Course investigation, subtle analysis, single-pointed attention, bliss. And sense of well-being, they're all right on tap, but none of them are human. Even the coarse and subtle investigation are not distinctively human, and moreover it's not locked into conceptual way of knowing, because that immediately gets you into language, right? Report an error in the passage at 18:16 Highlight the passage at 18:16

18:47 At least for the most part it does. So this is kind of a transhuman or subhuman or primal, but whatever, it's not anthropocentric. There's nothing anthropocentric about the substrate consciousness. And Shantideva is designed to get you there, to a point of kind of objectivity. It's not locked into the bias of being human versus some other species, let alone a preta, deva or so forth and so on, because it's sub all of that as well. Report an error in the passage at 18:47 Highlight the passage at 18:47

19:11 So that's something of the rationale for shamatha and why it's specifically focused on the mind and isn't simply open to all the sense fields. Report an error in the passage at 19:11 Highlight the passage at 19:11

19:21 And he says... If you're of that wind constitution, here's a way where you are developing your shamatha, the stability, vividness, qualities that every other method of shamatha will lead to as well. But because it's so loose, and you're allowing thoughts, that whole obsessive flow of thoughts, to flow unimpededly, there's nothing in it to get you to start stressing out, to start getting locked in, yet rigid, tight. Report an error in the passage at 19:21 Highlight the passage at 19:21

19:45 Because, hey, just let it be, let it be. You can have the beetles refrain in the background the whole time. Let it be, let it be. And so it doesn't exacerbate if you have coarse mind, wind constitution and so forth or heavily caught up in thoughts. You just let them flow and then gently, gently, gently you let them subside. Report an error in the passage at 19:45 Highlight the passage at 19:45

20:04 But they unravel the thoughts, memories and so forth without you pressing them down, without you preferring for them to subside. Because you're not grasping onto them, they unravel. In Tibetan, Rang Do, they release themselves. So without any overt effort, To get the mind to pipe down, to calm down, to go silent, simply by attending to it without grasping, without either craving or aversion, then it unravels, it unwinds, it melts, and you watch yourself lose your mind. Report an error in the passage at 20:04 Highlight the passage at 20:04

20:37 From a perspective of awareness, you watch your mind dissolve, and you're sleeping right into substrate consciousness. So, that's the rationale of this practice. Okay, good. Report an error in the passage at 20:37 Highlight the passage at 20:37

20:50 Five after twelve, let's keep it sharp. Let's come back at five minutes past two. Enjoy your lunch. Report an error in the passage at 20:50 Highlight the passage at 20:50