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This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: Abiding in Care; Wholesome Qualities of Mind (5 of 5); The Parami of Energy. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Meditation: Abiding in Care; Wholesome Qualities of Mind (5 of 5); The Parami of Energy

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. Good morning, good afternoon. Sweet to see names there. So, we’re going to meditate. See what connotations that has for you this moment. Maybe some kindness practice, something. Okay. Find your posture.

Just let the kindness soften everything. Soften your body and tension. Soften the agitation, clinging. Soften the plans and expectations. Soften your fear. Kindness softens fear. The rigidity of self-view, kindness softens that. Kindness does not care who you think you are.

So we enter the realm of the heart, a kind of sacred realm. You don’t have to perform this love, kindness. We don’t have to leverage the love to defeat the hate or the fear or whatever. It just becomes a kind of ambiance of the mind, an ambiance of non-contention.

And sometimes this love feels quite subtle, and sometimes it cracks our heart wide open. The poignancy of having been born, of having a life with so much joy and so much sorrow.

We pick up the sign, the kind of resonance of care, kindness, love. Maybe it’s an image or a word or phrase. Maybe it’s connected more to your body, the sense of the body letting down, a kind of energetic softening. The subtle energy of our body beginning to resonate at a frequency of love.

The sense of the kindness, metta1 mind. The mind made vast by metta. The sense of this space of awareness becomes unimpeded by holding and contraction. The suffering, in a sense, is inherently self-absorbing. The hell is no space.

And maybe your love takes a particular form on this day. Love in the face of goodness, we call it metta. Compassion, love in the face of suffering. Joy, love in the face of good fortune. And equanimity, love in the face of helplessness.

We breathe. Just let the love catch the thread of our breath.

Grieving is its own species of love. Love makes us less intimidated by our feeling life, less intimidated by pain. It soothes the agitation but deepens the poignancy.

Okay. I appreciate what’s in the chat and some of the inquiries. And maybe next time here we do some kind of Zoom add-on where one of the days, you know, we converge and have some questions and dialogue. Happy to do that.

So, our species, generally speaking, is looking for the lowest caloric output to get from A to B. At some level, we ask the question, what are the pros and cons of doing anything whatsoever? Any energy expenditure really needs to be justified. I’m not a scholar, but my understanding is that energy, effort, is amongst the most prominent themes in the suttas.2 And I assume that’s the case because freedom is characterized as entering the stream, but we move against a different stream too.

This is from Majjhima Nikaya 263: “This dhamma I have reached is deep, hard to see, difficult to awaken to, quiet and excellent. Not confined by thought, subtle, sensed by the wise. But people love their place. They delight and revel in their place. It’s hard for people who love, delight, and revel in their place to see this ground, this conditionality, conditioned arising. And also hard to see this ground: the stilling of inclinations, the relinquishing of bases, the fading away of reactivity, stopping, cessation.”

So, generally speaking, neurosis is the path of least resistance. It’s so humbling and funny to see how my defilements require exactly zero effort. At some point in our training, dharma feels like less effort than grasping and aversion. Renunciation feels like absolutely nothing is lost. Sila,4 ethical conduct, is effortless. Love feels as natural as gravity. But until then, there will be energy asked of us.

The philosopher Thomas Metzinger wrote, “Biological evolution is not something to be glorified. It’s driven by chance, has no mercy. It’s a process that exploits and sacrifices individuals. Defining our goals involves emancipating ourselves from this evolutionary process which over millions of years has shaped the landscape of our brains and the representational architecture of our conscious minds. We have to learn to take a critical stance toward this process and stop glorifying our own neuro-phenomenological status quo, face the facts and find the courage to think about alternatives in a rational way.”

The kind of programming of the mind, if we obeyed the grooves entirely, would lead us to a life of quite a bit of suffering. We’re not designed, in an important sense, for freedom. Deep growth is often uncomfortable and takes energy. And taking our own best advice, which is often good advice, takes energy.

