Calendar

Dzogchen

Practice Library

Dzogchen

88 teachings in the library cover this practice.

  • Session Two - The Natural Warmth of Awareness David Oromith · 80 minutes · recorded July 21, 2026

    In two guided practices we rest in awareness of awareness and then let warmth in on the in breath, without it feeling manufactured. Between them David reads Tsoknyi Rinpoche on essence love, and Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo on our being something jewel-like rather than worthless. Gold covered in dirt is plunged into the water of awareness rather than scrubbed, and the frightened, contracted part of us is warmed like ice rather than broken with a hammer. It closes on a question about bliss, and a dedication.

  • Session One - Awareness Is Already Here David Oromith · 92 minutes · recorded July 14, 2026

    In two guided meditations we rest attention in bare awareness, first noticing the knowing behind sounds and sensations, then meeting bodily discomfort the same way. David draws on Mahamudra and Dzogchen for a way of meeting difficult emotions that is neither suppressing, avoiding, indulging nor fixing, using the image of sky and cloud and Mingyur Rinpoche's panic suspended in awareness. Questions cover using imagery as a support and resting in awareness when emotions arrive tangled together.

  • Guided Meditation - Dzogchen, Looking for Where Thoughts Happen David Oromith · 24 minutes · recorded March 18, 2026

    Practised with the eyes at least partly open and the gaze soft. David has you look for where your thoughts actually happen, using an imagined oak tree, a distant lawnmower, the feel of velvet, until no place can be found and you rest in that limitless space. Then a step further, turning awareness towards awareness itself, and a reflection read aloud to close.

  • S3 - Introduction to Dzogchen David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded March 18, 2026

    David calls Dzogchen the most accessible of the three, and the pinnacle in the Nyingma school. Great Perfection points not at something to strive for but at a nature already self-perfected, and where Mahamudra works up through ordinary mind, Dzogchen introduces rigpa from the start. Ground, path and fruition follow, with tekcho and the pointing out instructions a teacher may give. It closes with a practice in which we look for where thoughts happen, and a reflection called The Unbound Sky.

  • S2 - Introduction to Mahamudra David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded March 11, 2026

    David sets out the path as a straight one, shamatha then vipashyana cutting through to pristine awareness, and Garchen Rinpoche's answer that Mahamudra alone is sufficient. Mahamudra takes the mind itself as its object rather than reasoning through the five aggregates, cutting the tree at its base. In an experiment David reads out, we rest attention as the flashlight rather than what it lights. It closes in the stillness of awareness while thoughts move, then asks where the mind is.

  • S1 - The Path of Vajrayana David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded March 5, 2026

    David places Vajrayana in context, as a branch of the Mahayana that throws nothing out and makes no sense without renunciation, bodhicitta and emptiness beneath it. Then deity yoga, where the ordinary self dissolves into emptiness and is visualised as Tara or Avalokiteshvara, taking the fruit as the path. Empowerment brings lifelong commitments, and seeing the teacher as a Buddha is no licence to ignore red flags. The evening closes with a public Avalokiteshvara practice, with mantra likened to a lullaby.

  • D6S2 - Seeking What Is Aware, and the Nine-Round Breathing David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded August 23, 2025

    The same practice, with one question folded in: occasionally seek out what is that consciousness that is concentrating, then release the question back into non-doing. David sets out the three levels of mind this tradition works with, the ordinary psyche, the substrate consciousness that shamatha dissolves into, and pristine awareness, and is careful to promise nothing. The session also teaches the nine-round breathing as a preparation, without the elaborate visualisations.

  • D6S1 - Shamatha Without a Sign: Awareness of Awareness David Oromith · 90 minutes · recorded August 23, 2025

    The perfection of not doing, the one method with nothing to hold: we rest attention in its own nature, simply being aware of being aware, with no object at all. David reads Padmasambhava on shamatha without a sign and returns to the three words, relax, release and no return. He also reads Lama Alan on why solitude is found distressing, that without distractions we come face to face with our own minds with no buffer zone and no escape, and on the six prerequisites for this kind of training.

  • D4S1 - The Dzogchen Approach to Mindfulness of Breathing David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded August 21, 2025

    The last of the breathing methods: we move attention off the sensations of the body and rest in awareness itself, noting only whether the breath is long or short. David takes it back to the Buddha's own instruction for mindfulness of breathing, to go to a forest, sit at the foot of a tree or find an empty room, sit with the back straight and establish mindfulness in front of you, and sets that beside the Dzogchen teaching of releasing awareness into the space ahead, eyes open, with no object of focus at all.

  • D8S5 - The Retreat's Closing Visualisation and Dedication Lama Alan · 42 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The retreat's closing guided practice, a fourfold visualisation on flourishing: what genuine happiness looks like now, what is needed from the world to reach it, how one would like to grow, and what one would most want to offer others. Lama Alan pictures light radiating from the heart with each aspiration, dedicates whatever benefit has come from the week, and closes with thanks to those who organised the retreat. The group offers him a verse of gratitude in return.

  • D8S4 - The Substrate Trap, and the Moon Behind the Clouds Lama Alan · 37 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Why resting in substrate consciousness, however blissful and still, is not yet realisation of pristine awareness, since dharmakaya is non-dual with space itself rather than one mind or many. Lama Alan answers questions on reading Dudjom Lingpa's text without prior empowerment, and on what a first glimpse of rigpa is worth, using the image of the moon seen through thinning cloud rather than mistaking it for full realisation. He closes by encouraging the group not to dwell on unworthiness.

