This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Non-tension; Dharmette: Non-clinging, with Matthew Brensilver. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Non-tension; Dharmette: Non-clinging - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 04, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Welcome, folks. Welcome to Certain Wednesdays. Certain Wednesdays with Matthew, a production by Matthew. I'm Matthew. It's not really a production, and it's not officially called Certain Wednesdays, but I like that—Certain Wednesdays—because I'm here certain Wednesdays, and I am not certain about much at all. But we're here practicing nonetheless. Thank you, thanks for saying hi. It's lovely to see your names. We'll sit and see what happens.

Guided Meditation: Non-tension

Whenever it would get real hot or cold in the meditation hall, the teacher would say as we sat there, "In the summer, the Buddha sweats. In the winter, he shivers." And so if the temperature, as a number of people said, is not at the kind of set point for your body, just take stock of how it affects your heart-mind.

Any subtle bracing, practice releasing. It's not that conditions have to be just right for us to surrender and let go; they're never just right. So we actually leverage the imperfection as a motivation to stop fighting. And when we stop fighting, we become porous to the Dharma.

We don't have to say okay to everything forever, but for right now, we give permission for all the conditions that comprise this moment to be as they are. All the loose ends of any human life, everything that could get better, we give permission for it to be as it is for now. And we know that we've actually given deep permission for that which is to be as it is when that which is changes, softens. The permission reshapes the constellation of phenomena of our life.

Just fill your body with awareness. Less like we're pouring the awareness from our head into our body and more like our awareness blooms out of our body.

Clinging carries a burden of tension with it, a kind of whirlpool of tension, energy swirling. So we relax. We unify the field of our body. Settle into the juicy aliveness of the moment, undefended by our stories.

To pay attention is to pay attention to change. So we practice not pushing or pulling on impermanence. We practice not seeking a place outside the flow of Anicca¹, but finding ourselves within it.

If there is no place to stand, you might as well just fall. We fall more and more deeply into the present with less and less baggage, fewer and fewer ways for the attention to snag like a hangnail on fabric, but on phenomena.

Dharmette: Non-clinging

Okay, so it's good to sit with you. Thank you for the questions, great questions. I appreciate just seeing what's on people's minds. Last time, if you were in here, I chatted a link to submit anonymous questions and got a bunch. Great questions about free will and the self and consciousness and awareness. Some of the questions are above my pay grade. Some will lead me very deep into nerd territory, and we might not come out, and we might not be wiser if we did get out. So I got to be selective in what I pick up, but I do really... those are a lot of my questions, it's on my mind. And so even if I'm not answering the questions, it's informing what I'm thinking about, how I'm thinking about this group. So thank you, and we'll have time to do more of those. I'll pick up more that have been submitted.

The question that I selected, somebody just cut right to the chase: what's the best way to overcome clinging? And that's really the question, right? Joseph Goldstein², I remember some years ago, was asked to sum up his decades of practice in a sentence, and his response was simply, "the mind that's not clinging to anything." It's how he summed up everything.

And if you're not clinging, how could anything really be a problem? If you're not clinging, how could greed possibly gain a foothold? How could hatred gain a foothold? Hatred and greed are not possible in the wake of letting go, but love is. And that kind of asymmetry is of interest. So this is a critical question.

But in some ways, I can't really answer. Anyone who boldly pronounces, "this is how you let go, here's the algorithm, here are the three steps to letting go," you can know for sure that person is a scam artist. In the trenches of our experience, we're all going to have to wrestle with that. We always have to wrestle with it. It's not like we know how to let go and then we just keep doing it the rest of our life.

In one sense, maybe we say we want to be careful in the question not to overestimate the place of willfulness, as if there are choices of how to let go and it's just that we need to pick the right strategy. In a sense, the willfulness is a reiteration of the clinging rather than its solution.

