This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video If you’re looking, you’re lost; Dharmette: Goodness and Curiosity, w Matthew Brensilver. 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, welcome folks. Happy to be with you, and actively excited to meditate. That may not mean my instructions are good, but I’m excited to meditate. So, let’s settle in together.
Maybe beginning by finding something that’s genuinely inspiring. Anything that inspires the longing for the dharma. Not the craving to get somewhere; the longing for the dharma is different than that.
See where your attention is drawn. See what aperture of attention, how coarse or subtle the anchor might be. The anchor might be everywhere. It’s not grading yourself, it’s just being attuned to the conditions of the mind in this moment. What serves?
The raw materials of awakening, perhaps, are always here.
Don’t go looking out there. Don’t even go looking inside yourself. If you’re looking, you’re lost.
We’re practicing relinquishing the notion that pleasure is better than pain. Ordinarily, pleasure signals that it’s okay to relax a little bit, and pain mobilizes our behavioral repertoires and words. We’re practicing this very radical inclusion.
Maybe we fear there’s not enough goodness if we relinquish our willfulness. That the moment, the path, waking up, depends on our will and doing this. But you’ve already done enough. The willfulness cannot take us any further.
Maybe it feels like, “Well, it’s my job to prop up the attention, direct the attention to the breath, to whatever.” But the awareness won’t stop even if you cease propping up the attention.
Maybe it’s a little sad to have no jobs left, but very relieving.
Okay. It’s good to sit with you. I’ve been in kind of a weird mood. Not bad, but weird. Anyway, it’s nice to dwell in dharma together.
Good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. As far as I can tell, that’s true about this path. But the goodness evolves. I wanted to say some words about the connection between goodness and interest.
Some of the goodness of dharma can’t really be imagined at the beginning of the path. You wouldn’t be able to believe it. In the beginning, we might idealize the dharma in some ways. There might be naive hopes about what it will do for our problems, for our ego. We might put lineages or teachers or specific teachings on pedestals. But that’s not exactly the goodness of the dharma. It takes time and patience to open to just how good it is. It kind of can’t be summarized easily. That’s what dharma talks are trying to do, struggling to do.
Through thick and thin, the dharma must serve us in good times, but it also needs to serve us in times of difficulty. When life, in one way or another, has brought us to a place of deep need, maybe desperation, that’s only when you can see how good the dharma actually is.
How does the goodness of the path come into view? When I give dharma talks, I often feel some implicit pressure to give a kind of assignment, to give something to do. And sometimes I do give assignments, but I try not to collude with the delusion that the goodness lies outside of you. Much of the goodness of the path cannot be catalyzed by hearing an instruction about what you should do. The goodness of the path emerges out of interest.
Interest, Dhamma-vicaya1, is usually rendered as “investigation of phenomena” and sometimes as “investigation of the law.” That can convey a sense that it’s a kind of intellectual investigation or analytic, figuring something out. But it’s really sincere, non-transactional interest. Sincere, meaning unforced, genuine. It has nothing to do with “should.” And non-transactional in the sense that it’s intrinsically motivated. We’re not outcome-focused; we’re not bartering our effort for some prize, “if I do this, I get that.”
Dhamma-vicaya, investigation, is one of the seven factors of enlightenment, but it has deep connections to other factors. Mindfulness depends on some measure of interest, of curiosity. When it feels like you’re kind of performing knowing, it’s like studying a subject that bores you. And energy depends on curiosity. It’s very hard to sustain effort when you’re gunning for some outcome. But when there’s genuine curiosity, this kind of sincere, non-transactional interest, the effort feels natural and unforced.
The goodness is found through our own interest. As someone said that stayed with me, “Usually meditators are not interested in learning the truth of body-mind. We’re actually interested in controlling body-mind.” It’s worth looking at just how deep the agenda to control, rather than to open, runs in us. He said that when we’re trying to control, there’s tension, we get tired quickly, get bored. So instead, it’s just being with the experience in a very simple way. That’s what leads to truth.
Curiosity, this interest, is that impulse to connect rather than control.
Michelle McDonald often talks about “karmic knots”—these kind of places of deep pain where the dharma simply does not seem like it ever penetrates. It never soaks in. We might know the issue, that knot. We’ve tried hard to work with it. We’ve done everything. We’ve brought all of our effort and sincerity and mindfulness and loving-kindness and compassion. We’ve tried to feel it in our body, tried to apply the antidotes, tried to deconstruct it and untangle everything. And there it is.
Michelle says we’re learning to have that deep, unconditional acceptance. We’re not trying to get rid of it. With a karmic knot, if you manage to open to it, try to keep some relationship with the anchor. The line between accepting it and trying to get rid of it is very thin. That’s the definition of a karmic knot. You’ll think you’re there because you’re accepting it, but that’s not how it works. That little part of you that wants to get rid of it slips in. You don’t see it. And all you’re doing is reinforcing aversion by staying with it.
I believe our karmic knots are our teachers in this life. It’s not going to open unless you truly want a relationship with it. Truly want a relationship with it. That’s a way of talking about interest and curiosity, investigation.
When the interest isn’t there, don’t pretend it is. We can’t command ourselves to get interested, and we can’t fake it. There is a certain measure of patience. We keep practicing. We keep listening to dharma. We keep opening our hearts up to it. We keep close to spiritual friends. Keep close to Sangha. And at some point, something happens. It might have been a week of feeling uninspired, or years. But at some point, someone else’s being will affect you in a deep way. Something they did or said or some way they were. And their freedom or their courage, their suffering, their love—something will ignite sincerity, interest, willingness again. Maybe it’s the preciousness of our own human birth that bears down on us.
And then we get interested. It’s from our own heart. And then we just follow that thread. When we’re not making demands of the practice, the blessings of practice start raining down. The love gets richer. The sense of goodness becomes more and more multi-layered, multi-textured, like the love for a person that one’s loved for many years. It’s richer. It’s hard to summarize a love like that.
And the love is a kind of virtuous cycle. The love stimulates more interest and curiosity. The goodness stimulates more interest and curiosity, and we keep going even though we’ve arrived.
So I offer this for your consideration. I wish you all well. I won’t have class next week. I’ll be doing a retreat for young adults. And I’ll see you back the following week, I think the 13th. All right. I wish you all well. Thanks.
Dhamma-vicaya: A Pali term that is one of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. It is often translated as “investigation of phenomena,” “analysis of qualities,” or “curiosity.” The original transcript had “dhamavachaya,” which has been corrected based on the context of the teaching. ↩