  • D8S3 - Distinguishing Mind from Primordial Awareness Lama Alan · 72 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Lama Alan lays out three ways an ordinary mind gets mistaken for pristine awareness, from simply observing thoughts to resting in a substrate consciousness that feels blissful and still but is not yet realisation. He uses lucid dreaming to explain how recognising appearances as empty works the same way, then turns to the difference between conditioned and primordial consciousness, weighing in on the debate over what happens to an arhat at death.

  • D8S2 - The Text's Closing Verses, and Acquiring Confidence Lama Alan · 55 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The commentary reaches the end of Dudjom Lingpa's prose, tracing his own progress through the stages of realisation and the closing dedication verses of the text. Lama Alan explains why realising emptiness must go all the way down, likened to a nail driven flush with wood against one hammered below the surface, and why seeing the self as constructed rather than inherently existent makes choosing to see oneself as a Buddha a genuine option.

  • D8S1 - Resting in Awareness, and Why the Mind Must Change First Lama Alan · 95 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Lama Alan opens with guru yoga and refuge before a long guided rest in open awareness, then turns to why merely suspending self-grasping is not enough: freedom takes seeing the emptiness of self all the way down. He contrasts contentment with material needs against an insatiable aspiration for dharma, and argues that outer revolutions bring lasting good only once they grow from real inner change, as when a retreat at twenty-four showed him a mind like a junkyard and he set his studies aside.

  • D7S4 - The Foundations of Practice, and the Limits of Intellect Lama Alan · 42 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    A wide-angle survey of how Buddhist practice moves from the four foundations of mindfulness and calm abiding through the reasoning of Madhyamaka, and why Dzogchen then asks the practitioner to set all analysis aside once emptiness is realised. Lama Alan explains why pristine awareness can only be known by itself, never by perception or intellect, and recalls a Dzogchen text only coming alive once he received transmission from a teacher.

  • D7S3 - The Bardo as a Cinema, and Deities as Your Own Mind Lama Alan · 67 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The sense of moving from one life to the next in the bardo, compared to watching from inside a cinema: vivid, but never taking you anywhere. Lama Alan explains why Buddhas and their pure realms are displays of your own pristine awareness rather than places to travel to, and why emptiness must be realised before resting in open awareness or the insight will not hold. A guided practice continues the shift from calm abiding toward inverting awareness onto the observer.

  • D7S2 - Hell Realms as Dreams, and the Grip of Self and Other Lama Alan · 37 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The hell realms of traditional Buddhist cosmology, and why they are creations of mind rather than places built or imposed from outside. Lama Alan tells of the Buddha's earlier life as a beast of burden, whose compassion for a fellow ox ended his own hell realm, and turns to how reifying self and other as separate undermines empathy and invites manipulation. The session closes with a short guided practice in which we invert awareness onto the sense of being an agent.

  • D7S1 - The Three Marks of Existence in Everyday Examples Lama Alan · 118 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Lama Alan works through the three marks of existence: impermanence, illustrated by a ship that has had every plank replaced yet is still called the same boat; dukkha, the disappointment of expecting another person to be the source of our happiness; and not-self, shown by asking what in the body or mind is truly you, down to a cell phone that belongs to no one until it is claimed.

  • D6S4 - Finding the Basis of Designation for the Self Lama Alan · 68 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Before returning to practice, Lama Alan explains why greater stability of attention supports deeper inquiry, comparing it to the way trained working memory has been shown to raise measured intelligence. The main teaching then works through Dudjom Lingpa's method of finding the basis on which we label something as I, using examples from a facial blemish to a house, a cup of tea and an electron, to show that nothing is ever identical with its label.

  • D5S5 - Questions on Observing the Mind and Losing the Self Lama Alan · 90 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    A long question and answer session on why observing the mind is not the same as observing yourself, and why introspection can feel impossible even to a trained philosopher. Lama Alan addresses the anxiety that surfaces as meditation grows spacious and the sense of self loosens, and tells of the experiment in which Matthieu Ricard did not flinch at a gunshot while resting in open awareness. Questions also compare Dzogchen realisation with Advaita Vedanta.

  • D5S4 - Galileo's Moons, and a Realisation Not Yet Stable Lama Alan · 59 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Lama Alan uses Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter to show the difference between shamatha, simply noticing, and vipassana, noticing with inquiry into how something arises and fades. In the guided practice we extend this inquiry to thoughts and emotions arising in the mind. Returning to the text, he examines Dudjom Lingpa's admission that his realisation kept slipping, steady in practice but lost when he was frightened alone in the wilderness.

  • D4S5 - Bodhicitta's Stages and Whether Shamatha Comes First Lama Alan · 104 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Questions on whether one can enter the Bodhisattva path without shamatha lead Lama Alan through the stages of bodhicitta, from its first spontaneous arising to the irreversible form reinforced by wisdom. Wrathful teachers, one placing a boy unharmed in a bonfire, show ferocity as one of four compassionate modes of teaching. He explains why he critiques materialism, not materialists, and why Buddhists never chase people, as the newly enlightened Buddha let the first man he met walk away.

