This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation w/ Matthew Brensilver: Tranquility; Dharmette: Reflections on Ajahn Sucitto Quote. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Tranquility; Dharmette: Reflections on words from Ajahn Sucitto - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 30, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Tranquility

Welcome, folks. It's nice to be with you.

Let's sit. Find a posture that feels like the appropriate balance of alertness and relaxation.

In the Dharma, we calm down and nurture tranquility, not just to enjoy tranquility, but because tranquility is also associated with clarity, with clarifying our inner landscape. There's so much happening so much of the time, it's very easy to lose the plot. Part of why we nurture a factor of tranquility is so things can slow down enough in the field of perception, so that we can perceive more clearly.

Maybe you're tired already—long day, long week. There may be some measure of tranquility built-in, but with that fatigue, sometimes there's another layer of overstimulation. This is a kind of form of awake rest.

Maybe you elongate the inhalation and the exhale, just a few beats more for the in-breath and the out-breath.

Maybe you sense to see if there is something in you that's already deeply resting, tranquil.

Letting tension drain with each breath, letting tension drain down into the center of the Earth.

We do what we can to breathe into clinging—the energy of grasping, of aversion, of control. It's the epitome of non-tranquility. There's no sin here; this is what the mind-body does. We breathe into the clinging and soften, widen.

Maybe your body is a resource here. You just take your cues from that which is already resting in your body, some zone of sensation that feels like a nectar settling to the bottom of a glass of juice.

Maybe you anchor to silence, the sound of silence or distant sounds, sounds as they fade out. There's really a sense not of inferring silence from the absence of sound, but hearing silence itself. It doesn't have to be silent all around you. Maybe there's a sound to your right, but if you listen to the space on the left, you hear silence. Maybe you just take your cues from the silence.

Mother Teresa described prayer as silently listening to God, God silently listening to her. You don't have to believe in God to listen like that.

Your body, the soundscape, the visual field even with the eyes closed—my gaze in a very gentle, relaxed way. Darkness, brightness behind the closed eyes. There may be images flashing by: images of your own body, images of this device, an image of me. Just kind of gently gaze through that into the darkness of the mental screen. We rest our visual tension there, take our cues from the darkness.

Back to it, but not now.

Dharmette: Reflections on words from Ajahn Sucitto

Thank you. It's good to sit with you. There's a quote from Ajahn Sucitto¹ I saw recently and thought to share it and just say a few words about it. He said:

Generosity is about sharing, and not just in material terms. It's an attitude to life. It's a response to the interrelatedness that is the basis of all life. Most importantly, you share Dhamma² by advice and by example, aiming one's concern and goodwill for the welfare of others as much as for oneself. This helps shift the self-view to one in line with co-dependent arising. Action based on that view of interdependence generates a shared blessing: The giver feels joy and the receiver feels the effects of kindness. Everyone gains.

Morality leads to self-respect and the trust of people around you. Renunciation draws you out of the grip of the materialist energies that control much of society. Discernment cuts through the blur of feelings to tell you coolly and clearly what qualities are skillful and what aren't at this moment. Such discernment is required to steward and moderate energy so that it isn't frittered away on the one hand or strained on the other. The result is right persistence, and that brings around patience to not rush, to allow things to move at a harmonious rate, and to bear with the tangle of social and personal conundrums that we face. Patience is great for willful, 'got to get it done' mindsets. There's a whole life of cultivation in this pāramī³ alone.

Ajahn Sucitto packed a lot into that. Generosity is about sharing. Our depth of dependence is invisible most of the time. It's possible to fantasize about being an island most of the time. An interdependence is an insight, and then it's everywhere. I remember Jack Kornfield telling a story of a yogi who I think struggled with generosity, some kind of miserliness or holding. The instruction was just to pass a ball from one hand to his other, from his right to his left and back. That was the first lesson on generosity.

Relations are the basis of life. Everything belongs to everything else. In a sense, generosity is just our attempt to tip our cap to the universe and say, "Thank you." One aspect, of course, is sharing the Dharma. As Ajahn Sucitto said, sometimes by advice, but mostly by example. If you haven't gleaned this yet, most people don't really want to hear about Buddhism, but they do want to taste the Dharma. In a way, you must tailor it for them. Wisdom is always wisdom for this moment, for this person, this time. Our advice needs to reflect the landscape of their heart. Our advice is informed by our own very deep understanding of the architecture of the human nervous system. We learn a lot about that. We don't have to know neurophysiology or something to know a lot about how this body-mind works.

