This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation w Matthew Brensilver; Dharmette: Fear at the Gateway of Stillness. 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, so welcome folks. Good to be with you. I don’t have anything to say, let’s practice together.
Maybe a few deeper breaths, just to land here. Maybe deeper than any other breath today.
And maybe we make a kind of promise to our worries and preoccupations, the loose ends of any human life. Kind of make a promise that, “I’ll get back to you. I won’t neglect you forever.” We’re just cueing to the deep mind that it’s okay to put down the ordinary defenses. Okay to stand defenseless, just to offer up our heart to this moment.
Whatever you think your life is, lay it down. The sense of the project of your life, all the metrics we have, just lay it down.
And we’re practicing knowing experience very simply. What would it be to breathe without elaboration? Every moment is so ripe with a potential energy, like it can go so many ways, and we feel so compelled to elaborate on experience, keep our reference points. Here, we just are a body breathing. Simple, intimate.
Practice can feel hard. Instructions can feel like a cruel joke. Tension, squirrely, tired or wired or both. But we are often only a few mindful breaths away from something shifting. And we just attune to this subtlety, that shift. Appreciate it. Keep going.
Even the assumption, “I’m a human,” can cloud the view. When we get more quiet, we become more sensitive to the ways we construct the avatar of self, the little bits of sense data that go unnoticed and become the ground of self.
What if you were never seen? Like you were never an object in the mind of another. Likewise, no mirrors, never an object in your own mind. Just empty phenomena rolling on.
A question that was sent to me, a person writes:
“As I get deeper in meditation, composed and almost concentrated, fear pops up, flips the ejector seat, and out I bounce. I see the fear in my body, there it is, and have begun to acknowledge and even try to welcome it. In response, it insists louder and harder that it’s irresponsible for me to surrender. Not just on the macro level, like with all the horrors going on in the world and the US right now, but also on some very deep, intuitive level, it’s dangerous for me. I suspect this partly stems from growing up in a chaotic and unsafe household; being alert and aware felt necessary for survival. Partly, too, it might be a culturally female thing. I am meant to be perpetually attentive to others’ moods, needs, wishes, and not tune out until after I’ve assured that everyone else is fine. Anyway, I don’t know if this warrants a dharmette, but I would be grateful for any teachings on working with this fear instinct.”
So, let’s start with the easy part of my response, not the easy part, but the easy part of my response around the gendered pressures of being a caretaker. What I thought of was when we were out to dinner with my parents a few days ago, and the waitress had kind of large hoop earrings with some script written on them. My mom sort of caught her eye and she asked the waitress, “What does the script in your earrings say?” And the waitress said, “Smash the patriarchy.” [Laughter] And my dad was like, “Okay, okay, fair enough.”
So, Dharma pleasure, that’s your birthright as much as anyone’s. And it’s not a kind of indulgence. Your growing spiritual power, maybe it doesn’t feel justified or is intimidating to some, but it’s a good force in the world.
Okay, fear. Yeah, some part of our mind thinks stillness, samādhi1, surrender—all of that is dangerous. Anicca2, uncertainty, means that we don’t know. And not knowing is a very precarious position for an animal. Not knowing is precarious because how could we defend or manage or control that which is not known? And the priority, as I often say, in virtually all moments is ensuring more moments. It’s about safety and security. And security is about the future and a deep, abiding preoccupation with what now means for my future.
And so letting go, as you suggest, does not come naturally to us. It does not feel safe. And when the Dharma teacher says casually, “Oh, just let go, let go,” some part of us is like, “Really? You’re not actually serious that this is what you’re asking? Or maybe it’s different for you, but that’s not safe.” Clinging is what feels safe. Thinking is what feels safe. Worrying is what feels safe. Pinging to all of our familiar reference points is what feels safe.
And our consciousness, our knowing, is infused with this fear and this vigilance. That’s what I was alluding to in those strange meditation instructions—I’m not trying to be self-deprecating, but they were strange. What I was alluding to was the kind of potential energy of each moment, the sense of “needs to be elaborated upon, need to know which way this can go.” And so that infuses our consciousness.
And at different gateways to a deeper stillness or letting go, it can feel like it’s our job to do more, to do something, to make something happen. I’ll circle back to the fear, but at that gateway, it feels like, “Okay, I have to do something now.” But doing something, that sense of willfulness, is actually just more static in these realms. You know, when we get quiet in that way, trying to do something, which is trying to be somebody, that’s more static.
