This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Stillness and the Dissolution of the Predictive Mind; Expansiveness of Awe. 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.
Good morning to many of you, good afternoon Scotland and London. I’m happy to practice with you. It’s very sweet seeing the chat community. Okay, let’s practice together.
One way of talking about dukkha1, usually rendered as suffering, is that life is a little bit too much, at least often. A little overwhelming just to be human. And so in meditation, it’s just a way of doing much, much less, being open to how life flows through us, settling and tranquilizing so that we can meet life as it flows through.
So, relaxing whatever can be relaxed. The area around your eyes can hold so much tension, just unconsciously in the muscles around the eyes. Your jaw, softening, releasing. My friend Pam Dunn says, “Just let your whole face fall.”
And your shoulders hang loosely. Wherever your shoulders hang after a deep breath, just let them rest there. Let your belly be soft. Any subtle tension or holding, bracing in your belly, soften.
If you’re sitting, just letting your hips and pelvis sink into the ground. Let your feet be open, your hands be open. Sense that energy can run through unimpeded.
And now, that which we already know how to do—breathe—becomes our object of awareness. You already know how to do this. Now we just delight in it, in the aliveness, the simplicity, life becoming simpler. There’s a hunger for oxygen, we breathe in, and that’s quite pleasurable. A little tension builds up, and then we expel what’s been used up. That too is quite pleasurable. So for a few minutes, just enjoy.
In subtle ways, we’re embedding this present moment within a kind of matrix of predictions and expectations. There’s a sense of the energy just leaning forward, a sense of knowing, thinking that we know who we’ll be in the next moment, what our life will be at the end of this practice period, the end of this day. The ways in which we predict continuity and expect ourselves in the next moment, and the next moment.
We practice diving into the present moment. In a subtle way, as those expectations are modeled by our mind, we prune those back by having deeper fidelity to this mind moment. You stop predicting yourself.
And samadhi2 is a kind of dissolution of the predictive architecture. Craving is always about one word: next. Usually, what we envision being next is “me.” In meditation, we soften the expectation that “I’m next,” “me in the next moment,” “me reborn exactly as I was.” We stop making that hypothesis. We fall into the present moment.
We often associate disorientation with unpleasantness. Who likes getting lost? Maybe a few people, but I have never had the taste for that. I associate disorientation, generally speaking, with unpleasantness. But here in Dharma, we actually develop some appreciation for it. In those moments when, you know, right after you wake up or something, before you’ve remembered who you are. Some elements of practice are about acclimatizing to disorientation. I was alluding to that a little bit in the instructions.
Awe. Awe is a beautiful feeling, pleasant but maybe a little disorienting. The sense of the mind broadening, and it’s like we’re not accustomed to so much space. But awe is the feeling of a kind of simultaneous expansion and contraction. You know, we’re like infinitesimally small and vast, and there’s a sense of, “Oh yeah, this smallness is partaking in the vastness.”
This is from psychologist Dacher Keltner: “Awe is the feeling of wonder and amazement at being in the presence of something vast that transcends one’s current understanding. Awe is part of a family of states that includes elevation, appreciation, and admiration. The majority of awe experiences occur in response to nature, other people who display virtuosity or magnanimity, art and music, religious experiences, and ideas. Similar to other pro-social emotions like gratitude and compassion, awe reliably predicts increased sharing, assistance, and generosity.”
Maybe you’re in nature, in the mountains, and that kind of stunning austerity of the world just stops you. And this sense of time can be felt in a different way. You know, it’s like you just see the rocks and the trees and the landscape, and it’s just like, yeah, time can be sensed. Or virtuosity. You know, I saw a video of Simone Biles doing a floor exercise, the gymnast, like the best gymnast in the history of the world. And what she was doing, my response was like, “I cannot believe we’re both Homo sapiens.” She and I were both the same species. I just felt proud to be part of the same species as somebody who could do that. It’s like science fiction.
Or goodness. It’s usually called moral elevation, the moral beauty that we can witness that can fill us with awe. There’s a lot of it happening. It doesn’t get reported so much, but there’s much more goodness than we could ever estimate. Greed, hate, and delusion, of course, must fill the pages of the papers, but the amount of just simple, ordinary goodness is staggering.
And awe breaks us out of claustrophobia. I associate suffering with claustrophobia. And often we don’t realize how small our life has become. It’s natural; suffering is inherently self-absorbing. To live with a sense of life as a problem just puts all the focus on what’s in front of us. And because the feeling of self is a feeling of specialness, it’s hard to treat ourselves as just another person. So a lot of how we work with our mind is about broadening, and awe is like a sudden, dramatic broadening.
