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" "the widespread conclusion among Christian mystics that the highest states of contemplation are necessarily fleeting, commonly lasting no longer than about half an hour . This insistence on the fleeting nature of mystical union appears to originate with Augustine, 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 .
B. Alan Wallace (born 1950) (Tibetan) Buddhist scholar and writer, PhD. Tibetan translator.
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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.”
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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.