This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation - letting go of ideas of limitation; Dharmette: Death at the Center of Life. 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, welcome. It’s nice to see you all. Please find your posture.
It’s grounding, stabilizing. Just find something in your field of experience that feels conducive to settling.
What would it mean to put down ideas of limitation? Where I end, the world begins. My problems, what my heart is capable of. Just not pretending to be limitless, but putting down ideas of limitation.
Suffering is inherently self-absorbing and imposes some very firm limits on our mind. Sometimes, a gentle effort to put down notions of limitation can open us up to space or vastness. The mind made vast.
Can we feel safe enough that we don’t have to reiterate ourselves so frequently? We can melt into our breath, our body.
When there’s truly no preference between the expansive and contractive flavors of our mind, there tends to be more space. You don’t have to manufacture anything. Mother Nature sniffs out all our secret agendas.
In many moments, this realm of existence, samsara1, is enchanting. And sometimes, you just get bored of it. Not aversive, not hating, un-nihilistic. Just bored. It becomes more natural to lay some of our burdens down.
Thank you. So, last week I addressed the topic of golf. This week I could have done a talk on equanimity, but I’m pivoting to mortality—the only logical follow-up to a talk on golf.
William James described death as “the worm at the core of the human condition,” the worm at the core that turns us into “melancholy metaphysicians.” Increasingly, it seems to me that death is not the end of life; it’s the center of life. Kafka apparently said, “The meaning of life is that it stops.”
It’s not exactly that we have a life and then we have to let go. It’s sad. It’s the end. We die. Mortality and finitude are right here. They’re woven into the fabric of now, of how we experience the present moment. Finitude is woven into our emotional circuits. We’re here because evolution has made death the centerpiece of life. Finitude is in the architecture of our brains. It’s woven into our thinking and our cognitive systems. It’s woven into life itself.
There is this overt truth that all that arises passes. But there is also this more pervasive pressure forged by finitude. On the first front, the overt front, I feel like I’ve been, in a way, tending to my own death for a long, long time. When I was young, I would have these moments that kind of penetrated through my defenses, and it was just this sense of time slipping away, the sense of, “this can’t last.”
The Buddhist tradition recognizes that this trajectory called life cannot go on forever. So what to do? How to make sense of that? Many religions claim something like eternity, but I’ve generally found those notions threadbare, having the quality of coping. And where, after all, would eternity leave us anyway?
The critic and writer Martin Hägglund2 wrote:
Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make life meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal. The understanding of myself as mortal does not have to be explicit, theoretical, but it’s implicit in all my practical commitments and priorities. The question of what I ought to do with my life—a question that’s at issue in everything I do—presupposes that I understand my time to be finite. For the question of how I should lead my life to be intelligible as a question, I have to believe that I’ll die. If I believed my life would last forever, I could not take my life to be at stake, and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.
So, to my mind, we’re stuck with poignency. There are different Buddhist responses to this. Thich Nhat Hanh suggested “no birth, no death,” interbeing. There’s no clear way to say when something begins or ends. I appreciate that. But the realization of selflessness, of interbeing, the conservation of matter in the dharmic sense, still doesn’t feel like a perfect consolation. Where there was a house, there are ashes. Where there was a friend, there’s a corpse.
Sometimes we talk about nibbana3 as the deathless. “The gates of the deathless are open.” This, it is said, is the only refuge from Mara4, death, and samsara. We can talk about liberation, we can talk about nibbana, I feel, without resorting to the metaphysics of deathlessness. Some of that, to me, feels like a kind of overexuberance, a way of awarding the miracle and the experience of freedom the highest title we can imagine. It feels worth the highest title, but I’m not sure what could testify to deathlessness while one’s alive.
So we take stock. In what ways does finitude, does death, infuse life? For years in the morning with a group, I would chant the five remembrances in the early dark: I am of the nature to age, to grow sick, to die. All that’s precious and dear to me is of the nature to change. Actions are my only possession. That helps us clarify a lot; it helps us clarify priorities. But even still, as I practice more, I don’t know that we’ve fully accounted for death’s centrality in human subjectivity, in our practice.
In a sense, even when we’re safe and healthy enough, death is very close. Each moment is shaped by anicca5. That word is usually rendered as impermanence, but also as uncertainty. It was a quite remarkable, staggering genius of the Buddha to place uncertainty at the center of everything that weighs down on us moment by moment. Information is sometimes described as the reduction of uncertainty. We can see this in our life: the hunger to know, to narrativize, to stay oriented. Truth is valued insofar as it affords security; it’s of instrumental value in ordinary human life. In dharma life, I think it becomes more deeply animating, but generally, truth is valued insofar as it affords security and affirms our ground.
Marty Haselton writes:
On the surface, cognitive biases appear to be puzzling when viewed through an evolutionary lens because they depart from standards of logic and accuracy. They appear to be design flaws instead of examples of good engineering. To the evolutionary psychologist, however, the task is not whether the cognitive feature is accurate or logical, but rather how well it solves a particular problem and how solving this problem contributed to fitness ancestrally. Viewed in this way, if a cognitive bias positively impacted fitness, it’s not a design flaw, it’s a design feature.
Maybe the self is one of those cognitive biases. Sakkāya-diṭṭhi6, the self-view, was adaptive ancestrally in our evolutionary past. It’s adaptive now in some ways, but it constrains our freedom. The self as a kind of emanation of fear, the self as the bulwark against death.
And so I imagine, with mortality at the center of things, our freedom entails a deeply reworked relationship to death, to finitude, to Mara’s ultimate trump card. I’ll return to a question I posed some months ago: What would our life look like, what would our love look like, if we were a little less afraid?
I offer this for your consideration and appreciate your attention. I look forward to being together again next week. I wish you a good week of practice.
Samsara: (Pali) The cycle of death and rebirth, characterized by suffering, dissatisfaction, and stress. ↩
Martin Hägglund: A contemporary Swedish philosopher and literary theorist. ↩
Nibbana: (Pali) Often translated as “Nirvana” in Sanskrit. It is the ultimate goal of the Buddhist path, representing the cessation of suffering and the release from the cycle of rebirth (samsara). ↩
Mara: (Pali) A demonic celestial king who personifies temptation, sin, and death in Buddhism. ↩
Anicca: (Pali) One of the three marks of existence in Buddhism, meaning “impermanence” or “transience.” It refers to the fact that all conditioned things are in a constant state of flux. ↩
Sakkāya-diṭṭhi: (Pali) The “personality view” or “self-view.” In Buddhism, it is the mistaken belief in a permanent, unchanging self or soul, which is considered a primary source of clinging and suffering. The original transcript said “Sakya,” which was corrected based on the context of cognitive biases and the concept of self. ↩