Dharma Teachings By Lama Mark Webber

The class returns to mirrors, opening with Marpa prostrating to a vision of Hevajra rather than to Naropa, who tells him he has mistaken the guru. It then turns to Ramachandran's mirror box, which relieves phantom limb pain with nothing but a reflection - an illusory cause with a real effect. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21 Bubbles and Foam. E22 Mirror (1). E23 Mirror (2) and Gu

The class opens with the consecration of a thangka, which is bathed not directly but by immersing its reflection in a mirror, image and reflection being held to have the same standing. The rest is set as homework: what a mirror's properties are, whether anything ever sticks to it, and where an image actually appears. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21 Bubbles and Foam. E22 Mirror (

The class works through the Buddha's Discourse on Foam, in which a lump of foam inspected closely is found to be void and hollow. The same treatment is applied to pleasure and pain, and to Nirvana, described as the absence of clinging rather than the absence of pain. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21 Bubbles and Foam. E22 Mirror (1). E23 Mirror (2) and Guru Yoga.

The class takes the Vajra, a lightning bolt, as a symbol for an insight that arrives as a break rather than gradually. Most of it is given over to Libet's experiments, in which the decision to move a hand precedes any awareness of having decided by about half a second. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21 Bubbles and Foam. E22 Mirror (1). E23 Mirror (2) and Guru Yoga.

The class takes up rainbows, noting that no two people ever see the same one: each rainbow is the intersection of raindrops with a cone beginning at its own viewer's eye. It examines the pull of rare and fleeting phenomena, and closes on the Dzogchen rainbow body with a caution against chasing radiant experience. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21 Bubbles and Foam. E22 Mirror (1).

The class takes up the whirling firebrand, a torch spun fast enough that its separate positions merge into a single ring of light. It works through motion blur, afterimages, and the delay between a sensation and its conscious recognition, ending with instructions for breaking a single step into intervals. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21 Bubbles and Foam. E22 Mirror (1). E23 Mirr

The class takes up the gandharvas' cloud-city, a mirage-city of celestial musicians that fades at sunrise, and puts the series' strongest claim: that the solid world is no firmer. Like Sherlock Holmes or Narnia it is a collective projection, held in place because so many minds share it, and the self on the same account is a character the storytelling mind constructs. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightn

The class hears speech itself as echo-like and authorless, a willful "someone" cast behind a voice the way a shout is thrown at a cliff. Drawing on the old chatbot ELIZA and the habit of reading intention into machines, it asks why an insult should be any different, and finds that seeing the insulter as an empty, conditioned process is already a form of compassion. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightnin

The class takes up the echo as a study in how unreliable the sense of sound is: one sound, made once, is heard twice and taken for a second speaker. Working through where a sound is even located, it finds that perception comes out illusory on any account - and that we tend to settle not for the truest version of things but the most comfortable one. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E2

The class takes up Naropa's reason for calling the dream the foremost of the illusion examples: it exposes at once the insubstantiality of the world and of the self that keeps fearing for it, most emotion being at bottom only "don't hurt me." The practice given is to repeat the non-dual moment in which knower and known are one, slowly purifying the storehouse mind of its subject-and-object habit. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illu

The class works through the tests supposed to separate waking from dreaming - vividness, continuity, predictability, being woken by someone else - and finds that none of them holds, because both share one nature: a self taking its own projections as real. It then turns to self-image as the most stubborn clinging of all, the one no change of appearance can outrun. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning

The first of the classes on the dream turns to dream yoga from The Six Dharma of Naropa - recognizing a dream from inside it, then transforming its contents and walking straight into its fires, which cannot burn. The wider aim is to notice that waking life is shot through with the same making. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21 Bubbles and Foam. E22 Mirror (1). E23 Mirror (2) and G

The class takes up the mirage, the water a thirst-maddened traveler chases though there is nothing there to drink, and carries it from the desert to the buzzing phone and the hungry ghost. It ends on the mind-only view: no instrument has ever confirmed an object standing outside the mind that perceives it. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21 Bubbles and Foam. E22 Mirror (1). E23 Mir

The class takes up visual distortion, working from flashing dots that fuse into a single moving object and from faces and rooms filled in out of memory. What it arrives at is that substance is laid over experience in the very act of conceptualizing it, so the mountain neither solidly exists nor simply does not. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21 Bubbles and Foam. E22 Mirror (1). E2

The moon's reflection depends on water, an observer, and the air in between - interdependent, with no substance of its own. The class sets beside it Chandrakirti's image of a sufferer who sees hairs falling on a vase that a clear-eyed person cannot, and the everyday floater, to show how ignorance works like a flaw in vision: the cure is to change the seeing, not chase the phantom. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbo

We see a hare or a face in the moon's random markings though nothing is there - and in just that way we project a self onto a changing collection of experience. The class gathers cases where belief bends what's seen, even for careful observers like Galileo, and lands on the line: rather than believing what they saw, they saw what they believed they would see. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and

Clouds forming and dissolving in an empty sky as a fast route to impermanence, and the first turn toward the moon reflected in water. The old story of the monkeys who chain together to grab that reflection - until the branch breaks - carries the point: just as a child reaches for the water-moon, we grasp this changing body and take it for a self. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21

The magician's trick as a model for ordinary seeing. Through stage illusions, the rapid darting of the eye, and the blind spot the brain fills in, the class builds to its claim: the seamless, continuous world we seem to perceive is itself a kind of conjuring - "a magic show," a trick the mind plays on itself. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 Rainbows. E20 Lightning and Thunder. E21 Bubbles and Foam. E22 Mirror (1). E23

The class maps the ground to be covered, investigating illusion across three fields - the self, things, and the relation between them - and notes how thin a slice of reality human perception actually catches. It names the twelve classic similes that lie ahead, beginning with magical illusion, and uses a dew drop from the Diamond Sutra as an example of appearance that forms, shines, and vanishes without substance. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas.

Buddha nature as the ground of the path: awakening uncovered rather than built, like a plane breaking up through cloud into open sky. From there the class moves into the tantric purification of the subtle body - its channels, winds, and inner heat - while insisting that even blissful absorption is not yet freedom, and that the real test is daily life and death, not the meditation seat. In this series of teaching, Lama Mark Webber is giving instruction on the nature of illusion. He is using a number of classic images like the moon in the water, a mirage, dream and others. The teaching was given in 2012. Short table of contents: E01 Introduction. E02 Bodhicitta. E03 Emptiness and Compassion. E04 View, Progress and Signs. E05 Intro and Dew Drops. E06 Magical Illusion. E07 Moon Body and Clouds. E08 Moon. E09 Moon and Visual Distortion. E10 Visual Distortion. E11 Mirage. E12 Dream (1). E13 Dream (2). E14 Dream (3). E15 Echo and Music (1). E16 Echo and Music (2). E17 City of Gandharvas. E18 Optical Illusion. E19 R