This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: Tranquility; Dharmette: Nisargadatta - Nothing, Everything, Wisdom & Love w M 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 folks, so welcome. I can’t tell if I’m tired or tranquil. One of the two. We’re going to find out though. Okay, let’s practice together. Happy to be with you.
Like nectar settling to the bottom of a glass of juice, as Thích Nhất Hạnh1 says. We relax less by doing something than ceasing to do something, ceasing to exert a kind of willfulness on the moment.
Sometimes we can almost feel a kind of gravitational pull of the silence. If our job is to do anything, it’s to do something like yield. Can we sense the silence that’s beneath or beyond the noise?
If you’re tired or sleepy, worn out from the day, if the brightness and the readiness for the arising of phenomena isn’t there, you have to improvise, find ways of nurturing the brightness. But if there’s a kind of alert brightness where the mind is ready for incoming phenomena, then maybe you attend to restful experiences in your body and mind: the darkness behind your closed eyes, the soothing, subtle, restful sensations in your body, external quiet or internal quiet.
Restfulness, tranquility does not require the absence of agitation. Just attend to the signs of tranquility.
Anything we can put down, we put down. Anything we can’t put down, we forgive ourselves for picking up.
As the hunger in the mind subsides even a little, the richness of the moment deepens. It takes less and less to satiate us. Just to be alive, Suzuki Roshi2 said, is enough.
Okay, good to sit with you.
So, a friend was wearing a kind of interesting pair of sweatpants. A lot of text on them. I’m looking at his sweatpants and then I see the words on his sweatpants: “Wisdom tells me I’m nothing. Love tells me I’m everything. Between the two my life flows.” That’s a quote from Nisargadatta Maharaj3. It’s like, okay, we are definitely in the Bay Area here. That’s hard to come by, Nisargadatta sweatpants, you know?
But that quote, that’s worth a lifetime of practice. “Wisdom tells me I’m nothing. Love tells me I’m everything. Between the two my life flows.”
So the path is about becoming less and less, and the path is about dissolving into everything. We usually tend towards one pole or the other. Like, okay, give me nothingness, you know, the wisdom longing for that, just melt my self into nothingness. And then the love types are kind of like, okay, open my heart so completely that nothing lies on the other side of it.
And I don’t know if this is fair, but I would say the insight tradition, or this tradition, tends a bit more towards the nothingness. “Wisdom tells me I’m nothing.” Later Buddhist traditions elaborate more on the everythingness. And these are not philosophical ideas, and this is not a kind of literary flourish. These are very precise phenomenological descriptions. As weird as those words are, it’s an attempt to be very precise. When Rumi4 says, “You have eyes that see from nowhere and eyes that see from how far, how close,” he’s not being poetic, actually.
So, “Wisdom tells me I’m nothing.” We practice, and there’s energy and renunciation and genuine, abiding interest, curiosity—just a very non-transactional kind of awareness. We’re really no longer trying to get stuff or rearrange our life. We’re not trying to help things along or cure anything. We’re noticing so much, and everything we’re noticing is flowing change. We might be making kind of mental notes, noticing, but everything we note keeps melting.
And so there may be vitakka—you know, when we talk about vitakka-vicāra5—the initial noticing, then vicāra, the soaking. There might be vitakka, but the vicāra barely functions because attention is like a kind of laser, and all phenomena just keep exploding into vibrating space. And vedanā6, the feeling tone, which maybe we can say has long tormented our entire species—it hasn’t merely tormented it, but it has tormented it—that no longer operates. The torment stops. And it’s not that we’re equanimous with pleasant and unpleasant; it’s like vedanā is gone entirely. Maybe we say vedanā becomes pervasively neutral.
And we recognize that in the absence of feeling, nothing whatsoever is urgent. And clinging, it does not even make sense. It’s almost a mystery why we would ever do that.
Normally, our body is so dense, and space, you know, where we end and space begins, space is so airy. And now there’s really no gradient of density. It’s one piece. And the sense of self, the sense of ownership, the territory of self, the control, the headquarters—all of this dissolves. And wherever you were, there’s just space.
