This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Putting Down the World; Dharmette: Truth & Lies in the US in 2025, w M Brensilver. 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. Thinking of the [unintelligible] and others has had a very visceral impact on me. It’s not that it did anybody any good, but I’ve been up since 2 a.m. and just couldn’t go back to bed. There’s something about the images that stayed with me.
And we practice. We do other things, but we practice. The invitation of practice is this very deep surrender, in a sense, to put down the world. That can feel like some kind of abandonment, and maybe it is. Maybe it is a certain way of radically putting down the world, but we come back to it. We come back to it with a fuller heart, more effective action, and more clarity. It’s almost like we have to abandon the world to regain it.
So, we’ll practice just resting in this radical way of not transacting anything, not trading this moment for anything. There are outcomes, there is progress, there is development, cultivation, goodness, the fruit of practice. But we arrive at the fruit of practice by not trading, not trying to trade this moment for anything.
So, I invite you to find your posture, settle in with some sense of alertness, a kind of brightness, and non-tension.
The invitation is to put down greed and distress with respect to the world. And it feels like, “No, no, no, I can’t put the world down. Can’t abandon it.”
But to some extent, it’s a delusion that we’re propping up the world with our care and worry. And it’s a delusion to think that if we put down our care for a moment, it won’t be stronger in the next.
The ideas, notions of my life. The density of our autobiography, the density of time. The compulsivity of our care. We actually put all this down in order to discover a deeper love. But don’t fixate on love.
Just enter the territory of your mind. The simplicity of how experience constellates right now. The sound, sensation, this breath.
Let the breath breathe itself.
All thoughts of getting somewhere, making something of yourself, are a kind of buffer, disrupting the intimacy, the experience of being alive, breathing.
You’re not bartering with time, trading in this moment of mindfulness for something else in the future. Practice falling into the present.
The more completely we lay down the world, lay down greed and distress with respect to the world, the more full our love becomes. The less tenable hate becomes.
The experience of no world deepens the poignancy of the world.
We just, perhaps, find our own simple little ways of helping out here or there.
As a child, I would get so enraged by hypocrisy. Not just annoyed, but really deeply affected, and it usually mobilized a lot of anger in me. It wasn’t that I thought I knew the ultimate truth, but it wasn’t hard to spot lies. When I would see a society say one thing and do another, or I would sense someone living deceptively, using words to hide the truth, or when I would see something but nobody would acknowledge it or talk about it, pretending it wasn’t even there… it’s hard. That was sort of how I felt about dukkha1, you know, suffering. Like, nobody’s talking about this all-pervasive force that we keep bumping into.
As children, we learn and understand by interactions with others. Often, not always apparent, we sort of arrive at a sense of consensual reality through interaction. So, “Okay, what you’re experiencing is coldness, here’s some warm clothes. You don’t feel good because you’re hungry, here’s some food. You’re worthy of love, here is my love.” This is really the basis for empathic connection, for making sense of the world together.
In grad school, the research I was working on focused on risk and resilience in maltreated kids—abuse, neglect. When many of those kids faced trauma, part of what was so destructive and disorienting was they didn’t even really know what was real. Often, they didn’t have anyone to help them realize, “Yes, this is true. This is real. I’m sorry.” In this way, honesty feels like a kind of moral debt, and it’s owed to others so that they can make sense of their lives.
An [unintelligible] commentary said something like, “All evil states converge upon the transgression of truth.” To deceive another is to induce a measure of delusion in them. What we are attempting to uproot, we induce that in them by deceiving. The Buddha said, “One who feels no shame in telling a deliberate lie, there’s no harm they won’t perpetrate.”
Then there’s a related issue, not quite a lie, but almost 40 years ago, philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote this essay in a philosophical journal titled “On Bullshit,” defining it and distinguishing it from lying. He wrote, “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there’s so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes our share, but we tend to take this situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what function it serves. In other words, we have no theory.”
I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit. The bullshitter cannot be regarded as lying, for they do not presume that they know the truth. Their statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that is not true. It’s just this lack of connection to a concern with truth, this indifference to how things really are, that I regard as the essence of bullshit.
