Death and dying

76 teachings in the library are about this.

Morning Session Charlie Morley · 185 minutes · recorded January 31, 2026
Charlie opens with a short guided breathing exercise before turning to the theory of dream yoga, Milam Naljor: its four stages of recognition, transforming fear, multiplication and unification with a yidam such as Chenrezig. He explains why the practice is considered a rehearsal for death and introduces illusory body yoga, treating waking life itself as a dream. Discussion covers finding a teacher, how this differs from Western reality checks, and how ego motivation can cut a lucid dream short.
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.
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.
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.
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.
D1S3 - Three Breathing Methods and the Ground of Becoming Lama Alan · 167 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
Lama Alan teaches three ways of following the breath, each with its own guided practice: full body awareness from Asanga, abdomen breathing from the Burmese tradition, and the classic Theravada focus at the nostrils with counting. He distinguishes mindfulness from introspection, the faculty that catches laxity and excitation, and describes the ground of becoming, the substrate the mind dissolves into in sleep and at death, reachable through shamatha.
D5S3 - Non-Attachment, Generosity and the Roots of Ethics David Oromith · 90 minutes · recorded December 2, 2024
Desire and aversion are treated as appearances without solid existence, like a rainbow that can be admired but never grasped, or the death of a child in a dream. David works through the three kinds of generosity, giving materially, offering protection, and offering the Dharma, then turns to ethical discipline as the foundation the whole path rests on, using a leaking boat as the image for a mind not yet guarded by good conduct.
D6S1 - Diligence, Concentration and When to Step In David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded November 28, 2024
In this patient acceptance practice we ask what changes when a real conflict is met with acceptance, understanding and compassion rather than resistance. David covers enthusiastic diligence and its three kinds of laziness, then concentration as the union of shamatha and vipassana, the Buddha's key innovation. Questions turn on witnessing cruelty, whether to speak when nothing you say will change the person, and how much capacity we have to live out our values.
Session 4 - The Ten Nonvirtues (Three of Mind) & How Karma Ripens David Oromith · 80 minutes · recorded July 30, 2024
After settling meditation and refuge, David shares Alan Wallace's teaching that the person who ripens our karma in a future life is not quite us, so even cruelty deserves compassion rather than blame. He completes the ten nonvirtues with the three mental ones, covetousness, malice and wrong views, then explains projecting and completing karma and what shapes the mind at death. Questions range over pure lands, evidence for rebirth, funerals, and the forty nine day bardo.
Session 2 - The Ten Nonvirtues (Three of Body) David Oromith · 75 minutes · recorded July 16, 2024
In the short guided meditation we combine bare attention on the body with breath counting, refuge and bodhicitta. David sets out the four things needed for a complete negative karmic act, the basis, the attitude, the deed and its completion, then works through killing, stealing and unwise sexual behaviour, weighing pests, vegetarianism, euthanasia and abortion along the way. Questions cover suicide, whether all beings incur equal karma, and taking a puppy from its mother.
The Twelve Dependent Links of Origination David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded June 11, 2024
In the twenty minute guided meditation on emptiness we search body and mind for a findable self and rest in its absence. David then sets out the twelve links of dependent origination, from ignorance through craving to birth and death, using the traditional images of the blind grandmother and the potter's wheel to show how the whole cycle turns and how it can be reversed. Questions cover whether the six realms are literal or metaphors and what, if anything, continues from one life to the next.
D2S4 - Preparing for Death, and the Three Cleansings Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 62 minutes · recorded January 10, 2024
Purification as preparation for dying, opening with death and impermanence and the seven branch practice. Tenpa defines the pair of words that recur in these texts, misdeeds and obscurations, the second meaning here the factors that trigger afflictions and thoughts that block meditation. The commentary he quotes likens the practice to surgery rather than slow medicine, and to aiming at one problem such as anger. The long guided practice runs the whole text, with the hundred syllable mantra and the three cleansings.
