This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Insight Meditation w M Brensilver: Following Interest; Dharmette: Profligate Moral Vandalism & Anger. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by M Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Let’s sit together.
Like nectar settling to the bottom of a glass of juice, Thich Nhat Hanh says.
There can be some measure of tranquility when we’re not trying to keep all the balls up in the air, when we’re not trying to suppress, as if keeping fifty ping-pong balls submerged underwater. We let what’s in the air come to the surface, what’s subterranean come to the surface.
How radically might we relinquish the attempt to control experience?
Maybe the mind calls out, “No, no, no, no, I have to control my attention. I have to do the meditation. I have to do the letting go. We have to make progress.” We have to come to trust that you’re already enough, doing nothing whatsoever.
Maybe we follow wherever the thread of interest takes us. What is this? What is this moment, this life, this suffering?
When there’s a curiosity, an investigation, Dhamma vicaya1, it doesn’t matter where the attention goes, animated by interest. Interest is for itself, but it turns out to be a very conducive intention to the development of our practice.
So often, our attention is a kind of appendage of our wanting. Can we be awake in such a way that we’re not extracting something from the moment, but instead offering our attention as a kind of blessing? A settling back, a kind of receptivity. No more bartering with samsara2.
Just put all of your hope into this moment.
Okay folks, good to practice with you. I’ll be away for a few weeks, actually. I’ll be away for the next three weeks, actually in New York. If any of you are there, I’m at New York Insight. It would be nice to maybe see some YouTube people in real life if you like. I think I’m there the 29th, doing a benefit for that group. And then I’ll be back July 9th for certain Wednesdays.
Okay.
So, one of my friends, a fellow dharma teacher and a very kind of intuitive bodyworker, a Somatic Experiencing practitioner… we would be in the teachers’ office at Spirit Rock during a walking period or before a talk or guided meditation. It was just a few of us in the office, and we’d be sitting around talking, and he would just pick up my leg and start massaging it and manipulating it. It wasn’t weird for him. He knew that I had an old meditation injury that had sort of hardened into some chronic pain. Whatever he was doing, I just let him do it. It felt very good. It felt like there was wisdom in his hands.
At some point, he would ask, “What does your leg want to do?” And I remember one time it was like, it wants to kick the air. It wants to move out forcefully. And it was a movement of some kind of aggression, is how it felt. And he said, “That’s right. Yeah, there’s some movement of fight in the fight-flight-freeze kind of thing there. This needs fight. There’s some fight that hasn’t been completed.” And the energy needed to be guided into movement to complete something.
That was a very particular context, but I begin with that because the question arises for me: what does it look like to channel anger and aggression into something useful? Anger is kind of a little taboo, maybe, in dharma circles. It’s very easy to disavow. It very clearly belongs to the bouquet of afflictive emotions. And sometimes it’s more comfortable for us to say that anger is just the armor, or anger just protects us from some more fundamental feeling. You know, sometimes we say, “Oh yeah, anger is the secondary feeling. Before that, fear or grief or shame or something lies under the anger.” Our preference is for the less aggressive spectrum of feeling. Maybe we have more okay-ness in the scene with fear or grief, and anger is sort of like, “No, that can’t be the primary thing. That can’t be the bedrock or something.” So we can disown that.
And maybe we say, as part of our defense, that anger is just a distorted expression of fear or something like this. I’ve spoken almost glowingly and without regret about grief, but rarely about anger, certainly not glowingly. And I’ve done that for a reason. I do think there’s less wisdom in anger, often, than there is in grief. But even with anger, it’s not zero wisdom.
Now, in opening the door to anger, we want to be careful. Anger and aversion are literally one of the three pillars, one of the three wellsprings of suffering: greed, delusion, and aversion. And if we’ve paid attention to our own minds or to others, we know that anger can destroy us. It can destroy those around us, can destroy communities and societies.
From the Samyutta Nikaya3, “What’s the one thing, O Gotama, whose killing you approve?” The killing of anger is the response, “with its poisoned root and honeyed tip. This is the killing the noble ones praise, for having slain that, one does not sorrow.”
