This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Clinging is complicated, letting go simplifies;Wholesome qualities of mind 1: Parami of Truthfulness. 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.
Welcome folks. It’s nice to see your names there. My name is Matthew, I’m your substitute teacher. You can call me Matthew or Mr. Brensilver. I look forward to practicing with you. I’m unshaved but caffeinated. Gil gets up early, but I always really enjoy being with you, and we’ll find our way. So, find your posture and we’ll practice.
Sometimes it can be useful to kind of take our inner dharma posture slowly, getting into a yoga asana gently, letting the mind, the attention, take its time together. And then other times it can be useful to see what it’s like to put down everything all at once and start on a dime. A kind of abrupt putting down of the world.
There’s a certain kind of almost ruthlessness in the way in which we lay down the complexities of our life. And the only way we can do that, the only way we can justify that, is knowing that that gesture, that radical gesture of laying something down, will help us to love and serve more deeply.
So, you’re invited warmly into this realm of experience where our life, our so-called life, is just a thought arising. The siren calls of hope and fear are neither answered nor completely ignored. We might feel the kind of tug on the heart, feel our way into the kind of impact of thought or memory or worry on our body. And rather than trying to finish the sentence, finish the story of the hope or the fear, the excitement or the sorrow, we just feel its impact on our body. And in that way, practice tending to the experience without abandoning our heart in this present moment.
Perhaps letting your breathing be like whispers from the Buddha, just inviting us to release into the present moment.
Clinging is always complicated. Letting go is simple. Not of course always easy, but simple and simplifying. Just letting go into our breathing.
The stickiness of auditory thought, or the words careening through the mind, the stickiness of that is often dependent on a lack of equanimity with feeling in our body. If we can have this very patient, tolerant, radical permission for feeling to be what it is, rather than to be a commandment with instructions, demands, and we can just allow feeling to be feeling, the stickiness in the realm of thought starts to dissolve. In other words, it feels safer to rest here now in a very simple way. Let us just breathe together.
It’s important to appreciate the innocence of the movements of our mind. The really incredible poignancy of our mind trying to get what we feel we need, to protect ourselves from what causes fear. You don’t have to do loving-kindness practice or self-compassion just to see how much it’s needed.
So we meet the surges of feeling, hope and fear, and the stickiness of thinking, meet it with a gentle warmth, signaling to the deep mind that what’s important won’t be neglected. But for right now, it’s okay to be very simple. Breathe.
Okay, it’s good to practice with you. I appreciate the love being exchanged in various directions in the chat there.
The Pāramīs1 are a list of 10 virtues that, as I understand it, were composed after the Buddha’s life. It is speculated that the list was an attempt after the fact to understand how the Buddha arose as his own teacher. I wanted to explore some of these beautiful qualities this week.
Truthfulness with ourselves, with each other, with the moment, is really the foundation of the path. The philosopher Thomas Metzinger says the scientific, very sober, rigorous approach to reality and life, and the spiritual approach to reality and life, stem from the same values, the same normative core that has something to do with truthfulness. I guess the English word is veracity. The will, the pure will to absolute veracity, to accept the obligation of veracity towards oneself.
As a child, I would get enraged by hypocrisy. That made me a little annoying, but it was strong in me. I was really deeply affected. I didn’t think that I knew what the ultimate truth was; in fact, I knew I didn’t. But it wasn’t hard to spot lies. And when I would see society say one thing and do another, or I would sense that someone was living deceptively, using words to hide truth, when I would notice something but nobody would acknowledge or talk about it, pretending it wasn’t there, it would ignite so much feeling in me.
That’s sort of how I felt about dukkha2, you know, the suffering. And not even suffering, just the intensity. I kept bumping into this all-pervasive thing that we weren’t talking about. As children, we learn through our interactions with others, often a parent, and form this consensual reality. When you’re experiencing coldness, here are more clothes, here’s warmth. When you don’t feel good because you’re hungry, here’s food. You’re worthy of love, here is love, here’s my love. And that kind of empathic connection is foundational, and it really helps a child make sense of the world together.