D5S4 - The Eleven Benefits Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 60 minutes · recorded January 5, 2024
The eleven benefits of loving kindness attributed to the Buddha, taken one at a time: sleeping and waking comfortably, no unvirtuous dreams, being adored by people and by non-human beings, gods protecting you, no harm from fire, poison or weapons, a clear face, a joyful mind, a peaceful death. Michael Lobsang Tenpa describes how the practice starts turning up in dreams, and what Atisha and Dromtonpa say about the three best ways to die. The golden portal practice opens the session, self-guided.
The Noble Eightfold Path: Prajñā - Right View, Right Resolve David Oromith · 84 minutes · recorded November 22, 2023
This session starts with a brief settling meditation, with refuge and bodhicitta, before turning to the wisdom division of the path. David takes right view as knowledge of the four noble truths and the Kalama Sutta's advice to test a teaching by its results, then turns to right resolve as work at the level of thought, the Buddha noticing craving or ill will arise and letting it subside. Questions range from whether studying philosophy is wasted time to why compassion for others comes more easily than for ourselves.
The Four Noble Truths: The Truth of Suffering David Oromith · 80 minutes · recorded October 3, 2023
The session opens with a short guided meditation in which we ground awareness in the body, followed by refuge and bodhicitta. David opens the first noble truth using a doctor's diagnosis as the model, and the story of the nun whose patched robe leads her to a cat, a cow and a field. He sets out the three types of suffering, gross pain, the suffering of change, and pervasive conditioned existence. Questions cover addiction and letting go of attachment to pleasurable moments.
Reflecting On Our Impermanence David Oromith · 27 minutes · recorded April 16, 2023
The session opens with a short breathing meditation to settle the body, before we turn attention to how even the most solid seeming sensations are constantly changing. Prompted by the recent deaths of two teachers in his lineage, David talks about why Buddhist practice deliberately contemplates impermanence and our own death, not to bring on despair but to clarify what actually matters: valuing the relationships and time we have rather than getting lost in old arguments or in worry about the future.
Embodying the Qualities of Tara Thubten Chodron · 105 minutes · recorded November 5, 2022
Ven. Thubten Chodron works through the poem on Tara who liberates from the eight dangers, taken from her book How to Free Your Mind. Pride, ignorance, anger, jealousy, distorted views, miserliness, attachment and doubt each get an image and an antidote, with stories from her own life against each one. Her argument is that Tara protects by teaching, not by fixing us from outside. The talk closes with a guided visualisation of Tara in green light with her mantra.
In Conversation with Joanne Cacciatore: Bearing The Unbearable - Grief & Loss David Oromith · 60 minutes · recorded July 7, 2022
In this episode of The Samadhi Podcast, David is joined by Dr Joanne Cacciatore, an expert and acclaimed public speaker on grief and traumatic death.
Holding On To Our Perceptions David Oromith · 23 minutes · recorded January 23, 2022
We open awareness to all five senses before narrowing to examine the feelings, pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, that arise with sounds and bodily sensations, asking whether they are truly ours. David shares the parable of a father who refuses to believe his returned son is real because he is convinced of his death, and the Zen story of the overflowing teacup. Both point to how tightly we hold our perceptions as fact.
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.
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.
D1S2 - Attentional Intelligence, and Let the Mystery Be Revealed Lama Alan · 82 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Atisha's aphorism, once stability is achieved let the mystery be revealed, and why shamatha comes before the cultivation of ultimate bodhicitta. Lama Alan Wallace sets out conation, ethical intelligence and attentional intelligence in turn, and pictures our modern mind as a telescope mounted on a galloping camel in a sandstorm. The guided practice is mindfulness of breathing, felt throughout the whole body, and we note whether each breath is long or short, with introspection watching the attention.
D1S1 - Four Revolutions in Outlook Lama Alan · 93 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace opens the retreat with Atisha, the Indian master behind the Seven-Point Mind Training, and the text's first point, train in the preliminaries. He recasts the four thoughts that turn the mind as four revolutions in outlook, a rare human life, death, suffering and the consequences of our actions, and asks whether you are hanging ornaments on the tree of your life or transplanting it. He then leads a twenty minute guided practice in which we settle body, speech and mind in their natural states.
