Practice Library

The World of Mind & Mandalas and the Great Perfection

A three-part conversation between Ian Baker, Eva Natanya and Lama Alan Wallace on mandalas, mind and the Great Perfection.

A three-part exchange between Ian Baker, Eva Natanya and Lama Alan Wallace on mandalas, mind and the Great Perfection. The symbolism and iconography of Buddhist mandalas have evolved through centuries of social transformation in India and Tibet, and their depictions of interconnected worlds resonate with contemporary psychology, physics and cosmology. Ian Baker opens on the ways mandalas developed specifically within Buddhist cultures while still pointing to dynamic truths about human existence and the nature of reality as an inter-dimensional whole, moving from scroll paintings and sand mandalas to Borobudur, Samye and Mount Kailash, and then inward to the chakras. Eva Natanya responds from the perspective of the Guhyasamaja Tantra, the king of tantras, and Lama Alan Wallace expands the theme by bringing in the Great Perfection, or Dzogchen, regarded by many as the pinnacle of Buddhist contemplative inquiry into the nature of consciousness and its role in the natural world. In these Vajrayana contexts, as against the common contemporary view of a single universe composed of matter and energy in which consciousness plays only a marginal role, every sentient being is presented as

What this course covers

• How the mandala developed, from painted scrolls to Borobudur and Mount Kailash
• The Guhyasamaja Tantra, and the wisdom realising emptiness arising as the deity
• Dzogchen brought to the same theme, and what each vehicle does with the afflictions
• Guru yoga as the indispensable support, rather than deity generation
• Every being at the centre of their own mandala, with consciousness fundamental
• Quantum cosmology, and the place of the observer in nature
• Questions on visualisation, consort practice and what emptiness alone cannot do

Sessions

1. Mind & Mandalas - Part One 88 minutes
2. Mind & Mandalas - Part Two 93 minutes
3. Mind & Mandalas - Part Three 62 minutes