Cloudless Mind - Volume 1: Conversations on Buddhahood with Daniel P. Brown

Every Wednesday Night, for over six years, Dan Brown answered questions by students and colleagues about positive and negative experiences in life and mind, integrating the perspectives of both Western psychology and Eastern traditions of spiritual practice -- most notably Vajrayana Buddhism, Dzogchen, and then the Bon tradition. While Dan had no idea what questions might be asked on any given night, he answered them often with rather astonishing detail, while also making his answer relevant and helpful to the person asking the question. The basis of Dan's knowledge and communication was not from scholarship. His history of treating people psychologically for over 40 years, with a long-time focus on trauma, as well as teaching Buddhist meditation with a high Lama appointed to teach with him by H.H. the Dalai Lama for 15 years, and then on his own using the style of "pointing out" while teaching, and with oversight by living lineage masters, for another 30 or more, gave him a basis of understanding founded in direct experience, in relationship to others, both as a healer and a teacher.

About the Author :
Born in New Bedford, MA in 1948, Daniel P. Brown was granted scholarships to obtain his Bachelor's, Masters, and PhD degrees. Ultimately, his expertise spanned the fields of clinical psychology, hypnosis, forensics, and meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions of Mahamudra and Dzogchen. He also authored Pointing Out the Great Way, translated seven seminal texts in the Bon tradition, co-authored The Transformation of Consciousness with Ken Wilber, Hypnotherapy & Hypnoanalysis with Erika Fromm, and Memory, Trauma Treatment and the Law with Cory Hammond and Alan Scheflin, as well as contributed to many professional journals. He also served on the Harvard Medical School faculty for over twenty-four years. His devotion to helping others included testifying at the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague and defending the veracity of children's memories of having been abused by clergy across the U.S.

Review :
"Dan Brown has thoroughly investigated and experimented with the enormous literature and tradition derived from these thousands of years of codified experience, collected in the Indian and Tibetan scientific and psychological literature. To this he has added comprehensive research and insightful understanding of contemporary depth, behavioral, cognitive, and the newly nascent meditational, psychologies, which enable him to transmit the tradition in language accessible to any practitioner without access to the primary sources. Finally, he speaks not only as a scholar and an external scientist, but also as an inner scientist, a yogin of knowledge and experience, as he has practiced these paths in his own mind, with his own body, and so can make clear the discoveries that texts of observation can only describe, while manuals of practice must evoke, to help us to embody them in realization ourselves."--Robert Thurman