The Good Nun and the Patchy Robe David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded June 6, 2021
In mindfulness of breathing at the nostrils we keep the eyes soft rather than straining to visualise the breath, with counting to seven offered as a steadying aid. David tells the story of a nun who patches her robe, then acquires a cat, then a cow, then a field and an attendant to solve each new problem the last solution created. He draws out how chasing outer fixes for an inner dissatisfaction only breeds more problems, until she recognises this and returns to her simple life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
D2S3 - Mental Afflictions, and Whether You Need a Guru Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
In the vipashyana practice on the mind itself we count the breath to ten, then watch what disturbs the mind's equilibrium, asking whether any mental event is stable, satisfying or yours. Answering questions afterwards, Lama Alan repeats the Dalai Lama's answer on needing a guru: no, but it can save you a lot of time. Eva Natanya adds Gregory of Sinai's warning against practising without a spiritual father. Grief at a child's death, Lama Alan says, is a symptom and not a mental affliction.
D2S2 - Christ's Infinite Intention, and the Doorkeepers of the Heart Lama Alan · Eva Natanya · 122 minutes · recorded January 1, 2020
Eva Natanya answers the challenge left from the morning by arguing that Christ's intention was infinite in the way a bodhisattva's merit is, so anyone throughout space and time whose heart is open receives it, and that an eternal hell could only follow an infinite bad deed. In the practice you bring your own death to mind, treating this as your last meditation. She then works through Hesychios the Priest on the types of watchfulness that keep the heart clear even of thoughts that appear to be good.
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.
D7S4 - Open Presence and the Rainbow Body Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The final session opens with Lama Alan Wallace objecting to open presence being flattened into bare attention, a practice he says a marmot could manage. A silent 24 minute period builds through shamatha and vipashyana into open presence itself. He then reads Padmasambhava on entering lucid dreamless sleep with attention at the heart, the elements dissolving as sleep comes, and how the clear light of sleep prepares one for the clear light of death, closing with the levels of rainbow body.
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.
D6S4 - Searching for the Mind Lama Alan · 63 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
A second pass at vipashyana, this time following Padmasambhava's Searching for the Mind: is the mind that is placed the same as the one placing it, has it any location or size, and is it an emptiness that is nothing? Lama Alan Wallace then draws out what a basis of designation is, teasing one participant over whether a waving hand counts as seeing his body. He argues that the close applications of mindfulness are phenomenology, and belong with the ontology of the perfection of wisdom.
D6S3 - Looking for the Mind That Thinks Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Vipashyana on the nature of the mind, guided from the pith instructions of a fourteenth century mahamudra master: what colour, shape or gender has the mind that observes, and where does it arise, abide and cease? Lama Alan Wallace turns from that unfindability to how things do exist, taking the Higgs boson: in dependence upon prior causes and conditions, on its attributes, and finally on conceptual designation. He brings in Wheeler and DeWitt: no observer, and time falls out of the equations.
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.
D5S5 - Prospective Mindfulness, and Questions on Karma and Free Will Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The session opens with a silent period, with a choice of methods and two combinations Lama Alan Wallace likes, earth and wind and earth and sky, mindfulness of breathing leading into settling the mind or into awareness of awareness. He reviews prospective mindfulness: resolving to notice an anomaly or a dream sign and do a state check, and catching the moment of waking so the dream can be re-entered. Questions follow on free will, whether an android could be conscious, and whether watching an affliction arise accrues karma.
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.
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.
D4S5 - Why Shamatha Cannot Be Skipped, and Questions on Dying Lama Alan · 82 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace sets the physics notes aside and gives the rest of the retreat to Buddhadharma. He recounts asking the present Dudjom Rinpoche why hardly any Tibetans really teach shamatha, and is told they get bored and Westerners come for empowerments. Lucid dreaming that never questions the daytime reality changes nothing. No practice tonight: the hour goes to questions on karma in dreams, near death experience and dying sedated, closing with a burning coal melting through a cone of snow.
