This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew; Dharmette: The mirage of self evaporates as the fires cool. 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, welcome. I appreciate being together tonight. My talks, I plan out my talks carefully. I do not plan out the guided meditation at all, but we just see what happens. I sort of presume you have some way, at least one way of practicing that feels native to your heart, and you can just lapse into that if I do anything bad.
Okay, on that inspiring note, let us dwell in the Dhamma together.
Let us take good care. The karma of the day, or the week, or the life, it’s all come to this. The heart made so vast that everything has its place. There’s no more sorting out what we want and what we don’t want. Just putting down the melodrama of self, the gridlock of “I am-ness.”
We pour our awareness into the senses. Just each moment becoming more alive. How alive can you be in this moment?
Maybe pick up your breath as a way of refreshing aliveness in each moment. The more we hold on to the moment, the less alive we become. Don’t even look for ground.
This moment doesn’t exactly care about this life. We learn to tolerate it not caring. We come to trust that taking good care of this moment leads to a rich life.
A poem wrote something like, “That’s what the minute said to the hour: without me, you are nothing.” That’s what the moment said to the life.
To be fully alive, we have to, in a sense, put down our life, the sticky melodrama of self and project. This includes aliveness. Don’t hang on to all the familiar reference points. That’s not what keeps us safe anyway. Just come to trust that there’s safety in the falling, the groundlessness.
All phenomena remind us of our freedom.
Okay, good to sit with you.
So, a quote I saw this week from Ajahn Sucitto1: “As it is based upon dispassion and cooling, the realization of Nibbāna2 cannot arise from getting heated up about the host of Māra3 or from denying its existence. It comes from replacing the compulsive movements of craving and ignorance with mindful energy and insight. Nibbāna is the experience of space in the mind where previously everything was densely stuck together in regenerative congestion. In that congestion, a self is imagined that now and then longs to escape from the oppressive host of inner voices, feelings, doubts, and desires. So to one who practices insight, the idea that Nibbāna is a selfish goal doesn’t make sense, because the mirage of self evaporates as the fires cool. And the means of bringing this about is the selfless eight-fold path. As a practice, this means cultivating a purer and wiser response to faults and attachments than the counter-attack or defense moods adopted by the self-view. Rather than fight the host or get away from them, you have to liberate the host from Māra, the embodiment of suffering. You have to liberate the host of Māra from all delusion, from all the hatred and fear and belief that binds them with self-view.”
So, Ajahn Sucitto, of course, is a monk, but you get a sense of how profound the path turns inwards. This is a path that’s really not about helping my life along; the whole notion of “my life” is a symptom rather than the centerpiece. The austerity and devotion of that spirit is kind of startling. I see a quote like that and I have to reflect, “Okay, do I want that?” I would say I have some ambivalence. Sometimes I feel like I kind of want the middle path between Nibbāna and Saṃsāra4. Right? Like that, you know, from the Confessions: “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.”5 Maybe. I think we lay practitioners are still in very early stages of translating the kind of radical gesture of relinquishment for lay life.
So, “the host of Māra”—that is an interesting phrase. The host of Māra: me, my project, my views, ideas. This is the host of Māra. And Māra visits, and our so-called life becomes the host. In biology, a host provides the nourishment for the visiting organism. How do I provide nourishment for Māra?
The philosopher Thomas Metzinger6 says, “Biological evolution is not something to be glorified. It’s unknowing, driven by chance, and has no mercy. It’s a process that exploits and sacrifices individuals. For millions of years, Mother Nature has talked to us through our reward system and through the emotional layers of our self-model… We have to learn to take a critical stance towards this process, to view our experience as a direct result of it. We have to stop glorifying our own neuro-phenomenological status quo, face the facts, and find the courage to think about alternatives in a rational way.”
So much of my life is essentially the ruthlessness of my evolutionary conditioning just kind of bullying me. Mother Nature speaking through my reward system, speaking through sakkāya-diṭṭhi7, the self-model. Denying Māra is one of Māra’s tricks. So we practice radical openness to the truth of this moment. Failing to listen to Māra means that we will obey Māra. We have to see and hear Māra respectfully, so as not to host them.
