In this lesson, Alan Wallace explores meditation more in depth, going into topics such as awareness, movement, and stillness, and covering some of the challenges meditators may face. You can follow along with the text he comments from in the excerpt below, on page 146 of the PDF of the root text found in lesson 1, or in your copy of Heart of the Great Perfection: Dudjom Lingpa’s Visions of the Great Perfection, Vol. 1.
That which observes is called mindfulness, or awareness, that which is observed is called movement, and resting in that state is called stillness. Identify them as such and meditate! If you meditate earnestly, stable meditative experiences of the bliss, luminosity, and nonconceptuality of śamatha will arise in your mindstream. Consequently, when stillness, movement, and awareness merge into one and all discursive thoughts are self-knowing and self-illuminating, meditate by identifying this as awareness. And when thoughts automatically scatter in all directions, meditate by identifying this as the mind of unawareness. By doing so, in accordance with the degree of sharpness of your faculties, various meditative experiences such as bliss, luminosity, vacuity, stillness, and harshness will certainly occur. Just as it has always been in the moon’s nature to wax and wane, so it is in the mind’s nature to be periodically happy and sad. So without hope or fear, rejection or acceptance, negation or affirmation, do not lose your own grounding in that very luminosity and cognizance. [472] This is a crucial point. Meditative experiences and appearances disappear by themselves, fading away, unable to sustain themselves, like illusions and dreams, so recognize this. If you cherish, refute or affirm, hope or fear, or become attached to or fixate on experiences such as bliss, luminosity, vacuity, harshness, dreams, or subtle extrasensory perception, this will lead you toward errors and obscurations, so recognize this. (more…)