Fall 2011 Shamatha Retreat

Deep…During this extremely inspiring afternoon, Alan started by explaining how to recognize the object of attention of the practice of awareness of awareness for those that find this practice elusive. Also he explained, with the parallel of mosquitoes flying around a fan, how the oscillation works against thoughts. At the end, this practice leads to resting the mind into luminosity and emptiness. After this clarification, he went on to present his opinion of some aspects of how is being presented the dharma related to these degenerated times. We should try to avoid to be playing the last piece of music with the orchestra of the sinking Titanic by relying on the notion of the path that starts with afflictions and finishes free from them. He mentioned again the lack of emphasis put into shamatha nowadays. Moving on, Alan kindly shared with us another sublime passage from Dudjom Lingpa’s Vajra Essence that distinguishes the ground of the coarse mind from rigpa, giving detailed and extremely inspiring description