We don't give advice to consolidate our faith in practice. We're not speaking as a way of affirming what we are already committed to. We're unattached to view. There may be faith, but we're unattached to view. Most of the time, the generosity is not in sharing advice or something; it's that our evangelism comes in the form of our example, our life. When someone sees a deep habit shift in you, even if it's shifted just a little bit, that prompts some curiosity. We all know how hard it is to change, just how hard it is to move and grow from those habits that are carved seemingly in granite. When you see someone making a move, you've got to wonder, what's this person doing?

It's my life I must tend to. With more energy than yours, but how much more? What level of privileging my own happiness above that of others is ethically defensible? That's at the heart of ethics.

Ajahn Sucitto says, "Action based on the view of interdependence generates a shared blessing." Last year, I remember reading about research that got a lot of press on random acts of kindness and generosity. They did experiments where they would assign people in the experiment, at an ice skating rink I think as I remember, to go give this random person a cup of hot chocolate. Then they would assess how the giver felt and how the recipient felt. They both felt, maybe unsurprisingly, really good. The giver systematically underestimated how good the recipient would feel. Part of why was that the giver kind of focused on the value of the gift rather than the value of the warmth, the affect, the connection, the tipping the cap to interdependence. I was touched by that finding, and it resonated because I know if a researcher told me to go give a hot chocolate to some random person at an ice skating rink, my shame would come out. It'd be sort of bashful and something like, "Here it is, here's the hot chocolate. I'm sorry it's not a venti." That would be the vibe for me. But I know at the same time, if I were skating—if I could skate—and somebody gave me a hot chocolate, that would be like a mark in my life, probably.

Generosity. Then Ajahn Sucitto, he sort of packed a lot into this quote, he summarizes a lot of the path. Morality leads to self-respect and the trust of others. It's the path of non-regret. It really feels bad to live out of alignment with one's own deepest values. There's a kind of agitation that's built into that, self-doubt that's built into it, a lack of self-trust.

Then renunciation. Relatedly, he's elsewhere said the hardest question for a human to answer is, "What's enough?" Because you can always want more. So we have to get good at assessing the value of stuff, things that you will actually love. I sat a retreat with Ajahn Sucitto, and at the end, I was overflowing with gratitude and a sense of debt. I said, "Please let me buy you something." I had to kind of push, "Let me buy you something." He sort of relented. He said, "Okay, a duffel bag for travel." So I got a duffel bag in the color of his monastic robes. It's like, okay, I trust he will appreciate that. We have to discern for ourselves: is this purchase going to work? Is this hatred going to work? Is this clinging going to work?

Discernment is largely about prediction, a prediction about what can work, what will work, and what might work. This is important to clarify, because if we don't, we fritter away our energy on what is not meaningful. It's amazing and tragic sometimes just to see people investing in huge projects that I kind of know cannot work out for their heart. Even if they get exactly what they think they want, it cannot work out for their heart. But there's this sense of they can't imagine what else to do, what else might be satiating for the heart, and so you just keep doubling down.

Persistence is the steadiness of our energy. Dharma cultivation is very much about steadiness. It's not about these kind of peak moments of intensity where it's like, "Okay, I'm going all in on this, that, or the other." Those can be meaningful, but it's more like the steadiness of our intentional stance is what is associated with deepening in the path, with sustained behavioral change. The steadiness, just nursing this intention day after day, week after week, year after year.

And that involves patience, which is not my favorite part, you know, but it's really central to the path. Patience. We can practice deeply; there can be some sense of deep practice and commitment, and patience. They can go together. The long view informs the nearer term. We can discern what's urgent and what's not. This patience helps us bear with the tangle of conundrums we face. And that is not a rationalization of apathy or disengagement. It's more like a way of probing: where can my energy be effective? How do I spend my love well? How do I suffer efficiently?

Elsewhere, Ajahn Sucitto said something like, "If I'm getting everything done, I'm not getting anything done." The exactness of the checklist sometimes. So patience is about waiting for the ripeness of conditions. It's a kind of exquisite sense of timing. We come to discern something about the deeper architecture of causality that is not on the surface. We're perceiving forces, intuiting forces in ourselves, in a relationship, in an organization. Perceiving something deeper about causality, we detect this, and we have a better sense of when it's ripe to make a move. When is it a stretch but not exactly a leap? When are the conditions right? We get better and better at sensing into that. That entails patience.

So, in a way, it summarizes a lot of practice. I'm grateful to Ajahn Sucitto for that quote and offer this for your consideration. I wish you all a good week, practice, life, whatever it is we call it. See you next Wednesday.