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Guided Meditation: Not Predicting Me; Dharmette: Interpersonal Dharma (2 of 5): Not-Knowing and the Wildness of Loving Another Person - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 10, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Not Predicting Me

Okay, so, welcome. A warm welcome to all of you. I'm Matthew, and, let's practice. I don't know what we'll do, sort of find our way together.

It's very natural to just keep reiterating ourselves, effectively to predict Matthew for the next moment, to predict yourself, your model of self in the next moment. One neuroscientist said, "I predict myself, therefore I am."

What would it be to be genuinely open to the next moment, not overly structuring it with the expectation that I'd be exactly the same person in the next moment?

What kind of openness might we know if we didn't expect to find exactly ourself in the next moment? If we didn't know how we would feel, how life would feel, if we didn't know who we would be, what stories we would tell?

You've been humming the story of self for so long, and now we know the melody so well. We know when the chorus is coming. Can we relax all of this for a moment?

We can't simply direct our attention to our breathing or our body feeling because we bring the reverberations of that song into the attentional field. So instead, we make opaque what was transparent. The song we've been humming, that's just felt like "me," actually becomes an object of awareness.

We become slightly alienated from every song we sing of myself, every story of me. They don't all become false, but we just become a little fatigued, alienated from them.

We don't fight self with more self. We, to use a phrase from Shinzen Young, we love it to death, love the self to death. And this frees us up to pay a different kind of attention to our breathing, somehow less crowded. Less crowded by the childlike moralism of what we're supposed to be, less crowded by the moralism of the story of me, the pros and cons. Less crowded by the expectations of what the next moment will be, must be, ought to be. Less crowded by the kind of baseline assumption of what my life feels like, who I'll be in the next moment. And so we surrender into our breathing.

We tend to put this moment on autocomplete, like the sentence being finished in a text message, except it's our life. So we're relaxing some of the predictive business, becoming more intimate with our breathing.

We can't make our home in a story, a story of self or any other story for that matter. No story withstands the test of time. And so we become awake. If we make a home for ourselves at all, it's in that wakefulness.

These last few minutes, just becoming globally awake to the phenomena that we call our life, internal and external. Not trying to take up a vantage point anywhere in particular, just opening to the space.

Dharmette: Interpersonal Dharma (2 of 5): Not-Knowing and the Wildness of Loving Another Person

Okay, thank you. Thank you. Good to practice with you.

So, this theme of interpersonal life, Dharma and interpersonal life, and the question, "Who am I?" "Who am I?" We don't often explicitly ask that question, but it's a question that has a venerated spiritual history. And every answer we might give feels at least a little wrong somehow, inadequate or incomplete or inauthentic. And in our alienation, we have an answer. "Who am I?" And before the mind actually reaches for an answer, it stops, and it creates a certain kind of wonder and mystery. And we come on this path to love becoming mysterious to ourselves. That kind of moment when the familiar, all-too-familiar autobiography just kind of peels open. You know that feeling? It scares me a little bit, but it delights me and livens me too.

And sometimes I say that sincerity, spiritual sincerity, is the willingness to be surprised. But our tendency, of course, is to get to knowing, to knowing about ourselves, about others. And interpersonal practice, this realm is about knowing, but it's also about not knowing. It's about knowing, it's about empathy, knowing the inner life of others. Right? Sometimes described as theory of mind, or in the psychoanalytic literature, mentalization, being able to richly, accurately model the inner life of the other.

And sometimes, if a person has dealt with a lot of misattunement, maybe a parent or something that simply just could not understand the child's inner life, the capacity for mentalization is compromised. We almost come to an understanding of our inner life collaboratively. And when that's not there, this capacity for mentalization, this deep empathic capacity, can be compromised. And so sometimes we have to reparent ourselves. It's something we have to learn ourself in a new way. And mindfulness is a kind of self-directed empathy. We learn a lot about what it's like to be human, what it's like to be incarnated in this life. And through that process, we become dramatically more attuned to the feelings and needs, the beliefs, the action tendencies of others. We become more attuned to our impact on others. And so you could say a lot of the way that interpersonal Dharma practice functions, we become more knowing. Empathy is a kind of knowing, understanding.

