This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: All Phenomena are Friendly; Humor in the Dharma. 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.
Welcome, folks. Good morning to most of you, good afternoon to some. Happy to be with you. I’m your sub, and happy to be with you. I know a lot of these names, very sweet. Grateful to Gil for having me. So let us practice together.
Finding a posture that balances alertness and deep relaxation.
Because we have so much fidelity to the last moment and to all the ideas and models of self and world, it can feel like freedom is very far away in this moment. Perhaps not so far.
We might begin by just forgetting everything we know about ourselves, ceasing to turn yourself into an object to be assessed. That is the beacon, the orienting point.
It’s hard to forget ourselves. It’s hard to simultaneously remember the emptiness of all points of identification. But we train. This clears out some fresh space for you to just breathe, to just be a body rewarded by oxygen, expelling what’s used up. Enjoy it.
This sense of self accumulates sort of behind the radar of awareness, like dust on a shelf. A sense of pressure to prove something, to perform something, to be something. We relax. We receive each breath like a gift and a surprise.
It feels like in each moment we must take care of all our future selves, that all those future selves are depending on this self now. It’s a lot of pressure.
As we come to be less intimidated by anicca1, by uncertainty, we feel less responsible for all the future iterations of self. We feel safer to relax into the open space of this moment, this breath.
We can be precise without tension. Sometimes it’s useful to notice the beginning and ending of the inhalation, the beginning and ending of the exhalation. And then at the bottom of your breath, there’s a sense of release, surrender. Then it begins again. So many opportunities to begin again, so many opportunities to soften to the moment.
All phenomena are friendly. From the perspective of Dharma, all phenomena are friendly, even though some hurt.
Okay, good to practice with you.
So, there are a lot of lists in Buddhism, and they’re really so profound. Sometimes I kind of marvel at the genius of how the different factors fit together and work for our growing wisdom and compassion. And there are lots of kind of spiritual factors that don’t show up on the lists. I kind of made up a list a couple of years ago and now kind of rethought it a little bit and revised. And so the theme this week is like basically my fake list, you know, Matthew from California’s fake list. Not the seven factors of awakening or five jhānic2 factors or something. It’s just things that have been meaningful to me on my path, and I offer it for whatever it’s worth.
I was talking to a yogi after a retreat, and they said something like, “I’m suspicious of…” I kind of asked how the retreat was or something like that. I was like, “Was I a little too playful or something?” because I remember trying to be relaxed. And they said, “No, I’m suspicious of teachers who lack a sense of humor. The lack of humor usually means they haven’t reached deep into the mystery,” is what they said. It sort of stuck with me because for a long time, I thought Dharma practice was serious business, and Dharma teaching, that’s even more serious, right?
But I’ll tell you how I got my nickname, Captain Buzzkill. [Laughter] It was awarded to me by my younger brother. I have a lot of joy in my life, but not much excitement. Not because I’m trying to be all Buddhist and be present and trying to be in the moment. It’s not like that. Some of it’s temperamental, some of it’s probably practice. A lot of joy when things come, but not so much looking forward. My younger brother lives on excitement, kind of, and looking forward to things. He was telling me something he was excited about, and I was kind of just misattuned. I sort of reminded him of like the first noble truth, and wanting is always different than getting. And he was just like, “You know who you are? You’re Captain Buzzkill.” And still, years later, as I’ve told that story, sometimes yogis from far and wide just come up to me and call me Captain.
So, today on the fake list, the first factor: humor and playfulness. There’s this sense that the intensity and poignancy of life is somehow incompatible with laughter and play and humor. And it’s not. One of the gifts of Dharma practice is how quickly even strong forces can move through us, opening us to a very different moment, even a moment of grief followed by peace or joy. The seriousness, some of it may be sincere, but it’s often driven by ego. The ego is by nature serious. The ego doesn’t think it’s funny, but it is. It’s very funny.
