52 Wisdom and Compassion

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?