This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: Non-referentiality; Talk: ‘thing masquerading as freedom of attention is on the rampage’. 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 folks. Good to be with you. As for a meditation theme, I got one comment to make, NBA basketball related, which brings to mind a recent event. This will not be the theme of the meditation, but I was watching the Warriors against the Rockets, a tense game, with my nephew who’s 14. You would say I was not in a well-regulated state. I was kind of… I don’t even sit when I watch. It’s like I just am kind of pacing around and kind of exaggerated grunts and fear and hope, just pirouetting back and forth from dread to relief. And he wasn’t doing that well himself, but he is 14.
At some point he said—he calls me Mana because when he was a kid he couldn’t say Matt or Matthew—he said, “Mana, you’re a meditation teacher.” Fair enough. Fair enough. And it’s sort of like, I don’t know, I need some things to care about that don’t matter. It’s a little how it feels, but it feels like it matters, but it doesn’t. Anyway, may we send lots of love and kindness to Steph Curry’s hamstring, and we will now meditate.
Okay, settle in.
Relaxing everything but the brightness.
Just filling out your body with light.
The center of gravity just dropping down into your belly.
There’s a lot of gravity here on this part of the universe. We just appreciate the way in which the earth holds us fast.
Take some fuller breaths through your belly.
And the softening, softening.
Just like the location of a phone might be pinpointed by how it pings to different cell towers, where it is in relation, in reference to those towers, we ping to certain reference points in experience to locate ourselves.
The felt outline of our body before it gives way to space. Our preferences, our so-called life, our plans. We ping to the tower of craving, aversion. And we locate ourself in this.
What would it mean to be here without reference points? Without referentiality?
We’re good at noticing phenomena. We just tend to hold on too long, like we need to make sure all phenomena are safe, not hiding some secret we need to extract for our life.
How gracefully might we put down sight and sound, sensation and thought?
Become tolerant of endings, things dissolving. Not needing to pick something new up. Not needing to remind ourselves of who, what, where, why we are.
“Live in the nowhere you come from, and though you have an address here,” Rumi1 invites.
Even the sense of “I’m the meditator” or “I’m teaching meditation” is just another ping.
Attention and love have important connections. If you fragment the attention, love gets compromised too. It makes some sense to me that the technological frenzy, the kind of regime of technological frenzy under which we live, might be correlated with increases in hate and fragmented love.
This was published in 2019, in draft form, by a group that called themselves “Friends of Attention.” I did not do much research; I just came across this. They may be lovely people, it may be a cult, but this is their manifesto, edited down a little bit:
“In the present and worsening state of things, the faculty and the power of human desire suffers from monoculture, the over-cultivation of one or maybe two forms of a desire, in addition to one or more primitive spasms of the brain stem that resemble but are not desire. Desire is impoverished and it has fallen, and the grammar of desire too, both its call and its response. Instead, there is the continuous circular generation of immediate satisfaction of miserable, debased desires. A thing that masquerades as freedom of attention is on the rampage. It resembles an infinitely scrolling buffet of choice, where even the most thrilling of confections is made up of the same dye and corn syrup as all the rest. Constant invitations to self-expression are instead solicitations to evacuate the self, in which, in the end stages, one simply arranges a series of attractive objects within the empty, bauble-bedecked frame of a thing that was once a person.
True freedom of attention is a burden that uplifts its bearer. When it’s first assumed, it feels like its opposite, like unfreedom. But in fact, it is what happens when a human, in full and conscious possession of her freedom and power of attention, forges a path through space, matter, ideas, and time. Attention is a form of love. Yes, love, as one expects, is the answer. But we do not yet know what love is or could be. The house of attention has many mansions. Attention transforms mere points of space or points of reference into rooms, corridors, and labyrinths. Attention is a trap door opening down. Anything given sufficient attention will open into an abyss of knowledge, experience, and desire.”
