52 Wisdom and Compassion

Spring 2011 Shamatha Retreat

In this teaching, Alan Wallace guides a meditation on compassion for the deepest kind of suffering: the suffering of conditioned existence. He informs us that the cultivation of wisdom from insight is a prerequisite for this compassion; the sense that it is possible to wake up, to realize true freedom.

The guided meditation begins 29:08 at in the recording.

Editor's Note: The first three minutes of this session may be difficult for some to hear due to a recording error.

Alan then answers these questions:

1. When in awareness of awareness, we withdraw from all appearances and objectifications of our mind dissolve into the substrate consciousness. But only achieving shamatha, at the end of the shamatha trek, our mind has dissolved into a more essential and less configured consciousness. Can you please be more specific about the different "stages of dissolution" along this trek to destination?

2. In this morning's meditation, we were instructed to observe the space of the mind and the objects that arise in it without alteration. I know that quantum physics has discovered that inherent in observation itself is a changing of the observed, and some scientists today are questioning the scientific method itself, wondering if we do not alter experiments by observation. If this is true, is it really possible to observer ourselves without alteration?