This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver: Freeing Experience; Dharmette: Remembering Ann Buck. 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, welcome folks. Good to be with you.
Many years ago, Gil said something like, “It’s not you who gets free, it’s that you free everything else.” That resonates with the line from the Majjhima Nikāya1 that I shared some weeks ago: “Only when there is what belongs to a self is there self.” It’s not you who gets free; it’s you free everything else. So we practice in this spirit. How much might we free?
Finding a posture. If you’re sitting, stretch up towards the sky with the spine. Give everything else to the Earth.
Just arriving with your breath. Just letting it all take its place amidst awareness. What’s excluded often haunts us. And yet, to include is not to be entangled with. To be entangled with is just another kind of exclusion—excluding the fear or the stickiness or the whatever. So we include and let our life flow through awareness, not clanking into any whirlpools of clinging. So we breathe.
How much of experience can we free? To free our images and sounds, to free our pain, tranquility. To free our feelings, our whole rich affective life. To free our thoughts—not to be free from thought, but to free our thoughts. What a strain possessiveness is. So much tension in ownership. What can be freed as we breathe?
Whatever tastes like self, whatever tastes like “me,” like “I am this,” we let go. The whole play of appearances rising and passing becomes personal. We move out of the position of protagonist into just another little incidental subplot in the majesty of awareness. Don’t take a stand anywhere.
There’s more safety in openness than there is in insisting upon continuity, assuming that what comes next is me.
In greed, aversion2, and fear, these forces maybe intrinsically create the impulse to control. Greed and delusion always have an owner, but in equanimity, the self thins out.
Just resting for these last few minutes.
So, I’m at a stoplight this morning, and I had just seen the Dylan film with my parents a couple of days ago and was listening to one of his early songs: “Mama, take this badge off of me, I can’t use it anymore. It’s getting dark, too dark to see. Feel I’m knocking on heaven’s door.” I was thinking about my friend, Ann Buck, who died this week. I think she was 93, with 50 years of Dharma practice.
While she was in the hospital, her house in the Palisades burned to the ground. It’s a place I had spent a decent amount of time. And yeah, a tragedy for sure. In some moods, she might have said something like, “A better view of the moon.”
Earlier in the morning, I was flipping through Timothy Snyder’s book on resisting autocracy and was surprised how many of the chapters, the maxims, are essentially about fairly ordinary cognitive and emotional clarity. And I’m at the stoplight, I’m sipping a good cup of coffee and enjoying it. I heard somebody say, “When two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen are coming together, I think they don’t know, they don’t have any idea that they could become water.” And I’m aware of all of this. Amidst all of this, I’m happy, very happy. Then this person dressed head to toe in fluorescent psychedelic confetti, riding a bright pink bike, pedals past me. I’m like, okay, this is life here.
So we do our best to live the Dharma. You didn’t come to a memorial service here, and I don’t want to impose my private loss, but I imagine Ann Buck’s life has some meaning for most any Dharma practitioner. I knew Ann from retreats with Shinzen Young3, starting in, I think, 2003. Cumulatively, we probably sat many months together, often next to each other, close to each other. You really get to know a person in the silence. Sometimes I’d sort of feel like I’d sit next to her and kind of draft, you know, like the leader of a… like one drafts behind the lead rider in a bicycle race or something. They’re breaking the wind.
I remember one time we both arrived early to a two-week, year-end retreat at Casa de Maria in Santa Barbara. We both sort of caught each other greedily looking for the best spot in the room. We were there early, like before registration opened, I think. And we said to each other, “First we cling, then it’s time to let go.”
I remember the first time I got kind of a big gulp of freedom, I remember her saying afterwards, “I saw you. I saw your eyes. I knew what was happening.” We taught some daylong retreats in LA, and we would always plan really carefully and orchestrate and have an outline, and it was kind of like whatever we did, it would just get really teary in the room. Perhaps it was meaningful for yogis to see two people separated by almost 50 years who loved each other.
And she was fierce. She was kind of fierce. So when she said, “It’s okay to really love yourself,” you knew she wasn’t playing. She was a restaurateur, I think, owned a few restaurants, ran some restaurants. And I’m not sure I would want to have been her sous chef, I can say that. But when she said, “It’s okay to love yourself,” you did what the woman said.
Ever since I moved from LA to the Bay Area about 12 years ago or so, she suggested that we chat each month on the phone, just about life and practice. I thought maybe, and still think, we were speaking as friends, but I don’t know. I kind of suspect in some way that she wanted to just quietly support me, offer her blessing, try to ensure I didn’t do anything especially stupid. We would have these very lovely, free-flowing conversations about whatever was important, but the Dharma was threaded through all of that. Her confidence in the Dharma seemed to me unshakable. And somehow the path would just infuse everything we would discuss. It felt like, “Oh yeah, she’s sharing her mind.”
And greed, hate, and delusion just kind of look so silly in the mirror of that openness. That kind of made whatever life was for each of us somehow okay enough.
There was something about her home, the view from her backyard, which is quite striking, now in ashes. I looked on whatever was tracking it, you know, hoping the home was okay. But the Cal Fire has photos of each house damaged or okay, and it’s just ashes. But that view, that view a month ago, just a month ago, that view reminded me of her, of her mind in a way. I know she liked to sit out there and practice. It’s a very gorgeous view, some grass and the Santa Monica Mountain hillside, overlooking the Pacific.
Ann had practiced with Shinzen Young, to whom we both feel like we owe our life in some ways, maybe. But also, in a very simple way, she would just remark how much kind of ready access she had to a mind that is classically described as intrinsically empty, naturally radiant, ceaselessly responsive. And she would ask, “How easy is that for you? How accessible is that for you?” There’s a lot of safety in that, that guides you through disease, macular degeneration, through family pain, pain of the world. That keeps you well.
As she entered her 90s, I would call at our appointed time, and I was never certain how she would be. I could hear her aging. I would help her sometimes with a word or ignore it because it didn’t matter. And still, till the end, the kind of emotional resonance, the presence of Dharma was fully intact. There’s something precious about spiritual friends who can hear the [unintelligible] tone of one’s heart. And I know there were many who received her blessings.
So it’s worthwhile to reflect on life and death, the gifts of fearlessness. To reflect on that question I posed maybe a couple of months ago: how would our love look were we a little less afraid?
A poem by James Fenton, “For Andrew Wood”:
What would the dead want from us, Watching from their cave? Would they have us forever howling? Would they have us Rave?
Or disfigure ourselves, or be strangled Like some ancient emperor’s slave? None of my dead friends were emperors With such exorbitant tastes,
And none of them were so vengeful As to have all their friends waste, Waste quite away in sorrow, Disfigured and defaced.
I think the dead would want us to weep For what they have lost. I think that our luck in continuing Is what would affect them most.
But time would find them generous And less self-engrossed. And time would find them generous As they used to be.
And what else would they want from us Than an honoured place in our memory, A favourite room, a hallowed chair, Privilege and celebrity?
And so the dead might cease to grieve And we might make amends. There might be a pact between dead friends And living friends.
What our dead friends would want from us Would be such living friends.
Okay, thank you.
Majjhima Nikāya: A collection of Buddhist scriptures, part of the Pāli Canon. The name translates to “Middle-length Discourses.” The original transcript said “maim andaya,” which has been corrected based on context. ↩
Aversion: A common translation for the Pali word dosa. It is one of the three root causes of suffering in Buddhism, along with greed (lobha) and delusion (moha). The original transcript said “virion.” ↩
Shinzen Young: A well-known American meditation teacher. The original transcript said “shins and yang.” ↩