This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver; Dharmette: Sila Reflections. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
So, welcome folks. Good to be with you. We’ll do that thing we do together. So, finding your posture.
It’s so natural to predict that the next moment will be a great deal like the last, to expect the next moment. At some level, our highest priority is not being startled by anicca1. That can deaden our experience of our life.
Relaxing whatever can be relaxed. We’re just practicing being alive, just available to experience moment by moment. Just being internally caressed by your breathing, this sort of sweeping, soothing movement. Your breathing unifying your body.
To the imperfections of this moment, of our lives, we don’t have to say yes to those imperfections forever. But for right now, we can. There’s always something wrong, something we might tweak or adjust or fix or dial in. Just stop being baited by Māra2 moment by moment.
Each breath, just becoming secluded.
If there’s a thread of interest, curiosity, a kind of passion to know something, anything, just follow that thread of interest. We can’t manufacture interest when it’s not there, but when it is there, it’s maybe the most trustworthy intention for practice.
We’re practicing noticing new phenomena, or familiar phenomena, in just slightly new ways. The poetry and aliveness of not knowing, or not quite knowing.
We expect to find ourselves in the next moment. We’re invited to put down these kinds of expectations. What does it mean to cease reiterating the self as we breathe, feel through our body, sense the mind? The mind becomes infused with Buddha Dharma. We forget ourselves to remember the path.
Some years ago, maybe it was 2018, Gil and some others in the IMC system were asked to write some brief reflections on Sīla3, ethical conduct. They just asked for a couple of paragraphs, so I wrote something. One of the Sangha members was asking about those words, and so I thought to go back and revisit them. I’ll just read what I wrote and then say a few words.
Make of yourself a refuge for all beings. The Buddha enjoins us to cultivate this radical heart, a cultivation expressing not only Sīla, but Samādhi4 and Paññā5 too. To be safe for others entails a path of self-discovery, humility, sensitivity, and willingness to be softened by one’s suffering. Goodness ripens through a process of letting go, and letting go involves a measure of grief. We grieve the harm done to us and the harm done by us. We grieve the human condition, the indivisibility of life and suffering.
This process is autobiographical, idiosyncratic, and universal. To be mindful of goodness brings love. To be mindful of pain also brings love. That asymmetry is the miracle. The more attuned we are to our heart and its instant karmic reverberations, the clearer our ethical life will be. The more unified the mind becomes, the deeper the love will be. Boundless, nothing but warmth, the effortless care that is the face of emptiness. We learn unwaveringly: hatred is never the last word. To see more is to love more. Sīla expresses the entire path, and then we begin again.
The story we tell about love is never final. New questions, complexities, and debts arise. Might I owe more than I suppose? The ego complicates everything. “I want to think of myself as a really good person, and I don’t really want to change my behavior.” Ethical development stagnates when we rationalize our preferences. It’s conceivable that goodness entails much more than even we good people are accustomed to giving. Just because the saint is extremely rare doesn’t mean that anything less, strictly speaking, is justifiable.
I can imagine in the not-distant future a major reconfiguration of our ethical obligations to non-human animals, to the egregious suffering of the most vulnerable around the globe, and to future generations. This is a time for radical hearts. I don’t usually feel up to the task, but I am steadfast in keeping a relationship with my own sense of moral incoherence. From that relationship, I hope that I evolve and contribute more of what I owe to the welfare of others. The path unfolds. Then, at some point, it’s time to die. That final gesture of letting go, which is both deeply poignant and also not such a big deal. Your life was made complete by what you gave away.
You might be asked to write something about Sīla, but you might enter the doorway of wisdom and find your way to Sīla and Samādhi. Likewise, there are those people who are committed to love and service, to Sīla, who, maybe without knowing it, quietly find their way into more and more wisdom and stillness. This is part of why dharma talks don’t tend to stay on one theme. If you sampled five seconds of a thousand Dharma Seed talks, it would be hard to know what the topic was in each one because it just weaves together. You cannot talk about love without talking about wisdom.
To be a refuge, to cease doing so much harm, entails a measure of clarity and attunement, of sensitivity and humility, of tracking the ways our being ripples out into others. And there must be a kind of gracefulness about having been wrong. That gracefulness is just indispensable in our moral evolution and our evolution as practitioners. This process by which we grow, by which we recognize some measure of having been wrong, that process often feels like grieving. The growing pains of dharma feel like grieving. But we need not be so afraid of pain when we’ve acquired the taste for purification.