D4S4 - Introspection and the Black Box Lama Alan · 63 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Lama Alan Wallace makes the case for introspection as a science, taking William James's three-pronged psychology and the way mathematicians corroborate what only they can perceive. A silent period follows, shamatha on the space of the mind turning into vipashyana once questions are posed. He then uses Dignaga and Dharmakirti's inference of fire from smoke to argue that the objective world is a black box, and cautions with Heisenberg against granting existence to what is unknowable in principle.
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.
D4S2 - Causality Without a Mechanism Lama Alan · 60 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Causality in Buddhism is phenomenological rather than mechanical: had this not happened, that would not have followed, and no bumping is required. Lama Alan Wallace points out that physics is in the same position, since nobody can picture how matter warps spacetime or how measuring one photon collapses the wave function of another light years away. In the practice we deliberately arouse a pleasant feeling, children playing, so that a subjective impulse can be watched arising and fading.
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.
D3S4 - Thoughts in Real Time, Emotions Only in Hindsight Lama Alan · 66 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Settling the mind in its natural state, with a way in for anyone who keeps failing: deliberately generate a thought, Mary had a little lamb, syllable by syllable, watch where it dissolves and hold your attention there so the next arising is caught as it comes. The same is done with an image of a piece of fruit. Lama Alan Wallace explains why thoughts and images can be caught in real time while desires and emotions are only ever noticed afterwards.
D3S3 - Three Ways We Are Dreaming Lama Alan · 98 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Total withdrawal, deep into the formless absorptions, or total immersion in the world: Lama Alan Wallace goes through the two strategies and why Gautama found neither was an escape. Then twenty one counted breaths, observation of the somatic field, distinguishing sensations from the feelings we meet them with, and the same attention turned on the space of the mind. The three marks of existence follow as three dreams, one of them a cup of ginger and lemon that could never have made anyone happy.
D3S2 - Generic Ideas and the Second Instant Lama Alan · 42 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
In the guided practice we take one domain at a time, the visual field, then sound, then the tactile, then the mind, each nakedly, asking whether any of it is owned. Lama Alan Wallace names three ways of not knowing something: not paying attention, projecting what is not there, as racism does, and a blockage that hides what is in plain sight. He then gives the old two-instant account: the first gets what reality is dishing up, the second superimposes a generic idea, static where reality is in constant flux, and fusing the two is delusion.
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.
D2S4 - The Third Balance: Vividness Lama Alan · 43 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Vividness is the third quality to cultivate, after relaxation and stability. The practice is the classic Theravada one, attention narrowed to the sensations of the breath at the nostrils. Lama Alan Wallace warns that the eyes must stay soft and out of it, since focusing them on the target area brings on headaches. He then adds introspection as quality control, catching excitation and laxity, and offers counting one to ten as a speed bump for a wandering mind.
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.
D2S2 - Falling Asleep and Becoming Lucid Lama Alan · 65 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
In Asanga's approach to mindfulness of breathing we attend to the sensations throughout the whole body correlated with the rhythm of the respiration, relaxing more deeply with every out breath without losing clarity. Lama Alan Wallace then offers it as a way to fall asleep, practised in the shavasana until the waves of drowsiness come in, rather than reaching for medication. He goes through the three researched routes into a lucid dream, and what to do when one starts to fade: rub your body, spin.
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.
D1S1 - Hedonia, Eudaimonia and Where the Causes Lie Lama Alan · 76 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
Two kinds of happiness, and only one can grow and deepen. Lama Alan separates hedonia, any pleasure depending on a pleasant stimulus, from eudaimonia, a well-being that cannot be bought or sold, drawing on Socrates, Aristotle, Einstein and John Stuart Mill. He introduces conation, our faculty of desire and aspiration, and asks how intelligently we choose what we want. Teaching only, no practice, closing on principal causes, contributing conditions, and evident, subtle and very subtle causes.