Okay, so that's maybe the preamble, but enough of me dodging a very good question. The first thing that came to mind really is to know that certain choices guarantee clinging. You know that certain investments in relationships, in a child, in a cause, an ethical cause, pretty much guarantees some measure of clinging. I don't think that can be free of clinging. It's like the upstream decisions guarantee our fate. And then the question is, can you actually consent to that clinging? Can you consent to that suffering? It doesn't mean we can't work to free ourselves up to some extent, but the fantasy of freedom given those upstream choices, it's not realistic. The way we invest, the way I've invested in various ways, we actually open to that. Okay, this is part of the contract.

Shantideva³ said, "Just as no one thought, 'May I now be born,' no one thinks, 'May I now get angry.'" And we could add, "No one ever thought, 'May I now cling? May I now suffer? May I now be born? May I now cling?'" Clinging, in other words, arises out of many causes and conditions, and it's been reinforced in the behavioral sense. It's been reinforced in the sense that it's brought some rewards. It kind of works. Clinging kind of works some of the time, a little. And that kind of reinforcement schedule is very problematic. That really encourages the behavior, the repetition. It doesn't quite work, but it usually works at least a little. Sometimes it works really well, our clinging.

Maybe it's a little bit like gambling or something. It's like we know that playing a slot machine is not a strategy for getting rich, but the casino programs the slots so that we get just enough reinforcement to keep playing. And of course, everyone's heard that one story about that person, that friend's sister-in-law who won big, right? And so it gets reinforced. And because clinging kind of works, it's hard to actually believe that we've got to experiment with letting go.

So letting go is hard, and I'm very suspicious of a kind of instruction on how to let go because it strikes me that letting go is sort of like the simultaneous expression of many of the Pāramīs⁴, the 10 Perfections. That's why no one can tell you how to do it. You can't just tell somebody how to be patient and equanimous and have resolve and all at once. The Pāramīs are considered a kind of description created not by the Buddha but by others of the Buddha's beautiful qualities.

Looking at the list of the Pāramīs, the ones that have been highlighted for non-clinging and letting go, it involves a lot. Renunciation: letting go is to relinquish. We're unclenching our fist. We're foregoing some measure of the pleasure that clinging can deliver. "Anger with its honey tip and poisoned root," the Buddha said. And so, to let go of the poison, we actually have to let go of the honey too, the sweetness.

Vīriya⁵, energy. Another Pāramī. Clinging is painful, but it's often actually the path of least resistance. My clinging does not seem to ask much of me. It's water rolling down a hill. And so to actually change that, to change that habit, to go against the stream, that takes energy.

And Adhiṭṭhāna⁶, resolve, commitment. A deep commitment to stay the course. Part of its problem is its persistence. It's not so much the peak intensity of one given moment; it's just the persistence, the return of the longing. And patience, to bear with the process, willing to plant seeds and not insist upon harvesting now.

And maybe lastly, equanimity. This kind of practice of wrapping the whole realm of pleasant and unpleasant with a kind of space of okayness. In letting go of clinging, we will be asked to have equanimity with intense feeling. A lot of feeling gets released in the gesture of letting go.

Sometimes, to let go, we have to do something new. We have to ritualize some aspect of what's come and gone. Or sometimes we actually have to find something new to love. To let go, the energy that was invested in one thing gets reinvested somewhere else. That's actually how we let go. So sometimes it's not this pure internal inside job.

Letting go is about the wholesome unpleasant. The reward, of course, is very pleasant, but the process of letting go is about the wholesome unpleasant. And for the wholesome unpleasant not to devolve into unwholesomeness, we often need to leaven the letting go with some pleasantness. We need to find something soothing, some sense of refuge, some sense of pleasantness to make more space for the unpleasantness as we practice.

And of course, there are certain things that, I don't know, maybe it's like you don't let go of them. You find a way for love to grow alongside the pain. Certain losses... I've been in certain rooms where somebody describes to me a loss, one of those cardinal kind of losses, and my thought is not letting go, exactly. It's living alongside the absence, letting that grow one's love.

So I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up what's useful, leave the rest behind. I will be away next week. We won't have class next week, back on the 17th. You can always check IMC's calendar; it's posted there. And I look forward to regathering. Okay, thank you all.