  • D4S4 - Full Shamatha, and Whether Consciousness Survives Death Lama Alan · 71 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    In the guided practice we narrow attention from the body to the space of the mind, before Lama Alan turns to what marks a full achievement of shamatha: a physical lightness and mental suppleness he traces through the ninth Karmapa, Atisha and Tsongkhapa. He argues shamatha, not vipassana or tantra, is the tool for testing whether consciousness continues after death, drawing on past life research.

  • D3S5 - Working with Emotional Triggers, and a Wide-Ranging Q&A Lama Alan · 116 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Catching a difficult emotion before it takes hold, using a psychologist's advice on spotting triggers early. Lama Alan takes questions ranging widely: clarity in falling asleep and dreaming, why appearances and awareness depend on each other, and the three kinds of bodhicitta known as shepherd, navigator and king. He closes weighing reports of yogis who show no bodily decay after death as evidence against materialism.

  • D3S4 - Right Listening and the Limits of Watching Thoughts Lama Alan · 51 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    A retreat as a deliberate withdrawal to regroup, not an escape, and three flaws that make listening to teachings useless: a distracted mind, a leaky one, or one full of assumptions. Lama Alan explains how Dudjom Lingpa comes by the text's title, smearing himself with mud and feathers to make an impression, then describes watching thoughts pass like calves on a plain, useful for beginners but not enough on its own.

  • D6S3 - Why Dzogchen Practice Is Simply Waking Up Lama Alan · 89 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Lama Alan traces how mental afflictions such as anger and pride do not simply vanish upon realisation but melt into the five wisdoms, and offers a third translation of Dzogchen, the Great Encompassment, alongside the more familiar Great Perfection and Great Completion. He describes the false cave of appearances, likening ordinary experience to a non-lucid dream, and says the entire task of Dzogchen practice comes down to one thing: waking up.

  • D6S2 - Resting in Awareness, and Why Nothing Exists Inherently Lama Alan · 83 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    A short experiment asks the group to rest in bare awareness for a few seconds before Lama Alan turns to Padmasambhava's song on dualistic grasping, tracing why day and night, joy and sorrow, and even galaxies are displays within pristine awareness rather than things existing from their own side. Using the example of a pair of glasses, he shows how nothing is inherently anything until it is conceptually labelled.

  • D6S1 - How View Transforms a Single Meditation Technique Lama Alan · 101 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The same meditation technique becomes shamatha, vipassana or Dzogchen depending on the view behind it. Lama Alan traces reification to an innate ignorance present from birth rather than acquired from culture, and explains why wrong views are the most destructive of unwholesome actions. Realising pristine awareness is a matter of degree, like seeing the moon through cloud, which is why questions turn to finding and trusting an authentic teacher.

  • D5S3 - The Space Between an Impulse and Acting On It Lama Alan · 102 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Drawing on William James and psychologist Paul Ekman, Lama Alan describes the brief gap between a desire or emotion arising and its becoming visible in speech or action, and why noticing that gap allows a wiser choice. In the guided practice we extend the observation of thoughts to this subtler layer of feeling. He traces Dudjom Lingpa's breakthrough, still coloured by subtle grasping, and distinguishes the substrate from the pristine awareness beneath it.

  • D5S2 - The Training This Text Assumes Lama Alan · 64 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Lama Alan explains why this teaching comes at the end of a long monastic training, after years on epistemology and on emptiness, four of them on Madhyamaka alone, and why skipping it leaves only the appearance of understanding. In the guided practice we return to observing thoughts arise and release in the space of the mind. He shows how the same technique becomes a different practice depending on its motivation, then turns to Nagarjuna's argument against inherent arising.

  • D5S1 - Six Domains of Practice, and Why Mind Is Not the Brain Lama Alan · 119 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Morning devotions and mantra lead into a guided practice in which we move through the six domains of experience, from sight and sound to the space of the mind alone. Lama Alan works through Dudjom Lingpa's dream teaching from Padmasambhava on the stages of realisation, using ice and water, night and day, to distinguish ordinary mind from pristine awareness, then argues that mental events are correlated with brain activity but never transform into it.

  • D4S3 - Settling the Mind, and the Emotions That Surface Lama Alan · 88 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    A guided practice of settling the mind in its natural state, upright or lying down, with instructions to refresh, restore and retain attention whenever it wanders. Lama Alan warns against forcing concentration onto a fixed object, since this tightens and agitates many minds, recommending instead watching thoughts from a distance, as a herdsman watches his flock. He describes what surfaces once the mind loosens: old memories, sudden depression, bliss.

  • D4S2 - The Third Balance, and the Search for Where Mind Exists Lama Alan · 90 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    A last session of mindfulness of breathing adds vividness to relaxation and stability already practised, likened to a guitarist's final notes growing softer as the audience listens closer. Lama Alan turns to Dudjom Lingpa's claim that mind, not body or speech, is primary, then investigates where a thought comes from and where it rests. He uses recognising someone by their face to show what counts as observing the mind.

  • D4S1 - Motivation, Guru Devotion and Entering the Path Lama Alan · 89 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The evening opens with a retranslated line from the liturgy, then Lama Alan offers 'taste of the town' as an image for a week's sampling of Dzogchen. Mindfulness of breathing is guided through relaxation balanced with effort, and questions turn to receiving a teacher's blessing without becoming dependent on it. He begins the root text: ethics as the foundation, and the steps of solitude and guru supplication that open the path.

