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B. Alan Wallace (born 1950) is an American author, translator, teacher, researcher, interpreter, and Buddhist practitioner interested in the intersections of consciousness studies and scientific disciplines such as psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and physics. He endeavors to chart relationships and commonalities between Eastern and Western scientific, philosophical, and contemplative modes of inquiry.
Since 1976, Wallace has taught Buddhism, philosophy, and meditation in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Australia. Wallace grew up in America and Switzerland but left college after three years to study Buddhism in India. He has served as interpreter for many Buddhist contemplatives and scholars, including the Dalai Lama. He is a prolific author of numerous books and essays and has translated dozens of Sanskrit and Tibetan texts into English. Wallace has a bachelor's degree in physics and philosophy of science from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Stanford. He also founded and is President of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. In 2010 Wallace became the Director and Chairman of the Phuket International Academy Thanyapura Mind Centre, which provides a blend of contemporary psychology and neuroscience alongside ancient Asian contemplative practices. He is currently leading two 8-week, residential, intensive meditation retreats there each year, which are open to all who are interested in developing exceptional mental balance and well-being. In addition, together with Paul Ekman he is leading a 6-week course to train instructors in "Cultivating Emotional Balance," a 42-hour program developed by Dr. Wallace and Dr. Ekman, which was scientifically studied at the University of California, San Francisco. All these retreats and courses are organized in collaboration with the Santa Barbara Institute. His life's work focuses on a deep engagement between Buddhist philosophical and contemplative inquiry and modern science and philosophy, with a special emphasis on exploring the nature and potentials of the mind in a radically empirical manner, as free as possible from the dogmas of religion and materialism.
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Alan Wallace was born in Pasadena, California, in 1950, the son of Protestant theologian David H. Wallace, and was raised in the United States, Scotland, and Switzerland. In 1968, he began his undergraduate education at the University of California, San Diego, with an emphasis on biology and philosophy. He spent his third year abroad at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he shifted the direction of his studies to Tibetan culture and language. Wishing to immerse himself more fully in the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism, in 1971 he discontinued his university education and moved to Dharamsala, India, where he enrolled in classes at the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, which was established in that year under the auspices of the Dalai Lama. In 1973, as a newly ordained Buddhist monk, he enrolled in the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, where he trained until 1974. The following year he received full monastic ordination from the Dalai Lama, who then encouraged him to join the renowned Buddhist contemplative Geshe Rabten at the Tibet Institute in Switzerland. Two years later, he continued his training and also began teaching at the Center for Higher Tibetan Studies in Mt. Pelerin, Switzerland, still training under Geshe Rabten and many other Tibetan scholars and contemplatives. In 1979, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, he returned to India, where he began a series of solitary meditation retreats, first under the direct guidance of the Dalai Lama, and later in Sri Lanka and the United States. In 1984, he enrolled in Amherst College, where, as an Independent Scholar, he studied physics, the philosophy of science, and Sanskrit, completing his undergraduate degree summa cum laude and phi beta kappa in 1987 [1]. His undergraduate honors thesis was published in two volumes, Choosing Reality: A Contemplative View of Physics and the Mind and Transcendent Wisdom: A Commentary on the Ninth Chapter of Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life. In 1987, with the permission of the Dalai Lama, he formally returned his monastic vows, and two years later married Vesna A. Wallace, an accomplished Buddhist scholar in her own right. In that same year, he enrolled in the graduate program in religious studies at Stanford University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1995. During these years at Stanford, he also continued his studies of the philosophy of science and of the mind. His main research centered on integrating Buddhism with Western science and philosophy with the aim of achieving a more comprehensive understanding of consciousness. His dissertation was published under the title The Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Tibetan Buddhist Meditation, and during this time he also wrote The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. In 1997, he joined the faculty of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught courses on Tibetan Buddhism, language, and culture, as well as the interface between science and religion. In 2001, he left his position at the university and devoted himself to a six-month solitary meditation retreat in the high desert of eastern California. In 2003, Alan established the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, a non-profit institution concerned with synthesizing scientific and contemplative inquiry into the nature and potentials of consciousness.
B. Alan Wallace has served as translator for dozens of Tibetan lamas over the last thirty years in India, Europe, and North America. In 1979, he served as the Dalai Lama's interpreter during his first teaching tour in the West, during which he lectured in Switzerland and Greece before making his way to the United States for his first visit there. Since the founding of the Mind and Life Institute in 1987, he has helped to organize its conferences, for which he, together with Dr. Thupten Jinpa, has served as interpreter for the Dalai Lama and the participating scientists and philosophers. From 1992 to 1997, he served as the interpreter and translator for Gyatrul Rinpoche, a senior Lama of the Nyingma Order of Tibetan Buddhism.
B. Alan Wallace has written dozens of published essays in the fields of philosophy, psychology, physics, and Buddhism. Electronic copies of his essays are available from his website.
Selected Essays:
Recent studies of the effects of meditation practices on stress management and emotional stability and of meditation as a therapeutic agent have produced exciting results. But the studies conducted to date have been short-term and have generally used non-intensive interventions. The Shamatha Project includes a team of talented neuroscientists and psychologists in a longer-term study, with state-of-the-art methods, to examine the effects of intensive meditation training on attention, cognitive performance, emotion regulation, and health. This effort, the Shamatha Project, garnered the endorsement of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and initial funding from three private foundations, The Fetzer Institute, the Hershey Family Foundation, and the Yoga Research and Education Foundation. The training methods, taught by Dr. Alan Wallace, included deep, intensive meditation training that fosters attentional vividness and stability as well as compassion, loving-kindness, empathetic joy, and equanimity. The expected benefits included greater attentional control and increased ability to regulate emotions and apply prosocial values and motives.
More information on the Shamatha Project
The Cultivating Emotional Balance research project arose from a dialogue between biobehavioral scientists studying emotion and the Dalai Lama and Buddhist monks and scholars. This meeting, which took place in March 2000, in Dharamsala, India, was one in a series sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute to foster an interchange between the Buddhist tradition and Western science.
Increasing evidence suggests that meditation improves both emotional and physical well-being. However, much remains to be understood about how meditation might confer these health benefits. To address key unanswered questions within the field of meditation research, investigators from the Mind-Body Program and Emory-Tibet Partnership at Emory University are collaborating with the Santa Barbara Institute to conduct the Compassion and Attention Longitudinal Meditation (CALM) Study. The CALM Study will extend recent findings that training in compassion meditation reduces the types of deleterious physical and emotional responses to psychological stress that have been associated with an array of modern illnesses, including depression, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and dementia.
In 2003, B. Alan Wallace founded the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies as a not-for-profit institution with the interest of furthering our understanding of the nature, origins, and role of consciousness. He proposes that the nature of consciousness can most deeply be studied from a first-person perspective, and not be limited to the third-person methodologies of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Optimally, the first-person methods of the contemplative traditions of the world, such as Buddhism, may be integrated with the objective methods of science to create a new discipline of "contemplative science." Influences on his thinking and research derive not only from Buddhism and contemporary physics and neuroscience, but also William James, the pioneering American psychologist and philosopher whom he often refers to as one of his "intellectual heroes."
Snow Lion Publications [2] Google Tech Talks [3] Shambhala Mountain Center [4]
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