Daniel P. Brown - Pointing Out The Great Way

Hey everyone, I've been reading this book recently and found it to be a real gem, and I just wanted to share, also interested to hear everyone's thoughts:

www.4shared.com/office/s7E-1gXp/DanielPB...intingOuttheGre.html

Pointing Out the Great Way: The Stages of Meditation in the Mahamudra Tradition
By Daniel P. Brown, Robert A. F. Thurman

"This spiritual manual describes mahamudra meditation from the perspective of the "gradual path," a progressive process of training that is often contrasted to sudden realisation. The book contains a step-by-step description of the ways to practice, precise descriptions of the various stages and their intended realisations, and the typical problems that arise along with their remedies. Drawn from a variety of sources, "Pointing Out the Great Way" distills the experiences of many great masters who have traversed the path of meditation to the point of perfect mastery and freedom from suffering."

A short excerpt from the introduction:

i.imgur.com/yRQDM.jpg

I read the first 1/2 and skipped through the rest. I found it very academic and not useful for my practice. Maybe on further study, I might agree with you but probably not.

jack

i must say I'm curious about that book after seeing this interview with Daniel Brown many months ago. I also found out that he and teacher's trained by him conduct mahamudra retreats in US as well as Europe. Would love to attend one but it doesn't fit right now.



www.pointingoutway.org/teachers.html

Interesting that you two have so different views on the book. Are you both practicing mahamudra? Have you ever got pointing out instructions from a teacher? Something I would love to get at this point.

"I read the first 1/2 and skipped through the rest. I found it very academic and not useful for my practice. Maybe on further study, I might agree with you but probably not.

jack"

I agree. I found it more academic than practice oriented, so not so interesting to me. Practice wise my favorite Mahamudra book is "Mind at Ease".

I will have to look into Mind at Ease. My favorite book is Clarifying the Natural State by Dakpo Tashi Namgyal. I could spend a lot of years just with that book. Ken McLeod has a lot of good stuff. You can download from his web site his dharma talks from two retreats he led.

I have been daily practicing mahamudra for over a year but claim no expertise. I haven't had a teacher in this practice but am looking for one.. I had looked at Dan Brown's retreat schedule. I saw the daily schedule for the retreat didn't interest me very much.This week I emailed Susan Mikel who is one of the retreat teachers asking if she would be interested in taking me on as a student maybe over Skype. She responded I would have to go through a retreat first.

jack

Thanks for sharing gira and jackha will look in to those books.

I am on page 285 of the book presently, and I have found a wealth of practice oriented information in this book. It appears to me the book is a practice manual, so how someone could not find it practice oriented is confusing to me. It does seem to attempt to be complete / exhaustive, so it does include theory and information as a precursor, I would strongly urge anyone interested in Mahamudra to consider reading this book in it's entirety, because later in the book it gets into really juicy and valuable details about high level practice and insights. Advanced practitioners might want to skim through / skip over some of the introductory sections.

The book builds and illustrates the progression of deepening insight in practice, and exactly how these are accessed and arise in practice, how the practice is refined at each step; and so the later details about higher level insights are built on the context of the former realizations... this gives it a richness and clarity that is very valuable in my opinion. My hope is some here will benefit from this excellent book, it really seems to have a lot of the same spirit, the same practical, gradual path dhamma focus that I appreciate so much here, so I thought it might be appreciated by folks at KFD.

Thanks for sharing guys!

metta!

Justin

EDIT: typo(s)

By the way JYET, a mahamudra practitioner I speak with online, on a regular basis, linked me to information about Daniel P. Brown, and that video you shared, and that is how I ended up finding this book.

Another excerpt:

page 265 and 266;

"Child Viewing A Temple"

The third metaphor pertains to correcting subtle discriminations associated with perception. The root instructions are:

Set up [the mind] like a small child viewing a temple. Because the elephant of the mind has been tied to the stake of mindfulness and knowledge, the energy currents have been done-with and stay in their own place. Whatever [still] arises is neither to be grasped if liked nor obstructed if disliked. Because of the influence of [holding the energy currents], the experiences in a nonconceptual still state are such that empty forms arise like smoke, and a bliss arises that almost makes you faint and in which you don't feel like you have a body or mind, as if you were floating in space. Not grasping and not obstructing these kinds of perceptions is called "setting up like a small child viewing a temple."

this metaphor really resonates with me, and my current experience and practice. in particular lately i have been intentionally calling up thoughts, remembering, planning type thoughts intentionally, in order to investigate their nature. my baseline is one of stillness and quiet / silence. when i give rise to thoughts, they are immediately seen as empty and vanish of their own accord, resolved before they develop any further. thoughts no longer arise like a torrent besieging the mind, they are sparse.. translucent, mirage-like. or... whispy like smoke. I was trying to describe this on irc;

( cont )

( cont )

[00:18] :~malt: thoughts no longer have the power to agitate the mind
[00:19] :~malt: they are whispy, thin, like mirages, fleeting imagery, like reflections on water
[00:20] :~malt: they do not arise as they used to.. gross, disturbing things, pulling the mind this way or that
[00:20] :~malt: their emptiness is clearly, immediately seen
[00:21] :~malt: it is effortless for them to slide away, vanish, of their own accord.. self liberate.
previously thoughts were like a persistent torrent of activity
[00:21] :~malt: that has some force and needed to be opposed with force
[00:22] :~malt: it took effort and vigilance to restrain them
[00:22] :~malt: now they have no where to land
[00:22] :~malt: no where to fall
[00:22] :~malt: no where to stick
[00:22] :~malt:
[00:22] :~malt: the default mode is one of silence, stillness
[00:23] :~malt: thoughst are fleeting and vanish instantanously, and are separated by long periods of silence
and stillness
[00:23] :~malt: the thoughts themself, are silent as well
[00:23] :~malt: and do not disturb stillness
[00:23] :~malt:

( please forgive my typos ) ^__^

A friend of mine read it and loved it. I just often tend to prefer short and to the point over detailed and technical, so it wasn't to my taste. It's always awesome to find a book that resonates so much with your own practice!

Malt, my mistake. I went back to Brown's book and did find lots of meditation instructions.

jack