Vajrayana Institute is a Buddhist centre aiming to provide a friendly and conducive environment for people of all walks of life to learn about and the teachings of the Buddha and put them into practice. Our aim is to provide the opportunity for people to fully realise their potential, transforming their hearts and minds for the benefit of all beings.
Located in Ashfield, in the inner-west of Sydney we offer a variety of beginner, intermediate and advanced study and meditation classes and workshops. New faces are always welcome so pop in to have a look around, meet the team and enjoy a cup of tea or coffee in our student lounge or stupa garden.
Vajrayana Institute is a non-profit incorporated association that is affiliated with the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), a grouping of over 150 meditation centres worldwide. FPMT was established in the 1970s by Lama Thubten Yeshe and the current spiritual director, Lama Zopa Rinpoche.
I love the teaching on the harmlessness of thoughts - are empty apperences for as long as you don't engage with them. And then he gives this brilliant and hilarious analogy with lucid dream: woman who's expert at lucid dream forces a knife into her gut and Alan asks: "wow did it hurt?" And she says "How could it hurt? It's a dream-knife and a dream-gut! It's like a rainbow stabbing rainbow! It's all empty apperences!" Brilliant brilliant imagery 😂❤🌈✨
Maybe I am just extremely deluded and drowning in the great sea of samsara but I don't perceive Alan's pointers towards wisdom to point towards anything that has ever existed. And when he does point towards examples supposed to embody wisdom what I see is something incomplete. I'm sure Dalai Lama does a lot of good but if that is perfect wisdom then we're truly fucked. I'm sorry.
Than you Eva! Your teachings on the actual practice of meditation have been and continue to be IMMENSELY helpful 🙏❤ This talk here is the diamond lightning bolt thats really giving me many insights to whats going on during and after my own practice❤ Gate gate paragate parasumgate bodhi soha!🙏🌈✨️🌞🕉
Wow this meditation was powerful. I simply followed the instructions and felt as if the whole 'body' (read consciousness) was breathing, then I saw my vision (in my mind, eyes closed) have a dull white light, nothing bright or focused. Then my right ear started to shake and make popping sounds. I thought I was about to have an Out of Body Experience (OBE), then that sort of took me out of the state I was in. How sublime. I must say it's not my first time meditating or experiencing this sensation, but on all occasions I was using binaural beats (from RU-vid and from Monroe Institute), not this time! I have downloaded this video as mp3 and saved the meditation part and fixed the left/right ear issue by saving the audio in mono. All done in Audacity. Thank you Alan :)
I honestly do not understand how people listen to a nonstop talking machine like him .... he is teaching the art of calmness and stillness but he can not shut up ....
About time to deal with artificial intelligence, Alan. You've been dodging this topic for too long, and here we are. It is upon us with unimaginable power, and you need to talk about it. And we can't afford for this whole process of advancing in meditation to take years, just for the _initial_ steps. We need results, so that all of civilization can benefit, much faster, and those are only going to be brought about through major brain-based innovations to the skillful means of the Dharma. Today, if someone went on a ten-year-retreat, they would come back out into an unrecognizable world!
I'm curious: 4% of the population cannot form mental images en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia. What would Alan Wallace say in that case, since visualizations are so integral to Vajrayana?
I really wish Alan wouldn't attack medication or brain stimulation. My OCD would be too powerful for me to meditate if I had not been treated with both. It's still very strong and constantly seeking to undermine my practice, and I'm placing a lot of my hope in precision brain stimulation and psychedelics to break the endless looping that has hounded me for the past 17 years.
I like this man for his grasp of the tradition, and the way he translates it within a Euro-American context, without forsaken its original truth. I like that he is Scottish, and I'm half Scottish (Shout out to Greenock!), yet I forget his name (Willaim Wallace will never forgive me!), then found him again on this channel. Thanks!
Alan, stop attacking everything but the Dharma! You just couldn't help yourself with that remark about ayahuasca! You're just saying that because you know ayahuasca _works,_ and you feel threatened. And you keep doing this in video after video with everything but the Dharma, as if they got it all right centuries ago. Psychedelics have helped me a great deal with my anxiety, complex PTSD, OCD, ADHD, various buried traumas from childhood, kundalini syndrome, benzodiazepine dependency and physical pain caused by anxiety that no amount of meditation could accomplish. Meditation was like water off a duck's back for all of this. I disagree with Alan's dismissal of these substances. Using psychedelics judiciously can accomplish things that meditation could never accomplish for the average practitioner in a hundred years. Alan is wrong on this one. He's wrong about brain stimulation too, which is hitting clinics now with a greatly improved level of quality (and one kind, neurofeedback, has been available for many decades and is advancing as fast as computing power will allow) and will likely prove even more effective than psychedelics soon enough. And it can be combined with psychedelics to take advantage of the neuroplasticity induced by the latter. Alan's position on neurotech and the Dharma is particularly strange considering that the Dalai Lama supports this research. He has stated that if you could get rid of negative emotions through implanting an electrode, without impairing the critical mind, "I would be the first patient".
What an exquisite teaching. Emaho! Praise to the masters of the ancient lineages! May all beings practice with diligence and confidence and actualize the unconditioned joy and freedom of spontaneously accompished suchness!
By the time she comes out of her planned retreat, the world will be unrecognizable and people will be getting enlightened to her level via technological means with great speed, combining AI and neuroscience. GPT-4 is 900% better after just _six weeks,_ and nobody has no idea where it is heading, except that it is heading somewhere VERY powerful.
Hehe. We _were_ so much more intelligent than everything else. Now...we aren't. Machines are very close to becoming more intelligent than us now, and in less than ten years, will be much more intelligent.
So does that mean if your brain has been damaged and you struggle with brain fog like so many after COVID infections, that you will not be able to achieve shamata because it's harder to access the substrate?
Yes, brain disorders can really complicate your ability to meditate properly and deeply. I have OCD and it makes meditation very difficult. I have had a lot of success with ketamine therapy to uproot old traumas and psychic knots, and neurofeedback as well. Neurofeedback is advancing so fast that I believe within about five years (I would have said ten years until GPT-4 exploded this spring) it will be able to enable you to access the substrate without effort. Especially if you combine it with psychedelic therapy, which vastly increases neuroplasticity.
How do I know I am watching the space of the mind itself and not a projected image of what it would be like after this beautiful meditation? And why are thoughts and feelings etc said to be coming up, couldn't it be my awareness that is moving and directing a light the midst of the flow of the thoughts, feelings and images I am passing by? Sometimes I feel everything else is still, is my awareness that is moving and picking up content in the "frozen" pool of my mind. Can someone share thoughts?
