This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Forgive all phenomena; Dharmette: Unconscious Acting-Out. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Silver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Okay, welcome folks. Welcome friends. I’m happy to be here. I have been away for a little bit, but the practice continues for all of us. I’m happy to practice together and offer some reflections. So, let’s get settled together.
Maybe you give yourself some space and time to take your dharma heart posture, in a kind of gentle way that a yoga teacher might counsel us to get into a particular posture or asana. Maybe you take your time. Or maybe you start on a dime and just drop everything. Even though putting down what’s sticky leaves a kind of residue of some pain, some sense of neglecting something, maybe it’s okay. You start on a dime.
At points in practice, we become bored with Samsara1, bored by the promises of praise and gain. You just become fatigued by the compulsive effort to keep everything together all the time.
Craving is always about one word: next. We dignify our “next” by talking about spiritual growth, Samadhi2, progress. But next is next.
Just this breath. We’re too busy knowing to congeal the notion of my life, my practice, my sit.
Sometimes it feels almost impossible to take just one mindful breath. It’s like we’ll never make it through the meditation period. But actually, it often only takes just a few conscious breaths in order to land in a slightly or significantly different place. The burden of agitation and avoidance melts. Even a little, it’s worth a lot.
Just forgive all phenomena. Whatever you call your mind, your worry, hope, and fear, the sounds and the sensations, the pleasantness and the pain. Forgive it all deeply. Trust that in the wake of that forgiveness, you don’t have to do much at all.
Okay, it’s good to practice with you.
So, one of the characteristics of the self is that it feels accessible. It’s me, sort of right here, closer than close. And the self feels unitary. We have access to it. We literally hear the self. We can visualize the headquarters of self. Dan Dennett3, as I’ve often shared, described this sense of self as the “center of narrative gravity.” We sense it, hear it. And whatever I am, it’s amenable to conscious inspection. We might say there are different facets of the self, but they’re available to us. To put it differently, self-view doesn’t really have room for the unconscious.
Freud famously said that our species has suffered three humbling discoveries that have eroded our “naive self-love.” The first was Copernicus, you know, and heliocentrism—that we circle the sun. It’s very funny to me that we thought—I mean, you know, hindsight is 20/20—but it’s funny to me that we thought we were literally the center of the universe, rather than like one planet in one kind of incidental galaxy. That was the first humiliation.
And then Darwin, you know, that we evolved from earlier creatures, monkeys, primates. And now we do our best to differentiate ourselves from monkeys by getting haircuts. We’re very conscious about it, “We’re not that, we’re humans.”
And then Freud, maybe grandiosely, maybe not, said the third discovery was his own: that we do not govern our own mind.
In Mahayana Buddhism, the Yogacara tradition, the Alayavijnana4 is, from my understanding (I’m not a scholar), somewhat akin to the unconscious. The phrase that I’ve always heard, the rendering of it, was “storehouse consciousness.” It’s described metaphorically as a kind of receptacle for karma, where the potential energy of our habits, our karmic seeds, lie in wait.
I begin with this because a couple of weeks ago, I did something that I could not explain. On the one hand, it wasn’t a big deal. It didn’t cause serious problems, but it was unskillful. It involved a close friend and colleague and required an apology. The details are not the point. What’s important is I did something that couldn’t be explained by my conscious mind. I couldn’t point to it; it was like something else was acting on me. I remember dimly this conscious moment of deliberating, “Should I do A or B?” And I did A. And it was the wrong thing to do. In retrospect, it wasn’t clear how I thought it would possibly work out in a skillful way. It was so obvious this was a bad plan.
It was an example of the disruptiveness of the unconscious. Unconscious forces highlight the limits of willful self-control. We have these patterns that just sometimes don’t add up. They only make sense when you add a variable to the equation. And the variable is: I’m a little crazy. That’s the variable. I’m a little unknown to myself.
