This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: Everything is Passing; Wholesome Qualities of Mind (3 of 5); The Parami of Wisdom. 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, welcome all. It’s good to be with you. Let us practice together. Let’s find our way into some stillness together.
Maybe we take a deep breath. And it’s almost like with that breath, we’re calling in all the moments of dharma practice that we’ve ever done. No matter what judgments you might have about your practice, we’ve each had many, many moments of clarity, patience, gentleness, devotion, renunciation. It’s like one deep breath subtly, wordlessly reminds our body of all of that.
Just finding our reverence, reverence for something, for the path, for goodness, for love. Finding something towards which it feels very natural to bow down.
Knowing that somewhere right now in this moment someone’s practicing metta1, loving kindness for all beings. That means you, us. And so we enter this field of care as we breathe together.
Maybe we can understand all the movements of the attention away from what’s here now as the mind’s expression of its various loves, though perhaps a kind of naive love. These movements of the mind have a certain naivety about the nature of happiness, but so innocent. Nothing to judge for sure. So we forgive our conditioning. Breathe.
It’s not that this too shall pass. It’s that everything’s always passing. We re-enter the flow of anicca2. The model we have of our self knowing or breathing, the meditator observing, it’s also part of the flow of anicca, impermanence. It’s the habit of not noticing that gives phenomena their apparent stability. It’s melting into breathing.
Okay. It’s good to practice. Toni Morrison:
“In all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or whatever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there’s a kind of progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom and separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them. That is knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others while respecting each category of intelligence is generally what serious education is about.
And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you’ll see that it’s easy, it’s seductive to assume that data is really knowledge or that information is indeed wisdom or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy and how effortlessly one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data is just a hunch.”
Dharma practice begins by collecting data, a lot of data, to know ourselves as a sensory system. To know life as experience, to know life as anicca. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, in a now very famous essay, made an attempt to define conscious experience. What is conscious experience? It seems obvious, but it’s very contested terrain philosophically, and even in our Buddhist tradition, there are a lot of different takes on what that even means.
So Nagel says, “An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism. Something it is like for the organism.” Something that it is like.
Well, what is it like? That’s data. That’s the dharma. What is it like right now? It’s like this. Ajahn Sumedho3 famously said, “Right now it’s like this.” What is it actually like? We try to put down some of the ideas about what it is, what it should be. Beginner’s mind. We’re too insistent on what it is to be human. We’ve sort of been entranced by habits of perception and cultural mores about what it is.
And maybe we can say, following Morrison, that we keep prematurely turning data into information, knowledge. We keep imposing and reiterating our framework, and we don’t exactly learn. We keep reiterating our self. We don’t exactly learn. We keep assuming, “There I am. I come next. I come next.” The familiar baseline self comes next.
When I started meditating, I was genuinely kind of startled by my mind. The data was sort of shocking, not what I thought it was. If you had asked me, “Matthew, could you just go sit down for 60 minutes and just follow your breath?” I think I might have said yes. I actually might have said yes. The data was shocking, you know, and it was like, “Oh my god, the state of New York gave me a license to operate a motor vehicle.” [Laughter] You know, I really fooled them.
Okay, there’s data. We collect data. This is what it feels like to breathe. This is what it is like to try to anchor attention in one place. This is what clinging feels like. This is peace. This is the pervasiveness of change. What is it like to sense change?
We start to notice themes. The data emerges into information, to knowledge, patterns. In the novel The Candy House, Jennifer Egan, one of the characters says, “Knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing. Without a story, it’s all just information.” We start to assemble the data and information into patterns and observations to understand causality. The Buddha said to understand, you know, to know the dharma is to know causality. In other words, we start telling stories. A pattern is a certain kind of story.
But our stories, the stories we tell, are much better than the stories we used to tell. They are richer. Our stories are less brittle. Dharma stories are not brittle. Brittle stories hold a lot of egoic energy in place. Brittle stories cannot be challenged by another person, another view, because they hold a ton of feeling in place. They’re charged with egoic investment. “This is what’s so.”
And for a long time, our stories can aid and abet our habits of avoidance, of delusion. And part of this movement from data to information to knowledge, part of the evolution of our stories, is the capacity to speak about our inner life, about joy and sorrow and hope and fear and shame, all of it. To be able to speak about all of that fluently. Fluid stories can bend to include the views of others. These stories live alongside the permanent possibility of being wrong. They’re nuanced. They’re not fundamentalist stories.
Brittle stories have a kind of defensive function. Dharma stories conduce towards silence. It’s not that we elevate silence over story, but dharma stories move towards silence. And they privilege the patterns we notice, the information that we gather, the knowledge we begin to weave. It privileges the most fundamental distinction: suffering and non-suffering, suffering and peace. Ordinarily, our stories are all about self and other, praise and blame, good and evil. And now all of those distinctions bow to the much more useful investigation and pattern about suffering and its causes.
The Buddha said, “Just as a lion rules over the wild, wisdom rules over all other spiritual faculties.” Wisdom. Okay. This movement from knowledge to wisdom. Wisdom as realization. Wisdom is typically defined as realizing the Four Noble Truths: that there’s suffering, there’s a cause, there’s an end, and there’s a path leading to the end of suffering. And so wisdom, in other words, has primarily been tied to explanation, explaining how suffering arises and ceases. Explanation.
But there’s a capacity related to explanation. It’s not identical to it, but I associate it even more closely with wisdom, which is, rather than explanation, prediction. No matter what your worldview, no matter how wild or different it is, if you can predict something, I’m very interested. That’s very compelling.
And wisdom is the capacity to predict deep happiness, not mere pleasure. Not merely for self, but for others too. The psychologist Timothy Wilson says, “Many cultures have myths in which people can make their wishes come true. Common to these myths is the notion that if people could make their wishes come true, they will achieve everlasting happiness. Sometimes, however, people are disappointed by the very things they think they want. Research on affective forecasting has shown that people routinely mispredict how much pleasure and displeasure future events will bring. As a result, sometimes they work to bring about events that do not maximize their happiness.” They go on to conclude, “Finding ways to increase the accuracy of affective emotional forecasts is a worthy enterprise, though not, we suspect, a particularly easy one.”
Can we predict what is truly good for our hearts? Can we see at depth what would make others happy? What would help them thrive? Can we observe within families or groups or organizations and discern what might be helpful? What might lead to the alleviation of suffering, the promotion of flourishing? This is the province of wisdom.
And because we understand dukkha4, the unquenchability, and because we understand the architecture of our nervous system, because we’ve collected so much data, because we understand the homelessness of ego, we can make better predictions about the future. And this helps us get more of what we truly want, and give others more of what they need. I offer this for your consideration.
Okay. May we live well today. See you tomorrow.
Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, goodwill, or benevolence. It is a form of meditation where one cultivates feelings of warmth and kindness towards all beings. ↩
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. ↩
Ajahn Sumedho: A prominent and influential monk in the Thai Forest Tradition of Theravada Buddhism. The original transcript said “Ajin Samato,” which has been corrected based on the commonality of this teaching phrase. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is the first of the Four Noble Truths and refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and pain inherent in conditioned existence. ↩