But as the Zen story that I'm fond of quoting says, "Not knowing is most intimate." Not knowing is most intimate. The practice is also about not knowing. Simone Weil said, "I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness." "Also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness." I was very, very curious with that, "To know this is forgiveness." And perhaps it's only in our knowing, in the kind of overdetermined model we have of ourselves, our certainty, it's only in that that we can truly indict ourselves. And to know that we are also something other, it opens the space of not knowing, of forgiveness. And the child, the parent, the spouse, the partner, the best friend forever, they are also other than what we imagine them to be. To know this is forgiveness.

Yeah, so maybe you know the experience. It happens kind of most often with those we know most, those we love most. But over the years, we become so familiar with them that at some point we actually stop looking at them. And the sanctity of our attention becomes degraded. They become buried behind a wall of concepts, and the concepts sometimes feel so thick that it's like, "I cannot reach you. I cannot reach you." And sometimes, maybe after years or even decades, we might deeply look at them and ask this question, "Who are you, really?"

Because we're animals and vulnerable and dependent on many conditions and dependent on, in a sense, making life predictable. This is our deep habit. Not indicting this. Stephen Mitchell says, "We learn to love in the context of the contrived and necessary safety of early childhood. And love seeks perpetually a kind of safety that screens out the unknown. But in human relationships, safety and predictability are difficult to come by. We endlessly strive to reestablish that illusory sense of permanence and predictability." When patients—and he's a psycho, you know, was a psychoanalyst—when patients complain of lifeless relationships, it's often possible to show them how precious the deadness is to them, how it's carefully maintained and insisted upon. Love, by its very nature, is not secure. We keep wanting to make it so.

So with our escalating dependence on others, we try to make them predictable too. We sort of routinize the connection, routinize the love even. And how we actually try to connect with not knowing, the openness of the other's being, is from the Philip Roth novel, The Human Stain. About it, there's a Classics professor being described by the narrator, and the narrator says, "Previously concealed was the small Popeye-ish blue tattoo situated at the top right arm, of the professor's arm, just at the shoulder, joining the words 'U.S. Navy,' and inscribed between the hook-like arms of a shadowy little anchor and running along the hypotenuse of the deltoid muscle, a tiny symbol, if one were needed, of all the million circumstances of the other fellow's life, of that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography. A tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be, at best, slightly wrong." At best, slightly wrong.

When we get to knowing and relate to others as a kind of concept, we sacrifice a certain intimacy and spontaneity. We sort of orchestrate a kind of predictability, but that orchestration also leads to a certain kind of flatness. And I'm very sympathetic to that. I mean, how much anicca¹ can we take? How much can we take? It's not adaptive to only ever be focused on groundlessness. We need a measure of predictability, but that same predictability can muffle the wildness of loving another person.

And so we come back to not knowing because we don't wish to ignore the kind of fullness of the other's experience. We get into these highly choreographed routines with each other, and we each play our role with great fidelity, maybe as a way of soothing ourself and soothing the other. But then there's this wildness, and we want to remember that we know them only in our relation to them. We kind of freeze them into a parent or a child or a spouse or whatever, and we, in essence, confuse their role in our life with who they are. But they are only that in relation to you. To everyone else, they are something else. And sometimes I glance at someone I love, maybe they don't even see me looking. Maybe they're alone, absorbed in a way. And there's something very powerful in taking in their being as it's completely apart from me, the role that we play in each other's lives.

And so we cultivate this reverence for not knowing. We put down what is known. We attune to the wildness of loving another person. So I offer this for your consideration, and please pick up what's useful, leave the rest behind. And we'll keep going tomorrow. Wish you all a good day.