When experience becomes more light, a little less bounded by the self-story, spacious, there’s a lot more room for lightness, for humor. It’s always curious, it’s amusing to hear when the senior teachers, the Ajahns in the Thai Forest tradition, when they laugh. It’s very funny to me when they laugh because they laugh at things that I don’t really think are funny. You know, it’d be like, “Well, that didn’t work out too well, did it?” Very funny. It’s almost like we have to be able to laugh at ourselves.
The writer George Saunders says, “Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.” That’s very useful. Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to. And the Dharma is like that sometimes. It just sneaks up on you, and there’s nothing to do but laugh.
Humor and playfulness, they’re so… they’re kind of a central part of kalyāṇamittā3, spiritual friendship, often. And in my Dharma friendships, you know, fellow practitioners, teaching colleagues, it’s like we laugh a lot. A lot. Freud said, “Those who share a sense of humor share a whole lot more.” And you can kind of sense that. When two people find the same thing funny, it often testifies to something deep about their mind, maybe what’s not even conscious, something that is deeply shared. And to meet in that is beautiful.
Nietzsche said that maturity is re-acquiring the spirit that a child has at play. And what are the characteristics of playing? How can Dharma practice be sometimes a little bit more like playing? Well, the characteristics of playing are there’s non-vigilance. We cannot play when we’re patrolling, when we’re patrolling the boundaries or something like that, when we’re keeping tabs on every potential threat. We play in the absence of self-consciousness. You cannot play if you’re trying to look cool or smart or whatever, trying to look anything. Play is the absence of a kind of self-consciousness. And so this inclusion of our whole being, we’re at ease with ourselves and in a kind of flow. And play is intrinsically rewarding. We’re not getting anywhere in our play. For some people, it’s hard to tolerate that not getting anywhere. It’s important.
The psychoanalyst Winnicott says, “Psychotherapy takes place at the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. Where playing is not possible, the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.” A state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.
And a lot of that can be said for Dharma too, for a practice. Where can we play? Where can the self-consciousness dissolve? Where can a sense of just aimless exploration, just delight, where can that be? And then where can we not play? Can we play with our foibles and play in the zones of clinging, or even play in zones of shame? I want to play everywhere.
And as the egoic framework becomes less of an organizing system, you know, as we come to feel less and less like we orbit around the self-story, we open to more humor and play. And we come to play even with the conventions of self. In other words, we become the joke, and it feels very good. You know, sometimes I’ve been… I like making fun of myself, and maybe that’s subterranean self-hatred, but I don’t think so. I think it’s just there’s some delight in playing with the conventions of self. It’s like part of how I relate to my defilements is through humor. And sometimes you can sense, oh, the mind could go more than one way. It could go into shame or pain or defensiveness or humor. And we just play, play with the conventions of self, play even in our places of pain or wounding. Okay, yeah, some lightness there.
We move from a state of not being able to play to a state of being able to play and become progressively less defensive, less rigid in our holding, our fidelity to who we think we should be.
Some years ago, I went to this breathing workshop with a couple of Dharma friends, fellow practitioners. It was not a Buddhist practice, and I got into a very curious mind state that I had never been in until then and have never been in since then. It was not in the progress of insight, it was not a jhāna. It was very strange. So it was a 90-minute session. We’re all in the dark, people’s heads are all pointed towards the center of the circle. And maybe an hour in, I start to hear the woman next to me crying. And in this kind of very porous state, it felt totally effortless to just attune to that and to join. And I start crying. That is not so uncommon for me. I cry most times I give Dharma talks or practice much. But okay, I’m crying, but then also there’s something about it that I’m laughing deeply. You know, it’s kind of like this sense of zooming out to the cosmic wildness of it all. And I’m just crying and I’m laughing hard. And beneath all of it, it’s like miles under the surface of the sea, and just abiding, pervading peace pervading all of it. And it was like those were three very distinct mind states, totally co-occurring: crying, laughter, peace, not blotting one another out.
So, humor, playfulness on the path. I offer this for your consideration. Okay, nice to be with you. I wish you all a good day and see you tomorrow. Thanks all. Okay.