We learn to live in more and more awe. We develop awe for the path and the lineage. There are times when it’s like, “Oh yeah, I’m a meditator,” whatever. Then other times where the gratitude is so overwhelming that it just becomes awe. Like, how on earth did Siddhartha Gautama3 of Lumbini, you know, 600 BC, speak so directly to Matthew of California, 2025 AD? To speak words that are relevant across space and time—amazing.
I remember early tastes of the path. I’ve shared this moment with Galen Ferguson, a Tibetan teacher. After a weekend retreat on the unity of shamatha and vipassana4—the unity of tranquility and insight—I didn’t know what was happening, but I was beginning to fall in love with the Dharma. I went up to him afterwards, kind of crying and messy and trying to say something, but just wanting to hug him. And he’s a little bit buttoned up, didn’t know exactly what to do with me, but he was so gracious and beautiful. He just said something like, “Yeah, sometimes peering out over the vastness of the Dharma ocean can be a lot.”
Awareness becomes a kind of object of awe. How close the distance from suffering to peace might be. In the locked-in feeling of dukkha, the claustrophobia of dukkha, it feels like there’s no way out of this until I get circumstances right, until I get straightened out in some way. And then we start to appreciate, “Wait a second, maybe there’s a lot of peace much closer than my mind suspects. Maybe it’s just one moment away.” It’s not always like that, but sometimes it is. And when it’s like that, we say to ourselves, “Okay, I don’t want to forget this.”
We’re encouraged to reflect on the preciousness of human life. Awe, we could say, at having been born. We’re thrown into the condition of living, and it feels so self-evident that I should exist, but it’s super wild. It’s wild that there’s something rather than nothing. Nothing says we should exist. Nothing says the Dharma should have been offered. As I say all the time, all the time before you were born plus all the time after you die is almost precisely all the time there is. And yet, here we are on YouTube.
And wonder, a sense of awe in the face of possibility. How might I live? In existential psychotherapy, the failure to grapple with core existential themes is thought to produce symptoms, to lead to pain. And one of them is around the openness of possibility, the weight of freedom. How might I live? We’ve perhaps been too taken in by convention, by all the models of happiness proffered by society and everything that we consider, “Well, this is the natural way, this is customary, this is the right way, this is common sense.”
Sīla-paramasa5, like attachment to rights, usually rendered as attachment to rites and rituals, which is shed at stream entry. But it’s also, in a deeper sense, the ways in which fidelity to convention makes what is empty seem concrete. And sometimes it’s like, “Oh yeah, my entire life is sīla-paramasa.” My entire life is convention. It’s not to say we should live a totally different life, but we should realize we’re just making this up. Totally. Okay, how might I live? And even if I do live in adherence to convention, at least it looks like that, but not inside. And so we recognize the groundlessness of all convention, and there’s a lot of wonder, awe. How might I live?
I remember at a retreat, a New Year’s Eve retreat that fell over New Year’s Eve. It was a couple of weeks of silent sitting. We rang in the new year with chanting and then had a silent dance party. It’s after midnight, and I’m sitting in a chair out in the Santa Barbara stars. And some of the light from those stars, you know, looking up, you could see a lot. It was a good night. And knowing that I’m looking at some stars that are now gone, literally looking at the past. Amidst the vastness of space and time, I remember thinking, “Oh my God, here I am in this unimaginable vastness, and I’m worried about my butt hurting from sitting.” It’s hard to take much seriously amidst the vastness.
But as the self grows smaller, the world gets much bigger. The less clinging, the more life. The less clinging, the more life. And then there’s a lot of love, a lot of joy, a lot of cheerfulness. To sense into that openness, maybe we call it the openness of life, to sense how vast the love might be.
So we live in some sense of awe. We actually don’t acclimatize to it totally. It’s not old hat. For your consideration. Sweet to be with you. Thank you for your attention, and we’ll keep going tomorrow. Okay.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It’s a foundational concept in Buddhism, referring to the inherent suffering in all conditioned existence. ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption. It is a key component of the Buddhist path, leading to tranquility and insight. ↩
Siddhartha Gautama: The historical founder of Buddhism, who lived in ancient India and is known as the Buddha. ↩
Shamatha and Vipassana: Two primary forms of Buddhist meditation. Shamatha (tranquility) aims to calm the mind and develop concentration, while Vipassana (insight) aims to see the true nature of reality. ↩
Sīla-paramasa: A Pali term referring to the attachment to mere rites, rituals, and conventions, believing them to be sufficient for liberation without genuine understanding or practice. It is one of the fetters abandoned upon attaining the first stage of enlightenment (stream-entry). ↩