This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew: Goodnight Moon; Dharmette: Cruising Altitude & Upheaval. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Goodnight Moon; Dharmette: Cruising Altitude and Upheaval - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 23, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Goodnight Moon

Welcome, folks. Happy to be with you. It's sweet to see familiar names.

As I was sitting just before this for a few minutes, what came to mind—I don't know where from, maybe because I'm tired—was Goodnight Moon. As a kid, Goodnight Moon was a bedtime ritual situation. I have not thought about that book in a long time. But it came up as I was sitting, and it was like: "Goodnight memories. Goodnight pain. Goodnight thoughts. Goodnight feelings. Goodnight Matthew."

Maybe those are our meditation instructions: just blessing all these pieces of experience with that kind of gentle spirit. I love the rhythm of the book. Obviously, the book is so famous because kids love it. There's something about rhythmically moving through everything that needs to be put down, everything we say goodnight to. So maybe we just take our cues from that tonight and look to all the things we might just bid goodnight to.

So, with that unusual instructional note, goodnight dukkha¹. Let us sit.

Maybe we begin with a few deep breaths. The in-breath enlivening, awakening us. The out-breath soothing the energy of our body, as if running our hand over sand on the beach—just smoothing it now.

To say "Goodnight Moon" is not to brace against or avoid. It's just this very gentle gesture of putting something down. And so we sort of palpate our psycho-spiritual body: what needs to be put down? What lingered from the day, or the week, or this life?

It's almost like when we've bid a goodnight to something, when we fully actually blessed its presence, there's no more stickiness to it. And so it becomes possible to let it be in the background. For the gravitational force field of that loop of thought, or that memory, that plan, that sensation, to take its place in this much more open, vast field.

Thoughts can be painful. It can be painful to think, but also can be painful not to think—somehow to renounce some of our preoccupations. But maybe it feels okay to do this very gently: Goodnight Moon.

One of the things we're left with is the effortlessness of our breathing. The awareness is very gentle with our breathing. Sometimes it feels like the attention is inside the breath, and sometimes it's like the breath arises amidst the vast openness.

Just gently bidding goodnight to whatever can be put down. When we put something down we're not saying, "I'll never pay attention to you," just that phenomena need to be more patient. Just placing all of your hope into this moment.

Letting any fatigue—the sweetness of fatigue—soothe everything. Just leaving brightness, awareness in its wake.

Dharmette: Cruising Altitude and Upheaval

Okay. So there are probably a lot of different rhythms that run through a practice life—different phases. Some of those phases are really not discernable because we can only perceive some small segment of our existence. We sort of go to what naturally we can perceive, what's conscious, what awareness can penetrate. So we maybe over-read some aspects. Some phases of practice are maybe not discernable, but we kind of know something is happening, something's changing, the tectonic plates of my being are rumbling, but I don't know what is going on.

Some phases are maybe discernable, but we can make sense of them only after a long period of retrospection, looking back. I had a long phase that I was not conscious of being in, but it was years. It was only when I kind of woke up from it that I realized the mind was tinged with some measure of disillusionment, maybe on the slightly nihilistic side somehow. It wasn't an obvious thing, and so it only actually registered after the fact. It's almost like you can't see it until you have something new to contrast it to.

A friend last week, a Dharma teacher and close friend, said just before I went in to teach that she felt like I've been holding grief as a kind of fundamental bedrock of the universe. She said that in the attempts to defend grief from spiritual bypassing, I had somehow reified it. My attempt to defend it against the charge of being just another afflictive emotion... I had somehow reified grief as this non-negotiable bedrock of the universe. Which, we could make the case for that—to actually look deeply is to appreciate the necessity of grief.

But she went on to say that suggests not that I use my kind of Vipassana² laser to dissolve it into anicca³—to dissolve the grief into just empty phenomena—but her suggestion was instead to appreciate what is even bigger than the grief. She didn't say what, but I think she meant love, awareness, knowing.

It's a phase I've been in. It's hard to tell what phase we're in, you know? But the Dharma does go in phases. I think the last time I spoke, two weeks ago, I talked about coming home and leaving home. The ways that Dharma is a way of reawakening old loves—dormant loves, things we've loved before, coming home—and a way of learning to love new things, leaving home.

