The nature of mind

92 teachings in the library are about this.

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.
Guided Meditation - Awareness of Awareness Through Sound, Body and Mind David Oromith · 19 minutes · recorded July 14, 2026
Eyes open and the gaze resting in space, sounds are noticed arriving on their own, then the difference between a sound and the awareness of it: sounds come and go, what knows them does not. The move repeats in the body, taking the most obvious sensation and asking whether the awareness itself is aching, and then to a thought and a worry, met from the awareness holding it. It closes sharpening on the in breath and relaxing on the out.
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.
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.
D5S1 - Taking the Mind as the Path: Watching Thought Without Following It David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded August 22, 2025
We turn attention from the body to the mind itself: thoughts, images, memories and desires observed as they arise, play out and pass, without following any of them anywhere. David speaks personally about how this meditation helped with his own anxiety, because it totally changed his relationship with those anxious thoughts: the only power they have over you is the power you give them. He also warns of the version that only looks empty, where you are filling the space by talking your way through it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
D5S3 - The Oscillation, and Not Rushing Pristine Awareness Lama Alan · 142 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan guides an oscillation practice, concentrating awareness and releasing it, then turns to Padmasambhava's instructions for directing awareness to the sky, either side, below, and the heart, without anything to visualize. He warns against being introduced to pristine awareness before genuine stillness arises, since it then becomes only a memory to be dogmatic about. A closing exercise on listening for a distant sound shows how attention can reach outward with no image at all.
D5S1 - Shamatha Without a Sign, and Stages Six and Seven Lama Alan · 115 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
The session opens with a guided practice of awareness of awareness in which we rest without any object at all, followed by why this is considered the ultimate retreat. Lama Alan then maps stages six and seven of the nine stages of shamatha, where old material gets dredged up and desire, depression and lethargy can surface, and explains how to tell a meditative experience from something needing a doctor. He warns against treating each stage as a goal to chase.
D4S1 - Two Paths to Practice, and How Appearances Deceive Lama Alan · 116 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan contrasts the monastic route of cutting all ties with staying in the world, married or with children, and explains how to weed attachment out of a relationship while keeping the love that comes with it. He turns to why appearances of colour and self are always misleading, since nothing exists in the solid way it seems to, and answers those who say shamatha is no longer achievable by pointing to the Dalai Lama's own encouragement to practise it.
D3S2 - Letting Thoughts Dissolve, or Cutting Them Off Lama Alan · 86 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Two ways of working with thoughts in shamatha: the soft approach of watching them dissolve, shown through the raven that finds no land and returns to the ship it flew from, as a thought returns to the mind, and the more active approach of cutting off each thought as it arises, likened to a swordsman deflecting arrows. Lama Alan explains why any composite thing carries the seeds of its own dissolution, and answers a question on releasing a recurring thought without indulging or fighting it.
Session Three - Perception, Emptiness and Clarity of Mind David Oromith · 88 minutes · recorded April 3, 2025
Teaching only this week, with no guided meditation until the close. David examines how appearances such as colour or a table are constructed by the senses and mind rather than known directly, drawing on Guy Armstrong and Donald Hoffman's account of perception, before describing mind as the union of emptiness, clarity and compassionate responsiveness, or Buddha nature. The session ends with an eyes open meditation in which we rest in awareness without an object, then questions on that practice.
Guided Meditation - The Beginningless Continuum of Mind David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
We turn attention to the thing we call mind, where nothing static can be found, only moment to moment processes, a thought arising one moment and passing the next. The continuum is traced back through birth to the first consciousness of a foetus, which must have had its own prior cause. Since the lives are countless, so are the mothers, and David asks you to see every being you meet as one of them.
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.
D6S4 - Four Lines on Altruism Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 62 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
The golden portal practice again, then a four line verse on altruism gone through twice, first in a secular sense and then as the whole path folded into four lines. Through the attitude of benefiting others I tame my own mindstream, then the mindstreams of others, then everyone delights me, then there is tenderness for all. Michael Lobsang Tenpa then guides a free association practice, drifting between beings and spending a few cycles of breathing wishing each one well.
D4S1 - Mindfulness, Introspection and Awareness Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 61 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
The machinery underneath the practice. Michael Lobsang Tenpa separates awareness in the ordinary sense from pristine awareness, then explains mindfulness as non-forgetfulness rather than the non-judgemental awareness of the mindfulness movement. Mindfulness holds the chosen being and the awareness through the lens of loving kindness; introspection checks for laxity, excitation, and whether loving kindness itself has gone. The four questions open, and a short harvesting joy practice closes.
