This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation with Matthew Brensilver - Thinking as coping; Dharmette: Giving Love the Last Word. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Thinking as coping; Dharmette: Giving Love the Last Word - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 31, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Thinking as coping

Welcome folks, good to be with you this evening here in Berkeley.

Let's do that thing that we do. Maybe take a little extra time to get into your posture. Whatever posture that is, just feel good—as good as bodies can feel in a posture.

We're not just sitting here; we're in a lineage, a kind of continuation of wisdom and love started long, long ago. We don't have to invent wisdom or love, just take our cues from the momentum of the Dharma.

Just let your whole body settle. Give your blessing to every imperfection. There are always a thousand things right and a thousand wrong. We afford ourselves the luxury of not needing to sort all of that out. So with a supple heart, we take what's offered.

The less safe we feel, the more unprotected we feel, the more urgent and sticky our thinking becomes. So we relax our body, relax our mind, and attempt to reassure ourselves—our system—that right now it's safe enough to let go, to fall into the present.

Maybe we can say that all thinking is coping. Coping with some... coping with the intensity of being an animal: sentient, vulnerable. But we practice knowing pleasant as pleasant and unpleasant simply as unpleasant.

We practice listening to the alarm bells that go off in our body but not over-interpreting them. Not reading them as alarm bells, but simply as unpleasant. A kind of sense of safety and seclusion grows, and there's less need to elaborate our life, to conduct our ritualistic safety behaviors, checking on this and that.

We deepen our peace by making peace—making peace with imperfection.

Our thinking is so innocent. How can we blame something that's been conserved across eons of evolutionary time? But the silence beckons us, welcomes you with open arms, just as you are.

Dharmette: Giving Love the Last Word

Okay, it's good to sit with you.

Ajahn Sucitto¹ quoted not so long ago:

"When you're feverish, you're not healthy, and you cannot engage in your normal productive function. Something's wrong with you; your body's awry. Fever is a form of sickness, but a fever is also a healthy immune response to the presence in your body of some kind of infection. If I lost my susceptibility for fever, that would be a sign that things had gone very wrong. It would be a way of getting sicker, not healthier. So while it is clearly not 'best' to be weak, feverish, sleepy, and incapacitated, it might nonetheless be the best option on the table. A fever is a healthy way of being sick."

I have much the same view about anger. Fever is a healthy way of being sick, and the argument here is that anger, you could say, is a healthy way of being sick—a healthy recognition that something of value is under threat.

I have a fever: anger. Anger is not health, it's not balance. A fever is not health, but nevertheless a sign that our body is trying to return to balance. And so I begin in this way just to note: "Yeah, okay, in me some fear, some anger." And the anger and fear is set against a much larger backdrop of love.

Anger may be a kind of important first word, but anger can never be the last word. A fever, in other words, is not meant to keep you feverish. If we truly care about suffering, we give love the last word.

If we've seen deeply enough into Paticca Samuppada²—conditionality: "This is because that is," or "That was, this is because that was"—if we see that clearly enough, we give love the last word. If we've known fearlessness, the jewel of mindfulness, we give love the last word. In the penumbra of cessation, of release, not even a trace of fight left, just peace—we give love the last word.

In times of hate, we become even more acutely sensitized to love. When you touch into love, you know the tears shed testify to a kind of heart-longing. You know the pain bound up in fear and hate and helplessness. And so the tears, they're like a kind of emanation of our own longing to move back towards love, to move towards health, for the fever to break.

I will not tell you how to love, but merely note its necessity. The question "How should I love?"—that never gets answered. The people who think they've answered that question stop growing spiritually, ethically. "How do I love?" That is not a question; it's a koan.

Ajahn Sucitto talking about domination... domination is in fact the thing that needs to be fixed. It's based on an unawakened response to uncertainty and diversity. The ignorant citta³—heart-mind—reacts by demanding hard and permanent solutions, fixed boundaries, and simple strategies that will defend it against changing conditions that it can never control.

"Cultivate, investigate, purify, and release the citta from self-view has to be the starting point. When you enter your true territory, the domain of heart consciousness, you get the message. In your intimate territory, control and domination don't work. You can't even control your thoughts and emotions. You don't even own this body. Here there are no hard borders. Everything permeates you, from the air you breathe to the memories that well up in your mind. You have to cooperate, forgive, and allow inner changes that defy your identity. You learn to give up craving for simplistic solutions and fixed positions. Instead, there can be an acceptance of life's uncertainties and frustrations rather than feeling threatened by them. As we stop projecting our personal failings and dissatisfactions outward, we see otherness as a basis for increased understanding and even wonder. A love based on the miracle of sharing life gets born, and a relationship based on harmony rather than coercion. The great conquest then is over self-view. This has always been the teaching of the way of the supremely awakened ones."

An unawakened response to uncertainty, diversity. We want predictability. Understandable—we want the known. But there's so much aliveness in not knowing, in newness. Nietzsche said that truth is apportioned to one according to their strength. And maybe we say wisdom is apportioned to one according to their comfort with not knowing.

Ajahn goes on to say: "In your intimate territory, control and domination don't work." We have to discover that a million times on our cushion. When we start to release the territory we call "I, me, mine"—it is its own kind of claim of ownership and control and dominion. But that doesn't work; it's an illusion. We release the territory we call "I, me, mine." My country... "I'm a US citizen." Well, yeah. Country is not self; empty. My home. My Earth... even Earth, not self. "The world trembles in all directions," the Buddha says.

We have to take in the implications of that. Knowing that brings some relief—maybe a lot. And all the suffering still matters. It's not blotted out, but it matters in a new way. And what is left in the wake of this letting go? A love. A love based on the miracle of sharing life.

And so between "Everything means everything" and "Nothing means anything," we find our life. The kind of middle path between frenzy, nihilism, and this miracle of sharing life.

Giving love the last word is sort of like the urgency of care, compassion. Flipping through Shantideva⁴ today and saw this line: "May no one who encounters me ever have an insignificant contact." Oh, how beautiful is that? To live—for all of us to live—the sense of, "May my life bless this world in its beauty and brokenness."

So I offer this for your consideration, and I'll be back next Wednesday, again talking in one way or another about love.

Okay, folks.