This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Much Becomes Incidental; Dharmette: Self-Esteem Preoccupation as Symptom. 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 evening. Welcome, folks. Find your posture, find your heart.
Just take your cues from the silence. There’s a sense of actually attuning to silence, even if there’s noise elsewhere. We don’t just infer the silence by the absence of sound; we listen to the silence.
For a little while, pleasantness and unpleasantness, our preferences, become incidental. For a little while, the blizzard of details that constitutes your autobiography becomes incidental. For a little while, what you thought you knew also becomes incidental. Just to receive the moment is enough.
No projects, no building. You’re neither the project manager nor the project. In meditation practice, we stop messing with ourselves. Surrender is the dissolution of volitional energies.
To the extent you build anything, let it be love. Otherwise, just receive. Space receiving space. Each moment is a kind of new opportunity to let down.
Our so-called lives, our worries and hopes, will take care of themselves. We’ll win some and lose some. But for now, for these minutes, we’re practicing surrendering control, not medicating this thought and that feeling. And when we emerge, our life will be waiting for us, the same, just a tiny bit different.
Okay, it’s good to practice with you. Such a wild path. It’s sort of like, you know, it looks like a Labradoodle from the flyers, but it’s a tiger. And I love labradoodles.
Dharma is in conversation with science, I think in an increasingly respectful way, meaning that both sides are listening, both sides are learning from each other. There are a lot of Dharma-scientific research people who have a genuine affection for the path and understand it, and that’s having its effects. I remember, I think it was 2006, I was a summer research fellow for the Mind and Life conference. It was a scientific conference, but also part retreat, sitting on a Zafu. Next to me is the eminent researcher Richard Davidson; he’s there sitting on a Zafu next to me. He didn’t send one of his 500 research assistants or something to do his sitting; he’s there. The science folks are taking Dharma concepts, exploring them, bringing in new language and concepts, and then sort of importing it back to Dharma. It’s been meaningful for me to consume some of that work.
This is edited from a couple of social psychologists, Richard Ryan and Kirk Warren Brown. I shared this over the weekend but wanted to unpack it. The authors write:
“Some people are preoccupied with questions of worth and esteem, see their worth as dependent upon reaching certain standards, appearing certain ways, or accomplishing certain goals. The very process of placing oneself in the role of object and then evaluating its worth is a motivated act. Whether such individuals come away with positive or negative conclusions, the very fact that one’s esteem is in question suggests a psychological vulnerability. Although self-evaluation is a natural human tendency with both evolutionary and developmental foundations, ongoing concern with the worth of the self is a byproduct of need deprivation or conflict. The salience of self-esteem to a person is a sign of need deficiencies rather than need fulfillment.”
They go on to say, “Regulation based on mindfulness rather than contingent self-regard is associated with healthier and more vital living and provides a basis for acting more authentically.”
So they say self-evaluation is a natural human tendency, and it makes sense that in our pursuit of goals, we assess, we sometimes measure. The teachings on not-self are not getting moralistic or idealistic. I remember Ajahn Sucitto1 saying this is not an idealistic path; the Buddha just spoke about the way things are. The delusion in the quest for self-esteem, the compulsive measurement and comparison, is to think that we’re going to drive the same self to the goal and arrive and find rest.
The very process of placing oneself in the role of object and then evaluating its worth is problematic, they say. Making oneself a kind of object, Matthew, then turning into a kind of spectator—it’s a little what I was alluding to in the sit—spectator and evaluating my worth. What’s Matthew’s worth? It’s painful. And to even have that question, they suggest, is a function of psychological vulnerability. Health, by this view, is finding a way to step out of the debate of worthiness and unworthiness entirely. To enter, you lose. You’ve already lost.
