This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver & Dharmette: Unquenchability and What’s Worth Wanting. 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. Happy to be practicing together. Let’s settle in, maybe open to some compassion. Find your posture.
Maybe you begin just by listening to silence. There might be noise. There might be noise to one side of you, silence on the other. Might be silence as a sound fades out, dissolves. It might be that you feel like you can even tilt the attention towards silence amidst noise.
Don’t partition off the internal sound of your thinking as something special. Just more sound. Then the sentence ends, the loop completes. And before we get reabsorbed in another line of discursive thinking, there’s quiet.
Just let gravity work on us. Like nectar settling to the bottom of a glass of juice, as Thich Nhat Hanh1 says, we settle too.
Letting your nervous system unwind. That unwinding doesn’t always feel good, but it should feel true. Something is coming home.
The more settled we become, the more potent our love might be. And so we maybe begin just reflecting on this truth of suffering. There is suffering. Some of it can be alleviated, some of it cannot, but it necessitates compassion. Just the poignancy of having been born, of efforting, struggling to stay alive, depending on the care of others to even make it through the first phase of our life.
And when we understand precariousness, we become deeply grateful for whatever goodness and stability there is. And we cultivate compassion knowing that it cannot last.
Perhaps it feels right to bring someone to mind who you know who’s suffering. We make vivid their suffering in our heart, the textures of their mind. We generate a very rich, detailed landscape map of their pain. And in this first phase, not the last phase, but this first phase, we feel the full weight of their suffering.
We practice becoming undefended against the depth of the suffering. We practice recognizing ourselves in the other being. We are of the same nature. This is not yet the practice of love. This is actually sensing a measure of empathic distress. Just taking in their suffering, taking it into your body.
And then now, all at once, as if desperately attempting to answer all of that pain, we pour all of our love into them.
May you be free from suffering.
You begin to sense the way the heaviness or the grief begins to soften, melt in the warmth of the love. We’re unafraid of pain and unafraid of love.
May your suffering be eased. May you be held by love.
And because we all share in this nature, compassion can go everywhere. And the nagging doubts that it’s not enough… yeah, fair enough. But that’s just another way that we constrain our love. Unconstrained. Mind made vast by love.
Okay. It’s good to practice with you.
So this evening I wanted to address something different, something we don’t often address. I want to talk about golf. I follow sports pretty closely, partially because the skills are just amazing, and also I sort of feel like I need things to care about that don’t matter. I care about a lot that matters, and I need some kind of breaks from that. And I don’t know, it’s kind of compelling. And you know, that Simone Biles and I are of the same species, that’s funny to me. That kind of fills me with delight, you know.
So I go to ESPN numerous times a day to read stories or watch highlights. And sometimes when I get stuck while I’m working or supposed to be working, like creating a dharma talk, sometimes if I get stuck, I meditate. Other times when I get stuck, I go to ESPN. Mostly basketball, but other things.
Anyway, so Scotty Scheffler has been kind of like the most dominant golfer of the recent years, and sometimes he’s so much better than the rest of the players that he’s sort of considered like a generational talent and compared to the legends. And so yesterday morning, I checked sports and I saw the headline. The headline was “Scotty Scheffler’s take on success in golf.” Quote, “What’s the point?”
Click. Click hard. “What’s the point?”
That’s not a standard issue ESPN story, but it was like, okay, finally my two loves are coming together, sports and dukkha2, you know.
So they write, on the brink of a tournament that could get Scotty Scheffler to four major wins and three of the four legs of the career grand slam at age 29, the unquestioned best player in the world said Tuesday that he doesn’t find true fulfillment in winning.
I’ll read the paragraph of what he said. He said, “This is not a fulfilling life.” This is at a press conference before a major tournament. “This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from the sense of the deepest places of your heart. That’s something I wrestle with on a daily basis. Like, why do I want to go win this golf tournament so badly? Why do I want to win the Open Championship so badly? I don’t know. Because if I win, it’s going to be awesome for two minutes. You win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister’s there. It’s such an amazing moment. Then it’s like, okay, what are we going to have for dinner? Life goes on. It’s great to be able to win tournaments and accomplish things. The things that I have in the game of golf, yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it because I’ve literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport. To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special. But at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world because what’s the point? Losing sucks. I hate it. I really do. We work so hard for such little moments. I love putting in the work. I love getting to practice. I love getting to live out my dreams. But at the end of the day, sometimes I just don’t understand the point.”
I read that and I was like, okay, the matrix is malfunctioning, you know, sort of glitching, right? It’s very unusual to hear an incredibly famous person wonder publicly about the meaning of their life. We just take it for granted that all these people with money and fame and power and talent, of course, the meaning is assured by that.
So, dukkha. That word has two meanings. Usually rendered as suffering, but two meanings. There is the inevitable, ungovernable unpleasantness that’s striated throughout life. We know that. But in a sense, more hauntingly, the second dimension of it is that experiences do not satiate the heart. There’s a kind of unquenchable character to longing, to life. And the fantasy of quenchability drives so much of our life. It drives so many efforts towards money or prestige or power or excellence.
The media reports extensively on the first sense of dukkha, but very little on unquenchability. And in fact, our culture really depends on the craving that is sponsored by fantasies of quenchability. What would our economic and marketing and media systems look like if this second sense of dukkha were more fully understood?
What’s worth wanting? What’s worth wanting can be an important question to ask. You know, given the laws of dukkha, what’s worth wanting? And people sometimes have a kind of dim sense that they’re on a trajectory that doesn’t work. And then they ask that question, but no answers are forthcoming. So, they keep going. They keep doubling down. They try more new pleasures, novelty.
But that question, “what is worth wanting?” That’s not a question that you simply answer out of thin air. You have to live into the answer. The answer is not a word. It emerges only through training. As I was reflecting on that, I thought of Rilke3, right? “to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
A lot of dharma questions are like that. You know, often we ask questions that don’t have an actual answer that could be offered in words. It’s like asking the question, “please tell me how to lift 500 pounds,” as if the answer would help. As if there is an answer. “What is worth wanting?” gets answered through action, not an idea. It gets answered through training and satisfaction.
What is quenched, you know, it can’t be derived from one experience but is encoded in the training of our nervous system. Maybe we can say what we want is non-clinging. And there’s a weird thing. Experience, getting this, winning the next tournament, getting that—that doesn’t satiate the heart. But as we get freer, as we train, anything can satiate the heart. Very ordinary experience brings great love or joy or poignancy.
One way to think about spiritual practice is this: the question, “what’s the point?” completely dissolves. If we’re asking, “what’s the meaning of life? What’s worth wanting?” in a sense, we’re already in trouble. But we find a path, and the doubts dissolve. And the self-evident, self-evidencing freedom confirms that we must keep going.
And I believe that is very important at the end of our lives, to have something we do not doubt whatsoever. Even in our sleep, in our dreams, in our unconscious, do not doubt.
I offer this for your consideration. And yeah, I wish you all a lovely week. Be back next week and we’ll keep going.
Thich Nhat Hanh: A Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, and founder of the Plum Village Tradition. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers both to acute physical and mental pain, as well as the more subtle, pervasive sense that conditioned experiences are unable to provide lasting happiness or contentment. ↩
Rainer Maria Rilke: A Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets. The quote is from his book Letters to a Young Poet. ↩