This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation w M Brensilver; Talk: Crowdsourced question on fear & love amidst political chaos. 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.
It’s good to be with you. The chat is enough to have a sense that there’s a kind of field here, animated by goodwill and the longing for less suffering.
Let’s begin and take our posture. A little bit of sweetness on the tongue, a little bit of goodness rippling through our body. The goodness that is called saddhā.1
We come to be moved by goodness, moved by our own goodness, that of others, by the path. Dharma is a kind of progressive sensitization to goodness. The light from that star grows brighter and brighter over the years, decades maybe, of practice. As we come into a sense of goodness, the ordinariness of it, we come to trust it. Know that it’s there for us as practitioners. It’s there for us to call on.
You start to become a little bit less intimidated by the future, a deeper sense of security. Maybe it feels more natural just to put the complexity of life down and rest.
Drawing the line clearly around what’s in the focus space and what’s background. In drawing that line around, say, the sensations of our breathing, sound, the body, a phrase—in drawing that line, we’re not turning everything outside that circle into an enemy. We just treat it all like a phone ringing that we know is not for us, as Ajahn Brahm2 said.
When the past doesn’t feel like it conceals any secrets and our future is unintimidating, it comes natural to rest here now. We don’t need to trace out the lessons of memory and pain. When we already know how it all ends, it comes natural to rest here now.
Sometimes we have to firewall our peace from our care. The love, devotion, compassion, service can feel like it’s irresponsible to take that off the back burner ever. But there are cycles of love and rest, caring and peace. To always be caring erodes our capacity for love, for rejuvenation. Sometimes our care is actually just a kind of placeholder for an amorphous agitation that would exist even in a utopia. And so we rest.
A few questions or inquiries came up around the political moment, fear, and love. I’ll start there.
This is a very active question for me, and it’s not something that I have a sense of, “Okay, this is how to do it.” I certainly have no sense that I know something that you must know and can tell you how to do it. It’s more a kind of living with the question of what the appropriate response is and what love entails. That question—what does love entail? What is love? What does it ask of me? What does it offer me?—that’s not a question we answer. That’s something that we live with, and it’s heightened in this time. But that’s not a question ever meant to be answered, because to answer it is to short-circuit our ethical evolution.
I want to be balanced. I want to live a balanced life, but at the same time, I don’t want to fetishize balance. Some of my moral heroes are not living balanced lives. They’re really going for it. Sometimes it almost looks like this bourgeois preoccupation for me to care about balance. And yes, they burn out. That does happen. Or they become nihilistic, or they suffer a lot, or they fall off the horse and have to get back on. That’s true. But they live impactful lives, and there’s a lot to be said for that.
As Buddhist practitioners, the path is founded on the sense that it’s possible to live a life of love and also take good care of our heart and stay balanced in some way. Given that, one of my impulses is, if we’re going to suffer, it better be for a good reason. It better be consolidating our love. It better be sponsoring our service. It better be moving us into engagement of some kind. If we’re suffering and it just has a cyclical, spinny kind of feel, that’s inefficient suffering, and I’m becoming more and more suspicious about that. Sometimes it feels like a moral obligation, but we want to look: is it actually wholesome suffering? That’s the question. This path is about not squandering pain, but we want to be sensitive. Is this a wholesome form of suffering, or is this some kind of almost moralistic sense that I’m supposed to be suffering? We want to investigate.
I feel like we’re just being called into a more radical form of compassion and equanimity. What is compassion? We have this sense that it’s the medicine for suffering. In some ways it is; it’s love in the face of suffering. But it’s not medicine whose efficacy we assume. In other words, we don’t know. It’s just love in the face of suffering. It’s not the intolerance of suffering, and it’s not some kind of frenzied insistence that it works. It’s just love, and it’s a love that wishes to alleviate suffering.
There’s a certain way, and I have glimpses of it in moments, when the compassion is run through with so much equanimity too. That doesn’t make the love less potent, but it becomes very vast, and some of the layers of clinging and control that creep into the compassion are distilled out, refined out. That feels very different, because a lot of my compassion feels entangled with some measure of control, some way in which I’m at some level refusing the first noble truth.
If I really got dukkha,3 maybe that’s a question. If we really, really got dukkha, suffering—”comprehend suffering,” the Buddha says—if we got that deeply, what would that do to our compassion? I don’t know. Only our hearts understand dukkha fully. But I get little intuitive hints on what that might be, to really know suffering, and for that love to rise up to try to meet the suffering that might be alleviated.
That entails a kind of refining our relationship with helplessness, which I’ve been talking about a lot for a couple of years, maybe. That word, helplessness, sometimes acts as a synonym for dukkha, for suffering. Can our heart remain open on the other side of our power? Or is love reserved for only times when it can be exercised? Is love reserved only for times when we can make some move? What happens when we can make no move? I want my heart to still be capable of something in those moments.
It connects to a sense of mortality for me, which is like, okay, if I really understood anicca,4 really understood that, what would my love look like? What would my rest look like?
You know that famous refrain from Ajahn Chah,5 “This cup, which was not broken, is already broken.” And he goes on to say, “When it does break, my heart won’t break with it because I know it’s already broken.” It’s a very beautiful, poetic way of expressing the depth of realization around anicca. We trace that out and we might say, “I’m already dead.” It sounds like some kind of macabre heavy metal refrain or something, but what does that do to our love? It gets a little sober, but also wild. You know, nothing left to lose.
My love still feels constrained by fear in different ways, but I’m keeping a relationship with that fear and its distorting effects. Not that we want to dismiss all fear, but my whole life I’ve been trying to listen, feel out a path. And I’m listening and feeling out when it’s time for the love to get more radical. I feel like I’ve been saying that for a while. Maybe it’s just cowardice keeping me in place. I don’t know. But there’s something brewing.
There’s a kind of mismatch between the architecture of our nervous system and this world now. My nervous system doesn’t feel tolerant of loving in the way I wish to love, and caring about what warrants our care. We don’t have to have answers, just good questions. For your consideration.
Okay, thank you. Thank you all. I appreciate all that’s in the chat. I’ll take a look at that and maybe get inspired. I will actually prepare something next time.
I wish you all well. I’m doing a daylong for IRC on Saturday. If you want to come, you can drop in for a little bit or the whole thing if you like, at the Insight Retreat Center online.
Okay, folks. You all be well. Talk to you sometime. See you somewhere on the Dharma campus.
Saddhā: A Pali word that translates to faith, confidence, or conviction. In Buddhism, it refers to a serene confidence in the truth of the Dharma and the path to awakening, born from understanding rather than blind belief. ↩
Ajahn Brahm: A British-Australian Theravada Buddhist monk. He is the abbot of Bodhinyana Monastery in Western Australia and a well-known author and teacher of the Thai Forest Tradition. ↩
Dukkha: A fundamental concept in Buddhism, often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” “dissatisfaction,” or “unease.” It refers to the inherent unsatisfactoriness of all conditioned phenomena. The first of the Four Noble Truths is the truth of dukkha. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word for “impermanence.” It is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism, signifying that all conditioned things are in a constant state of flux and change. ↩
Ajahn Chah: A highly influential Thai Buddhist monk of the Forest Tradition. He was a key figure in establishing Theravada Buddhism in the West and was known for his simple, direct, and profound teaching style. ↩