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.
D4S1 - The Sautrantika View, and the Instruction to Bahiya Lama Alan · 95 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The guided practice is the Buddha's instruction to Bahiya, in the seen only the seen, carried through sight, sound, touch and mental events, and we ask whether we are found by way of them. Lama Alan Wallace sets it inside the Sautrantika account of perceiving the world by way of appearances, and is precise about what is refuted: a self that is autonomous and substantial, running body and mind like a chief executive. The day's task is to notice the thought of I and check its referent.
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.
D2S1 - State Checks and Dream Signs Lama Alan · 100 minutes · recorded January 1, 2019
The first full day opens with a detailed preamble: Lama Alan Wallace asks how anyone can be harmed inside a dream, and answers that we identify with what is neither I nor mine, and reify everything. A guided practice of settling body, speech and mind in the natural state follows, ending in self-knowing awareness. He then turns to Stephen LaBerge's research: the three requirements for lucid dreaming, state checks such as jumping or reading a text twice, and a dream journal to find your own dream signs.
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.
Part Five - Mindfulness, Alertness, and Difficulty as Incitement Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo · 123 minutes · recorded January 1, 2016
The last of the verses. Mindfulness and alertness are the companions, and a sinking mind is the more dangerous fault because it can be mistaken for something profound. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo takes difficulty as the incitement rather than the obstacle, and a heavenly rebirth, with no incentive to practise, as a spiritual dead end. She names three kinds of laziness, including the one that says I am not worthy. Questions on trees, animal testing and addiction, then a short practice on the breath.
Guided Meditation - Tonglen for the Aged, the Ill and the Dying Lama Alan · 24 minutes
Lama Alan directs tonglen through three groups in turn: those worn by old age, those living with physical or mental illness, and those close to death. For each you imagine being in their shoes, then step back and breathe in the darkness of their suffering, dissolving it in the light at your heart, the unborn and undying dimension of awareness. The wish for the dying is a transition met with serenity and without fear. It ends resting briefly in stillness.
Guided Meditation - Compassion, Beginning with Your Own Suffering Lama Alan · 26 minutes
Compassion is the heartfelt wish to be free of suffering and its causes, and Lama Alan Wallace begins with your own. You weigh how much mental suffering you have already borne and how little control you have over circumstances, then imagine freedom as an orb of white light at the heart. With each in-breath you draw in the darkness of past and future suffering and dissolve it there. You then do the same for others, closing in simple awareness.
Workshop Part 1 Charlie Morley · 214 minutes
For practitioners who have taken refuge, Charlie Morley's workshop opens with refuge and works through the four stages of dream yoga: recognition, transformation, multiplication and unification. He teaches the Chenrezig dream practice, which needs no initiation, and Akong Tulku Rinpoche's three word instruction, walk through wall. After the break comes Padmasambhava's dream yoga from Natural Liberation, with a guided rehearsal of falling asleep in divine form, focus drawn to the throat centre.
A House of Pain: Coping and Support after Catastrophic Loss Joanne Cacciatore · 82 minutes
Joanne Cacciatore sets out what catastrophic loss does to the whole self, and Vanessa Juth's finding that social constraints predicted poorer psychological and physical health. She tracks the bereavement exclusion shrinking then vanishing across the DSM, and her own study where 42% of bereaved parents could have met prolonged grief disorder criteria a decade on. She reports what grievers name as good support, pets and animals outranking every human group, and her case that the system needs changing, not grievers.
Empathetic Joy Glen Svensson · 78 minutes
Empathetic joy, mudita, as the corrective to the modern obsessive focus on the negative. Glen Svensson turns cognitive fusion on ourselves to explain low self-esteem and the difference between useful regret and useless guilt, and advises praising a behaviour rather than a person. In the guided practice we rejoice in another's good fortune and virtues, then travel the timeline of our life recalling every kindness received. He closes with the four thoughts that turn the mind.
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.
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.

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