Attention is the most basic currency of being human, the most basic currency of our dharma practice. And yet, we’re vulnerable. The attention is very vulnerable. And because technology has so effectively scaled greed, hate, and delusion, it’s almost like the second noble truth has gotten worse. There’s a cause of suffering. Craving is the cause. I don’t know, maybe it’s ill-advised to say something’s gotten worse. That seems very deeply baked into human nature and kind of impervious to many influences. But it seems like it’s worse. The ease with which certain desires can be expressed has made the cycle of craving, acquisition, momentary satisfaction, and then heartbreak tighter. That loop is tighter. And the information economy, like a fresh pain each hour, is confronting us, reminding us of our nearly complete helplessness.
And we are kind of chasing that helplessness with debased desire, with compulsivity. And then maybe the dharma is supposed to provide the perfect consolation to all of that. But we know it doesn’t; it won’t. It’s almost like our power is dwarfed by our love. “Oh, that my monk’s robe were wide enough to gather up all the suffering people in this floating world,” so Ryōkan’s2 lament.
Then we sort of acclimatize to frenzy, and it feels almost like we owe the world or we owe our helplessness that frenzy. And we wrongly assume that in that frenzy, we’re suffering effectively.
Naomi Shihab Nye3, in a poem called “Slowly”:
Slowly, clean one drawer. Arrange words on a page. Let them find one another. Find you. Trust they might know something. You aren’t living the whole thing at once. That’s what the minute said to an hour. Without me, you’re nothing.
“Given sufficient attention, anything will open into an abyss of desire.” We don’t typically link attention and desire. Even “desire” sounds like a bad word in Buddhism. Sometimes that’s used interchangeably with craving, but not here. It strikes me that patient attention, careful attention, deep attention cultivates a certain kind of desire, a certain kind of engagement, fidelity. It’s through that kind of patient attention that dharma becomes a passion project.
And we recognize, maybe at the end of a day, maybe right now, maybe at the end of a week or on the first day of a retreat, that we’ve been glancing off the surface of life. And that makes irritability and agitation much more accessible. So, like staying maybe with a piece of art, lingering a little longer than we might, we stay with experience. Just stay. We risk boredom. We risk impulsivity. It took a long time to do that painting. Let us see.
Attention, they go on to say, transforms mere points of reference into rooms, corridors, labyrinths. And that kind of transformation is important for love. Attentional stability, kind of staying, risking boredom, is important for love—the kind of gradual opening of a point into a space, a point into rooms, corridors, labyrinths.
Simone Weil4 wrote, “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. Attention taken to its highest degree is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our minds towards the good, it’s impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted there too, in spite of itself.”
I’ve shared that before, and I come back to it now. What would it be to cure something through attention? In the dharma, we might say that wise attention refines out the forces of greed and delusion. Or we might say that faith and love follow in the wake of letting go. We cure our faults by attention, not by will; by offering ourselves up to something, not by engineering. And little by little, the whole soul will be attracted towards the good. I think that’s right.
Part of why we don’t stay quiet is that we have to give up our hate. Hatred just cannot withstand kind of patient, deep attention. We might still have to say no, but the abrasiveness of hatred becomes self-evidently painful, and it’s not the most effective way of saying no. This is the prayer of attention, and our love depends on it.
I offer this for your consideration. I’ll be at retreat next week, so I won’t have class, but I’ll be back the week of the 21st. I wish you all well. Take good care of your attention, your love.
Rumi: Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207-1273) was a Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic. ↩
Ryōkan: Ryōkan Taigu (1758-1831) was a quiet and eccentric Sōtō Zen Buddhist monk who lived much of his life as a hermit. He is remembered for his poetry and calligraphy. ↩
Naomi Shihab Nye: An American poet, songwriter, and novelist, known for her work that lends a fresh perspective to ordinary events, people, and objects. ↩
Simone Weil: (1909-1943) A French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Her work spanned a wide range of subjects, from spirituality and metaphysics to social and political philosophy. ↩