Practice Library

Consciousness and science

15 teachings in the library are about this.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Four Aspects of Mental Balance Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded August 29, 2022

  Lama Alan Wallace argues that modern psychology mistakes symptoms such as depression and anxiety for disorders, and looks outward for causes that are primarily inward. Drawing on the Nalanda tradition, he sets out four kinds of mental balance, conative, attentional, cognitive and emotional, each able to fail through deficit, hyperactivity or dysfunction. It is exposition throughout, with no guided practice. Questions cover his fourfold vision quest and compassion in wartime.

• D4S2 - The Five Powers and Dying Lama Alan · 86 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022

  Accumulating merit and purifying obscurations by the four remedial powers, why Atisha counsels offerings to spirits, which Lama Alan Wallace defends by arguing that the physical world is not hermetically sealed against the non-physical, and offerings to the Dharma protectors. Then the five powers for one life and the same five for dying, of which Atisha says there is no more wondrous counsel on dying than this. Questions on brain and mind correlations, lucid dreaming and whether the self is a composite. No guided practice.

• D4S2 - The Mind as a Black Box Lama Alan · 123 minutes · recorded January 1, 2021

  Dignaga and Dharmakirti argued that we only ever meet appearances, so nothing can be validly inferred about a world behind them, which is why the mind only school kept the mind and discarded the world. Lama Alan Wallace then shows Dudjom Rinpoche turning the same blade inward, since the mind that observes is a black box too. Kant's noumena and John Wheeler's conclusion that information is fundamental follow. In the closing practice we seek out the mind as agent and observer.

• 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.

• 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 - 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.

• D2S3 - What Materialism Cannot Explain Lama Alan · 99 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019

  The Burmese method of mindfulness of breathing, attention on the rise and fall of the abdomen, chosen here to enhance stability without losing the underlying ease. Lama Alan Wallace tells how Stephen LaBerge's recurring dream monster kept coming back until he gazed into its eyes and thought, you're just like me, wishing for happiness, at which it dissolved into his heart and never came back. Most of the teaching is a case against materialism: no theory of consciousness in 150 years, and the luminous ether as his parallel.

• Space, Time and Consciousness Lama Alan · Bernard Carr · 145 minutes · recorded January 1, 2016

  An evening dialogue between Lama Alan Wallace and the cosmologist Bernard Carr, a doctoral student of Stephen Hawking. Carr speaks first: what is missing from the triumphant picture of physics is our own mind, which needs a higher dimensional space beyond that of ordinary physics. Lama Alan answers with three dimensions of consciousness and a contemplative observatory opened to scientists from day one. They differ once, over Buddhism classed as a religion, and close on cosmic cycles and consciousness conserved.

• 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.

• D2S2 - In the Seen, Just the Seen Lama Alan · 46 minutes

  The Buddha's instruction to Bahiya, in the seen let there be just the seen, becomes a twenty four minute guided practice. We take attention in turn to the visual, auditory, tactile and mental fields, with as little projection as possible. Of everything that appears we then ask whether any of it is unchanging, a true cause of happiness, actually yours, or actually you. Lama Alan follows with a challenge to materialism, arguing that nothing we directly experience is located in physical space.

• D1S3 - William James on Attention, and the Shamatha Project Lama Alan · 67 minutes

  William James held that each of us chooses, by our ways of attending, what sort of universe we appear to inhabit. Lama Alan turns that on narcissism and on low self-esteem, and on why a materialist and a contemplative find different things obviously real. James also thought sustained attention a fixed trait; the three month Shamatha Project, with seventy subjects, showed otherwise. Relaxation supports stability, stability supports vividness, and skipping a step ends in burnout.

• 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.

More by subject

• Anger and aversion 140
• Attachment and craving 116
• The nature of mind 92
• Emptiness 84
• The bodhisattva path 80
• Anxiety and fear 78
• Death and dying 76
• Distraction and attention 70
• Sleep and rest 66
• Buddhist psychology 59
• Illness and pain 57
• Karma 56
• Teacher and student 56
• Habits and change 50
• Genuine happiness and wellbeing 48
• Patience, forbearance and acceptance 46
• Relaxation 41
• Impermanence 40
• Gratitude and appreciation 38
• Tantra and Vajrayana 37
• Relationships and family 35
• Depression and low mood 32
• Dream yoga 32
• Motivation and intention 32
• Dreams and sleep 31
• Comparison and self-cherishing 27
• Guilt and regret 27
• Work and daily life 26
• Rebirth and continuity 25
• Self-criticism and shame 24
• Lineage and tradition 23
• The four noble truths 22
• Stress and burnout 21
• Buddha nature 20
• Ethics and precepts 20
• Emotional balance 19
• Forgiveness 17
• Generosity and dana 16
• Sangha and community 14
• Enthusiastic effort (virya) 13
• Dependent origination 12
• Grief and loss 11
• Perception and projection 11
• Refuge 11
• The four thoughts that turn the mind 11
• The eight worldly concerns 10
• Attentional balance 8
• Not-self (anatta) 8
• The six perfections (paramitas) 8
• Ecology and the climate 7
• Nature and the outdoors 6
• Cognitive balance 5
• The eightfold path 5
• Peace and conflict 4
• The sixfold matrix of mental balance 4
• Secular mindfulness 3
• Symbolism and iconography 3
• Introspection and self-monitoring 1
• Spiritual materialism and bypassing 1
• The three marks of existence 1