This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver; Dharmette: Moral Outrage and 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.
So, welcome to you all. It’s nice to see some names there. It’s good to be back with you. Sometimes a week away feels like not so long; this time felt like a long time. Thank you for the questions you’ve submitted. I’ll answer more of those at some point and let those inform the topics that I try to address.
One question I saw that I thought maybe I should just very briefly address was something like, “Why ‘certain Wednesdays’ isn’t just ‘plain Wednesdays’?” The suggestion was very reasonable: to get substitute teachers on weeks that I’m away. I get that. Partially, it’s just that it gets more stressful administratively to do so; some of it’s my laziness. But there’s also a kind of fire hose of online Dharma, you know, and that’s mostly a great thing. It has also perhaps driven down the kind of value placed on offerings, too. So anybody I could potentially get to sub has a wealth of online stuff already. That market effect, that logic of the marketplace, of the hyper-availability, I think is generally great, but it’s also so complicated. The Dharma really only works under the assumption of a certain preciousness or rarity, maybe. And so that was on my mind too.
And then also, subbing is a bad gig for the sub, you know, generally. When there’s an established teacher who has effectively driven away all the people that they annoy—I have driven away at this point most, maybe not all, most of the people I annoy—and then you have like a very idiosyncratic crew that’s left, namely you all, the experience of kind of stepping into that and subbing is kind of jangly sometimes. So I’m sensitive to that. Anyway, hopefully that sounds okay, but I just wanted to explain that; it seemed worthy of explanation.
We’ll sit in a moment, but I just wanted to share something that came up maybe a couple of weeks ago. I just finished this book, Agnes Callard’s Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, and in it, she discusses Socrates. It’s a book about the necessity of others in growing our wisdom. We cannot see the back of our own head, and Socratic dialogue is a way to help us pursue truth, where the goal is as much to be convinced by others as to convince others. The goal, in other words, is to lose debates as much as to win them. This is not a Dharma book, but it struck me, “Oh yeah, Dharma practice is about losing debates.”
Callard writes, “We are unable to think about the most important things on our own, and we habitually shield ourselves from this terrifying fact. All of us, even professional philosophers, walk around with a conceit of knowledge separating us from other people. Our feeling of basic mental competence, of having the answers on which the living of our lives depend, keeps us from connecting to others in ways that benefit us most. Ignorance of ignorance leads us to think that we are to figure out these important questions for ourselves. Ignorance of ignorance prevents us from thinking alongside of another person about what neither of us knows. Ignorance of ignorance is the barrier between us. Socrates dismantled that barrier.”
And it strikes me, Sangha1 dismantles that barrier. Spiritual friendship dismantles that barrier. And that’s part of what we do in our practice. This is the jewel of Sangha, not lesser than Buddha and Dharma. And even here on video, with our little chat and my little talks and the many ongoing relationships you have amongst each other, we have with each other, we’re attempting to dismantle that barrier and to think and practice alongside one another, to wake up together. That feels especially important these days. And so maybe we begin to sit, just feeling the goodness of our collective practice.
Allowing your eyes to close.
We cannot wake up on our own. We depend on so much and so many. We stand on so many shoulders, and we offer our shoulders to so many.
And because we cannot distinguish between our wisdom and our delusion, we need each other quite deeply. The jewel of Sangha.
And so, just let this network of goodwill, of mutuality, let it soften your heart as we begin practice this evening. Breathing.
We are, in a sense, only aware of what our self-model permits us to see. Deep assumptions about who we are, what life is, what the world is. And so what we know is mediated by self, by self-view.
In this sense, it’s a kind of blessing when another person clanks into our self-view. We begin to make what had been transparent, opaque. We begin to look at that which we’re accustomed to merely looking through. The avatar of self. The way that awareness tastes like self.
We begin to notice the ways that we model our life, model this moment. The way we model a kind of vantage point. You practice noticing, letting go, disidentifying.
Become awake to all the subtle feeling and words and images that, when unnoticed, become the center of gravity of “I-am-ness.” When noticed, they become empty.
Okay, it’s good to sit with you.
So, before we even begin Dharma practice, we have a lot of love, a tremendous depth of care. A Sangha member was speaking about generosity. She talked about, I think it was her very young nephew, who loves cheese, yogurt, and blueberries, just eating it ravenously, delightedly. And then, all mashed up together, he very proudly presents that mashup to his aunt, you know. And because she’s trying to be a good aunt, she gratefully takes it. But these deep impulses are evident from very early on, and they don’t go away.
