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92 Morning Q&A
Posted on May 30, 2012 by SBI Staff We are encouraged to practice the four immeasurables in a spirit of looking back on our retreat and broader past. Then we receive advice around the question, How do we prepare for death when we have months, days, hours, seconds? (27:19) Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
90 Morning Q&A
Posted on May 29, 2012 by SBI Staff
How to help people ? What aspects of dharma speak of developing these abilities and is there a first aid guide for specific ailments ? Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
90 Morning Q&A
Posted on May 29, 2012 by SBI Staff How to help people ? What aspects of dharma speak of developing these abilities and is there a first aid guide for specific ailments ? Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
* Introspection in awareness of awareness. * When the distracting thought is a mantra. * Defining locality in awareness of awareness. * Resting without thoughts and a subtle thought stream. * Awareness (vidya) vs. consciousness (jana, vijana) vs. mind (citta). * Subject and object in awareness. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
86 Equanimity
Posted on May 26, 2012 by SBI Staff Alan gives the remaining two of Buddhaghosas fourfold analyses of the four immeasurables, those of empathetic joy and of equanimity. The analyses consist of the false facsimile, the diametric opposite, the immediate catalyst, and the sign of success of each quality. Silent meditation not included.
* Does one realize any emptiness by achieving the first jhana? Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
May we be a light that inspires others to draw on their own inner resources! Silent meditation not included. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
78 Compassion (3)
Posted on May 23, 2012 by SBI Staff Silent meditation Podcast: Play in new window | Download
We begin tonight by reading an excerpt by Ddjom Lingpa describing the dzogchen practice of open presence and discussing its similitude to settling the mind in its natural state. The illusions of a lucid dream are analogous to the empty appearances of mental phenomena when settling the mind which in turn is a microcosm of the immeasurably deeper open presence practice and recognizing pristine awareness in the emptiness of all phenomenon. Silent meditation from 40:02 1:04:40, then Q&A. Q&A * The fast-track helicopter method of entering into meditation. * Om mani padme hum and Newt Gingrich. * Judging nonsectarian bare attention mindfulness meditation. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
compliment to the more stirring effects of settling the mind and awareness of awareness. Little is said about the practice before we begin. Q&A * In a beginningless universe, shouldnt all beings be enlightened? * Settling the mind in its natural state and multiple lucid dreamers. * Classic yidam practices, balancing with shamatha, and three-year retreats. * Maintaining shamatha. * A reality where Padmasambhava is born from a lotus. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
72 Loving-Kindness (3)
Posted on May 18, 2012 by SBI Staff Metta bhavana as taught by the Buddha. Silent meditation not included Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
cognizance of awareness do we know it to exist in its own right outside of any cognitive framework? Alan attends to these questions with glee. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
70 Loving-Kindness (2)
Posted on May 17, 2012 by SBI Staff The meditative cultivation of loving kindness as taught in the Visuddhimagga by Bhadantacariya Buddhaghosa. Silent meditation not included Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
68 Loving-Kindness
Posted on May 16, 2012 by SBI Staff We review loving-kindness distant enemy, false facsimile, proximate cause, and sign of success. What is your vision of your own flourishing? Silent meditation begins at 8:55 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
67 Awareness of Awareness
Posted on May 15, 2012 by SBI Staff Tonight we plunge right into the practice of awareness of awareness, with the variant of stretching in four directions. Then we discuss the value of familiarizing oneself with awareness, as a portal to the greater depths of wisdom and virtue. Q&A * Cognition fused with dullness in settling the mind in its natural state. * Are the Buddhas teachings that resulted in spontaneous nirvana related to taking the result as the path? * Could there be a benefit to inducing fainting safely? * The method of probing in awareness of awareness. * Dredging the psyche in awareness of awareness. * The briefest moments of experience in awareness of awareness. * Aversion to giving attention and the need for forbearance. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
Posted on May 15, 2012 by SBI Staff Might it be that when our resolve is to realize genuine happiness for the sake of all beings we may have confidence and trust that reality rises up to meet us day by day moment by moment? Meditation starts at 31:23
65 Mindfulness of Breathing