And many of these gateways into some deeper intimacy, deeper surrender, deeper states of practice, they’re highly attenuated self-states. You know, the ordinary sense of the control tower of preferences, of judgments, of agendas—all of that is thinned out. Otherwise, we’re not granted access to any kind of stillness. And the sense of free will, of me orchestrating this thing, me entering into something, me choreographing my practice—that sense of control, even of the sense of free will, that gets thinned out. And the pressure to make something happen is just more contraction.
So the arising of spiritual vertigo sometimes comes when we’re so accustomed to the somethingness of the self, the solidity of the self. It’s like we’ve just grown so accustomed to reiterating the story of “me” that these attenuated self-states, they are jarring, right? It feels like we’re standing at some kind of abyss, and it’s almost like, “I can’t really see where I fit in there.” That’s scary.
And sometimes at that gateway, that kind of doorway, there might be fear, yeah. But there is also craving, and the craving needs to be known clearly in awareness. Nothing actually needs to happen. I think it was Jesse Vega-Frey who said, describing a long retreat, he had this sense of being right on the cusp of something. He said, “That’s the worst, you know, on the cusp.” But we do get to the cusp of some things, and the way we kind of enter is by releasing the need for anything to happen. The goodness unfolds from not needing anything to happen.
Sometimes when the fear comes up, we make the fear an object of practice, as you’re implying. And so we’re deconstructing the experience of fear. Like, “Okay, what is this? Why do I call it fear?” I’m not disputing that, but why do I call it that? What is its signature in body and mind? How can we know it as impermanent? How do we know it, soothe it, soothe it with love?
Sometimes we simply need to go through that. Many times we have to actually habituate so that the fear is kind of like old hat. You know, it’s like, “Oh yeah, familiar with this. Get quiet, then Māra3, me, whatever you want to language it, there’s the fear.” Sometimes, once the fear has arisen, it’s just already too late. And that’s okay too.
We’re practicing such that spiritual vertigo is less likely to arise. And yeah, sometimes in the hyper-plastic modes of deep practice, some of the most congealed self-states rise up to meet the precipice of anattā, of not-self. That really does happen. The stillness and the quiet, it makes love much more accessible, but also everything else much more accessible. It seems weird, but yeah, stillness can make hate more accessible, make the most dense self-states more accessible. These are much more fluid realms of being.
So sometimes there’s something to do in the moment, and sometimes it’s this gradual training. We don’t have to perfectly heal. No one has perfect psychological health, no one has no scars. But we’re working so that our past is de-electrified. And the pain of the past, the pain of our life, it might still hurt, but it can no longer ambush us. In us, there are no monsters lurking.
Sometimes the monster is mortality, the changing of all things, the grief at the center of all things. And so we let our heart acclimatize to that fact. The fact that, as Suzuki Roshi4 said, we already know how every story ends.
And so we focus sometimes on the pleasant. So much feels really good, and we just marinate in that. We get on a kind of positive feedback loop. “Ah, yeah, very pleasant.” Bake that into your circuits. “Feels good to be tranquil. This is safe. This is a safe kind of pleasure. This is a safe kind of surrender.”
And then sometimes, the only thing we can entrust ourselves to is faith. Faith that the darkness will not harm me. Faith that something, love, will catch me. And the sense that “I’ll be harmed by this silence,” it’s almost like the last breath of the thawing self. We surrender to Dhamma5, trust in the lineage, and know that you are not the exception to the Buddhist rule.
So welcome. The silence beckons you.
Okay, thank you. Thank you all. I appreciate your attention. I won’t have class next week, but I’ll be back on the 26th. We’ll keep going. I’ll post the link to submit any questions. I obviously can’t answer all of them, but they help structure my thinking and understand some of you. All right, take good care. Good to be with you.
Samādhi: A Pāli word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption. ↩
Anicca: A Pāli word for impermanence, one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism. ↩
Māra: In Buddhism, the personification of the forces that keep beings trapped in the cycle of rebirth (samsara), often representing temptation, distraction, and fear. ↩
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971): A Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. He founded the San Francisco Zen Center. ↩
Dhamma (Pāli) / Dharma (Sanskrit): The teachings of the Buddha; the universal truth or law. ↩