Guided Meditation - White Light at the Heart Centre David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded November 12, 2023
Twenty one counted rounds steady the mind, then a glowing white orb appears at the centre of the chest, no bigger than a golf ball, at the level of the heart. It is enough to imagine it is there. David calls this the root of the mind, where it converges in deep dreamless sleep and at the end of a life, and asks for a loose focus and the sense of meditating from there rather than behind the eyes.
Our Need to Be Liked & Approved Of David Oromith · 34 minutes · recorded September 17, 2023
In the meditation on the sky-like nature of mind we watch thoughts arise and pass like clouds while resting in the clear, spacious awareness beneath them. David talks about our need to be liked and approved of, seen in social media validation, peer pressure and people-pleasing at work, and why tying self-worth to others' opinions is such shaky ground. He offers loving kindness towards ourselves, reflecting on impermanence and the Dalai Lama's reminder that we carry Buddha nature.
D6S2 - The Four Yogas of Mahamudra Lama Alan · 98 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
The four yogas, single-pointedness, freedom from elaboration, one taste and non-meditation, and how each maps onto the paths and grounds of a bodhisattva. Lama Alan Wallace reads Atisha's images of realisation complete but not manifesting, the lion cub in the womb whose three strengths are all there and the garuda inside its shell, and describes the mother and child clear light meeting at death. Questions close the retreat, among them what to do when a teacher's conduct has harmed students.
D6S1 - Atisha's Mahamudra, the View Lama Alan · 99 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
The retreat leaves the mind training for Atisha's own root text on mahamudra, his pith instructions on connate union, the lineage traced back through Naropa and Tilopa. Lama Alan Wallace gives Atisha's view: the mind's essential nature is its lack of origination, cessation and duration, its manifest nature is luminosity, and the two have never been apart. The practice is Atisha's own instruction, do not modify, do not block, do not think, do not practise, once all uncertainty has been cut off.
Guided Meditation - Viewing the Mind As Like the Sky David Oromith · 20 minutes · recorded March 31, 2021
This is a guided meditation on viewing the mind as like the sky. Whenever we identify with and get carried away by our thoughts we lose awareness of the spacious clarity of our mind, within which our thoughts occur, and our perspective becomes small and constricted. When we can simply observe thoughts arising without getting involved, then we can come to know the natural spacious and clear nature of our mind. Calm, clear, peaceful, open spaciousness – without agitation and without anxiety and distress. Getting to know the mind in this way will help us understand and influence our thoughts, emotions, and in turn, our entire reality.
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.
Illumination of Primordial Wisdom, Question and Answer Sessions, Session 2 Lama Alan · 64 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
Can Westerners achieve shamatha? Lama Alan Wallace answers firmly yes, naming one of his own lamas, Lama Karma, who reached it in six months of very strict retreat after twenty years of practice, and argues that it is rare because conducive conditions are rare. Waves of fatigue in practice mean take a nap. Mantra recitation opens the heart but cannot carry anyone to shamatha, since the mind stays active. Readiness for a strict retreat is contentment when the stimulation is taken away.
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.
D6S1 - Do Nothing a Buddha Wouldn't Do Lama Alan · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
The final morning begins with a twenty four minute practice rather than a talk, in which we rest in awareness of awareness. Lama Alan Wallace then reaches conduct, where equipoise and daily life merge indivisibly and thoughts arise as aids to meditation. Yangthang Rinpoche's commentary adds the detail: sustain that initial moment of freshness, because mental afflictions ride on the current of conceptualization. In the closing practice we watch the mind designate objects and reify them.
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.
D4S1 - Searching for the Apprehending Mind Lama Alan · 127 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
Chasing awareness back to its source, as a sunbeam is traced back to the sun, is the instruction here. Lama Alan Wallace distinguishes vipashyana, which entails inquiry, from the non-judgemental witnessing taught under that name, then puts the questions in Dudjom Rinpoche's commentary: where a thought arose, where it is now, where it ceases, who is the agent of joys and sorrows, and whether that mind has a beginning, end and interim. In the closing practice we put them to whatever arises in the mind.
D3S1 - The Demons Are Your Own Appearances Lama Alan · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021
Whether shamatha must wait for full retreat is answered with an email from an elderly practitioner in a city flat, whose practice has continuity and bliss: right now we are in the optimal circumstances. Lama Alan Wallace turns to vipashyana, where Dudjom Rinpoche treats the whole external world through the demons we blame for obstructing us, and shows them to be appearing aspects of our own mind, empty yet vividly appearing, like a dream. He then guides a practice, opening all six doors of perception.
