B Alan Wallace Quotes

Meditation is a balancing act between attention and relaxation.

A Tibetan aphorism states, “Let your mind be a gracious host in the midst of unruly guests.

Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground. As you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, 'You idiot! What's wrong with you? Are you blind?' But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped into you is actually blind. He, too, is sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be replaced by sympathetic concern: 'Are you hurt? Can I help you up?' Our situation is like that. When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and compassion.

In Buddhism, consciousness is central because all phenomena are realized to be mere appearances to consciousness that have no independent existence.

Solitary meditation doesn’t cause mental imbalances, but uncovers them.

The sequence between shamatha and vipashyana makes perfect sense: first refine your powers of attention, then use them to explore and purify the mind, which can be directly examined only through first-person observation.

Samsara is not out there, but rather in the way that we experience our environment. To target it precisely, samsara is in the quality of our minds. Our minds are not functioning in accord with reality, and therein lies the problem.

It takes no deep insight to see that the source of both our well-being and our maladies lies within our own hearts and minds. To change our experience of life we must inevitably change our hearts and minds, or rather our heart/minds.

The mind that reaches out to other people, to the environment, to provide what it seems to lack itself, is a mind that is ignorant of its own resources for peace and happiness.

It is best not to silence the mind with a crushing blow of our will.

Normally, the mind involuntarily superimposes a sense of solidity on our perceptions of visual objects, even though the eyes are not designed to detect this tactile characteristic.

I suggest that if you were able to focus your attention at will, you could actually choose the universe you appear to inhabit.

Again and again, counteract the agitation and turbulence of the mind by relaxing more deeply, not by contracting the body or mind.

Let go of any conceptual associations you have regarding visual impressions. Let go of preferences or judgments...Your likes and dislikes...Just be present with the shapes and colors...focusing on them with bare attention.

According to the general Buddhist view, the whole of saṃsāra, with its myriad pleasant and miserable realms, is a prison. But from the perspective of pristine awareness, all of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa is equally suffused by the primordial purity of the Great Perfection.

The text presented here, the Vajra Essence by Düdjom Lingpa, a nineteenth-century master of the Nyingma order of Tibetan Buddhism, is known as the Nelug Rangjung in Tibetan, meaning “the natural emergence of the nature of existence.”1 This is an ideal teaching in which to unravel some of the common misunderstandings of Tibetan Buddhism, since it is a sweeping practice that can take one from the basics all the way to enlightenment in a single lifetime. The present volume explains the initial section on shamatha, or meditative quiescence, about nine percent of the entire Vajra Essence root text.

If you wish to take shamatha all the way to its ground, however, it requires a supportive, serene environment, good diet, proper exercise, and very few preoccupations. The necessary internal conditions are minimal desires, few activities and concerns, contentment, pure ethical discipline, and freedom from obsessive, compulsive thinking. It is my feeling that the achievement of shamatha is so rare today because those circumstances are so rare. It is difficult to find a conducive environment in which to practice at length and without interference—even more so to have that and access to suitable spiritual friends for support and guidance. Therefore, if the causes are difficult to bring together, the result—shamatha—is also necessarily rare.

When you are asked, “What am I holding in my hand?” and answer, “a cup,” you have just grasped on to “cup-ness.” You have identified an object within the context of a conceptual framework—a word, a sign. So the mind that latches on to a sign—here an image commonly designated as a “cup”—does so through grasping. Although you are merely identifying “That’s a cup,” this is also a form of grasping. It may not be the kind of grasping that will lead to endless misery, but it is a subtle form of grasping.

Ultimate reality, then, is obscured by the concept of self. It is not the concept alone that is obscuring ultimate reality. Rather it is the reification, the grasping on to the concept, that creates the obscuration. The Tibetan term for reification (dendzin) means grasping on to inherent existence, grasping on to true existence. You decontextualize, you grasp something as existing independently, by its own nature. One example is to believe that there really is an inherently existing person—you or me or anyone—that could be praised or insulted. Moreover, anything believed to exist by itself is a product of reification. This reification is the root of samsara, the cycle of existence.

When attention is impaired, it detracts from everything we do, and when it is well focused, it enhances everything we do.

Shamatha is presented in the Vajra Essence as a foundational practice on the Dzogchen path. Dzogchen, often translated as “the Great Perfection,” is the highest of the nine vehicles (yanas) in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Classically speaking, after achieving shamatha, the yogi will use his or her newly acquired powers of concentration to practice insight into the nature of emptiness (vipashyana), followed by the Dzogchen practices of tregchö (breakthrough) and tögal (direct crossing-over). These four practices comprise the essential path to enlightenment from the Nyingma point of view. The practice of Dzogchen brings one into direct contact with reality, unmediated by the individual personality or society.

Within Tibetan Buddhism, shamatha practice maps on to the nine stages of attentional development wherein thoughts gradually subside as concentrative power is increased to the point at which one can effortlessly maintain single-pointed focus on a chosen object for at least four hours. The accomplishment of shamatha is accompanied by a powerful experience of bliss, luminosity, and stillness.

An indispensable ingredient for spiritual maturation is the cultivation of fortitude: strength, forbearance, and patience.

In the initial section on shamatha, the Vajra Essence has the practitioner take the mind as the path, using the specific approach of taking appearances and awareness as the path, also known as settling the mind in its natural state. In brief, this consists of observing all arising mental phenomena without grasping on to them. Your thoughts, emotions, images, and so forth are observed closely with mindfulness, but you do not encourage, discourage, or involve yourself in any way with the arising mental phenomena. The aim at this stage is to settle the mind in the substrate consciousness (alayavijñana)—the ground of the ordinary mind. The text also comments on the many meditation experiences (nyam) that may be encountered and how to behave when they appear. Pitfalls are described, along with some of the deeper possibilities of this phase of practice.

There’s no one-to-one correspondence between outer events and our inner emotional states.

The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma was called “Good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end,

The demarcation between science and metaphysics is determined by the limits of experiential inquiry, not Nature or God.

Settling your mind in its natural state entails releasing all grasping, grasping onto the future, and the past, grasping onto cogitations about the present. Letting your awareness rest in its own place, naturally luminous and still.

One of the most persistent of all delusions is the conviction that the source of our dissatisfaction lies outside ourselves.

God, the soul, salvation, consciousness, love, free will, and purely spiritual causation may seem far more real to you than elementary particles and energy fields. I suggest that if you were able to focus your attention at will, you could actually choose the universe you appear to inhabit.