Skillful Meditation Project
Jason Siff and William Waldron Workshop
Over the weekend of November 22nd and 23rd, 2008 the Skillful Meditation Project sponsored a weekend workshop in Albuquerque, New Mexico featuring Jason Siff and William Waldron discussing Buddhist theories of consciousness. The weekend featured presentations by Jason and Bill along with group discussions and meditation sittings.
The topics covered ranged from alaya vinnana and dependent arising to discussions about how these philosophical ideas present themselves in our experience, the processual nature of the arising of awareness and how this leads to understanding who we are in the world. Jason and Bill examined their views around concepts and experience as ways of increasing our awareness and our understanding of the dharma. The tension between samsara and nibbana was explored as well as various Mahayana ideas around Buddha nature, emptiness and how our world comes to be in the Yogacaran tradition.
Jason Siff, founder of the Skillful Meditation Project and an experienced meditation teacher, focuses on what we actually experience when we meditate as a way of increasing our awareness and our ways of knowing. Jason has written several novels which evince the teachings of the Buddha in our search for nibbana. William Waldron teaches at Middlebury College with a specialty in the South Asian religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, Tibetan religion and history, and comparative psychologies and philosophies of mind. His written works focus on the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism and its dialogue with modern thought. He is the author most recently of “The Buddhist Unconscious: The alaya-vijnana in the context of Indian Buddhist thought.” William has a refreshingly open intellect, combining many different disciplines into an analysis of mind which brings together science, Buddhist religious thought and western psychology.
Sunday Talk 1 – Dependent Arising (36:10)
Sunday Talk 2 – Samsara and Nibbana (58:56)
Sunday Talk 1 – Dependent Arising
Bill elucidates the personal nature of dependent arising leading into a discussion exploring how we see dependent arising variously through our experience and through conceptual formulations. What is emphasized is the importance of seeing dependent arising in our experience and then consequently understanding how conceptual understandings can provide a pragmatic description of the connections we have seen between various elements arising in our experience. Jason fills in with a background on the importance of developing a trust of our subjective experience that can contribute to a lessening of self.
Sunday Talk 2 – Samsara and Nibbana
Jason and Bill begin by discussing the tension between samsara and nibbana, that nibbana is not a reified state, not a different “place” from samsara, but that they are interrelated, that we are looking at samsara in our search for nibbana. Bill then takes us into the development of Buddha Nature in Mahayana schools which can be seen as the other side of dependent arising into a discussion of emptiness as exemplified in Tantra and Vajrayana. The discussion concludes with explorations of Yogacara notions of the emptiness of subject and object, into a description of how our worlds come into being, both shared and individual (common and uncommon).