Ordinarily, we’re modeling a knowing self, the meditator, an agent that receives the world. And whenever the agent is unnoticed, we could use the language “transparent.” Whenever the agent is transparent, the resulting experience is one of selfhood. And now, the modeling of the agent becomes another arising. What felt like the origin of our light becomes illuminated. We felt like, “Okay, here I am, this meditator. I am the spotlight, the emanation of attention.” And now the spotlight is awash in luminosity.
And what can I claim to be? Not much. Welcome to the desert of the real, as Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix. I don’t really remember that, but I always love that line. And maybe that line that sounds kind of Lacanian7, you know, Jacques Lacan. But the desert of the real—barren, desolate—normally those words have very bad connotations. But now, it’s relief.
And all of some sorrow seems like melodrama. All of it. And birth and death and hope and fear. All of it.
But the story doesn’t end there. From this kind of rich, pregnant barrenness, new species of love become possible. One yogi said, “My being was pixelated and dissolved into the rest of the pixels that made up the entirety of everything else.” And this emptiness cannot be the ground for hate or clinging, but it can be the ground for love.
You are not your face. The face is so personal and intimate, it’s somehow confused for self rather than a part of our body. So yeah, we say you’re not your face, but when you know this, the image of your face and all faces will break your heart wide open. And this is a very uncompulsive form of love. You know, sometimes it’s like we’re looking for opportunities, channels to pour our love into. This is not that kind of love. But when love is called for, it arises with so much potency and un-self-created, unmanufactured kind of feeling.
The pain of others breaks the heart open. Their confusion and clinging, and the drama and pain of selfing, the egoic catastrophe—it’s all very dear. This is not arrogance, that we see ourselves in others, see others in yourself. And the love feels very beautiful and very ordinary.
It’s kind of like, okay, there’s something that ends. Some of the seeking ends. It’s like, okay, I’m not going to look for a peace or a love more sublime than this. This is as much as the circuits could ask for. And so there’s an integration.
Wisdom of nothing, love of everything.
I’ll close with something from Shinzen Young:
The true goal of meditation is achieved through a dialectical process that alternates between dissolving into flowing nothingness and detecting subtler and subtler instances of solidified somethingness. We must watch how an ordinary experience becomes waves of impermanence over and over before we will really believe that every ordinary experience is by nature extraordinary. We must do this with tremendous patience, equanimity and openness. Eventually it sinks in.
Ultimately we come to realize that in essence there is no sensory experience at all. There’s only vibrating vacuity. When experience flows unimpeded, the oneness of spirit arises. When experience gets blocked or congealed, the multiplicity of matter arises. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with the world of multiplicity and materiality, as long as it is not the only world you’re familiar with.
As you go about the ordinary activities during the day, emptiness and form shade into and out of each other smoothly and continuously, even in the most complex, intense or mundane situations. Your connection to the source is never completely severed.
I offer that for your consideration. And I wish you a good week. Good to be together.
So, I’ll maybe take questions next time. I chatted in a link there to submit anonymous questions, and you can also submit hate mail there, you know. [Laughter] And yeah, anything actually. It’s just useful to hear what’s on your mind.
Okay. You all be well. Have a good week and see you next time.
Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-2022): A Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, and founder of the Plum Village Tradition. ↩
Shunryu Suzuki (Suzuki Roshi, 1904-1971): A Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. ↩
Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981): An Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher of the Advaita Vedanta tradition. ↩
Rumi (1207-1273): A Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic. ↩
Vitakka-vicāra: Pali terms. Vitakka refers to the initial application of thought or the mind’s placement on an object. Vicāra refers to the sustained examination or exploration of that object. Together, they are factors of the first jhāna (meditative absorption). ↩
Vedanā: A Pali word for “feeling” or “sensation.” It refers to the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral tone that arises with all experience. It is one of the five aggregates (skandhas). ↩
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981): A French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called “the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud.” The phrase “desert of the real” was popularized by his work. ↩