There's another kind of discernable rhythm in practice that maybe we characterize as something like "cruising altitude and upheaval."

We come to practice with pains, with questions, with problems, with some need. And sometimes, somehow, those things get resolved. They actually do. It's like practice fulfilled its promise; it met the need. Maybe we have an insight, or a problem just dissolves, or it's still there but it doesn't have the same weight on the heart. There's some burden that gets shed. That's beautiful. And then we kind of get comfortable in that understanding, and it feels so good. Maybe we cruise at that altitude for a while.

That's genuinely good practice. It's comfortable, it feels good. I'm not trying to suggest there's something unwholesome about that, right? Because the sense that we constantly have to be growing—the urge to always be growing—is often just another case example of greed. Okay, my cruising altitude, the Dharma feels like home, this understanding feels like home.

I thought of a strange parallel with the philosophy of science and Thomas Kuhn's⁴ "normal science." The nature of scientific discovery... science is often at a kind of cruising altitude. Science is working contentedly within a paradigm, tinkering and making advances, and is generally quite orderly. But then, in Kuhn's view, something happens in science. There's enough anomalous data, enough inconsistency, enough data that doesn't fit well into the old paradigm, and then there's a kind of scientific revolution.

The criteria by which one might judge the old paradigm doesn't really work for judging the new paradigm. There's no common standard of comparison, and it's hard to know what's true or how to compare the past with the present. That sense of being in a new land—this is how practice is sometimes. Sometimes we're tinkering, and sometimes there's some kind of revolution. It might be something that's great and beautiful; it might be painful and bewildering. But there's anomalous data, and you have this sense that the old paradigm, my old way of framing the Dharma, my old way of understanding my path, it can't contain this data anymore.

There's enough anomalous data that there's some kind of break, and you realize that the story you've been living in feels obsolete. The vision you had of the Dharma has to give way. The Dharma rug gets pulled out from under us. That happens with insight, that happens with grief or pain or some shock to the system. It's like, "Ah, the old paradigm will not be able to accommodate this."

There's often a sense of disorientation. You kind of don't know how to judge or assess this new land. "I don't know who I am in this new realm. I don't know what is left of me after that insight, that love, that loss, that grief." Whatever the old standards were, they don't really work.

That sense of disorientation can be really dramatic, or it can be more subtle. It happens at a kind of micro level anytime our model of who we are gets challenged. We sort of have to tolerate a measure of disorientation. When somebody says that horrible question, "Can I offer you some feedback?" it's like, "Oh no." It's almost like the cage of self starts rattling immediately. And then, okay, you get some feedback. This might literally be feedback from somebody, but this may be just the feedback of the world. Sometimes the attachment to self-view is only apparent when that cage gets shaken.

This can happen at the level of practice more generally. Not just something being rattled, but the whole of one's being gets rattled. The familiarity of the view, all of the familiar kind of reference points and the frames and the language, the connotations, the stories we have used to stabilize a sense of identity, a sense of what practice is, a sense of our life project—that gets disrupted.

You can appreciate how your prior understanding, the prior story you would tell about the Dharma, about yourself, somehow—and I don't say it pejoratively, it's very tender—but somehow all of that story was just a little naive. To wake up is to wake up to more. And so our previous understanding of myself, of what I was doing here, of what the Buddha's offering is... it somehow failed to fully appreciate the complexity of being human. Maybe we failed to fully appreciate just how deep suffering can run. Or maybe we failed to appreciate just how wide love can be.

It's interesting to consider, to use the Kuhn parallel, just how much anomalous data is required in your life to usher in the next revolution. When can you feel like the paradigm, the story I tell of me, my life, can no longer quite contain that anomalous data? And then something breaks open.

This is not a way of saying we should always be in periods of upheaval, but to appreciate this cycle: Normal science, revolution. Normal life, normal Dharma practice, disruption. That cycle just keeps going, as far as I can tell. Just keeps deepening. Each time we shed some measure of naiveté. Each time our heart grows in subtlety and sensitivity. And then we rest. We hit our cruising altitude and know that there will be turbulence some other time, and that will be an opportunity.

So I offer this for your consideration and wish you all a lovely week. We'll see you next time.