“Regenerative congestion”—that’s like the opposite of space. You’re just cramped, gridlocked. Congestion is a metaphor, but it’s also not in a way. Suffering often seems to involve energy—and by that, I mean very subtle layers of feeling experience—it involves energy not flowing somehow, contracted whirlpools, hyper-intensities, the whirlpools where things feel stuck. Regenerative congestion. Compulsivity always feels dense. If we were imaging our spiritual body or something like that, compulsivity would show up on the image, a kind of density.
Compulsivity and ignorance. Ajahn Sucitto says ignorance—we forget. We forget the Dhamma, we forget our wisdom. Suffering, in an important sense, is a kind of forgetting. It may be worthwhile to ask, “What do you forget when you suffer?”
That word Nibbāna gets used in different ways in different moments by different traditions, different teachers. Here, it’s “the experience of space in the mind.” How vast can the mind be? How empty and open, unfixed? The movement towards more well-being in this life, I don’t think it can be fully characterized as a move from contraction to spaciousness, but that captures a lot of the heart’s movement. Suffering and space tend to be inversely correlated. Suffering is a kind of claustrophobia. The vastness is occluded.
So, dispassion and cooling. Ajahn Sucitto says so much of suffering and clinging involves a certain kind of—in psychological terms—hyperarousal. Maybe all of craving is a kind of hyperarousal, a kind of heat. The eyes are burning, the ears are burning, everything’s burning. The heat of clinging. Tranquility is not numbness. It’s alive. It’s the aliveness that I was alluding to in the sit, but without the kind of whirlpools that capture the attention.
The ego, the ego sense of self, is almost endlessly innovative, crystallizing around anything like a kind of amoeba, including spiritual practice. The word Nibbāna or Enlightenment is sort of catnip for the ego. But this is not a story about the self getting better; that’s just more congestion. The idea that freedom is a selfish goal doesn’t make sense. “The mirage of self evaporates as the fires cool.” The whole notion of the self possessing some attainment that it possesses becomes kind of silly, absurd.
The Visuddhimagga8 says today is like, “I am not anything belonging to anyone anywhere.” We could say nothing could ever belong to freedom or own freedom. Freedom is so often envisioned as adding something, like a kind of accoutrement of the self, but it’s subtraction, a profound state of non-territoriality.
So, liberating from all the hatred and fear and belief that binds them with self-view. The sense of self—sometimes I have this image of the sense of self as like a hologram, the creation of some figure by arranging light in a particular way. The lights creating the impression of self are made of fear, clinging, and so on. The dissolution of self, if it’s genuine, can only lead us to care more. When the self-system is no longer the site of endless curation, what’s left is the rest of life, very open. The self re-arises, but we know a little more deeply how innocent it is. It’s not a host for Māra in the same way.
So I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up what’s useful and leave the rest behind.
Okay, so thanks folks. This week, IMC is supporting Save the Children, with money going, I believe, primarily to Gaza and Darfur to protect children. I put the link there in the YouTube video. I also put a link to a form to submit questions. It’s also in the chat, but it’s in the description. Submit some questions. It’s helpful for me to know what’s on your mind and get inspired by your curiosity. So, see you next time, and I wish you all well. Okay.
Ajahn Sucitto: A British-born Theravāda Buddhist monk. The original transcript said “arent aito,” which has been corrected based on the context of the talk. ↩
Nibbāna: (Pali) The ultimate goal of the Buddhist path, meaning “to extinguish” or “to cool.” It refers to the extinguishing of the “fires” of greed, hatred, and delusion, resulting in liberation from suffering. ↩
Māra: (Pali) A demonic celestial king who personifies temptation, sin, and death in Buddhism. He represents the passions that distract and delude humans. ↩
Saṃsāra: (Pali/Sanskrit) The cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound. It is characterized by suffering and dissatisfaction (dukkha). ↩
“Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.”: A famous prayer by Saint Augustine of Hippo from his autobiographical work, Confessions, reflecting the conflict between spiritual aspiration and worldly desires. ↩
Thomas Metzinger: A German philosopher and professor of theoretical philosophy. The original transcript said “Mets singer,” which has been corrected. ↩
Sakkāya-diṭṭhi: (Pali) The “personality view” or “self-view,” the mistaken belief in a permanent, independent self. It is considered the first of the ten fetters to be abandoned on the path to enlightenment. ↩
Visuddhimagga: (Pali) “The Path of Purification,” a comprehensive manual of Theravāda Buddhist doctrine and meditation written in the 5th century by the scholar Buddhaghosa. The original transcript said “vudi Maga.” ↩