When I was in grad school, my research was focused around risk and resilience in kids who were maltreated. When many of those kids faced trauma, part of what was so destructive and so disorienting was that they didn’t even know what was real. This would come out in meeting with them. They didn’t often have anyone to help them realize, “Yeah, this is true. This is real. I’m sorry.” Honesty, helping each other make sense of reality, feels like a kind of moral debt. We owe it to each other so that they can make sense of their lives.
The Theravada commentary says all evil states converge upon the transgression of truth. That gives you an idea of how fundamental this capacity for honesty and truthfulness is. Gil has said mindfulness practice is just honesty practice. To deceive another is to induce some measure of delusion, and that is harm. The Buddha said one who feels no conflict in telling a deliberate lie, there’s no harm that they will not do.
Then there’s this related issue, not quite a lie, but… excuse my language, but a famous essay from Harry Frankfurt in 1986 distinguishes BS from lying. He said the bullshitter cannot be regarded as lying, for they do not presume that they know the truth. Their statement is neither grounded in a belief that it is true, nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with the truth, this indifference to how things really are, that I regard as the essence of it.
As dharma practitioners, we take a firm stand against that in our personal lives and in our public lives. At various times in my practice, I just felt such a deep longing, like, “Let me understand. I don’t even care if the truth makes me happier. Just let me understand.”
In this political moment, at least in the United States where I am, when there’s so much deception and such pervasive BS, such fundamental indifference to how things really are, I find myself returned to a kind of adolescent rage. This anger then motivates a kind of deep wish to show them, whoever “them” is, “No, you’re wrong.” This hunger to prove something, for the final piece of evidence to be revealed that this was always a con. It feels like I’m trying to maintain my epistemic sanity—epistemic from philosophy, the capacity to know, the theory of knowledge. But marshalling evidence doesn’t matter in the face of indifference to truth. And so that then sends me into a kind of self-righteous spiral where I need to find others who completely, totally agree with exactly my view. I get where all that comes from, but it is not a healthy cycle. There’s got to be some different way. How do we honor the truth?
Well, we begin. May we treasure the truth. May we speak it as best we can discern it. The pāramī of sacca3. And we try to do that. I try to do that here in the dharma, this field of honesty where the urge to be deceptive has a kind of instant karmic effect we can discern.
May I give up on saṃsāra in a way? I cannot make my sanity dependent on the world honoring truthfulness. To enter a bad-faith debate is to lose.
May I be relentless in perceiving self-deception. When I dimly sense that perhaps I’m pulling a fast one on myself, may I not live cocooned in the mythic story of my own ego. Tanya Lombrozo said people think that they’re like scientists, but we’re actually more like trial lawyers. We’re not actually looking for all evidence evenly; we’ve predetermined what’s true and then are making the case for that. May I take a stand in my own heart against that?
May I listen to others. Truth is closer to a property of dyads than an individual. We cannot see the back of our head. We cannot know without others. We cannot uproot delusion without listening deeply to others—to others who care about the truth. Nietzsche said that truth is apportioned according to one’s strength. May we be strong enough to tolerate truth.
And then there is Sangha4, a place where we don’t have to pretend what’s in front of our eyes isn’t there. This is the spirit of the dharma. It’s very undefended against truth. And nature bats last anyway, which is to say, maybe we say anicca5 bats last, truth bats last. And so let’s discover how to let go of illusion, the illusion of holding on, before that illusion is shattered.
I offer this for your consideration, and we’ll keep going tomorrow. I wish you a good day. Maybe it’s a contemplation of this kind of fidelity, veracity, commitment, the ways in which the curation of self often involves some subtle deceptiveness. Let’s honor the truth today.
Okay. See you tomorrow morning.
Pāramī: A Pali word meaning “perfection” or “completeness.” In Buddhism, the Pāramīs are a list of ten wholesome qualities or virtues to be cultivated on the path to awakening. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism, referring to the inherent stress and discontent in life. ↩
Sacca: A Pali word for “truth” or “reality.” It is one of the ten Pāramīs. ↩
Sangha: A Pali word that can mean “community” or “assembly.” In a spiritual context, it refers to the community of practitioners, which can be a source of support and shared understanding. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word for “impermanence” or “inconstancy.” It is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism, along with dukkha (suffering) and anattā (non-self). ↩