I remember Jack Kornfield saying in a retreat talk something like, “You are a child of the Buddha.” I had never thought of myself that way but was touched by that. It was not “you’re special.” It was not like, “Matthew, you’re the Buddha’s favorite child.” So ordinary, you know, so ordinary and of course worthy. We normally link “worthy” with “extraordinary,” but I link worthiness with utter ordinariness. The path moves us towards ordinariness, and that’s strange. The practice makes us feel so ordinary, but that feeling is a blessing. That’s a way that we begin to step out of the morass of self-view, the pros and cons.
What I find intriguing here is that the selfing is understood to be a symptom of need deprivation. The selfing is a symptom. The selfing arises out of pain. Normally, we talk about self as a cause. Here, it’s an effect. We normally say the self causes this and that; here it’s an effect of pain, of need deprivation. In the past, I’ve suggested that the self is an effect of fear, that fundamental force tied to survival. It just intuitively seems like we really would not need a self were it not for the brutality of samsara, this realm of gain and loss, birth and death. If there were no pressure to track and integrate threat and opportunity, we wouldn’t have to stay so glued together. There’s a sense that the self is the intersection of the pressure to act and control.
So we can begin to understand why teachers say the self is done by grasping, not exactly that the self grasps. The self is done by grasping. And then the question from Brown and Ryan is, how do we resolve the need deprivation that made self-worth a preoccupation? There are intermediate steps in between self-harshness and forgetting the self. There’s a kind of thawing process, so that our needs are somehow met, and the question of our worth recedes, becomes more and more incidental.
A yoga teacher I remember in LA when I was living there, she would say—maybe quoting Iyengar2—whatever we’d be in a pose, I don’t know how much yoga is supposed to hurt, but it hurt from the beginning to the end. It hurt good, but it kind of didn’t stop hurting. Anyway, she would say, “Whatever is heavy, make light. Whatever is light, make heavy.” I was just trying to survive, but I love that line. I could get it. I could sense all the places I was heavy, I needed to make light; places light, make heavy. Whatever is heavy with self, we make light.
The Dharma normalizes our pain at a very deep level, and the shame for the wounds, for the needs met and unmet, begins to melt and dissolve, thaw out. We’re instructed to align our conduct, right? To live in accordance with our own deepest values. And Sīla3, ethical conduct, is associated with a certain kind of self-respect, non-regret, a certain kind of dignity. “Okay, I’m living, not perfectly, but I’m living in accord with what I care about, what I think is worthy of my love.” There’s some dignity in that. And we take refuge. We take refuge in the Buddha, and the details of our life, they still matter, but more and more they become that word I came back to a few times in the sit: incidental. That’s not uncaring, but incidental in the sense of life always happening to me. Experience happening to me. Life is just happening.
And we look at how much self is needed to function. How much self is needed to function? And when is self just an expression of some pain? And one just tends to that pain like a wound. When is it enough just to be a person?
Jay Garfield4, from the book Losing Ourselves, writes: “The self is taken to be pre-existent, primordial, unitary, and transcendent of the world of objects… independent of body, mind, social context. The person is constructed. The person is dependent on the psychophysiological and the social network in which it’s realized. The person is complex, embodied, and embedded.” That’s the difference between the actor and the role. We are roles, not actors. It’s enough just to be a person. I can play my part, play my roles, without ever having the sense that I need to prove who I am. Questions of worth and unworthiness don’t occur anymore.
So I offer this for your consideration. I appreciate the chance to speak with you about this. I wish you all well, and maybe see you next week.
Ajahn Sucitto: The original transcript said “Ajin Sado,” which is likely a mis-transcription. Ajahn Sucitto is a well-known Buddhist monk and teacher in the Thai Forest Tradition. “Ajahn” is a title of respect meaning “teacher.” ↩
B.K.S. Iyengar: A renowned yoga teacher and founder of the style of yoga known as “Iyengar Yoga.” The original transcript said “Ayenar.” ↩
Sīla: A Pali word that refers to ethical conduct, morality, or virtue. It is one of the three sections of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Jay L. Garfield: An American professor of philosophy who writes extensively on Buddhist philosophy, particularly Madhyamaka. ↩