This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation w/ Matthew Brensilver: Abiding in Goodness; Dharmette: On not understanding dharma talks. 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.
When the Dalai Lama said that kindness and compassion are necessities, not luxuries, what did he mean? Discover the necessity of love in the barren, desolate landscapes of hate and misattunement.
When the heart’s been drying out in the sun or becoming more brittle, the intensity of life… when the heart’s been living in a kind of state of forgetfulness around the necessity of kindness, compassion, and love, it can be very powerful just to have a moment of reunification with love. Our whole body can quiver with it.
The mind goes to work figuring out how to trace out the implications of our love, what to do in the face of the enormity of hate. Just put down those details for now. Those details have the effect of dampening the brightness of the love. In other words, don’t worry about anything except caring for your heart in this moment. The only nourishment for your heart is wisdom and love.
Without flirting with any tribalism or sense of homogeneity of this group, we can take some refuge in the fact that our Sangha1 is gathered around a commitment to goodness, to non-harming, to restraint and care. Part of why Sangha feels good is this mutuality and the sense of, “Oh, this is an ethical culture, a little community within society that is trying not to trespass on the hearts of others.”
Whatever goodness means to you, abide in it. An image, a word, or a phrase, a kind of vibrational frequency in your own body and heart. Just abide, in one form or another. Abide in love.
There’s a recognition that every movement of our mind and body expresses this longing to be happy. And yes, some of those movements are unwise, maybe they don’t work out, but this thread of longing to be well runs through the entirety of our life. The recognition of that can engender a tremendous amount of compassion for ourselves.
“One who loves themself,” the Buddha says, “will not harm another.” Because it does not take much work to trace out the implications of our own experience, to recognize how urgently all beings long to be well, safe, and protected. So we kind of melt into a web of billions of beings.
Abiding in a sense of goodness, ringing the bell of love, reminding ourself moment by moment of its necessity.
Sometimes touching into goodness is like grief, and sometimes like ecstasy. Just stay close in. “Strong back, soft front,” Joan Halifax says. The fleshy underside of our bodies that we call our face and chest and belly is soft, but the trust, courage, and confidence that love engenders is the strong back.
Sometimes love feels like love, and sometimes love just lets you feel whatever it is that needs to be felt. Either way, we come to something like a very deep faith in love.
So, I got an anonymous question. It’s quite moving to read your questions, and I’m just answering one, but maybe we’ll get to others. They certainly inform how I’m thinking about the group.
This person said, “Sometimes your talks resonate so strongly, it’s as though I already knew and understood all along, and you just brought it to the light. But then there are talks that feel out of my reach, teasingly standing just outside the realm of my understanding, making me feel like I’d missed an important class. I wish there were a makeup session I could have attended. Which brings me to my question of whether there are makeup classes in the forms of readings or books, transcripts of previous talks in some accessible order you could suggest to bring some of the more complex teachings within reach?”
First off, I don’t know if I’m teaching the right way. Who even knows how to do this? You can kind of follow the Buddha’s model and pedagogical advice, but in the end, you have to make a million editorial decisions in any Dharma talk. Teachers can merely express their particular loves as best they can. So I don’t know if I’m teaching the right way. And just because certain ways of teaching get reinforced by the Sangha, you know, doesn’t mean they’re optimal. Like sometimes I wonder, maybe I should be tougher, much tougher. And then I think, but I don’t want to. And then I’m not, but maybe I should be. So, you know, that’s kind of like the footnote on all of this.
There’s a kind of sincerity in the question that I found sort of charming. And everything beautiful that happens on this path depends on sincerity. By sincerity, I mean a kind of true willingness to be surprised by one’s mind, by the path. The person says, “Yeah, I understood that all along.” That is right. That’s how Dharma2 recognition feels. Something kind of clicks in, and the knowledge feels like remembering. It’s a very, very intimate experience to have one’s mind spoken plainly by a stranger. That’s an experience I’ve had many, many times as a practitioner, you know, sitting with a teacher. A teacher says something, and it feels like they’re almost in my mind. That can feel… that kind of intermingling of beings can feel very intimate. And because that can feel so boundaryless, all the other boundaries are so important. It’s easy to confuse the messenger for the message. Dharma teachers get all kinds of credit that belongs to the Dhamma.
So yes, there’s knowing, recognition, knowledge as a kind of remembering. And there’s not knowing. There are parts that won’t be understood in what I say or what other teachers say. But the recognition of non-understanding is itself an expression of wisdom. To know and respect what one doesn’t understand, that is a kind of hallmark of sincerity.
This Agnes Callard book I mentioned to the daylong on Sunday, on Socratic dialogue and investigation, she writes, “It’s not hard to admit that you were wrong, but very hard to admit that you are wrong. It is not clear how someone is supposed to ask a question to which she thinks she has an answer, when she is currently using that answer to guide her life. She’s not going to saw off the branch she’s standing on.”
Dharma practice involves sawing branches. Sincerity is sawing branches. How is one supposed to ask a question to which she thinks she has an answer, and that answer is currently required for her living? But Dharma practitioners, we see the kind of epidemic of overconfidence, the crisis that actually creates. But Dharma practitioners live with an abiding sense of, “I suspect I’m wrong. I suspect there are real limits to my wisdom. I suspect that my pain, in one way or another, distorts my view.” And accordingly, we have to hedge sometimes, knowing the kilesas3, that our own pain infuses our view.
When I first got into practice, I was too knowing, a kind of arrogance. And it took me… I was sort of unprepared to be surprised, in a way. It took me a little bit of time to get my Dharma sea legs and then survey the terrain. And the conclusion was like, “Oh my God, I don’t know anything.” You know, just gazing at the kind of ocean of Dharma, so humbled by my ignorance and energized by the possibility of learning. There was a lot of aliveness and so many kind of dramatic discoveries in those early years of practice. And it felt like my life kind of hinged on understanding more. I was living an ordinary life, I was not a monastic or something, but it felt like, I know this is the priority. And it was really a kind of process of falling in love with the Dharma and delighting in the revelation of my own ignorance.
Callard highlights that one of the characteristics of Socratic dialogue is that Socrates apparently would be as delighted to be proven wrong as to prove the other wrong. The point is the learning, not the being right.
So now, 24 years after beginning practice—I’ve been practicing exactly half my life, kind of wild—things have evened out. Some of the dramatic discoveries of the first decade have yielded to more of a sense of cruising altitude. But sometimes I get too comfortable in my knowing. And then my own practice, or especially spiritual friendship, or students saying things, or the world, shakes something up, and the rug’s pulled out. Practice is a kind of dialectic between making a comfortable Dharma home—we can’t live without a nest, you know, some of the time—and then the rug being pulled out.
So part of what I’m saying here to you, to whoever asked the question, is to enjoy the not knowing. Your hunger to understand is a very wholesome engine for practice, for growth. Goodness will surely come of it. In a way, it’s kind of like the most important ingredient.
And no, there are no makeup classes. Be patient. Be patient. You kind of can’t swallow the Dharma in one gulp, and there’s no cramming for wisdom. You know, it kind of just ripens, and the circadian rhythms of wisdom are not observable to oneself. So, patience.
When I give a talk, I don’t need you to understand me. I just want you to believe me. And understanding that can come whenever you have time. I do want you to believe me. And believing someone before you understand them, a kind of cognitive dissonance opens up, and the Dharma flows into that gap.
So I offer this for your consideration. Okay folks, good to be with you. I’ll be away next week, so no class on the 26th, but I’ll be back the next week. Okay, I wish you all well.