  • D3S3 - Seeing Through the Guru, and Boundless Compassion Lama Alan · 103 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The substrate consciousness as a homing pigeon's coop, the place awareness returns to in sleep and in death. A breath practice leads into a guru yoga visualisation in which we trace devotion through lineage to our own pristine awareness. Lama Alan covers seeing Dharma companions through their Buddha nature rather than faults, cultivating compassion free of a mother's partiality, and what it means to receive a siddhi, in the lama who healed him with a stone heated in meditation.

  • D3S2 - Guru Devotion Across the Three Vehicles Lama Alan · 71 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Whether the universe rises to meet genuine effort toward wellbeing, or whether realisation simply depends on luck, training or momentum from past lives. In this breathing practice we explore the body's capacity to heal and not getting caught in the grip of emotion. Lama Alan sets out three ways of relating to a teacher, from the Buddha's emissary to the Vajrayana view of guru as Buddha, and how each can curdle into idolatry if misunderstood.

  • D3S1 - Refuge, Devotion and the Two Causes of Suffering Lama Alan · 106 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The refuge and bodhicitta prayers, examined line by line, with the image of trusting a dentist to explain what taking refuge means. Lama Alan introduces guru yoga and a self-empowerment visualisation with Padmasambhava, then leads a breathing practice in which we let go of identifying with sensations as mine, using a scratched phone and an injured knee as examples. The session ends with the three common preliminaries: precious human life, impermanence and suffering.

  • D2S4 - Four Questions on Happiness, and Reality's Blessings Lama Alan · 68 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Lama Alan admits teachings on suffering and hell realms can leave people tense rather than steadied, unlike those raised inside the tradition from childhood. A guided practice puts four questions to you: what would truly make you happy, what you want from the world, how you want to change, and what you would offer it. He closes with a Tibetan aristocrat who lost everything and called it a blessing, asking whether reality rises up to meet genuine practice.

  • D2S3 - The Buddha's Breathing Practice as a Source of Joy Lama Alan · 99 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The Buddha's own instructions on mindfulness of breathing, moving from long and short breath to attending to the whole body, with Lama Alan's account of his own breath settling to around fifteen cycles a minute in retreat. He describes a quiet enjoyment of the practice itself, a source of wellbeing that costs nothing. The second and third foundation stones follow: reflecting on death, and what it means to stop clinging to this life alone.

  • D2S2 - Stillness Without Stimulation, and Life After Death Lama Alan · 88 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    In the guided practice we remain still without stimulation or boredom, using the breath as an anchor rather than entertainment. Lama Alan surveys the basic supports of a contented life, food, shelter, clothing, medical care and education, before turning to the first of the text's foundation stones: whether consciousness continues after death. He argues the question cannot be set aside, since the rest of the practice depends on how it is answered.

  • D2S5 - Shamatha, Materialism and the Question of Rigpa Lama Alan · 101 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    A clarification that wealth, power and prestige are not faults in themselves, only where happiness is mistakenly sought. Lama Alan questions whether a materialist worldview can truly support ethical life, then explains why the Buddha and later masters insist shamatha remains indispensable even for those with deep realisation. The evening ends with a question on pristine awareness and the ground of reality, and a guided practice for settling into sleep.

  • D2S1 - The Liturgy, and Whether Dzogchen Must Wait Lama Alan · 95 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    The morning liturgy is recited once in Tibetan, once in English and once in silence, neither abandoned nor performed by rote. A guided Dzogchen practice follows, in which we rest awareness in stillness while attending to the fluctuations in the space of the body. The text then opens with Dudjom Lingpa stating plainly what he has realised, and the question Lama Alan spends the session on is whether Dzogchen must wait until the generation and completion stages are finished.

  • D1S1 - Meeting Dudjom Lingpa's Text and Its Lineage Lama Alan · 89 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025

    Lama Alan tells the story of Dudjom Lingpa, the nineteenth century Tibetan master who received his teachings through visions and never had a living human teacher. He traces the short lineage carrying this text to him and sets the retreat's format. The session includes a guided practice in which we settle body, breath and mind, and closes with the text's opening lines, where Dudjom Lingpa describes waking into pristine awareness as the Buddha Samantabhadra.

  • D6S3 - Atisha on Perception, and Closing the Retreat Lama Alan · 67 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025

    Lama Alan opens with Atisha's teaching that extrasensory perception depends on shamatha, illustrated with siddhis he has seen and Russell Targ's remote-viewing research. He contrasts the effortful path of tantric practice with the Dzogchen alternative: resting body, speech, and mind in complete inactivity until the mind settles of itself. The retreat closes with a four-part loving-kindness meditation in which we dedicate merit to the group's shared aims.

  • D6S2 - Merging Mind with Space, and What Shamatha Requires Lama Alan · 91 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025

    A guided practice of releasing awareness into open space, drawn from Dudjom Lingpa's Dzogchen texts, continues the sequence from the day before. Lama Alan describes the lasting effects of achieving shamatha, from vivid perception to lucid dreaming, and what it requires: a quiet environment, few desires, few activities, and companions with a similar practice. He ends by describing a Scottish property that could become a retreat centre.

  • D5S2 - Stability by Effort, or by Letting Go of Grasping Lama Alan · 73 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025

    Lama Alan opens by distinguishing shamatha, only the on-ramp, from the path itself, and contrasts developing stability through effort with simply discovering it once grasping is released. A short guided practice of resting in awareness of awareness follows. Questions take up the rest of the session, including three ways of handling a persistent thought and why reaching for awareness inside the head, instead of resting it in the space ahead, can bring on a headache.

