This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver; Dharmette: Being Somebody, Nobody, Self Love & Anatta. 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 folks, so welcome. I’m always happy to see your names and be practicing together. So, finding a posture.
Just landing in your body as a bird lands on the earth.
Just breathing into your body as if to deepen the sense of gravity.
And just as we begin, scanning through the hindrances just to see what’s here. So, the two poles of energy: of agitation and restlessness on the one hand, and kind of dullness and sloth on the other. And the two poles of desire: of wanting, not wanting, seeking sense pleasure, experiencing aversion, ill will, and doubt—a kind of lack of confidence in our contact with sensory experience, the dharma, feeling buried behind layers of fog.
And so for each of these five, we just get a kind of pulse check. It’s okay. Whatever you find, just bring that into awareness in your finding.
Just appreciating how profoundly intolerant we are of unpleasantness. Not to be judgmental, it’s just the architecture of our nervous system. Unpleasantness, even quite modest, signals to us that something about the universe is off its rails.
And sloth is unpleasant. Restlessness is unpleasant. Sense longing is unpleasant. Ill will is unpleasant. Delusion, unpleasant. Doubt, unpleasant.
We bear with it, blessing it with our awareness.
Pay attention to whatever you feel drawn to pay attention to. Maybe the cycles of your breathing, maybe your body more broadly, maybe your body experience from the perspective of emotionality and affect, urgency and motivation. Maybe you’re anchoring to sound. Maybe the anchor is everywhere and nowhere, just wide open to all sensory experience.
But every so often, it may be fruitful to check the ways in which our attention can become a kind of appendage of our wanting. And so we do a kind of pulse check on the ways in which greed or aversion creeps into the meditating mind.
How much can we relax and offer a kind of unmixed attention? An attention that bows rather than grasps.
We’re practicing surrendering control. And we think, “Wait a second, no, I have to pay attention, I have to let go, I have to do all these things.” Surrendering control does all of them.
You really don’t have to create goodness. Just let it find you.
Greed, hatred, and delusion is a making of measurement. Just put down all the yardsticks.
Okay, it’s nice to practice with you. I know that sit was better for me having been with you all than it would have been left to my own devices.
So for whatever reason this morning, I went back to my notes that I had saved from the kind of very first Dharma talks I’d given. These are about 17 years ago, and it’s kind of a fossil record of my wisdom and delusion, you know? And that’s kind of interesting to look back. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20 as they say, but we know with certainty that the present will become the past. And so, until time stops, some humility is necessary.
And it was curious to see, you know, kind of detect some measure of confusion in those notes, a kind of angular rigidity, but also some continuities, themes that preoccupied me then remain with me now. And I had looked back at a talk I’d given on a classic line from Jack Engler, who’s a, I think, transpersonal psychologist and Buddhist writer-teacher. He got this question about somebody with psychosis, a highly unstable sense of self. And so the questioner asked, “Okay, are they, given this very kind of amorphous sense of self, is that person close to understanding anatta1, understanding not-self?”
And Engler’s reply was, “You have to be somebody before being nobody.” The implication is you have to have a solid sense of self before you can shed that self. And many years later, Engler was interviewed and was asked where he stood on that quote. You know, and he said, “Yes, well, I don’t see it as quite that linear or exclusive anymore. In a general way, I would still stand by it, that you have to be somebody before you can be nobody, although it’s a provocative way of putting it. What I had in mind when making that statement was that if you’re going to go to the depths of the Buddhist mindfulness practice, which is what I was talking about, it requires certain psychological capacities, what in the psychoanalytic tradition would be called certain basic ego strengths. And those ego strengths form around some stable sense of who we are, some stable sense of identity. I still believe that’s true.”
So I get that the deconstruction needs to occur from a place of strength. And I’ve recently suggested that there are kind of two dimensions: Insight into not-self gives us power, insight into self makes us safe. And I think all that’s fair enough, but it strikes me that there’s some confusion involving our language about, quote, “self.” The philosopher Wittgenstein famously says, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
And the word “self” in the phrase “self-love” is not exactly the same as “self” in the phrase “no-self” or “not-self,” anatta. Self-love is not the celebration of a permanent, self-existing entity that is me. That’s not what self-love is. Self-love is not a kind of deeply emotionally charged story about the essence of my being.
Self-love is maybe better thought of as a kind of forgiveness. Self-love is forgiveness. It’s understanding and honoring one’s very peculiar conditioning and sensing our innocence. And so to love oneself is not to cherish or elevate a self or claim ownership over something. In other words, self-love is an expression of non-clinging. Maybe we even say self-love is the first mini-taste of the emptiness of self. Self-love is the first taste.
Self-hatred is clinging. Self-aggrandizement is clinging. Self-love is the beginning of unclenching the fist, the beginning of insight into not-self.
The kindness we can show to ourself, the love we can show, is a function of metacognitive clarity. In other words, we’re not fused, we’re not wedded, we’re not reifying some story, some self-story. In a person with psychosis that Engler was asked about, there may be a kind of diffusion in their sense of identity, but often very intense emotions are bound up with the self-story. If you ask somebody with schizophrenia about their self-view, you’re likely to get some very charged material.
And anatta, not-self, is not about diffusion. It’s not about being confused or oblivious to one’s traits, to the continuities in one’s personality. It’s about flexibility. And as we drain the self-story of attachment and aversion, we begin to get freer. We begin to get freer. And that doesn’t mean we can’t aspire towards excellence. It doesn’t mean that we’re confused about our traits, but we know that it doesn’t attach to me. Life is happening. Life is happening, and gains and loss, all of it is happening. It’s just not happening to you.
Exactly. Self-love is the beginning of metacognitive clarity with respect to traits and characteristics. Anatta is a dramatic deepening of that metacognitive awareness. It’s the unbinding of things that had previously been grafted into the model of self. That which felt like the origin of our light becomes illuminated.
What we sensed before was something like, “I’m the spotlight,” but the spotlight itself was in the dark. And now the spotlight is awash in luminosity.
The philosopher Thomas Metzinger says2, “In ordinary waking consciousness, representations that are bound to the self-model, including our deeply held, often unconscious beliefs about ourselves and our lives, typically do not attract explicit critical attention or reflection. They are experienced as reality itself, or as that with which we see the world, rather than part of the world that we see. When the binding of these stimuli into the self-model is disrupted, we disidentify with them in a very straightforward sense, rendering them opaque. They are no longer experienced as part of me, but as something separate, an object or an appearance in consciousness to which I can attend with some sense of critical distance and suspension of judgment.”
You get the sense of, yeah, what had been grafted into me, the place from which I see, becomes something else that is seen. There’s a kind of unbinding process. It’s along the same continuum of metacognitive awareness that begins with self-love. “Okay, I’m conditioned like this. Okay, that’s okay. It’s okay. Oh, I aspire to change this, to grow. Okay, that’s okay.”
Self-love. And the self that is loved is easier to forget than the self that’s hated. And forgetting the self dramatizes the importance of love. The self re-arises, re-congeals, but we know a little bit more deeply how innocent it is.
I offer this for your consideration and wish you all a good week. Stay safe. Wish you well. Thank you.
Anatta: A fundamental Buddhist doctrine of “not-self” or “non-self,” stating that there is no permanent, underlying substance that can be called a soul or self. ↩
Thomas Metzinger: The original transcript was unclear, but the quote strongly aligns with the work of German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, particularly his “self-model theory of subjectivity.” The quote describes the process of disidentification from the contents of consciousness, a core theme in his writing. ↩