40 A Standard for Judging Claims of Existence

For this meditation Alan reads a passage found on page 136 of Natural Liberation in which Padmasambhava excerpts descriptions from various tantras about the nature of primordial awareness.

After the meditation Alan discusses Freud’s statement in The Future of an Illusion that a view of the universe that doesn’t take into account the role of mental perception is an empty abstraction of no practical interest.

He then proposes a playful approach for how concepts in Buddhist cosmology such as the four continents might be integrated with contradictory scientific evidence without resorting either to fundamentalist denial or opening the gates to all claims and saying they have equal validity from their own perspective.

Meditation starts at 0:55