About the Book
Volume 2 of the Cloudless Mind collection carries readers deeper into Dr. Daniel P. Brown's Wednesday night dialogues, charting the territory where profound meditation realization meets the uncompromising ethics of daily life. Spanning two transformative years, this volume finds Dr. Brown guiding his students across the threshold from foundational practice to the subtle and sublime--the "crossing over" into the Natural State where emptiness and liveliness co-arise.
Here, the conversation turns to the heart of Buddhist transformation: cultivating empathy and compassion through Common Humanity Practice, understanding karma theory not as dogma but as the mechanics of intention, and developing the "healthy sense of self" that prevents emptiness from collapsing into nihilism. Dr. Brown explores the neurocircuitry of metacognition--how we see our own basis of operation--and examines the background beliefs that shape our experience, offering psychological precision to the process of spiritual unfolding.
This volume introduces advanced Dzogchen teachings rarely accessible to Western students: the Rainbow Body, Dharmadhatu exhaustion, visions in non-meditation, and the Vast Expanse beyond conceptual mind. Yet these lofty topics remain grounded in practical application--working skillfully with physical and emotional pain, processing grief while recognizing the indestructible essence, and maintaining virtue "24/7" amid a culture of greed and selfishness.
Perhaps most poignantly, Volume 2 addresses what Dr. Brown calls "preparing to die"--extensive teachings on phowa (consciousness transference), the stages of change, and cultivating the capacity for a fearless death. Throughout, he warns against the traps of spiritual pride and cognitive dissonance, urging honest practice over premature claims of awakening.
Cloudless Mind, Volume 2 offers an intimate portrait of a master at the height of his powers--equally at home discussing Asanga's Nine Stages of Staying, postformal cognitive development, or the inexhaustible Bodhicitta that invites all beings toward liberation.
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.
"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