Posted on May 15, 2012 by SBI Staff Mindfulness of breathing, a active developmental practice, produces skills such as attentional stability which can be said to have a high market value. Likewise, settling the mind in its natural state helps develop such evolutionarily advantageous qualities as the skill to recognize emotional refractory periods. Awareness of awareness, conversely, in its passive method of discovery, has zero hedonic value. What is does provide, with its insight into the substrate consciousness, is a preparation that is useful in confronting death. The core of awareness of awareness is releasing all that is identified with I and mine, as one probes inward beyond the layers that are eliminated at the end of life. Q&A * The role of introspection in awareness of awareness. * The value of seeking the agent. * What is the locality of awareness? * When body energy arises. Meditation starts at 38:53 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
61 Awareness of Awareness
Posted on May 11, 2012 by SBI Staff With awareness of awareness, the body and speech are settled normally while the mind is given a complete reboot: all concerns are released, attention from all phenomenon is revoked, then that which remains will dawn. Were given the metaphors of the sailors raven and the dueling swordsman. Then the three types of knowledge and their relationship to the qualities of the substrate consciousness and the method of resting in non conceptuality with knowing. Meditation starts at 21:05 46:05 Q&A * When sensations at the belly are subtle. * Why Tibetans dont give forgiveness; how to deal with resentment. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
59 Mindfulness of Breathing
Posted on May 11, 2012 by SBI Staff In mindfulness of breathing, the technique of arousing interest during inhalation and relaxing during exhalation is incredibly effective. We apply this technique tonight as we focus on the sensations at the apertures of the nostrils. Q&A * Thomas Merton, Chamtrul Rinpoche, and the Pratyekabuddha. * Three countless aeons, rainbow bodies, and the king, navigator and shepherd. * Reasons for the sequence of mindfulness of breathing, settling the mind, to awareness of awareness. * More shrinking lamas. * Differentiating between the substrate and substrate consciousness. * Awaiting ones moment of grace. Meditation starts at 04:51 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
56 Great Loving-Kindness
Posted on May 9, 2012 by SBI Staff Over time, why couldnt all sentient beings find the genuine happiness that stems from the cultivation of the heart and mind? May it be so. We practice arousing this aspiration of lovingkindness, may we all experience such wellbeing. Meditation starts at 6:37
Then we discuss our habit for seeking serenity and stimulation outside of ourselves, when in fact these qualities exist nowhere other than their source in our own awareness. Meditation Begins 13.46 38.10 Q&A 47.05 * How thoughts and images relate. * Considering we may constitute an intergalactic super-organism. * Practicing vipasyana before attaining samadhi. * Degrees of grasping in awareness of awareness. * Techniques of counting the breath. * Bringing interest to boring subjects. * Eyes as a portal to the substrate. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
fruitless in the context of multiple rebirths if it is not sustained with visionary motivation such as with bodhicitta. It is this benign form of grasping that provides the continuity of coherence in the long thread in the path to liberation. Alan begins with these lessons of ambition. Then with the guided meditation we bring our attention to the three knowable aspects in settling the mind in its natural state: the space of the mind, objective thoughts and memories, and subjective feelings that arise in their accompaniment. Q&A * Can the attainment of shamatha be hindered by excessively striving? * The difference between dzogchen and mahamudra. * How should one begin a vajrayana practice. Meditation starts at 39:07 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
speaks at length about the experience of mental events compared to the other sense fields, and our reifying these experiences with cognitive fusion and conceptual overlays; taking the mind as the path is shown to be a strong analog to becoming lucid in a dream. Meditation begins at 46:26 Q&A begins at 1:11:22 Q&A * Con-fusing first-person energy with mental events. * A down-home experience of the substrate consciousness. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
* Mindfulness of breathing through the mouth. * When stretching our awareness: up, right, left, down. * Using the news media as material for practicing the four immeasurables. * Balancing theory and practice. * Unachievable shamatha; throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
48 Great Compassion
Posted on May 4, 2012 by SBI Staff Alan shares his definitions of spiritual and religious, and discusses Mahakaruna or Great Compassion. Then, we practice developing this aspiration and intention to help all sentient beings become free. Meditation begins at 14:42 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
* From the research of Ian Stevenson, why dont children remember previous lives as animals or from hell realms? * Experimentation with practices to get traction during our retreat. * Does the achievement of shamatha with awareness of awareness leave a wake of unaddressed mental issues that would have been resolved by practicing settling the mind? Meditation starts at 02:59 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
