This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver; Dharmette: Pleasant and Unpleasant Dissolution. 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, welcome. Welcome, folks. Good to be with you. I fell asleep when I meditated a little while ago, so the theme didn’t exactly emerge with a tremendous inspiration, but we will find our way no matter what condition our minds are in. Find your posture.
Maybe you relax absolutely everything, as if you were going to sleep, except the brightness of the mind and a luminosity. Let me see how deeply we can relax everything else, staying tethered to the light of the mind.
Maybe just being here together, tethered by electrons and love, maybe that’s enough to support the brightness of your mind.
Whatever it feels like needs to be done, you need to do, just relax that too.
They sense all the busyness and complication of clinging, conniving, and strategizing. Sense the taxing quality of willfulness.
What’s left in the wake of letting go? What brightness is not governed by you, your willfulness, clinging?
We just keep relaxing until we’re wide awake.
The sense of self is experienced as a kind of knot of tension. How deeply can that be relaxed?
The more safe we feel, the less entranced by clinging we become, the more our mind flows out in all directions.
Like a hangnail snagging on fabric, the attention snags on phenomena. We keep relaxing, softening, widening.
The experience of being you is a kind of reiteration. It arises, ceases, but then re-arises again and creates the impression of continuity.
How deep does a nature run?
If the self is done by grasping, we’re invited to become deeply unafraid, deeply unattached. See how much of the self melts, becomes porous, fluid, is enlarged.
Okay, it’s good to sit with you.
So I remember a long, long time ago, I was returning from a retreat and was telling a friend about a dissolution experience—a kind of prolonged experience of the self having no trace whatsoever, and a kind of melting away of agency and boundaries and center. A sense of centerlessness. Everything was the background; there was no foreground. It was like everything was background, and it was exquisitely peaceful. As I’m describing it, she’s laughing, saying, “This sounds horrible.”
When people describe a kind of emptiness, the descriptions often echo some unsettling kind of psychiatric symptoms. Depersonalization and derealization are characterized by feeling very detached from one’s feelings and experiencing one’s surroundings, objects, and people as unreal, distant, artificial, or lifeless. And yet, the person experiencing that, their reality testing remains intact. They’re not having psychotic symptoms, but it leads to huge distress and impairment. Almost everybody with that has co-occurring depression and anxiety conditions.
And here’s Nagarjuna1 describing the positive dimensions of emptiness. He says, “Whenever there’s belief that things are real, desire and hatred spring unendingly. Unwholesome views are entertained, from which all disputes come. Indeed, this is the source of every view. Without it, no defilement can occur. Thus, when dependent origination is completely understood, all views and afflictions vanish utterly.”
So that sounds good, but I’ve often thought that there might be some overlap if you were neuroimaging a brain on emptiness and a person experiencing derealization. I would imagine there’d be some overlaps, and I don’t want to say that they’re the same experience, but they kind of rhyme a little with each other. And so then the question is, what accounts for the difference between nourishing and terrifying dissolution experiences?
The researcher Aviva Berkovich-Ohana and meditation teacher Stephen Fulder and some of their colleagues published a paper that I just saw yesterday, examining that question. It’s a more complex study—I’ll post the study in the YouTube description—and I won’t go over all of it, but I want to speak to some elements of it.
As animals, knowing what’s going to happen next is of paramount importance. I sort of say that often. And our brains are continuously generating and updating models of self and world. These authors… and we start to get more sensitive to that. That’s what I was alluding to in the sit a little, you know, that sense of the reiteration of the model that creates—it’s happening fast enough that there’s a sense of continuity. The authors argue that the basic experience of phenomenal selfhood—phenomenal as in the subjective experience of self, the experience of feeling like a self—this arises as a function of those modeling processes. And even the sense of existing emerges from some of that predictive processing.
We usually consider the sense of self as the cause of things: “I choose to do this,” “I choose to do that,” “I did it myself.” But in Buddhist psychology, the sense of self is an effect of things, not a cause. The self is, I might say, an effect of fear. An effect of fear. The consequence of fear. And there’s no greater fear than death.
Death denial is considered a kind of transdiagnostic construct, so across many different forms of psychological distress, there are elevations of death anxiety. And of course, anybody, even without any elevated psychological distress, is likely to have a lot of feeling around death. This fear leads us to associate death with the other, not with self. And in a way, it can sometimes have the sense of this subtle default assumption of immortality.
So what does death threaten? It seems to threaten everything, but the very foundation, the sense of self, is a target that is put under direct threat by the prospect of mortality. And Stephen Levine asked the question in the title of a book, Who Dies? This sense of self is not the only part, but I think it’s a part of what makes death so terrifying. It feels like death pertains to me, the kind of me inside me. It pertains to the seat of subjectivity, the center.
In dissolution experiences, that comes under threat. There’s sometimes a fear of non-being. The Buddha described bhavatanha2, the craving to become, the kind of perpetuation of me-ness or the perpetuation of something into the future. And dissolution is the extinguishing of bhavatanha.
So what the researchers found previously, in a prior study, was that the depth of dissolution was not correlated with bliss or terror. So it wasn’t like if you partially melted, it’s unpleasant, and if you fully melt, it’s good. What the researchers found was that higher levels of death anxiety led to more fearful dissolution experiences—derealization, depersonalization—that was negatively valued, unpleasant, fearful, terrifying, anxious. When one’s relationship with death is deeply unsettled, the dissolution experience is sensed as a kind of attack, a mortal attack on the sense of self.
And so in dharma practice, we contemplate endings, mortality, groundlessness. We place anicca3, impermanence, at the center of all things. And then dissolution maybe doesn’t feel like it threatens as much. There’s still loss, but that sense of the kernel of one’s being perishing under the tides of change and mortality, that can shift. There’s still a goodbye, but a different kind of goodbye.
Levine writes somewhere, I think in A Year to Live, that book, “Death is perfectly safe.” Letting go is a kind of rehearsal, dying in concert. And don’t mistake what I’m saying. I don’t think it’s my view, but I don’t think even enlightenment is a perfect consolation for death. Not perfect. In other words, maybe grief is a kind of irreducible part of the universe. To my mind, it can’t be refined further. But the dharma really helps, and it helps with the most fundamental problem for all animals.
And maybe this bolsters our courage. In this period of moral decrepitude, I don’t know how I’ll be asked to spend my modest courage, but I do know that I’m being asked to develop it. Maybe so. Okay, I offer this for your consideration.
Nagarjuna: An influential Indian Mahayana Buddhist philosopher (c. 150–250 CE), renowned for his development of the philosophy of emptiness (śūnyatā). The original transcript said “nega,” which has been corrected based on the content of the quote. ↩
Bhavatanha: A Pali term meaning “craving for becoming” or “craving for existence.” It refers to the deep-seated desire for the continuation of a self or identity into the future. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word for “impermanence,” one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism. It points to the reality that all conditioned things are in a constant state of flux. ↩