B. Alan Wallace

Integrated meditation practice is like a healthy dietwhich is indispensable for maintaining your vitality and resistance to disease.Likewise, a balanced meditative practice in the course of a socially engaged way of lifeheightens your psychological immune system, so that you are less vulnerable to mental imbalances of all kinds.

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.

Integrated meditation practice is like a healthy diet which is indispensable for maintaining your vitality and resistance to disease. Likewise, a balanced meditative practice in the course of a socially engaged way of life heightens your psychological immune system, so that you are less vulnerable to mental imbalances of all kinds.

Tibetans look at a person who holds himself above others, believing he is better than others and knows more, and they say that person is like someone sitting on a mountain top: it is cold there, it is hard, and nothing will grow. But if the person puts himself in a lower position, then that person is like a fertile field.

We are persons whose bodies can be objectively studied according to the impersonal laws of physics but whose minds are subjectively experienced in ways science has not yet been able to fathom. In short, by radically seperating science from religion, we are not merely segregating two human institutions; we are fragmenting ourselves as individuals and as a society in ways that lead to deep, unresolved conflicts in terms of our view of the world, our values, and our way of life.