Meditation begins at 15:45 Q&A begins at 53:19 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments
* Advice: be kind to yourself. * The natural propensities related to shamatha. * Imagining a dar shadow instead of actual suffering. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
* Evaluating ones practice in the moment. Meditation starts at 13:35 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
40 Equanimity
Posted on April 30, 2012 by SBI Staff If you bring that equal openness of heart to everyone who comes to mind and everyone who comes into the field of experience, than that will do it for all sentient beings. Meditation starts at 05:54 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
38 Equanimity
Posted on April 28, 2012 by SBI Staff Here we allow our favorable and unfavorable perceptions of others to arise, recognize these as fabrications, and then probe beneath them to the common ground from which to view others desire to be truly happy. Meditation begins at 14:50 Closing comments at 39:25
Awareness of awareness, the simplest of all shamatha practices, requires only the slightest instruction and yet its object can be elusive and indescribable. This evening, we proceed directly into the mediation, then open the floor to questions about the practice. Meditations starts at 04:50 Q&A: * My own kind of practice: awareness of a bindu. * Going up hill in the wrong gear. * Anarchistic mode of relaxation. * What awareness of awareness is not. * Bifurcation of awareness as it drops like hot coal. * Awareness, elusive because its collapsed? * Moving from the space of the mind into awareness of awareness. * Three ways of watching a movie, and the gradient of grasping. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
mental events, subjective impulses such as feelings, and the space of the mind itself. Tonights meditation emphasizes the act of differentiating between these three. Meditation begins at 8:05 Q&A: 33:04 * Meditation and mental disorders. * The spiritual business model. * Finding compassion, retroactively. * Applying the dharma to civil service. * Derivative benefits of the three modes of shamatha practice. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Meditation begins 28:20 Closing comments 52:58 Question and Answer 1: 01:04 There is a recording error at 1:29:54 Q&A * Progressing along the stages of shamatha. * Clarifying the duration of continuity of mindfulness. * When the mind resembles a life that resembles a lucid dream. * Are the feelings attached to sensations hardwired? Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
and our point of awareness. We hope to accomplish this in the moment using single pointed mindfulness (the first of the four types of mindfulness, as noted in the Vajra Essence). The meditation leverages the technique revealed in Bhiyas teaching (In the seen, let there be only the seen) to spiral in on the space of the mind. Q&A: * Deepest fear of shamatha: loosing ones sense of self. * Clarifying Terton Sogyal Rinpoche, and a tangent into splitting photons as a metaphor for bifurcating mindstreams. * Meanings of mindfulness. * When events from home destabilize ones retreat. Meditation starts at 23:02 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
Alan brings to question the validity of the instruction for use of the acquired sign in the final stages of shamatha, suggesting it is only an interpretation, and not what the Buddha actually taught. Q&A: * How to regard ones career in the pursuit of dharma. * Status of previous retreatants. * How to cope with bliss when it arrises. * Medium excitation in settling-the-mind. * How consciousness functions as pulses through time. Meditation starts at 27:04 Q&A starts at 52:04 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
whole body becomes calm. This can be very peaceful, we can see why its called an ambrosial dwelling. Alan speaks to those who may experience variability in the quality of their practice, and emphasizes the importance of developing an authentic way of evaluating ones practice. He then gives guidelines on how best to use our time in retreat when off the meditation cushion, finding activities that are conducive to shamatha practice: being grounded, present, aware and mindful while walking, eating, discussing dharma or reading meaningful books. Question and answer 59.40 * Questions on anatomy: posture that influences the belly, a jaw that drops, and which nostril sensations to attend to. * While in the supine posture should one exert effort to return to the body if the mind is agitated? * In settling the mind, when emotions relating to mental events arise in the space of the body, should these be attended to at the expense of bifurcating ones attention? Meditation starts 9.37 Meditation ends 34.30 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
24 Loving-Kindness
Posted on April 20, 2012 by SBI Staff Metta Bhavana, a classic approach for breaking down the barriers. Beginning with oneself and the extending out to loved ones, casual friends, neutral and so on. Buddhaghosa regards the immediate catalyst for loving kindness is attending closely to the other and seeing the lovable quality. Meditation starts 7.22 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