  • D5S2 - The Emptiness of Self and the Nature of Awareness David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024

    David guides a practice of watching thoughts arise and dissolve without following them, a step toward resting in awareness itself. He turns to absolute bodhicitta, using a plant pot and an empty bank balance to show how self and things are labels placed over shifting causes and conditions rather than solid entities. Questions cover rebirth, relationships, and resting in pristine awareness.

  • S3 - Taking the Mind as the Path David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded October 29, 2024

    The releasing approach to shamatha, practised with the eyes open. David guides what Lama Alan Wallace calls the Dzogchen approach to mindfulness of breathing, resting in awareness itself with the rhythm of the breath only at the periphery. He gives the four benefits the Buddha named for this concentration, and the story of the monkeys raiding a retreat room in Nepal. The Vajra Essence's advice for those who cannot calm their thoughts leads into observing them without identifying or grasping.

  • Guided Meditation - The Dzogchen Approach to Mindfulness of Breathing David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded February 20, 2024

    The breath taken by releasing rather than by holding on. With the eyes partly open and the gaze resting vacantly in space, each out-breath lets go of tension and of thinking, until awareness simply hovers in the present. David then has you notice that the rhythm of the breath rises up to meet you on its own.

  • The Nine Stages (1-4) and Dzogchen Approach to Mindfulness of Breathing David Oromith · 65 minutes · recorded February 20, 2024

    The guided meditation follows Lama Alan's Dzogchen approach to mindfulness of breathing: we rest awareness openly with eyes open and only peripherally note the breath's rhythm rather than holding it as an object. David then works through the first four of the nine stages of shamatha, directed, continuous, resurgent and close attention, describing what is achieved at each and what still gets in the way. Discussion afterwards is brief, just a quick check on how the practice landed.

  • D2S2 - Compassion, Not Despair, and the Small Adversities Lama Alan · 83 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    Lama Alan Wallace returns to a point he had passed over, on training in compassion, and gives Buddhaghosa's analysis of it and its false facsimile, despair, which looks like it and is not. Practise first with minor adversity, the text says, and it will gradually become easier. Whether a thing is agreeable or disagreeable is the way our minds apprehend it, as with a dentist's drill. Half an hour of questions follows, on shamatha and dzogchen and on why expressing a toxic emotion deepens the habituation.

  • D3S1 - Self-Centredness and Tonglen Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

    Relative bodhicitta, and Shantideva's claim that self-centredness is a root of all suffering while caring for others more than oneself is a root of all happiness. Lama Alan Wallace traces the causes of suffering from the shravakayana through to dzogchen, then turns on Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents for teaching learned helplessness, and Francis Bacon's wish to put nature on the rack, which he calls psychopathic. The guided practice is tonglen with a loved one, a despised person and a neutral person.

  • Illumination of Primordial Wisdom, Question and Answer Sessions, Session 3 Lama Alan · 93 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    Appearances are handled differently in shamatha, where attention is selective, and in open presence, where it is not, and that difference opens the last hour of questions. Lama Alan Wallace tells a student with no teacher nearby to let the text itself be her lama, relays Karma Chagme on Mahamudra and Dzogchen being one as far as trekcho, and says fear of the mind dissolving means you are really getting somewhere. He ends by giving the oral transmission of the root text in English for the first time.

  • D6S2 - The Fruition and the Rainbow Body Lama Alan · 128 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    The commentary closes with the last two sections of the text, conduct and fruition, where meditative equipoise and daily life merge until no distinction is left between them. Lama Alan Wallace describes the three kinds of rainbow body the tradition reports, and reads the prophecies Dudjom Lingpa recorded in his autobiography, including thirteen disciples who would attain it. Two guided practices carry the whole path, from settling the mind to resting beyond apprehender and apprehended.

  • D5S2 - What Open Presence Actually Is Lama Alan · 121 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    Meditation in Dzogchen is nothing but sustaining the view, and the root text gives it in a line: the past has ceased, the future has not arisen, bring the consciousness of the present, as naked empty awareness, onto the path. The Vajra Essence warns how easily resting in the substrate is mistaken for that, and Lama Alan Wallace reads Sera Khandro on the four kinds of open presence. He tells of lamas who kept one taste through years in prison camps.

  • D3S2 - Quantum Physics and the Dreamlike World Lama Alan · 124 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    Against Stephen Hawking's picture of human beings as chemical scum on a little planet, Lama Alan Wallace says there is no happy middle ground between materialism and Dzogchen. He asks when anything actually came into existence, taking Mount Everest and the Higgs boson as his examples, then reads Niels Bohr and Schrodinger, who say physics cannot state what really exists, and living physicists who say space and time have gone. From the perspective of pristine awareness, this is not like a dream, it is one.

  • D2S2 - The Four Kinds of Mindfulness Lama Alan · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    Resting open to whatever arises is neither open presence nor shamatha, Lama Alan Wallace says, because the senses have no reason to implode into the mental. Gyatrul Rinpoche's line that those who achieve shamatha naturally experience compassion, as they view the predicament other beings are in, draws a long commentary. He traces the four kinds of mindfulness from Dudjom Lingpa's revealed teachings, ending in self-illuminating mindfulness, which is shamatha itself. The session closes with a practice on settling the mind in its natural state.

