Quotes from B. Alan Wallace

Life is a flash of lightning in the dark of night. It is a brief time of tremendous potential.

Life is a flash of lightning in the dark of night. It is a brief time of tremendous potential.

Meditation is a balancing act between attention and relaxation.

A Tibetan aphorism states, "Let your mind be a gracious host in the midst of unruly guests.

In Buddhism, consciousness is central because all phenomena are realized to be mere appearances to consciousness that have no independent existence.

It takes no deep insight to see that the source of both our well-being and our maladies lies within our own hearts and minds. To change our experience of life we must inevitably change our hearts and minds, or rather our heart/minds.

Samsara is not out there, but rather in the way that we experience our environment. To target it precisely, samsara is in the quality of our minds. Our minds are not functioning in accord with reality, and therein lies the problem.

Solitary meditation doesn't cause mental imbalances, but uncovers them.

The sequence between shamatha and vipashyana makes perfect sense: first refine your powers of attention, then use them to explore and purify the mind, which can be directly examined only through first-person observation.

The mind that reaches out to other people, to the environment, to provide what it seems to lack itself, is a mind that is ignorant of its own resources for peace and happiness.

According to the general Buddhist view, the whole of sa?s?ra, with its myriad pleasant and miserable realms, is a prison. But from the perspective of pristine awareness, all of sa?s?ra and nirv??a is equally suffused by the primordial purity of the Great Perfection.

Again and again, counteract the agitation and turbulence of the mind by relaxing more deeply, not by contracting the body or mind.

It is best not to silence the mind with a crushing blow of our will.

I suggest that if you were able to focus your attention at will, you could actually choose the universe you appear to inhabit.

Normally, the mind involuntarily superimposes a sense of solidity on our perceptions of visual objects, even though the eyes are not designed to detect this tactile characteristic.

Let go of any conceptual associations you have regarding visual impressions. Let go of preferences or judgments...Your likes and dislikes...Just be present with the shapes and colors...focusing on them with bare attention.

Settling your mind in its natural state entails releasing all grasping, grasping onto the future, and the past, grasping onto cogitations about the present. Letting your awareness rest in its own place, naturally luminous and still.

An indispensable ingredient for spiritual maturation is the cultivation of fortitude: strength, forbearance, and patience.

There's no one-to-one correspondence between outer events and our inner emotional states.

One of the most persistent of all delusions is the conviction that the source of our dissatisfaction lies outside ourselves.

When attention is impaired, it detracts from everything we do, and when it is well focused, it enhances everything we do.

The Buddha's teaching of the Dharma was called "Good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end

The demarcation between science and metaphysics is determined by the limits of experiential inquiry, not Nature or God.

Within Tibetan Buddhism, shamatha practice maps on to the nine stages of attentional development wherein thoughts gradually subside as concentrative power is increased to the point at which one can effortlessly maintain single-pointed focus on a chosen object for at least four hours. The accomplishment of shamatha is accompanied by a powerful experience of bliss, luminosity, and stillness.