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.
Guided Meditation - The Space of the Mind David Oromith · 15 minutes · recorded April 6, 2020
This is a 15-minute guided meditation in which we turn our attention to the space of the mind - the domain where thoughts, images, memories, and feelings arise. This meditation helps us to become familiar with the true nature of our human mind and the true nature of our mental activity, by taking a step back from being dragged along and instead, simply observing. When we are experiencing crippling anxiety, stress, depression, and other strong negative emotions, it is easy to become overwhelmed and can seem impossible to gain control over our mind. This meditation allows us to see that thoughts, feelings, memories, are not as big, scary and daunting as they seem. Instead, we see that they are formless - they have no shape, colour, size, smell, or tactile properties. By seeing this directly, we can realise our power as the agent, the 'thinker,' and learn to gain control over our mind and our emotions, instead of them having control over us.
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.
D5S3 - Simeon's Light, and the Clear Light of Death Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 96 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Eva Natanya tells Simeon the New Theologian's own story of being flooded with light while praying, and reads Gregory Palamas on deification as a grace no natural capacity can reach. In her guided practice the heart becomes a chamber of light, drawing in the suffering of others and sending it back transformed. Lama Alan then answers a question on dying with the Tibetan account step by step, from the senses imploding to the clear light, and compares heaven with the pure land of Amitabha.
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.
D6S1 - Convergence, Not Conversion Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 128 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Convergence rather than conversion is Lama Alan Wallace's theme for the closing day, and where the two traditions find deep common ground is in love and compassion. He works through the four immeasurables, then guides a practice with an orb of light at the heart, drawing in darkness on the in breath and sending out loving kindness on the out breath, widening from oneself to one person and on to every being. Eva Natanya warns how easily one's own pristine awareness becomes a possession of the ego.
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.
D4S1 - Searching for the Mind, and Whether Shamatha Is Indispensable Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Lama Alan Wallace separates the Christian meanings of meditation and contemplation from the Buddhist ones, then leads a vipashyana practice from Padmasambhava: place the mind in the space in front of you and look for its shape, colour and size, and ask whether the mind that places and the mind placed are one or two. Eva Natanya agrees within a Buddhist context that no transformation is sustainable without shamatha, but not for the hesychast tradition, where dispassion is worked by the uncreated energies of the Trinity.
D3S1 - Shamatha Without a Sign Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 123 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Lama Alan Wallace turns awareness in upon awareness itself, the method the Buddha called the most profound of the shamatha practices, and traces where it leads: the mind dissolving into the substrate consciousness, which is often mistaken for nirvana. He guides a practice of inverting awareness on the in breath and releasing it into open space on the out breath, then asks who the meditator is. Eva Natanya asks about the different levels of mystery, and which of them can be known.
D7S3 - Nighttime Dream Yoga Lama Alan · 80 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Yangthang Rinpoche's pointing out instructions are completed and then practised, awareness resting in open presence, body relaxed, voice silent, mind unmodified. Lama Alan Wallace then takes up Padmasambhava's stages of dream yoga, beginning with falling asleep in the lion posture, Padmasambhava at the throat and a request to recognise the dream. Recall and vividness come first, then the dream is transformed, one thing multiplied into many. Last comes seeing through it, by jumping into a river.
D7S2 - Pointing Out Pristine Awareness Lama Alan · 59 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace gives one more reason for his research centre, a controlled experiment on past-life recall, and Michelle Alexander's New York Times column asking what if we are all coming back. The guided practice carries Yangthang Rinpoche's root text from shamatha through vipashyana into pointing out, the mind found to be neither existent nor non-existent, its emptiness the dharmakaya and its luminosity the sambhogakaya. He closes on the Vajra Essence, the ground frozen by dualistic grasping.
D6S2 - The Grand Finale of Shamatha Lama Alan · 62 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
A review fires Descartes, materialism and the Buddhist schools in turn on the way to Madhyamaka, before Lama Alan Wallace turns to what he calls the grand finale of shamatha without a sign. He guides awareness cast upward, to each side and downward through the space of awareness, then down into the heart, then released whole into space. Padmasambhava's text gives the indications of flawless shamatha, an oil lamp unmoved by wind, and warns against being introduced to pristine awareness too soon.
