If you don’t listen to this podcast, you will miss the celestial music that spontaneously manifested in our auditory space, only The Who knows from where!
After that musical intermezzo we continued our search for the mind from yesterday, at the end of this session foraying into identifying awareness, even pristine awareness, which will be the dominating topic from this afternoon on.
In his teachings Alan highlighted the necessity to come out of the peace of shamatha to arouse the mind for the inquiry of vipashyana. As the Buddha himself found out after he had mastered the deepest levels of samadhi, when he came out of it again, his mental afflictions were still present as before. So you only reach the pinnacle of samsara in the deepest samadhi. If you want just peace, you are wrong here, vipashyana is meant to be upsetting.
Then we came back to yesterdays topic of this psychotic split between ones views and ones everyday behavior. If we don’t bring Buddhism into the 21st century, this same split takes place in us, the split between the “Sunday mentality” with its unquestioning, simple faith and the “working-day mentality” where we switch into our intelligent, inquiring, questioning mode. We have to integrate, unify our scientific world view with the religious one. Otherwise our practice will fade out when we leave from our retreat, due to the discontinuity that breaks us apart into two modes of being.


Meditation starts at 07:11 min