Alan Wallace

B. Alan Wallace (born 1950) (Tibetan) Buddhist scholar and writer, PhD. Tibetan translator.

Quotes

• 'Righteous hatred' is in the same category as 'righteous cancer' or 'righteous tuberculosis'. All of them are absurd concepts.
  • Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground up, Wisdom (1993).

• The point of Buddhist meditation is not to stop thinking, for … cultivation of insight clearly requires intelligent use of thought and discrimination. What needs to be stopped is conceptualisation that is compulsive, mechanical and unintelligent, that is, activity that is always fatiguing, usually pointless, and at times seriously harmful.
  • Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground up, Wisdom (1993).

• Over the past three millennia, the Indic traditions have developed rigorous methods for refining the attention, and then applying that attention to exploring the origins, nature, and role of consciousness in the natural world. The empirical and rational investigations and discoveries by such great Indian contemplatives as Gautama the Buddha profoundly challenge many of the assumptions of the modern West, particularly those of scientific materialism.
  • Wallace, Alan. 'Why the West Has No Science of Consciousness: A Buddhist View'. Infinity Foundation. July 2002.quoted from Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• In short, the trajectory of Western science from the time of Copernicus to the modern day seems to have been influenced by medieval Christian cosmology. Just as hell was symbolized as being in the center of the earth, and heaven was in the outermost reaches of space, the inner, the subjective world of man was depicted as being the locus of evil, while the objective world was free of such moral contamination … And it was only in the closing years of the twentieth century that the scientific community began to regard consciousness as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry. Why did it take psychology – which itself emerged only after many scientists felt that they had already discovered all the principal laws of the universe – a century before it began to address the nature of consciousness?
  • Wallace, Alan. 'Why the West Has No Science of Consciousness: A Buddhist View'. Infinity Foundation. July 2002.quoted from Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• Alan Wallace explains the role of mind in any empirical investigation of consciousness: “The primary instrument that all scientists have used to make any type of observation is the human mind…” However, like any scientific laboratory, one has to first clean, fine-tune, and calibrate the mind:
  “The untrained mind, which is prone to alternating agitation and dullness, is an unreliable and inadequate instrument for observing anything. To transform it into a suitable instrument for scientific exploration, the stability and vividness of the attention must be developed to a high degree.”
  This is the scientific importance of yoga, meditation, kundalini, tantra and other systems of achieving higher states of mind, and more evolved states of body, which may then be used to discover deeper layer of reality:
  “Over the past three millennia, the Indic traditions have developed rigorous methods for refining the attention, and then applying that attention to exploring the origins, nature, and role of consciousness in the natural world. The empirical and rational investigations and discoveries by such great Indian contemplatives as Gautama the Buddha profoundly challenge many of the assumptions of the modern West, particularly those of scientific materialism.”
  • as quoted from Rajiv Malhotra (2003), Problematizing God's Interventions in History

• “The first step in developing a science of any kind of phenomena is to develop and refine instruments that allow one to observe and possibly experiment with the phenomena under investigation. The only instrument we have that enables us to observe mental phenomena directly is the mind itself. But since the time of Aristotle, the West has made little, if any, progress in developing means of refining the mind so that it can be used as a reliable instrument for observing mental events. And… there continues to be considerable resistance against developing any such empirical science even today.”
  • as quoted from Rajiv Malhotra (2003), Problematizing God's Interventions in History

• “the widespread conclusion among Christian mystics that the highest states of contemplation are necessarily fleeting, commonly lasting no longer than about half an hour[45]. This insistence on the fleeting nature of mystical union appears to originate with Augustine, [46]and it is reflected almost a millennium later in the writings of Meister Eckhart, who emphasized that the state of contemplative rapture is invariably transient, with even its residual effects lasting no longer than three days[47].”
  • as quoted from Rajiv Malhotra (2003), Problematizing God's Interventions in History

• “With the advent of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the gradual decline of Christian contemplative inquiry into the nature of consciousness rapidly accelerated. Given the Protestant emphasis on the Augustinian theme of the essential iniquity of the human soul, and man's utter inability to achieve salvation or know God except by faith, there was no longer any theological incentive for such inquiry. Salvation was emphatically presented as an undeserved gift from the Creator.”
  • as quoted from Rajiv Malhotra (2003), Problematizing God's Interventions in History

• “Descartes, whose ideological influence on the Scientific Revolution is hard to overestimate, was deeply committed to the introspective examination of the mind. But like his Greek and Christian predecessors, he did not devise any means to refine the attention so that the mind could reliably be used to observe mental events… Moreover, in a theological move that effectively removed the human mind from the natural world, Descartes decreed that the soul is divinely infused into the body, where it exerts its influence on the body by way of the pineal gland… This philosophical stance probably accounts in large part for the fact that the Western scientific study of the mind did not even begin for more than two centuries after Descartes.”
  • as quoted from Rajiv Malhotra (2003), Problematizing God's Interventions in History

• “James was well aware of the importance of developing such sustained, voluntary attention, but he acknowledged that he did not know how to achieve this task[48].”
  • as quoted from Rajiv Malhotra (2003), Problematizing God's Interventions in History

• “In short, the trajectory of Western science from the time of Copernicus to the modern day seems to have been influenced by medieval Christian cosmology. Just as hell was symbolized as being in the center of the earth, and heaven was in the outermost reaches of space, the inner, the subjective world of man was depicted as being the locus of evil, while the objective world was free of such moral contamination… And it was only in the closing years of the twentieth century that the scientific community began to regard consciousness as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry. Why did it take psychology -- which itself emerged only after many scientists felt that they had already discovered all the principal laws of the universe -- a century before it began to address the nature of consciousness?[49] ”
  • as quoted from Rajiv Malhotra (2003), Problematizing God's Interventions in History

External links

• Alan Wallace online