When we’re propelled by unconscious forces, our behavior is less adaptive. It’s distorted. It’s mismatched to the context, and we leave a little wake of debris. The unconscious process is a form of overdisclosure. What we said means too much. What we did, did too much. We’re exposed in some way. The self-curation project is shattered by unconscious motives, the leakiness of it all. The fantasy of pulling off the performance of self is challenged by the disruptiveness of the unconscious. It’s like we break roles, like breaking the fourth wall for actors. The role cracks somehow; the performance of self has a leak.
And we’re seen for precisely what we do not want to be seen as: the kleshas5, the defilements, have leaked out. That often comes with some shame. The gap between our preferred self-story and the experience that others have of us is often filled with shame. In these zones, we get so moralistic about our inner life. Very young, very, I don’t use the word pejoratively, but very kind of primitive, moralistic mind states. And then maybe we want to hide or deny or say, “No, no, no, you don’t understand.” No, no, no. Okay, breathe.
The defilements are not self. Shame always requires a self, requires a measure of identification. We come to appreciate our mind is not in our possession. We do not belong to ourselves, but we can do the work of integration. To wake up is to wake up to more. All self-knowledge is good news in this sense. Even when it’s bad news, it’s good news.
Often we need another person to wake up to the kind of unconscious forces, the tectonic plates of our mind. We often need another person. But sometimes our behavior lights the way. Sometimes we do something that we don’t understand. We don’t know where it came from. Okay. Yes. Let me investigate.
“Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.”6 It’s famous from Freud, sometimes rendered as, “Where it was, there shall I become.” Where there was unconsciousness, there shall be understanding.
Okay. Non-shame. Non-shame. We find ways to soothe ourselves, to make room for the pain by connecting with some goodness. How do you take refuge in something other than a self-story? We have to feel our way through the exposure, maybe the shame, until what’s left is actually just some very clean kind of remorse about any difficulties that were caused. And maybe there’s some rupture, a repair to be made. Maybe not. But either way, we’re enriched by the experience, changed by it, and we’ve learned something about ourselves. These dimly sensed, disruptive forces of our mind, the storehouse, can be appreciated.
The more we develop a kind of awake relationship with those forces, the less they move in this subterranean way to sponsor distorted behavior. It’s possible that meditation, without always making the unconscious into propositional self-knowledge—things we could say, “I’m like this, I have this”—even without those words, it’s possible it dissolves some of the forces. The pressure on those tectonic plates eases without even knowing what we’ve let go of. We don’t need to know what we’re working with in order for some of the disruptiveness of this storehouse consciousness to be discharged.
But we’ll never be able to do it all alone. We need each other. In other words, we might say that wisdom is a property of dyads rather than individuals.
So, I offer this for your consideration. I didn’t do anything really bad. It’s not going to be in the newspapers tomorrow: “Matthew Brent Silver, Buddhist minister…” But it was just like, okay, this requires some investigation. So, may we all know ourselves well. I wish you well. Lovely to be with you. Happy to be back. I’ll see you next week.
Samsara: (Pali & Sanskrit) The cycle of death and rebirth, characterized by suffering, dissatisfaction, and stress, to which all life in the material world is bound. ↩
Samadhi: (Pali) A state of deep meditative concentration or absorption; the eighth element of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Dan Dennett: Daniel Dennett, a prominent American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology. ↩
Alayavijnana: (Sanskrit) “Storehouse consciousness” or “all-encompassing foundation consciousness.” A central concept in the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism, it is the deepest level of consciousness, which holds all the karmic seeds (bijas) of past actions that ripen into future experiences. ↩
Kleshas: (Sanskrit; Pali: kilesa) Mental states that cloud the mind and manifest in unwholesome actions. These include states like anxiety, fear, anger, jealousy, desire, depression, etc. ↩
Wo Es war, soll Ich werden: A famous German phrase from Sigmund Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933). It is often translated as “Where id was, there ego shall be,” signifying the process of making the unconscious conscious. ↩