D5S4 - Probing the Mind as Agent Lama Alan · 71 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Consciousness is defined as luminous and cognizant, and Lama Alan Wallace turns Padmasambhava's next phase inwards: who or what is it that concentrates and releases the attention? In the guided practice we keep the oscillation going and probe the sense of being the agent, which he says can cut through to pristine awareness. The Heart Sutra and the Diamond Cutter Sutra follow, where even nirvana is like a dream, the Dalai Lama on why that turns sympathy into compassion, and lucid dreaming as the footstool into dream yoga.
D5S3 - Awareness of Awareness Lama Alan · 88 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace takes up shamatha without a sign, awareness of awareness, which the Buddha counted among the ten kasinas and the subtlest of the methods Padmasambhava teaches. We use an oscillation of arousing the attention and releasing it into space, and three things mean you are doing it incorrectly: distraction, grasping, and losing clarity. Conduct between sessions follows: rely upon unwavering mindfulness, picking thought up and putting it down like a knife and fork.
D4S3 - The Space of the Mind Lama Alan · 91 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace fills in the piece most easily overlooked in shamatha on the mind: when nothing arises, attend to the space itself. Mickey Mouse balanced on his head and the Big Dipper's imagined lines show that the space of the mind is not inside your head. In the guided practice we move from shamatha into vipashyana on where thoughts come from and dissolve. He then reads the physicist Henning Genz on real things as excitations of the vacuum, shapeless in itself until it takes on a shape.
D3S5 - False Awakenings and Dream Karma Lama Alan · 94 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Thoreau on going to the woods to front only the essential facts of life, read out in full, then an unguided period, offered as half subduing thoughts breath by breath and half settling the mind in its natural state. The questions that follow take in false awakenings, one dreamer waking nine times over, and people certain they have achieved shamatha. Lama Alan Wallace gives the Buddha's answer on whether a non lucid dream accrues karma, and the experiment he wants run on where memories are held.
D2S5 - Evening Questions on Mind and Memory Lama Alan · 89 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
One silent period, each person following whichever method of mindfulness of breathing benefits them most. The rest of the evening goes to written questions. Lama Alan Wallace argues that memories are stored in the substrate consciousness rather than the brain, since your apps are not stored in your keyboard. He gives consciousness two defining characteristics, making appearances manifest and knowing, and calls panpsychism, integrated information theory included, the last gasp of materialism.
D2S3 - Awareness of Awareness, Dying Lucidly, and Loving Kindness Lama Alan · 85 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Nothing could persuade you that you are not conscious, and Lama Alan takes that as his starting point. He describes the substrate consciousness, then guides awareness of awareness, released into space on the out-breath and inverted upon itself on the in-breath. What the dying process holds for anyone who stays lucid follows. The session closes with loving kindness, an aspiration rather than an emotion, with the near enemy Buddhaghosa names in the Path of Purification, self-centred attachment.
D2S2 - Observing Thoughts and Emotions, and the Substrate Consciousness Lama Alan · 54 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Paul Ekman's spark and flame: recognising an emotion before the flame of its expression is worth training for, and a neuropsychiatrist rated metacognitive impairment worse than being blind, deaf or physically impaired. In the guided practice we move through the visual, auditory and tactile fields into the sixth, the mind, sorting appearances seen in real time from impulses caught only retrospectively. Maitripa's second method closes on the substrate consciousness, its bliss, luminosity and non-conceptuality.
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.
D6S1 - Looking for the Observer Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The third phase on the way to shamatha without a sign, guided: we rest awareness in the space ahead with no object, then turn in upon the mind that is observing, probing closely then releasing. Lama Alan Wallace gives Tsongkhapa's pith instruction, focus on the sheer luminosity and cognisance of awareness, and grants Shantideva's point that a candle flame does not illuminate itself: awareness illuminates only the bundle just before it. Pull the observation out of observed, observation and observer, and all three go.
D5S1 - Watching Thoughts Like a Cowherd Lama Alan · 96 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
In settling the mind in its natural state, eyes softly open and the gaze vacant, we watch whatever rises in the space of the mind from the stillness of awareness, as Dudjom Lingpa's cowherd watches cattle from afar. Lama Alan Wallace reads Lerab Lingpa on what the practice yields, empty forms and a non-conceptual sense that nothing can harm the mind, and warns with the story of the student who reached shamatha and did nothing but enjoy it, before mapping the four kinds of mindfulness that lead there.
