This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver; Dharmette: It’s Complicated and It’s Simple. 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.
Welcome, folks. It’s good to be with you. I’m looking forward to sitting together, practicing in one way or another. Please find your posture, sitting, standing, lying down.
If there’s anything that feels good about stopping, anything that feels good about stillness, just anchor there. It doesn’t need to be intense, and the pleasantness can coexist with a lot of unpleasantness, but anchor to whatever feels good in the stopping.
To be drawn into concerns is natural. Mild pleasantness doesn’t feel urgent at all, and so it feels irresponsible not to worry or plan, to tie up the loose ends of the day or week. One facet of equanimity1 is just the capacity to stay with what feels less urgent.
Maybe there’s something soothing about your breathing, the deliciousness of getting oxygen when you need it, the ripple of relaxation as we exhale what’s been used up.
The Satipatthana Sutta2 says that we establish mindfulness by placing down greed and distress with respect to the world. In this sense, mindfulness is built on the foundation of something like equanimity. We can’t turn inwards if we are trying to rearrange the external. We can’t truly turn inwards if we’re turning inwards in order to rearrange the external.
We get more comfortable just offering our heart up to the moment, trusting that no matter what happens, it’ll be Dharma3.
Maybe it feels right to open up the aperture of attention. Let me see how much the attention can relax around all objects. The attention can build and make objects more substantial than they are. The object becomes denser, weightier. In our practice, we are making what was heavy, light.
In the world, it’s a little quieter; the awareness, a little louder.
Maybe even your autobiography becomes a little light, run through with space. Equanimity allows the attention to move without snagging on objects, snagging the way a hangnail gets snagged on fabric. Just keep opening.
Okay, I see a comment. No, that was just hair. A cat did not scratch my forehead. A cat has scratched my forehead, that’s true. I just don’t fully understand the difference between cats and dogs. With a dog that you love, you just get up close, head to head, that kind of thing. Apparently, that is not how one expresses feline love, and you might get a claw to the forehead, as I did. But it was my fault. It was my fault. I should have read the signals better. It’s a little bit of a non-sequitur on the Dharma theme, but this is a slow process of getting to know each other, and so all of that is true.
This world is complicated, and we grapple with it as best we can. The systems we live in—environmental, economic systems—they’re just staggeringly complex. An economist once said to me, “No one understands the economy.” And our brain… this is from one researcher, Wolf Singer:
The more we learn about the brain, the more abstract the descriptions will become because we shall be dealing with increasingly complex assemblies of neurons and the spatiotemporal patterns generated by these assemblies. These patterns are with all likelihood non-stationary and best described as dynamic trajectories of a highly nonlinear system. We’ll have to consider more and more that the brain is a member of a sociocultural network and that some of the phenomena that seem to be so difficult to explain in pure neuronal terms will have their explanation only when considering interactions among brains or networks of brains. Many of the constructs that are so difficult to relate to brain processes, like value systems, consciousness, intentionality, and so forth, have only come into the world because brains mirror themselves reciprocally in other brains and assign properties to the then-gained experiences. Obviously, the complexity of these networks formed by interacting brains by far exceeds the complexity of individual brains.
So even our own life, in certain respects, is beyond our comprehension. We desperately try to explain our life, to explain how we got to be the way we are, to explain why we love or do not love another person, to explain a mood, a momentary feeling, why we’re feeling like this right now. To explain our moral commitments, our beliefs, why we value this or that. We give a lot of reasons for what we do and say and believe, but those reasons may not be the actual causes of our actions, our words, our beliefs. We tell stories. We tell the story of our life. We tell heroic stories or tragic stories, or we tell stories of redemption, but every story is ambivalent about truth. And what we call “my life” is much more mysterious than we tend to believe.
And then there’s this universe. This is from cosmological science:
We can currently see a sphere around us extending 46 billion light-years in all directions, known as the observable universe. Light and galaxies beyond this sphere haven’t yet had time to reach us. On our leading cosmological theory, the rate at which new galaxies become visible will decline, and those currently more than 63 billion light-years away will never become visible from the Earth. We could call the region within this distance the “eventually observable universe.” Accelerating expansion also puts a limit on what we can ever affect. If today you shine a ray of light out into space, it could reach any galaxy that’s currently less than 16 billion light-years away, but galaxies further than this are being pulled away so quickly that neither light nor anything else we might send could ever affect them.
There’s something beyond even the eventually observable universe. And I read that because it’s just a marvel at how much we’ll never know. It’s so complex, and it’s so simple.
A yogi walked into a one-on-one practice meeting with me on a recent retreat and said something like, “It’s so simple. There’s just love and heartbreak.” Sometimes people speak about insights, but this yogi was speaking from the inside.
The Buddha said if we focus on the wrong categories of experience, the wrong distinctions, we spin out, we get confused, we cause trouble: praise and blame, good and evil, self and other. If we get too fixated, it’s not the right place for our energy. And so he offered a much more fundamental distinction that simplifies everything: suffering and peace, the highest happiness.
And maybe “love and heartbreak” is a kind of variation on that theme. And perhaps for you, love and heartbreak is a useful framework for understanding your life simply. There was so much love in the beginning. As a baby, the soft animal of your body loving what it loves. And all that love, all that need, almost instantaneously running into heartbreak. The world has and will disappoint us at a fundamental level. Whatever love we’ve received, it’s involved heartbreak. Whatever love we get, it will involve more heartbreak.
But we try to grow up, perhaps master the kind of dialectic of love and heartbreak. We grow up and we try to figure out what we love or what’s actually worthy of our love. And maybe we find someone to love, and someone with whom we dramatize the cycles of giving and receiving. Leonard Cohen said it doesn’t matter whether we found ourselves in the loneliness of separation or the vertigo of union; everyone finally learns there ain’t no cure for love. And maybe that’s a way of saying something like, we can’t not love. We must love, but that love entails heartbreak. So there’s no cure.
But we can learn to love and to let the heart break in a way that’s imbued with incredible grace, to let that become and consolidate wisdom and compassion. We must perceive and stand guard over the love and the heartbreak of people we care about. To actually stand guard, to protect their love, to honor their heartbreak. If we cannot perceive the love and the heartbreak of others, our care for them, our own love for them, will feel misattuned, might even be alienating.
And we have goals and aspirations. We try in our lives, we try in our work, we try in relationships, we try in our spiritual practice. And all that trying is okay, but it better not lose sight of love, and it better not forget heartbreak.
We grow up and discover, to our amazement—we should have known, but to our amazement—that we must yield our life back to time. It’s more heartbreak, more love.
So I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up what’s useful and leave the rest behind.
Thank you for your attention. This is the last meeting of this year. Next week is Christmas; we won’t have class. And then I’ll be back January 1st, New Year’s Day. Thank you. On certain Wednesdays, we started in April, I think, and we’ll keep going. It hasn’t been canceled yet. I’m grateful for your support and the Dharma solidarity over the course of the year. So I wish you all well.
I’m going to go check the chat and see if there were any consequences to my cat comments. I’m not trying to add to the divisiveness of our polarized country with more dog-cat dichotomies. But I wish you all well. See you somewhere on the Dharma campus. Okay.
Equanimity (Pali: upekkhā): A state of mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation. It is one of the four sublime states (Brahmavihāras). ↩
Satipatthana Sutta: A key Buddhist discourse on the foundations of mindfulness. ↩
Dharma: In Buddhism, this term can refer to the teachings of the Buddha, the path to enlightenment, or the fundamental nature of reality. ↩