  • Illumination of Primordial Wisdom, Question and Answer Sessions, Session 1 Lama Alan · 71 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    An hour of written questions from 300 participants. Lama Alan Wallace separates the substrate consciousness, individuated and conditioned, from primordial consciousness, and calls shamatha in an active daily way of life and shamatha in retreat complementary, each the preparation for the other. On choosing a teacher: are the teachings compatible with the gold standard, is the conduct in harmony with them, do you find them beneficial? On the red HUM at the heart, go gently and let it come to you.

  • D5S1 - Apprehending the Apprehender Lama Alan · 124 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    The morning opens with Atisha's line on examining the character of unborn awareness, and Lama Alan Wallace draws out its consequence, that there was never a point at which we became sentient beings. Gyatrul Rinpoche's commentary separates apprehending the mind from apprehending the apprehender, a search that ends not in failure but in seeing one's own face directly. A one minute experiment identifies the interim between two thoughts, not other than rigpa.

  • D1S1 - The Homage and the Foundations Lama Alan · 127 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

    Lama Alan Wallace opens his commentary on Dudjom Rinpoche's five page manual, the first Dzogchen text Gyatrul Rinpoche taught him thirty one years ago. He works through the title and the homage to Dorje Drolo, and explains why resting in pristine awareness is the most ferocious response to the maras. Gyatrul Rinpoche's commentary supplies what the root text leaves out: the four revolutions in outlook, refuge and bodhicitta. It closes with a guided meditation on motivation.

  • D6S3 - The Brain Cannot Generate Consciousness, and Eva Natanya's Path Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 86 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020

    Closing questions, then a final guided practice. Lama Alan argues that emergent properties of physical phenomena are always physical, so there is no evidence that the brain generates consciousness, and that technological access to the substrate consciousness would liberate nobody. Eva Natanya describes her path from Zen through the Gelug tradition into Vajrayana. She closes by leading his fourfold vision quest: what you long to become, what help you need, what must change in you, and what you will offer.

  • D6S2 - The Uncreated Light of Tabor Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 117 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020

    Eva Natanya reads Gregory Palamas on the Transfiguration, where Christ became nothing he was not but showed the disciples what he had always been, and on the difference between God's essence, which no creature can share, and the uncreated energies, which divinise the saints. In the practice the breath is taken as divinising energy, and the innermost heart cries one line of prayer. Lama Alan replies with a bouquet of lotuses, taking up her point that human means something different in each tradition.

  • D5S2 - Created or Begotten Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 138 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020

    Eva Natanya sets Julian of Norwich's parable of the lord and the servant beside the Dzogchen account of how samsara begins, and draws the Greek distinction between created and begotten. She then guides a practice in which we draw awareness into the heart with the Jesus prayer and a stillness that can never be moved. Lama Alan hands her what he calls a bouquet of roses with thorns: no Christian tradition allows ontological identity with God, only visionary union, and asks whether Jesus said that or his followers concluded it.

  • D4S2 - The Circular Movement of the Intellect Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 132 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020

    Eva Natanya draws out the circular movement of the intellect, which Gregory Palamas quotes from Dionysius: awareness returning to itself and beholding itself in the heart, set beside awareness of awareness in Dzogchen. The meditation is an inquiry: who am I, where did this consciousness begin, could it have arisen from matter or been infused fresh from the divine mind. Lama Alan answers that the guru for all Christians is Jesus the Christ, and realisation comes through devotion and reverence.

  • D3S2 - The Prayer of the Heart Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 123 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020

    Eva Natanya teaches the prayer of the heart from Simeon the New Theologian, whose instructions are physical to the point of controversy and which Father Silouan, relaying his own teacher, called more a gesture of what happens in that experience than a technique. In the guided practice we let awareness fall from the head into the heart, call on the name of Jesus, then release even the words and rest in the darkness Simeon says comes first. Lama Alan objects to her calling pristine awareness unique.

  • S3 - Questions on Guru Yoga and Lineage Eva Natanya · 59 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020

    Questions put to Eva Natanya, starting with where to begin reading in the hesychast tradition: the Philokalia, and the contemporary writing of Father Silouan. She answers at length on whether a Christian can practise Dzogchen ngondro with Christ as root lama, and why she would keep a visualisation as it was transmitted while holding guru and yidam as inseparable. Further answers cover how lineage and authorisation work, and what the words Buddha, guru and lama actually carry.

  • D5S1 - Guru Yoga, and When Samsara Begins Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 119 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020

    Lama Alan Wallace sets the cataphatic question, what do I need to do, against the apophatic, what can I stop doing, and explains why guru yoga is core to Dzogchen: you cannot recognise yourself as a Buddha while seeing your guru as a sentient being. In the practice we dissolve the mentor into the heart, then rest without meditating on anything. Eva Natanya asks how a Buddha ever became deluded, and how the son of God ever fell, and hears that samsara begins in every instant appearances are seen as other.

  • D2S1 - The Dzogchen Answer to Suffering Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020

    Lama Alan Wallace gives the Dzogchen answer to why we suffer: we grasp at a body and mind that are neither I nor mine, and fail to recognise awareness that is already signless, boundless and all luminous. In the guided practice we rest in the awareness of being aware, eyes open, without identifying with whatever arises. Eva Natanya raises past lives as the elephant in the room, and is asked what becomes of those who lived before Christ if salvation is a one time offer.