As Dharma practitioners, if we take a stand against anything, it’s against that in our own lives with our people. This is Thomas Metzinger: “This scientific, very sober, rigorous approach to reality and life and the spiritual approach to reality and life stem from the same values, the same normative core. It has something to do with truthfulness. I guess the English word is veracity—the will, the pure will to absolute veracity and to accept the obligation of veracity toward oneself.”
At various times in my practice, I felt such a deep longing, just like, “Let me understand. I don’t care at all if the truth makes me happier, just let me understand.” So in this political moment in the United States, when there’s so much deception and such pervasive BS, such a fundamental indifference to how things really are, I find myself returned to my adolescent rage. This anger motivates a kind of deep wish to show, “No, you’re wrong.” There’s this kind of hunger to prove, for the final piece of evidence to be revealed, to finally agree on the epistemological terms of the moment, to show, “No, this was always a con.” It feels like I’m trying to maintain my sanity as a citizen, I’m trying to maintain some sense of consensual reality, but marshalling evidence doesn’t matter at all in the face of indifference to truth.
This sends me into a kind of self-righteous spiral where I need to find others who agree with me totally, and there’s a kind of bond in the outrage, finding consensual reality together. I get why I have these feelings, but it’s not a healthy cycle. I feel like there’s got to be a better way. Now you say, “Yes, Matthew, there’s a better way. Let me tell you, there is a better way.” [Laughter]
Probably many things to do, but a few came to mind. The first being just simply, may I treasure the truth, speak the truth as best I can discern it. It’s the pāramī2 of sacca3, truthfulness. And I try to do that in my own way here certain Wednesdays and the rest of my life.
May I give up on some sorrow in this realm. “Give up,” meaning I cannot make my sanity dependent on the world honoring the pāramī of truthfulness. In a way, to enter the debate is to lose. To enter it is to lose. I understand the incentives to deceive, the incentives of BS. I’m even sympathetic, actually, to some of the incentives.
May I be relentless in perceiving self-deception. It’s sort of at the heart of this path. When we dimly sense that we’re pulling a kind of fast one on ourselves, we need others. We can never have 360-degree vision, but we can make a kind of commitment to veracity. May I not live cocooned in the mythic story that is ego. May I be willing to see that burn.
Tania Lombrozo4, I think a social psychologist, she said that people tend to think of themselves as scientists seeking evidence to arrive at the truth or something, but we actually think more like trial lawyers, where we’ve predetermined what our case is, what’s true, and then we make the case for that, more like trial attorneys rather than openly gathering evidence to determine what is.
Nietzsche5 said, “Truth is apportioned according to one’s strength.” Okay, may I become strong enough to tolerate more truth.
And then there is saṅgha6. Not that we believe all the same things or have the exact same political ideology or anything like that, but it is a place where we don’t have to pretend what’s in front of our eyes is not there. And there’s healing just in that.
Nature bats last anyway, which is to say anicca7 bats last. So let us know how to let go before the illusion of holding on is shattered.
Okay, I offer this for your consideration. I appreciate being with you this evening. May you all be well.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. ↩
Pāramī: A Pali word meaning “perfection” or “completeness.” In Buddhism, the pāramīs are virtues or qualities cultivated on the path to awakening. ↩
Sacca: The Pali word for “truth” or “reality.” It is one of the ten pāramīs. ↩
Tania Lombrozo: The speaker may be referring to Tania Lombrozo, a psychologist who studies reasoning and cognition. The analogy of humans as “trial lawyers” rather than “scientists” is more famously associated with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, particularly in his book The Righteous Mind, where he argues that people generally make intuitive judgments and then use reasoning to justify them afterward. ↩
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): A German philosopher whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. ↩
Saṅgha: A Pali word that can mean “community” or “assembly.” In a spiritual context, it typically refers to the community of Buddhist monks and nuns, or more broadly, the community of all those on the Buddhist path. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word meaning “impermanence.” It is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism, along with dukkha (suffering) and anattā (no-self). ↩