This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation w/ M. Brensilver: Ground and Opening; Dharmette: Unsustainable Trajectories & Love. 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.
Okay folks, we should practice together. So finding your posture, finding your belly. Just live in your belly for a moment. A sense of gravity, the earthiness of your body. Really taking your seat. What did the Buddha mean when he touched the earth? Just let your body find out right now.
I’m so used to living in my heart and my head that the attention almost drifts up like a helium balloon out of my belly, out of the bones to my head and heart. But we just stay grounded in your belly. Sit in your bones. Know yourself as earth. Breathe yourself down into the ground. May you stay open but very stable.
Just sensing a feeling in your body, kind of circuits of emotional activation, and just bathing those circuits in awareness, patience.
It’s like we have a certain unannounced vision of how our life is supposed to unfold, and the feeling in the body is the way we assess our progress towards that model of our life. But we’re invited to put down notions of what our life is supposed to be, what it is. To put down notions of what it is to meditate, and to breathe. Let me just use everything as a way of becoming more alive.
Just for now, pleasure and preferences become very much beside the point. Not forever, but for now. And you don’t have to perform awareness. Awareness depends on certain conditions, but none of those conditions are you.
Buddha knowing. Dhamma.
So the Buddha’s path began with a recognition that something about his life was unsustainable. As the story goes, before leaving the palace, he was living in a kind of illusion. And then he realized that pleasure couldn’t go on forever. There’s a kind of recognition—he saw the human condition was inherently unstable, ruled by uncertainty.
This recognition generated some fear as the illusion of a governable, permanent pleasure crumbled. And he sought security instead in relinquishment. In a way, you could say he sought security by being infinitely vulnerable to the world.
And perhaps the ambient anxiety of 2025, of this moment, is something along these lines. We’re intuiting something similar, but not about the individual, but about our society. That we as a human species are not on a sustainable path. And just as the Buddha’s pleasure was unsustainable, so too, maybe, are the conditions and the trajectory of us.
It’s not that human nature is getting worse, not that over the last 100 years or something we’ve deteriorated. We have actually gotten better in many ways. It’s just that greed and hate and delusion scale more efficiently than Dharma. And technology has functioned, not only, but in part, to scale greed, hatred, and delusion. Our bewilderment grows as we are flooded with ideas and opinions but cease to care about evidence. And overconfidence is what goes viral.
So we’re a kind of caricature of the Dunning-Kruger effect1, a Dunning-Kruger culture. They write, “The skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain. Those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”
I was angry when I wrote up these notes, just full disclosure. You know, and as I offer the talk, I was sort of recognizing, “Oh yeah, anger always imputes an agent.” And maybe in certain moments, in reflecting on this theme, I forgot something about empty phenomena rolling on.
Let me continue my rant. Renée DiResta2 said that freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Ignorance now reaches everywhere. There are likely massive labor effects of AI and new technology. Disparities of wealth are heartbreaking, and the emerging economy is likely to exacerbate that gap, not heal it. And the rise of authoritarianism, not just in this country but many places, the confidence of conmen mistaken for actual hope.
And of course, LA is on my mind, and climate change, and the shrinking of livable land, or at least insurable land. And all this just… yeah, it just seems like it’s not sustainable. I don’t feel apocalyptic or something, or feel like something is so imminent, but it just feels like this is not sustainable.
And then we sense our nearly complete powerlessness in the face of the scaling of greed, hate, and delusion. Sometimes our heart gets frenzied, sometimes it collapses. Sometimes for me, it sparks a kind of dabbling with a certain kind of nihilism. Not nihilism in the sense the Buddha used it, but just the sense of, “Get me out. Get me out of samsara.”
On the one hand, it’s a very good thing to have confidence that you can be very happy even amidst very difficult circumstances. Practice engenders that confidence. Happiness independent of conditions is a reasonable way of talking about freedom. Shinzen Young3 would often use a phrase like that. But still, I don’t even want to flirt with nihilism, you know?
And so, sometimes we do say, “Step out of the realm of hope and fear.” That’s often an instruction. We say to hope is to hope for the wrong thing. T.S. Eliot said, “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing.” And so yeah, step out of hope and fear. But sometimes, and today was one of those times, I need hope. I need hope, but the time scale of my hope might need to expand. I need to expand beyond the horizon of our lives.
And maybe our love can’t quite dispel misery right now, but nevertheless, let us steadfastly plant seeds of wisdom and compassion. They’ve been planted through time. We are enjoying the fruit of that now. And so I want to be part of a group that is committed to love, to non-harming, to heedfulness, to care, even if that fruit is not born now, even in this lifetime. We do need the momentum of goodness to continue. And I want to be part of an endless stream of wisdom and compassion that predates the Buddha and continues after us.
“Doing no evil, engaging in what’s skillful, and purifying one’s mind—this is the teaching of the Buddhas.” Plural. From the Dhammapada4. “Doing no evil, engaging in what’s skillful, purifying one’s mind.” I go back in moments to the fundamentals when things get staticky. Maybe that’s clear enough. Maybe just that is enough. Let us do that, even though it feels insufficient. Let us do that.
This is from a local San Francisco paper I saw today.
In December, Rangers from the U.S. Forest Service encountered an unexpected climber: a goose attempting to summit Mount Shasta. Forest Rangers Nick Myers and Eric Falconer of the Mount Shasta Avalanche Center were on routine patrol when they came upon their first attempted ascent of Mount Shasta by a goose. Found at about 10,000 feet, Myers said the first step was to catch it. “I didn’t think I’d actually catch the goose, but as boys being boys, we tried.”
The rescue proved more challenging than expected, with the goose initially trying to escape. “At first, the goose tried to fly away but couldn’t. Its head and eyes were crusted in ice, wings battered. It flopped its way down the slope. We chased after it without success. Eric and I were about to give up, but I said, ‘I’m going to try one more time.’ And I ran up from behind and dove on top of it and caught it. Honestly, I was surprised I caught it. And my next thought was, ‘What do I do? What do we do now?’ And that’s when we were like, ‘Well, I guess we try to take it down the mountain.’”
“I tucked its wings and stuck it under my arm like a football. I expected a big fuss and fight as I started the snowmobile and began riding down the mountain. This is when I began to feel a real connection of the spirit with the goose, as its demeanor relaxed and it tucked its head into my jacket. The goose most certainly understood we were helping it.”
As it warmed up in the truck, it got a little feisty, but nothing crazy.
It started to talk angry, but tender now. And as I wrote up the notes, I sort of cried in an unusual way for me. And the tears kind of affirmed the necessity of care, stewardship, of love, spiritual friendship.
I offer this for your consideration.
Dunning-Kruger effect: A cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. ↩
Renée DiResta: A researcher and writer who focuses on the spread of disinformation and propaganda in social networks. ↩
Shinzen Young: An American mindfulness teacher and author. ↩
Dhammapada: A collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best-known Buddhist scriptures. ↩