  • D5S2 - Shamatha Without a Sign Lama Alan · 55 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019

    A guided 24 minute practice from Yangthang Rinpoche's root text on the view, meditation and conduct of Dzogchen. Turn awareness in upon that which is aware, follow no thought of past or future, and rest loosely without modifying anything. Lama Alan Wallace then reads the Vajira Sutta, the one place he has found in the Pali canon where the outer world is questioned: the nun answers Mara's who made you with the chariot that is only a word, but leaves suffering as real as it gets.

  • D7S1 - Padmasambhava's Pointing Out Instructions, and Innate Ignorance Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019

    The Dzogchen day. Lama Alan Wallace settles body, speech and mind, then reads Padmasambhava's pointing out instructions from Natural Liberation while we rest awareness in the space in front, without a meditative object. He separates the ignorance we are born with from the acquired kind, such as racism or materialism, and quotes one of the masters whose texts he translated in Open Mind: the awareness of which you are aware can be viewed as a ray of pristine awareness, and walking up that ray gets you to the sun.

  • D3S1 - Free Will, and the Three Qualities of a Student Lama Alan · 107 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019

    In a detailed preamble Lama Alan Wallace argues that the dispute over free will is the wrong question, and offers Shantideva's counsel to remain like a piece of wood when the mind comes under a mental affliction. The practice that follows is a fourth approach to mindfulness of breathing, from the Dzogchen side: we rest awareness in its own place, knowing itself while the breath is noticed peripherally. He names the three qualities that make a suitable vessel: open-minded, perceptive, eager to practise.

  • P2 - Meditation, Conduct and Dying Well Lama Alan · 139 minutes · recorded January 1, 2017

    Yangthang Rinpoche's text is blunt: without the view there is no meditation, only a cheap imitation of it, and poor preparation for death. The session opens with a guided practice in which we probe the mind for its colour, origin, location and destination. He works through meditation and conduct, the nine kinds of activity to be released, guru yoga and the four empowerments, why clinging to bliss, luminosity or non-conceptuality casts you into the desire, form and formless realms, and how to recognise the ground at death.

  • P1 - The View of the Great Perfection Lama Alan · 124 minutes · recorded January 1, 2017

    Lama Alan gives the oral transmission and commentary to a Dzogchen text by Yangthang Rinpoche, who turned eighteen years in a Chinese concentration camp into an eighteen year retreat. Four preliminaries come first, all difficult to find: a human life, the spirit of emergence, a qualified guru, the sublime dharma. The view is not theory: stop looking outward, settle the mind in its natural state, then ask where awareness comes from, where it is located, where it goes. The session opens with a guided shamatha practice.

  • S3 - Non-Meditation and the Near Misses Lama Alan · 121 minutes · recorded January 1, 2016

    Is the method shamatha, vipashyana or Dzogchen? Lama Alan answers that the same practice can be any of the three depending on who does it, then maps understanding, experience, realisation and confidence, realisation being nailing it and confidence countersinking it. The near misses: clinging to bliss, luminosity with grasping, and a non-conceptual openness with no lucidity of vipashyana in it. The session opens with a guided practice from Padmasambhava's Natural Liberation, ending in non-meditation.

  • S1 - Cracking Open the Egg of Unawareness Lama Alan · 99 minutes · recorded January 1, 2016

    The session opens with a twenty four minute practice on awareness of awareness. Lama Alan begins his transmission of Mipham Rinpoche's A Lamp to Dispel Darkness with who a village tantric practitioner has to be: an authentic motivation, bodhicitta and insight into emptiness. Then the fool's gold, the muddled consciousness of dwelling in the substrate, a space devoid of appearances, which yogis have conflated with realisation generation after generation, and why unawareness is what lets confusion in.

  • Part Three - Emptiness, Bodhicitta and Buddha Nature Lama Alan · 81 minutes

    How the second turning follows from the first. Lama Alan traces the argument from the nun Vajira, who reduces a chariot to a label and with it everything else, through Nagasena and King Milinda to the Heart Sutra, where the aggregates are empty of inherent nature too. He gives the reason for the bodhisattva's turn, the father who is last out of the burning house, and what is needed to reach the path of accumulation. The third turning and Buddha nature follow, and Dzogchen the final point.

  • Nature of Mind Glen Svensson · 79 minutes

    The mind itself becomes the object. Glen Svensson takes the shamatha practice of resting in awareness and adds questioning to it, which is what carries it over into vipashyana: who is releasing, who is concentrating, who is resting? He maps the three levels of Mahamudra and the nine vehicles of Dzogchen onto coarse mind, substrate consciousness and pristine awareness, and defines mind as that which is clear and knowing.

  • Part IV: Realising Spontaneous Fruition Ian Baker · 151 minutes

    Fruition as base, path and fruit, opened with the death of Dudjom Yangsi at 33 and Dzongsar Khyentse's letter on the vast chasm the great Dzogchen masters warn of between Dzogchen and the teaching of Dzogchen. Ian Baker sets passages from the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra beside Tilopa's instructions to Naropa, arguing that the inner fire and the spheres of light predate their Buddhist iterations. He describes a reverse breathing tummo rather than leading one, and closes on community, and on the depth that only retreat gives.

