This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Affect and the Lure of Thought; Dharmette: Dereification of the Self-Model. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Sometimes we get into our Dharma posture very gently, the same way somebody might get into a yoga asana, where the getting in is as important as the getting to. But other times, it’s counseled by one of my teachers, Shinzen Young1, who would say, “Start on a dime.”
Sometimes we have to do that in our life, and so here we practice a kind of ruthlessness with respect to the trail of distractions and dramas. We start on a dime.
Maybe it feels like, “Wait a second, I need to tend to all those loose ends. I need to patch things up, figure things out.” It feels like neglecting a loved one to put down our thoughts, but put them down. And if there’s pain that comes with that, if there’s a sense of vulnerability or incompletion, just feel that.
The renunciation involves the willingness to feel. Renouncing a thought that feels important to tend to, the egoic wound that feels important to nurse, the uncertainty, the ambiguity that feels necessary to game out for our life. For that life to become less sticky involves the willingness to feel, to not use the pacifier we call thinking.
Just breathe and be with your body. Tend lovingly, clearly to the emotional circuits of your body that make a plea about the necessity of thinking.
We practice bringing equanimity2 to the emotional activations. One of the effects of this is that everything becomes less urgent.
You’re not pretending the rest of your life doesn’t exist, but right now, this is your life. It won’t commence when class ends or tomorrow begins. This is your life.
May we be free.
The closer we get to experience, the more fully we need to forget ourselves, to cease pinging to the tower of I-am-ness. Feel safe enough in the wondrous dark.
I had a memory teaching a few days ago of a few times as a kid, I don’t know, eight or ten, something like that. I remember playing this weird thought experiment game in my mind. I don’t know where this is from, and maybe I needed some help or something, but I felt okay emotionally. I remember I would imagine things falling away. First, that I was never born—that was quite conceivable. Then, my brother and my parents, family, never existed. Okay. What about our species? What about no history, no time, no universe, nothing, nothing?
I would kind of hit this point of real, abiding nothingness and then sort of freak out. In retrospect, probably for a few reasons. First, I was actively imagining my death and the changing of all things, and that’s a lot for a kid. But more radically, I think I was imagining something even beyond nihilism—not merely that nothing mattered, but that nothing could ever matter. That there was no meaning, no love, no nothing. I was trying to get my mind around that, and something just blotted out. Of course, it could have been that way. And that there is something is extraordinarily wild.
In that thought exercise, I think I was also trying to essentially think my way into emptiness. Not that there is nothing, but that the something is much more like nothing than we realize. Emptiness is characterized in a lot of different ways, but one aspect of it, one characterization, would be emptiness as the progressive dereification3 of the self-model.
That word, dereification, was typically used in meditative circles to describe the process whereby thoughts become mere thoughts rather than reality. Generally, the voice inside my head is confused for the voice of God. To think is to be identified with thinking. There are wise thoughts, but all thoughts involve some measure of identification, a collapse of metacognitive awareness. Mindfulness is about appreciating phenomena as phenomena, rather than phenomena as the world. To recognize visual impressions are arising, rather than “that’s the world.”
To reify things is to make them more substantial, more real. The thought of some food you love makes you salivate. The thought of something scary makes you afraid. It’s reified; that thought is the world, it’s very real. Dereification moves in the opposite direction. Dereification recognizes thought as a passing phenomenon. An auditory thought, “I am a bad person,” or “I am whatever,” is heard in the same way that we hear a sound. There’s no more meaning in “I’m a bad person” than in a passing sound. So what had been transparent becomes opaque. What we had been looking through becomes an object of attention. The thought, “I need lunch,” is just as real as anything in the world, and then it becomes an empty arising. It’s the process of disidentification.
To use the philosopher and Buddhist practitioner Thomas Metzinger’s4 language, the representation of lunch is not automatically integrated into a transparent self-model. We recognize, “Oh, that’s a thought about lunch.” It’s dereified. Rather than, “I want lunch,” which remains transparent and then gets integrated as the agent, “the Matthew model of myself wants lunch, needs lunch,” and then we go about fulfilling that craving or whatever.
But there’s a lot more to disidentify from than the thought of lunch. New meditators take so much for granted about the self-model. Really, the only thing new meditators disidentify with is just distractors, like a simple thought about lunch or whatever it may be—thinking, coming back to breathing, or something. But what distracts us is not nearly as problematic as what is always assumed. What is assumed is transparent.
It leaves many layers of the model of self, the self-view, transparent. They must become opaque. So we start to hear the different ways in which we incessantly hum the song of self. We’re almost constantly reiterating our position, sandwiched between our past and our future, each moment a kind of addendum to our autobiography. “This is who I am, this is where I’ve come from, these are my papers, they say who I am.” The position of our body—we keep tabs for understandable reasons—but we keep tabs on the places where “I” end and the world begins. This is reiterated and integrated into the self-model again and again.
So part of what we’re learning to do is this process of disidentification. To disidentify from our preferences, because unnoticed preferences, unnoticed little knots of clinging, create a motivational urgency that gets integrated into the self-model. Part of the function of equanimity is to help us disidentify. When we don’t have equanimity with craving or aversion, it’s very hard to disidentify with it. It feels like we must enact it. The craving and aversion that is not held in equanimity, our preferences and points of clinging, holographically project a sense of self.
The sense of ownership is assumed, often transparent. “This is me, this is mine.” The Majjhima Nikāya5 says, “Only when there is what belongs to a self is there a self.” This ownership, these mechanisms of ownership, are transparent. We’re making them opaque. To disidentify from all of this is not to dispute the content, not to say, “I’m someone else,” but it’s to recognize that the identification, the reification, has important effects on the view.
So we get quiet. We get quieter. Ram Dass6 says, “The quieter you get, the more you can hear.” We have to get quiet enough to hear the noise of our self-model. Nisargadatta Maharaj7 said, “What is known cannot be self.” So we become more comfortable without some of the reference points, having made opaque what was transparent. More comfortable in not knowing, more comfortable in emptiness.
I offer this for your consideration.
Shinzen Young: A well-known American mindfulness teacher and meditation consultant. ↩
Equanimity (Upekkhā): A Pali term for a state of mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation. It is one of the Four Sublime States (Brahmaviharas). ↩
Dereification: The process of recognizing thoughts as mental events rather than as objective reality. The speaker uses the word “deification” in the audio, but the context and the talk’s title, “Dereification of the Self-Model,” strongly suggest the intended term is “dereification,” which is the opposite of “reification” (to make something abstract more real or concrete). ↩
Thomas Metzinger: A German philosopher and professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Mainz. His work focuses on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of cognitive science, and ethics of neurotechnology. ↩
Majjhima Nikāya: “The Middle-length Discourses,” a collection of suttas or discourses attributed to the Buddha and his chief disciples. It is the second of the five nikāyas, or collections, in the Sutta Piṭaka, which is one of the “three baskets” that compose the Pali Canon of Theravāda Buddhism. ↩
Ram Dass: An American spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author. His best-known book is Be Here Now (1971). ↩
Nisargadatta Maharaj: An Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher of Advaita (nondualism), who lived in Mumbai. The quote “What is known cannot be self” is a central theme in his teachings. The original transcript said “thear,” which has been corrected based on the well-known quote. ↩