A year before he died Rob Burbea expressed his wish that a foundation be set up to house and protect the extensive body of work he would be leaving as his Dharma legacy. HAF was established by three of Rob's students in 2019 for this purpose. HAF also exists to support the teachers and sangha who are engaging with Rob's teachings. Not of great importance but as far as I know Rob studied jazz guitar rather than piano at Berklee in Boston before he devoted himself full-time to the Dharma.

And the book just starts with the premise that, well, you know what, as human beings we have this capacity, as I said, to look in different ways, to experience in different ways, deliberately. We can change our ways of looking at things. A classic one from the Dharma would be – I’m just pulling this out from an infinite number of possibilities – just to see something that’s going on – let’s say my body sensations right now, or even the thoughts that I’m having as I’m speaking this – and to regard them as ‘not me, not mine.’ This is a classical anattā way of looking, as I would call it. That’s a mode of looking. A typical, more normal human way of looking would be to regard them as mine – that these are my sensations, or I am this mind or whatever. So that’s just an example of two contrasting ways of looking.

Other compositions

The Circle of Darkness and Fire is a more programmatic piece, less abstract perhaps, than Amāra Vigil. In the course of its long opening, three musics appear in succession, each with their own characteristic musical language: a music of mystical contemplation (transcendent and timeless, a sort of ‘alpha and omega of creation’); a ‘Dance of the Earth’; and a music ‘of demons’. As the piece unfolds, each of the three musics takes its turns on the stage, affecting, and sometimes infiltrating, the others in the process. The ‘demonic’ music – which, while always retaining its own essential harmonic vocabulary, manifests over the course of the work in various and sometimes quite gesturally disparate guises – keeps interrupting and trying to overcome the other two. Only the transcendent contemplative music remains essentially untouched, unperturbed by the battles that play out. The following is a (fairly) verbatim transcript of a podcast interview I conducted with Rob Burbea. Please let me know if there are any errors in the text.) Rob supported many environmental campaign groups financially, including Green Peace, Flora and Fauna International and the World Land Trust. Stephen Batchelor's Talks at Gaia House on 24.07.2015: Instructions - Behold the Ceasing (Duration 34:23)

Rob's practice deepened greatly during the decade he'd been in America, and wanting to devote more time to the Dharma he returned to the UK for a year in 1998, living in London with his mum and going to Gaia House retreat centre in Devon for short retreats as often as he could. Rob then returned to the States to embark on his PhD in composition at Brandeis, continuing to sit retreats whenever possible. On a solitary retreat in the woods during this time, practising and deepening in the jhānas, Rob realized that the fantasy or archetype of the monk was becoming stronger in him, and he began to wonder if he should actually ordain in the Theravadan tradition. Ingen studied massage therapy in California upon leaving San Francisco Zen Center. Through the years Ingen has practiced Aikido, T'ai Chi and Chi Kung (Qi Qong) and from these disciplines has created a set of flow exercises which he calls Zen in Motion. Rob: Yeah. I can’t remember so much what’s in the book now; I think there’s a little bit of reconstruction in the book, but yes, I think so, when it gets into the more Vajrayāna practices. One way of conceiving what we’re doing with Vajrayāna or tantric practices – one way of conceiving it – is that one has realized or become quite skilled and adept at this kind of fading of perception, and one can become so skilled at it that it’s almost like it’s a gas pedal on a car; you can press more so that everything just completely fades out, or a little less, or a lot less. So you can kind of modulate where you are on what I call the spectrum of fading, or the spectrum of the fabrication of perception. One of the things you can do is, let’s say, put the gas pedal fairly far down, but not completely far down so that everything fades; you’re retaining an almost light or insubstantial sense of the perception of the body and self and the world of phenomena. What you have there is a very insubstantial, fluid but malleable perception. Then you can actually start shaping perception this way or that. So in some sense, the premise of the book, or one of the premises, one of the sort of starting strands of the book turns out to be the actual delivery point where it all ends up. So that’s part of it. I think maybe another sort of weave in the story was – and again, it’s today’s story, right now, at this time, when you’re asking me – I think, perhaps, I certainly felt helped by a lot of the teachings that were out there. Certainly, as I mentioned, Ajahn Geoff, and Christopher Titmuss, and Christina Feldman – actually lots of teachings. But I also felt, somehow, nothing fully satisfied me. There were lots of questions that I couldn’t really find answers to, or people with the same degree of burning interest in them. So I had a lot of time on retreat – years, in fact. And I was, to a certain extent, it was a natural kind of move for me to just begin experimenting and seeing what happened and getting super interested in stuff, with this burning curiosity about it. Everyone has off-moments, and we’ll always try to be in friendly dialogue with you if a problem arises with one of your contributions. But we reserve the right to remove posts and comments (or even suspend user accounts) when we feel these guidelines are not observed.So besides Thanissaro Bhikkhu, what other resources did you find that helped you do this long process of investigation into emptiness? CHRISTINA FELDMAN is a co-founder of Gaia House. She has been leading Insight Meditation retreats worldwide since 1976. She is a Guiding Teacher of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She is the author of a number of books including Woman Awake, Way of Meditation, and co-author of Soul Food. Recent books include Silence and The Buddhist Path to Simplicity. YANAI POSTELNIK first encountered the teachings of the Buddha while travelling in Asia in 1989, and has been teaching Insight Meditation and Buddhist practice internationally for 30 years. Yanai is much inspired by the forest tradition of Thailand, and the transformative power of the natural world. He is a member of the Gaia House Teacher Council, and a Core Faculty member of Insight Meditation Society, Massachusetts. Since 2018 Yanai has devoted a significant amount of his time to activism and nonviolent civil disobedience, calling for an appropriate response by government, to the climate, ecological and social justice crises of our time. Having grown up in New Zealand, with parents of European and Asian heritage, Yanai lives with his wife Catherine McGee in Devon, England. As someone who was a dear friend of Rob’s ( and have been since 1988, when we met at Berklee College of Music in Boston), I am here to share some personal reflections on his kindness, brilliance andgentleness. She has been trained under the guidance of Martine Batchelor and completed the Bodhi College Dharma Teacher Training. She also took the MBCAS instructor training program (mindfulness based cognitive approach for seniors).