D1S1 - Are You Human? The Three Poisons and the Substrate Lama Alan · 100 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The opening evening is teaching only, with no practice. Lama Alan Wallace starts from a Pali Canon exchange in which the brahmin Dona asks the Buddha whether he is a god, a spirit or a human, is told no to each, and hears the reply, I am awake. He works through the three poisons of the mind, and the dualistic grasping that is the taproot of craving and hatred, runs the ten Buddhist analogies for illusion, and lays out the substrate and substrate consciousness.
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.
S2 - The Substrate Is Not Rigpa Lama Alan · 48 minutes · recorded January 1, 2016
The whole instruction is one sentence: naturally observe that which knows the referent of the mind. Lama Alan returns to it, argues that Buddhism was never a religion so nothing needs taking out of it, distinguishes three levels, the psyche, substrate consciousness and pristine awareness. A barn in the dark with a sliver of sky: the barn is your mind, the sky primordial consciousness. Resting in sheer luminosity or a serene vacuity is pleasant and a complete dead end. Teaching only, no practice.
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.
Guided Meditation - Awareness of Awareness Released into Open Presence Lama Alan · 24 minutes
You begin with the movements of the mind, attending to thoughts and images without distraction or grasping, then shift to the space they emerge from and ask whether that vacuity is simply nothing or a kind of something. Lama Alan then turns your awareness back upon itself, resting in the sheer event of knowing, and describes how this practice pursued intently implodes into the substrate consciousness. Finally the cord is cut and you rest in open presence.
Guided Meditation - The Nature of Mental Events, How Thoughts Arise and Dissolve Lama Alan · 24 minutes
With the gaze vacant and the mind settled in its natural state, you turn to the field of the mind and inspect the events arising there. Lama Alan asks how thoughts and images emerge, from where, whether they hold still or change, and how they dissolve. When you find yourself caught up in a thought, that thought becomes the object rather than a distraction. The practice then continues in silence to the close.
Guided Meditation - Vipashyana, Searching the Mind for Shape, Size and Location Lama Alan · 24 minutes
With the body settled and your eyes partly open, Lama Alan asks you to place your mind in the space before you, then look for whatever it was you placed. Is there a single entity that thinks, remembers and perceives? Is it the same from moment to moment? The inquiry narrows to one question: if the mind exists it must have characteristics, so does it have shape, size or location? It ends with you still searching, in silence.
Guided Meditation - Vipashyana, Searching for the Mind That Observes Lama Alan · 24 minutes
Lama Alan turns awareness back on itself and asks what the mind actually is. Having directed attention to the space of the body, you invert it and inspect whatever was doing the directing. Does the mind have a shape, a size, a colour, a location? Set it in motion when it is too still to see. You watch states of mind arise and dissolve, and close on the question: who or what are you?
Guided Meditation - Settling the Mind in Its Natural State, with the Snorkelling Metaphor Lama Alan · 25 minutes
Lama Alan uses a snorkelling metaphor to move you in stages from the breath to the mind itself. Floating on an air mattress, you rest in the tactile field; then you dip your face beneath the water and turn part of your attention to the space of the mind. Handhold released, thoughts, images and reactions to sounds become the whole object, observed without grasping and without distraction, attentive but not reactive.
Cognitive & Emotional Balance Glen Svensson · 90 minutes
The last two balances: cognitive balance, which is vipashyana seeing experience without projecting onto it, illustrated by the coiled rope mistaken for a snake, and emotional balance, which the compassion practices serve. Glen Svensson guides a nature of mind practice in which we search for where awareness is located, and then a tonglen. He then lays out how to integrate all four into daily life, and a review of one good act, one harmful act and one thing received before sleep.
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.
Merging Mind with Space Glen Svensson · 80 minutes
Awareness is directed up, right, left and down into space, then to the centre of the chest and out in all directions, loosening the sense that it is something small inside the head. Glen Svensson sets out what Buddhism means by mind: its definition as clear and knowing, the six consciousnesses, and the coarse, subtle and very subtle levels. He warns how easily stillness is mistaken for insight into emptiness. A second practice adds Padmasambhava's questioning, and we alternate looking with rest.
Open Awareness Glen Svensson · 85 minutes
The last session of the day opens with a further guided observing of thoughts, then Glen Svensson sets out three levels of mind, the coarse mind, the substrate consciousness reached in shamatha, and pristine awareness. He works through the six prerequisites for shamatha training, quoting Tsongkhapa on a supportive place and Steve Jobs on remembering death. The closing practice is open awareness, widening to sensory as well as mental events, introduced with Viktor Frankl on the space between stimulus and response.
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.

The nature of mind

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