And then you start practicing, and the love grows. And yes, practice is hard, but there is only love and that which has not yet been loved. The practice begins to free up a lot of energy, a lot of understanding of insight. And the face of insight is love. Its manifestation in our lives is primarily love. And we start to care more deeply about so much. The circle of empathy widens, begins to include the nameless and the named, those we’ll never meet, those not yet born. And the love begins to animate our life, our action in the world, how we relate to one another, how we vote, how we engage.
But as the line in the song goes, “there’s a thin line between love and hate.” And our moral commitments, what we care about, our love, gets yoked together with rage and the urge to punish. And the question is, how does that happen? How do love and hate become entangled?
I’m trying to address this because I’ve been feeling a sense of something like moral outrage, and I don’t know exactly what to do with it or what, if anything, to trust about it. I don’t want to dismiss it out of hand if it motivates some action, some wholesome engagement. Perhaps that’s useful. But is it possible to harness a kind of moral revulsion in a way that doesn’t corrode one’s heart and is genuinely productive, that reduces suffering?
Ruth King said, “Anger is initiatory, not transformative.” We can begin, perhaps, with outrage or anger, but we can never end there. And through all the different cycles in my own life, in my own mind, I am left with the sense that love has to have the last word. We tend to think that our clinging is what makes us persuasive, but it’s our letting go that actually gives us our power, that makes us persuasive. We think the volume of our hatred is what signifies the depth of our care, of our love. But our hatred is a kind of distorted expression of our care, some kind of alienated expression of our care. And we are purifying our love, untangling it from hate, even as one articulates a very forceful “no.”
Hannah Chapman, she says, “Disgust plays an important role in morality. The commonality between physical and moral disgust illustrates the elegant pragmatism of brain design, whereby a new set of abstract social triggers is attached to an ancient motivational system originating in the rejection of aversive and potentially poisonous tastes. The co-option may be driven by the association between disgust and withdrawal motivation, which could have been a valuable addition to the behavioral repertoire of our highly social species.”
Rotting food disgusts us. We wouldn’t eat it. We wouldn’t let a loved one eat it. And ugly ethical conduct disgusts us. We want to punish it. But disgust and hate probably live in the same neighborhood. And the intensity of our feeling seems like it must be matched by the intensity of our view, our stated position. Maybe not. What is unbearable needs an object of hate, right?
No. And I’m trying to learn to surf the kind of intensity of my moral emotions without acquiescing to the kilesas2, to greed and delusion. Dharma practice involves purifying the nature of our love, refining out the ancient evolutionary entanglements of disgust and hate and vengefulness. And the cruel irony is that that which we most want to change tends to be that which we most hate. And yet, hatred is often the worst way to get someone to change.
So it’s not really that there’s a thin line between love and hate, but there’s a very thin line between clinging and hate. There’s a thin line between fear and hate. And so we begin with the imperfection of… some sort of like, it gets better, it gets worse, it gets better, it gets worse. That matters, but it’s always imperfect. And we open our heart to that.
I feel a need to take—we need to take good care of fear. We need to take good care of our fear. That’s not to say there’s nothing to fear, but we need to take good care of it. And we investigate the ways that our love becomes entangled with a kind of egoic tribalism. Our moral commitments are about love, but they’re often entangled with sakkāya-diṭṭhi3, you know, with self-view. Our moral commitments can become sort of egoic badges. But our love is not about self. Our love is not a badge. It’s not an accessory of ego.
And we want to be careful not to impute an agent, a self, to processes that in the end are empty. Selves are just linguistic channels into which hatred can flow. We take some characteristic and make that the center of their being, their identity, and then try to hang our hatred on that centerpiece.
We will not keep our moral sanity through hatred, but through love. And that might mean less hate, but more grief. That’s possible. And I don’t really know, but I don’t think grief can be reduced further, can be deconstructed more. I think it’s at the quark level, or whatever the next level is, you know. But I think the grief is kind of like, yeah, that’s just going to be the burden of those who love deeply. And so let us bear that well. And let our tears be the kind of source of our motivation.
And none of this means I won’t be in the streets. I have been and will be. But I’ll try to remember you all and what I’m saying now. So I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up what’s useful and leave the rest behind.
Sangha: A Pali word that in its broadest sense means the community of all followers of the Buddha. It can also refer more specifically to the monastic community or the community of enlightened beings. In this context, it refers to the community of spiritual friends who support each other on the path. ↩
Kilesas: A Pali term for mental defilements, impurities, or poisons that cloud the mind and manifest in unwholesome actions. The three primary kilesas are greed (lobha), hatred (dosa), and delusion (moha). ↩
Sakkāya-diṭṭhi: A Pali term for “identity view” or “personality belief.” It is the mistaken belief in a permanent, independent, and substantial “self” or “I” existing within the five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness). Original transcript said “suity,” corrected based on context and pronunciation. ↩