Poisoned root, honeyed tip. Fair enough. And I’m not there, but I can envision a mind free from anger. As radical as that is, I can envision a kind of uprooting of aversion so thorough, and an understanding of causality so deep, that anger does not arise. Because I do feel—not pivoting to talk trash about anger—but I do feel like anger, in the end, is a basic confusion, an impoverished model of causality. I can see anger is never the last word. There’s always something more to be seen. And at some point, our emotional system may find ways of expressing our love and our boundaries in such a way that does not involve rage.
But until I’m that free, until my emotional system really is changed, I need to listen to my anger and to extract its wisdom, to untangle the delusion and the wisdom, to find a way of making that movement that I was being invited to make—that kicking of my leg—that doesn’t harm anyone. To find a way of kicking that expresses force but clarity.
All this is to say that I’ve been aggrieved, angered, by the profligate moral vandalism of our president and the wanton cruelty that delights in inflicting suffering on imagined enemies. And when somebody asks me how I’m doing, there’s a dimension of my heart, it’s true, I can say honestly, is extremely happy. And in a sense, that well-being is not occluded by, but it coexists with, a lot of heartache and anger over so much unnecessary suffering.
So can I extract the wisdom from my anger? Can I untangle the wisdom from the delusion that I also know is there? And what I’m asking myself is, what is a wise, powerful expression of the energy of “no”? What does that look like?
We need to kind of turn to our moral heroes. I read the recent, I think it won the Pulitzer, a very superb biography of King by Jonathan Eig. It’s a book for our times. In that biography, he argues that history has sort of mistaken King’s nonviolence for passivity. It has sanitized and polished the legacy in a way that doesn’t do justice to just how radical and fearless the approach was. The book argues that we’ve forgotten that the approach was more forceful than most anything the country had seen.
And moral outrage, it needs a place to go. Like that energy in the leg, it needs a place to go. But I don’t want to distort the energy. I don’t want to express it in a way that comes out sideways. When I do that, there’s a kind of instant karmic reverberation. Sometimes even just giving a dharma talk, if something’s not quite aligned in my heart, there’s something self-indulgent or melodramatic or self-involved, I’ll feel it afterwards. With this, I want to find a way of expressing this energy cleanly in my life, in my teaching, in my practice.
And when the feeling is not expressed or discharged, is not channeled in some way, it sort of rattles around the cage of the heart-mind. And that rattle compounds the pain. That kind of passivity and inactivity compounds the pain. It’s easier to get angry when there’s no movement of the energy out. And so action is sometimes the only way to actually discharge the pain of that.
So, okay, as a dharma practitioner, where does this energy go? How is this alchemically transformed, knowing just how much faith we develop in love and just how profound the moral persuasiveness of love is? So much more persuasive than unmitigated anger.
It sounds paradoxical, but can one’s anger inform one’s love? I had the sense that in King, something like that happened, that he kind of mastered that process of moving the energy of moral outrage into courage and love.
So this is February 1957, King wrote: “In speaking of love at this point, we’re not referring to some sentimental emotion. It would be nonsense to urge people to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. Love in this connection means an understanding of goodwill. When we speak of loving those who oppose us, we refer neither to eros nor philia; we speak of a love which is expressed in the Greek word agape4. Agape means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate. It means understanding, redeeming goodwill for all people, an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of humans. When we love on the agape level, we love people not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but because God loves them.”
We don’t have exactly the same theological language to pull on, but it’s close enough. It’s close enough to love because God loves them. And we put all the movement of the heart into expressing our care.
So I offer this for your consideration. And may we find ways of expressing all that’s wise in us. Okay, I wish you well. See you in July.
Dhamma vicaya: A Pali term meaning “investigation of phenomena” or “analysis of qualities.” It is one of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. ↩
Samsara: A Pali word that means “wandering” or “world,” connoting the cyclical, unsatisfactory nature of existence characterized by birth, death, and rebirth. ↩
Samyutta Nikaya: “Connected Discourses,” a collection of Buddhist scriptures, part of the Sutta Pitaka of the Pali Canon. ↩
Eros, Philia, Agape: Three of the four ancient Greek words for love. Eros is passionate or romantic love. Philia is friendship or brotherly love. Agape is selfless, unconditional love for all people, which Martin Luther King Jr. identified as the love at the heart of nonviolent resistance. ↩