Dr. Alan Wallace

"Observing the Mind: A Buddhist Approach to Exploring Consciousness"

B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D. has been a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970, and he has taught Buddhist theory and meditation throughout Europe and America since 1976. Having devoted fourteen years to training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by H. H. the Dalai Lama, he went on to earn an undergraduate degree in physics and the philosophy of science at Amherst College and a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford University. With this background, he brings unique experience and skills to the challenge of integrating traditional Indo-Tibetan Buddhism with the modern world. One of the most prolific writers and translators of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, he is currently seeking ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices and Western science to advance the study of the mind. He is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies.

To read more about Dr. Alan Wallace and for a full list of his publications, please visit www.alanwallace.org

While the modern cognitive sciences approach the study of consciousness primarily by way of examining the neural and behavioral correlates of states of consciousness, Buddhist contemplatives have introspectively focused their attention primarily on subjective mental states themselves. But introspection, as William James pointed out more than a century ago, is a fallible mode of observation, and it has been largely marginalized in the modern study of the mind. Buddhists have recognized how unreliable introspection can be, but they have sought to overcome its shortcomings by developing highly sophisticated modes of attention, with enhanced stability and vividness. By exploring the mind primarily from a first-person perspective with refined attention, they claim to bring to the light of consciousness many mental processes that are otherwise unconscious. In this way, they assert that the nature of consciousness phenomena themselves, and not just their physical correlates, can be investigated in depth. The Buddhist study of the mind is not only epistemic--concerned with the nature, origins, and causal efficacy of mental events--but also pragmatic, for it is primarily concerned with bringing about greater mental balances and genuine happiness through understanding the nature of the mind and its relation to the world at large.