This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation w/ Matthew Brensilver: Sound and Silence; Talk: A Very Condensed Overview of the Path. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Sound and Silence; Dharmette: Very Condensed Overview of the Path - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 11, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Sound and Silence

Okay folks, good evening. Welcome to you all. It is nice to be here. So let's practice together. Please find your posture.

Don't let the sound around you obscure the silence. Just listen. So little is asked of us in the gesture of listening. We tend to experience hunger with relation to the visual field. But we see the hunger we experience with relation to thinking. Just listening; it's maybe a little less hungry.

We listen in all directions—to our sides, above, below, in front of us, and importantly, behind us. We listen such that sometimes the silence gets louder. This sense of self has just about no job at all. We notice external sound; we just call it sounds. Notice internal sound; usually call it thinking. Without any sense of discrimination about external or internal sound. Just listen in a way that doesn't depend on who we think we are, what we think our job is. We don't need to prop up awareness. Even the phrase "we just listen"—let's not be seduced by grammar.

But all the other forms of experience that might call for our attention, might attempt to assert themselves above the sound and the silence. Just practicing equanimity in the sense of not picking them up. Equanimity in the sense that they don't become a sticky phenomena. Just listening.

We bow to our clinging, bow to our fear, bow to our preoccupations. Bow to our needs. In the gesture of bowing, the phenomena become a little less sticky. It feels less neglectful to cease chewing on them. And just listen.

Experiment listening to the most distant sounds. The sound as it trails off into silence. Listening to whatever we hear. When we don't know if we're hearing something, we're hearing silence.

Dharmette: Very Condensed Overview of the Path

So the Dharma is vast, and generally talks zero in on one particular aspect of the path. I give many talks on one aspect of the path. That seems very reasonable. But I was speaking with a friend, a practitioner, who wondered about the relationship between key teachings. How do they fit together? And I thought to give a kind of high-altitude view of how I see the teachings fitting together.

So: Four Truths, Three Characteristics, Five Aggregates, Four Foundations, Three Wholesome Intentions, Four Brahmavihārās¹. 15 minutes. We're going to try this; maybe ill-advised.

Most anything that matters begins with a problem definition. What's at stake? What is the problem? The problem is that we think we want the world, but we actually want peace. We think that owning a piece of the world, owning phenomena, is the best chance for peace. But if we're honest, we find that leads to anxiety, some measure of disappointment.

So the problem is that we've not clarified our problem. And whenever you have a misdiagnosis, the treatment is very likely going to be wrong. We might get lucky, but generally: misdiagnosis, mistreatment. And ignorance, avijjā², is not our only problem, but in a sense, until that's resolved, nothing good can happen.

Usually, we talk about the First Noble Truth, dukkha³, as the diagnosis. But in some sense, the diagnosis is actually the Three Characteristics: dukkha, anicca⁴, anattā⁵. Maybe we can say the diagnosis begins as diagnosis, but later the diagnosis becomes the medicine. Dukkha, Anicca, Anattā as the diagnosis: unquenchability, uncertainty, unpossessibility.

So normally we celebrate anattā (not-self) as liberating insight. Yeah. But it's also diagnosis in the sense that we'll never land in an identity that feels like a true home. It's a diagnosis in the sense that our world is not governed by selves and centers—that there's no epicenter of causality.

Craving is sometimes considered an epicenter. Everything bad unfolds from there. But craving is not merely a cause but also an effect. It doesn't merely cause suffering. It's an effect. And it's not that craving begins the causal chain that terminates in suffering. Craving is also, we could say, caused by things other than itself. It's not self-caused. So, it's not as simple as just letting go.

You could say craving covaries with suffering, and that those are very closely yoked together. That's almost a tautology. Craving, suffering—you know, like suffering includes the wish for the moment to be different, and craving is simply the urgency of that wish.

And so it's not as simple as just a decisional moment when we let go. The medicine is a raft of practices and views that we develop to support the capacity to let go. And the raft of practices and views is... yeah, you know Joseph Goldstein said, "An experience is not a path." And letting go is supported so much by the path, by the totality of the path.

And so letting go is not merely a kind of decision, a decisional point, but is about karmic or maybe we say neural momentum. So we cultivate intentions towards renunciation, towards mettā⁶ (non-ill will), towards harmlessness.

And without renunciation, we're left with just one word on our mind. Our life becomes one word: "Next." Next. Many lives are just lived in the confines of that word. And if the entirety of our life is devoted to "next," we never see our mind and never know peace.

So we cultivate renunciation until that renunciation matures and we know we're not giving anything up. And this cultivation towards mettā, friendliness, or non-ill will... so few things matter in the face of finitude. So little serves as a consolation at the end of our lives. But mettā does. And even as the impulses towards greed and ill will and harmfulness persist, we commit as best we can—imperfectly. We commit to ethical care. That ethical care leads us to a life increasingly of non-regret. There's less and less debris from our past.

And these three intentions—renunciation, non-ill will, harmlessness—are supported by and support Wise View. The Dharma is in many respects a cognitive therapy. But Wise View is not a thin idea, not thin cognition, but involves our body. Wise View is more akin, it seems to me, to muscle memory. Wise View applies to our future, but also retrospectively as we rewrite the autobiography we've been telling ourselves—rewrite our autobiography in light of the Dharma.

Practice unfolds in cycles of reification and dereification. We make something solid. It's not that everything's supposed to melt. Some things become solid: Four Foundations of Mindfulness, ethics, Dharma, reminders, slogans, contemplations. And by reification, I mean that we don't attempt to melt those experiences into vibrating no-thingness. Not all practice is deconstructive.

It was relayed secondhand that Ajahn Chah⁷ said something like, "The Dhamma is all about letting go. The Vinaya⁸ (conduct) is all about holding on. When you figure out how those two things go together, you'll be all right."

Reification helps us stand on the ground of wisdom, to pay attention to what matters, to cease making distinctions that compound suffering and to make distinctions that alleviate it.

And then from that ground, a process of dereification unfolds where we attempt to recognize that suffering is always more than the sum of its parts. Suffering congeals when channels of data—you could say the Five Aggregates, that's one way of cutting up the pie of sensory experience, sensory life—suffering congeals when those channels of data tangle and what is merely seen becomes more than just the seen. What is unpleasant becomes not merely unpleasant but a problem, a burden on the heart.

And dereification is a process using our attention and equanimity to melt complex experiences into their sensory components. And then melt sensory events into empty resonating space. This is a process of—maybe paraphrasing Shinzen⁹—"loving life to death." You cannot do it without love. You will reemerge from that with more love, a more radical, more totalizing form of love. And that love takes different shapes depending on what it's meeting.

And so path... kind of depth of gratitude for the path. The path and the fruit of the path merge.

To offer this for consideration. This made things worse; I apologize sincerely. [Laughter]. But regardless, we carry on as people and practitioners. And yeah, I wish you well this week and see you next time.