  • Part III: Unifying Insight and Action Ian Baker · 152 minutes

    The view carried into conduct, around Chatral Rinpoche's instruction that action should not be lost in the view, nor the view lost when acting. Ian Baker reads the mahasiddha Siddharajni on the inner fire burning the chakra deities, and places tummo as the foundation of the six yogas. Asked about his practice, he describes lungom, a wind meditation of held breath and running in the Scottish forest, gazing at the sky until the mind moves. Questions take in doubt as a path, and Kali as Troma Nakmo.

  • Part II: Perfecting the Path Ian Baker · 150 minutes

    Turning from view to practice, Ian Baker reads Dudjom Rinpoche's instructions for mountain retreat on how thoughts liberate themselves: first like meeting someone you already know, then a snake unbinding itself, finally a thief in an empty house. The longest stretch is korde rushen, the Dzogchen preliminaries: acting out the six realms as psychodrama, clearing them along the central channel with om ah hung, then the secret practices of body, voice and mind. Trekcho, togal and dark retreat are described rather than taught.

  • Part I: Refining the View Ian Baker · 158 minutes

    Ian Baker traces how Dzogchen developed, from early formulations close to Chan through their absorption into mainstream Tibetan tantric Buddhism. He reads the view from images of Samantabhadra and Padmasambhava, and describes his own training under Chatral Rinpoche, who sent him to a cave for a month with a bag of tsampa. Before there was Dzogchen there was Sahajayana, Saraha's innate bliss. A talk and questions, no guided practice, closing with a request to find a poem or song expressing the view.

  • Part IV: Nourishing the Subtle Body Ian Baker · 197 minutes

    Chulen, the Tibetan word for rasayana, substances that support practice and realisation, is the subject here. Ian Baker reads out a treasure text describing five magical herbs said to grow in the womb of the goddess Vajrayogini in lower Pemako, then traces herbal medicine as one of five means of attaining siddhi through the Abhidharmakosha and Patanjali, mercury in the Kalachakra, and what soma was. Practical examples follow, from onion juice and honey for inner fire to shilajit in long retreat, then an hour of questions.

  • Part III: Approaching the Great Perfection Ian Baker · 197 minutes

    Ian Baker turns from landscape to the six yogas of Naropa, read through a seminar Chogyam Trungpa gave in the 1970s: illusory body, inner fire, karma mudra, clear light, dream, transference of consciousness and the bardos. He tells the story of the prince who believed in neither islands nor princesses nor God, and sets Longchenpa beside Milarepa, for whom nothing compares with the yoga of inner fire. Questions follow on Mahamudra and Dzogchen, kundalini and tummo, and ethics for Vajrayana in the West.

  • Part II: Outer and Inner Pilgrimage in Dzogchen Tantra Ian Baker · 193 minutes

    The route continues past the waterfall into lower Pemako, now in Arunachal Pradesh, up the Yangsang Chu, which the Tibetan texts describe as the uterine channel of Vajrayogini. Ian Baker describes the Adi and Mishmi communities and the Adi shamans, then turns to tummo, the postures that open the lower gates, and merging the mind stream with the sound of a waterfall. He closes with the search with the amchi Sherab for five magical plants named in the texts. The discussion asks who tantric practice suits.

  • Part I: Outer and Inner Pilgrimage in Dzogchen Tantra Ian Baker · 192 minutes

    Ian Baker tells how he came to the hidden land tradition through his principal teacher Chatral Rinpoche, who answered his questions by sending him to live alone in a beyul for a month. He works through the outer, inner, secret and innermost secret levels of Pemako as the body of Vajravarahi in union with Hayagriva, and the long search for the waterfall in the Tsangpo gorges. A seminar with photographs throughout and no guided practice. Questions cover Tulshuk Lingpa and the pure lands.

  • Mind & Mandalas - Part Three Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · Ian Baker · 62 minutes

    Questions from those listening. Eva Natanya gives Tsongkhapa's answer to why realising emptiness alone is not enough: living beings need form, and a Buddha must be able to manifest in form. Ian Baker takes the objection that visualisation is a flight simulator rather than a flight, and agrees it can become a trap. Lama Alan Wallace sets out what Atisha and Tsongkhapa said about consort practice, who it is not for, and how badly it has been abused. He closes on Dudjom Lingpa's Buddhahood Without Meditation, and how much effort it takes to reach the effortless.

  • Mind & Mandalas - Part Two Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · Ian Baker · 93 minutes

    Lama Alan Wallace replies to both presentations with a single image, Samantabhadra as the personification of one's own pristine awareness, and argues that guru yoga, not deity generation, is the one indispensable support for Dzogchen. He traces what each vehicle does with the mental afflictions, from counteracting them to their revealing their true face. Ian Baker brings in Milarepa and Yeshe Tsogyal on tummo, Lama Alan Wallace turns to quantum physics and space-time being doomed, and Eva Natanya closes on mind and the vital energies being of one nature but distinct in function.

  • Mind & Mandalas - Part One Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · Ian Baker · 88 minutes

    Ian Baker opens with an illustrated tour of the mandala, from scroll paintings and sand mandalas to Borobudur, Samye and Mount Kailash, then inward to the chakras and the mandala of the completion stage. Eva Natanya answers from Tsongkhapa's Guhyasamaja commentaries: it is the wisdom realising emptiness that arises as the deity, never an ordinary sense of identity made to look like a Buddha. They close on how practices born outside monasticism were absorbed into it. Teaching and dialogue, with no guided practice.

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