It’s amazing to feel it happening inside us, almost alchemically. I don’t know how to say it exactly, but unpleasant vedanā6, the intensity, the imperfection of life, becoming the Brahma-vihārās7, becoming some species of love. It strikes me that it’s like solid, liquid, gas; pain, grief, love.
It’s one dharma talk for 100 people, but the dharma is said to be universal, with an almost infinite number of constellations of upāya8, or skillful means. What is wisdom for one is delusion for another. The way that delusion often manifests is not by doing the opposite of what the Buddha says, but delusion expresses itself when we reach for the wrong teaching, when we try to fit our practice into someone else’s mind, into some ideal. So much of practice is a kind of sensitive, improvisational way of being. You’re not assimilating to some Buddhist culture; you’re finding your belonging within the dharma. Idiosyncratic, and yet it feels exactly like home.
This love can stabilize, can linger with us, is never far. It animates our daily rhythms. I’m not a lucid sleeper; I’m a dumb sleeper. I know some people have dream yoga and lucid dreaming—beautiful, right? That’s not my experience. I don’t know if I could train myself. But if you woke up in a dream, a lucid dream, it would be, I presume, very easy to love, almost recklessly. The sense of being conscious of being in a dream, and to feel, as I imagine I would, that love is utterly cost-free. What happens if we wake up in our life and it becomes more dreamlike? What shape would your love take?
The story we tell about love is never final; it evolves. And we’re suggestible. It’s hard to hear the dharma when you love your place. Loving one’s place, I would say, is part of being a person of our time. Of course, we’re all people of our time, but we’re incredibly suggestible, morally speaking. Even when we call ourselves radical, we take on many of the dominant values of the culture. So part of our practice is developing a kind of deep moral imagination.
There’s this line from the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel9 that I quote sometimes: “The prophet is human, yet they employ notes one octave too high for our ears. They experience moments that defy our understanding. They are neither a singing saint nor a moralizing poet, but an assaulter of the mind. Often their words begin to burn where conscience ends.”
The philosopher Derek Parfit10 said, in a philosophical inquiry into identity, that we’re separated from our future selves by time, and separated from fellow humans by space. Why does the separation across time matter so much more than the separation across space? That sounds harsh, maybe, but the phrase that came to me is that the ego makes liars of us all. Just liars. That’s not to inject a measure of self-conquering or something like that. I know it’s strong language, but the truth just seems absolutely meaningless to the ego. In a sense, it’s only when we wake up to love, when the homelessness of ego is realized, grieved, and released.
This, for me, is the only way that my life might feel complete at the end. Otherwise, even a thousand years would feel like I’m being robbed of something. So what would be complete for your heart? What would be a complete life? The sense that this life was enough. And so we practice completing our life. We practice dying before we die.
I offer this for your consideration. Thank you for your attention.
Anicca: A fundamental concept in Buddhism, meaning “impermanence” or “transience.” It refers to the fact that all conditioned things are in a constant state of flux. ↩
Māra: In Buddhism, Māra is a demonic celestial king who personifies temptation, distraction, and the unskillful forces that hinder spiritual progress. ↩
Sīla: A Pali word meaning “virtue,” “morality,” or “ethical conduct.” It is one of the three sections of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Samādhi: A Pali word for “concentration” or “unification of mind.” It refers to the practice of developing a calm, focused, and stable mind, often through meditation. ↩
Paññā: A Pali word for “wisdom” or “insight.” It is the understanding of the true nature of reality. The original transcript said “pa,” which has been corrected to “Paññā” as it fits the classic Buddhist triad of Sīla, Samādhi, and Paññā (ethics, concentration, and wisdom). ↩
Vedanā: A Pali word for “feeling” or “sensation.” It refers to the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral tones that arise with all experience. The original transcript said “vena.” ↩
Brahma-vihārās: The “divine abodes” or “four immeasurables” in Buddhism: loving-kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā). The original transcript said “brahma vharas.” ↩
Upāya: A Sanskrit term meaning “skillful means” or “expedient means.” It refers to the ability of a teacher to adapt their message to the specific needs and capacities of the audience. ↩
Abraham Joshua Heschel: (1907-1972) A Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century. The original transcript misspelled the name as “Hesshel.” ↩
Derek Parfit: (1942-2017) A British philosopher who specialized in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. The original transcript misspelled the name as “Parfett.” ↩