23 The Infirmary
Posted on April 20, 2012 by SBI Staff
Beginning the Second Cycle. While keeping the emphasis on relaxation, Alan suggested balancing three groups of practice as you would with the three food groups. First, shamatha for cultivating attention, stability, clarity. Second, the wisdom group since insight acts an antidote to delusion and ignorance studying and reading that which helps an understanding of the practice. In formal sessions and in between sessions, we practice the third group: that of cultivating the heart. In this practice, theres a vertical dimension related to faith and devotion and a horizontal dimension focusing on our fellow sentient beings through the practices of the Four Immeasurables. He also gave an interesting talk addressing the topics of precognition, remote viewing and recall of past lives. Meditation starts 11.42 Meditation ends 35.40 Question and answer starts 51.26 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Alan talks about the fundamental impulse of caring. The barriers of the I-it relationship. The achievement of shamatha and how this is the base for achieving bodhicitta and extending that caring. Described the final practice of shamatha as described by Padmasambhava in his text Natural Liberation. In this practice we begin by stretching the space of the mind in all directions and then getting into the flow by just sustaining a clear cognoscente of being aware. He also explained how the Four Immeasurables are the foundation for the practice of bodhicitta. Meditation starts 28.37 Meditation ends 53.22 Question and answer starts 58.30 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
20 Equanimity (2)
Posted on April 18, 2012 by SBI Staff With this session we have come to the end of the cycle related to the four immeasurables. Alan points out the I-it-relationship, as proposed by the German Philosopher Martin Buber. Alan further explains, why the practice of Equanimity is also a matter of humanizing our relationship with other humans by looking for common ground. Meditation starts at 10:58 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
18 Equanimity
Posted on April 18, 2012 by SBI Staff Introduction to the fourth of the four immeasurables: Equanimity sometimes also referred to as Even-mindedness or Even-heartedness. Alan is asking the question, if we can develop equanimity with respect to ourselves. Mediation starts at 20:40 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
15 Awareness of Awareness
Posted on April 16, 2012 by SBI Staff Shamatha always implies a withdrawal. In shamatha without a sign we are not interested in the 5 sensory field not even in the mind, it is the ultimate retreat, just resting in the very nature of awareness. The knowing of knowing is the most undoubtable knowledge we have. This practice
is a bit difficult because were addicted to doing. Alan also talked about the Janas and why the bliss of Samadhi is not to be feared. Meditation starts at 15:36 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
14 Empathetic Joy
Posted on April 16, 2012 by SBI Staff Introduction of the third of the four immeasurables: Empathetic Joy Meditation starts at 07:27 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
12 Compassion, part 3
Posted on April 13, 2012 by SBI Staff Alan introduces the third type of suffering, in the Buddhist understanding, the deepest dimension of suffering the persuasive suffering of conditional existence. He is further elaborating on egobased-suffering or ego-grasping.
If there is no hope, than there is no compassion. Meditation starts at 11:41 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Alan also answered practical questions from the students. What is the correlation between emotions and bodily sensations? Does the acquired mental sign in mindfulness of breathing interfere with the visual field? How does one measure the progress of Shamatha practice? Meditation starts at 12:00 Podcast: Play in new window | Download Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
03 Mindfulness of Breathing
Posted on April 9, 2012 by SBI Staff Focus on the tactile sensations of the breathing throughout the body, cultivating relaxation of body and mind. If were not fully engaged with what is happening in the present moment, rumination will fill our mind. Learn the prerequisites for Shamatha, how to get rid of OCDD and why multitasking is inefficient. Meditation starts at 09:05 Podcast: Play in new window | Download
01 Introduction
Posted on April 9, 2012 by SBI Staff Alan welcomes all participants and gives an overview of what the retreat will entail as well as some information on Thanyapura. After meditation Alan talks about motivations for the retreat and values of cultivating different kinds of intelligence.
Conative Intelligence is the ability to recognize which of our desires are meaningful. Attentional Intelligence is choosing where to put our attention. Cognitive Intelligence is the clarity of mind engaging with reality as it is. Emotional Intelligence shows whether our emotional responses are balanced as compared to over-reactive.
The practice of Shamatha enhances these four forms of intelligence and leads to a shift in our priorities. Note: Several sections concerning logistical issues have been removed from the recording. The meditation begins at 02:50