So energy is important, but our goal is not to have high energy our whole life. We have to be graceful with the vicissitudes of our energy. Sometimes the energy is high. This is most clear in a residential retreat. It’s like the energy is high and whatever is happening is okay, and there’s interest and investigation, motivation, aliveness. And then the energy flags, and you can feel you’re more prone to dharma meltdowns. In the research literature, those moments are known as self-regulation failure.

In the course of a retreat, when the energy flags, we move into a mode of purification. And it’s quite gruesome to watch the mindfulness decay as we kind of tumble down the hill from peace into purification. But that’s all part of practice, and we do our best. And so sometimes we have to tolerate these kind of low-energy periods, and sometimes we rally our energy.

So very briefly, from the Tibetan tradition, there are four thoughts that turn the mind towards the dharma. It’s a way of rallying the energy.

  1. To reflect and appreciate the preciousness of human life. That we are thrown into the condition of living, and it feels so evident that I should exist, that everything that does exist should exist. But it might have been otherwise. In fact, it’s astounding that it was not otherwise.
  2. This precious human life will not last. It’s very hard to believe that everything changes. Even our brain has trouble. I was just reading a study on cortical reorganization after an amputation of an arm. There’s phantom limb pain where my arm was; the pain remains. And grief is like that. The depth to which we assume a measure of permanence feels woven into our brain. It’s hard to believe everything changes, and yet it does. And to get that in our bones, to bring that contemplation into our bones, helps clear away what’s meaningless. And there’s a lot that we do that offers zero consolation in the face of death. We want to contemplate if it’s worth persisting in that. What would life have to be to feel complete? Is that possible? I hope it’s possible. But we inquire, what would I have to do, learn, relax, let go for life to feel complete? What would I have to discover? What would I have to love for this to have felt like a complete life?
  3. Karma.5 That is not to say that our life is entirely a function of our own action, but there are trends. And goodness tends towards goodness. If we marinate in hate, that has its own effects.
  4. The defects of samsara,6 the cyclical realm. We can be respectful of the goodness on offer here, and there’s a lot. But the enormous pile of pleasure we’ve accumulated has been good, and certainly better than pain, but it’s not been enough to quench our heart. We contemplate this.

Now, just before we end, I want to acknowledge that much of what I’ve said is compatible with incredible striving. And somewhere very early in my practice, vīrya7 and sakkāya-diṭṭhi8 got yoked together. The effort, energy, and self-view were yoked together. And so the question is, what would your effort look like freed from the logic of self?

For me, the energy becomes more about willingness than willfulness. It becomes more about—there’s energy in it for sure, sometimes a lot—the energy of surrender, the dissolution of volitional energies, exerting oneself, the will to power on the world. The sense of effort being sourced from something less like self, more like love.

So, I offer this for your consideration and thank you for having me. I have appreciated our time together and I wish you all well. Gil’s on his way back soon from the Sierras, Big Springs, a very lovely spot, a retreat center. So I wish you all well and see you somewhere on the Dharma campus.

  1. Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, goodwill, or benevolence. It is a form of meditation aimed at cultivating universal, non-attached love. ↩

  2. Sutta: A discourse or sermon, especially one attributed to the Buddha or his disciples. These are collected in the Sutta Pitaka. ↩

  3. Majjhima Nikaya 26: The 26th discourse in the “Middle Length Discourses” of the Buddha, a major collection of suttas in the Pali Canon. The original transcript said “Rajima 26.” ↩

  4. Sila: A Pali word that means “ethical conduct” or “morality.” It is one of the three sections of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩

  5. Karma: A Sanskrit word (Kamma in Pali) that literally means “action” or “doing.” In Buddhism, it refers to the principle of cause and effect, where intentional actions influence one’s future. ↩

  6. Samsara: The cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound. It is characterized by suffering and dissatisfaction (dukkha). ↩

  7. Vīrya: A Pali word for “energy,” “effort,” “diligence,” or “vigor.” It is one of the ten paramis (perfections). The original transcript said “Vya.” ↩

  8. Sakkāya-diṭṭhi: A Pali term for “identity view” or “self-view,” the belief in a permanent, separate self. It is considered a primary fetter to be overcome on the path to enlightenment. The original transcript said “Sakya.” ↩

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