This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: What's Already Here? Dharmette: New Questions. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: What's Already Here?; Dharmette: New Questions - Matthew Brensilver

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

Guided Meditation: What's Already Here?

Welcome, folks. It is great to see the names here. I am sick and I have a pimple on my nose; nevertheless, tonight we begin Wednesdays.

I will jump right in with a few comments and then we will sit.

I was reading an evolutionary anthropologist—Glowacki, I think the name is—about the origins of war, of cooperation, and the possibility of peace. The article doesn't exactly say that there are good forces in us, like cooperation, and bad forces, like violence. It is not exactly like the "two wolves" inside of us, love and hate. It is more like one wolf, and it can become war or peace.

The author says the traits and the technologies that allow people to mobilize, achieve collective action, cooperate across groups, and sanction spoilers to enable peace are the same traits that are used to wage war. The better our species became at creating peace, the better we also became at waging war. He goes on to say, "While intergroup coalitionary aggression and intergroup cooperation may be evolved traits, peace is an invention."

The same tremendous human intelligence, effort, and ingenuity can be leveraged for love or hate, for war or peace. Of course, I am reading this because I am concerned. What will become of us as a society, as a species? What will become of me, of each of us?

Peace is an invention. There is cooperation and there is war or violence, but peace—that is an invention. Can we invent it?

Ajahn Chah¹ said that we find our freedom in the same place we find our suffering. It is all right here.

Find a posture that feels sustainable.

So, what is already here?

We go looking, but the grace is in being found. There is some alienation when we go looking, trying to make something happen, or make something of ourselves. Grace is in being found. Let yourself be found.

Don't go looking for the breath; let the breath find you. Let the breath suffuse you, drench you.

You don't need to go anywhere to be found.

In the looking, there is maybe a sense of duality, alienation: "me" looking for something, "me" looking for my breath, "me" looking for peace. But in being found, much of that melts away. There is no ground anymore for self-doubt.

Refound.

Our freedom is found in the same place as our suffering. We don't have to go looking somewhere for freedom. We rehearse our freedom in this moment. Embody freedom. So we let go of looking for something.

Have so much forgiveness for the ways our mind forages, where we look for peace or seek. We just come back, resting in what is already here. Being found by stillness. Being found by silence. Letting that heal the fundamental alienation of always looking.

Dharmette: New Questions

Welcome. I am honored to be with you.

From 2007 until 2018, I led a group weekly or bi-weekly in Los Angeles or San Francisco. It has been six years, but I had some intuitive sense that it was time to start something up, and so here we are. I am very happy to be with you.

Teaching is a weird thing. I still find it kind of strange that anyone wants to listen to me. If no one wanted to listen, that would be very understandable. I know you are going to say, "No, Matthew, that is just the self-hate talking." I get it, but I actually don't think it is that. It is because most of the time in my life, I feel like a big, dumb, happy golden retriever, not a Dharma teacher. The retriever really is my spirit animal; that is kind of the baseline self-view and experience of myself.

But the thing is, our mind is not our own. It constellates in very particular ways based on the totality of conditions. Your mind is not your own. There is continuity, but what gets drawn forth from conditions is a lot. Who we are is partially reflected by who we are when we are with others—what others pull to the surface. It is not like the "real self" is the retriever and this is some performance.

The Buddha emphasized spiritual friendship, associating with goodness, because our mind is not our own. Something happens to my mind when I am with Sangha². It is not a performance; something happens to it, and it becomes very easy to know love. It becomes very easy to sense the Dharma—like some living presence between you and I. It is there even in the chat. I can't see a face, but just the names are enough.

So on the one hand, I don't feel very identified with the role of teacher, but a big part of how I actually know myself, know my heart, is from taking the seat. All of that maybe is a long-winded way of saying that I am here for me, but while I am here, I kind of want to be useful.

As we begin, I have been thinking about pedagogy: How does learning happen? How do we actually absorb the Dharma? How does it become woven into our biology? Pedagogy is something we Dharma teachers have been a bit incurious about. I inherited certain pedagogical assumptions about how to transmit the Dharma, and I think there is incredible wisdom in that, but I wonder, how do we actually learn? How does this thing go?

I was reading something about lessons from cognitive science for learning. The author said:

People learn new material better when it creates impasses in their current mental models—contradictions, conflicts, anomalies, uncertainties, and ambiguities—which stimulate curiosity, inquiry, questioning, problem-solving, and deep reasoning to restore cognitive equilibrium.

"Impasses in the current models." We are all trying to stay balanced, to keep our equilibrium. We prefer knowing to not knowing. We prefer familiarity to uncertainty or shock. We really have routinized our mental life to a large degree, and for good reason. If I am walking and I stumble, there is a very quick impulse to get back into balance, to reestablish balance before I even think. There is just awareness, body proprioception: Off balance. Okay, do my best to right myself. That is a wholesome impulse.

But our Dharma path is a kind of dialectic between equilibrium and disequilibrium. It is a little bit like what the author was saying about learning creating impasses in the models. If it is all upheaval, if it is all disequilibrium, nothing gets integrated. It is just chaos, trying to get some kind of footing. On the other side, if it is all "cruising altitude" equilibrium, the models become too comfortable, too familiar. Our Dharma understandings become stale in a way.

So the path is this dialectic between equilibrium and disequilibrium, between a kind of coziness and being thrown out of the nest. Pema Chödrön³ said to be truly alive is to be thrown out of the nest moment by moment.

The Dharma path feels like home, and it feels like exile. It is so wonderful to come home, to feel the coziness of home. The Dharma is a lot like that. It is this sense of, I knew this, but I had forgotten. I am returning. I am remembering. The heart is returning to its native ground. That is a beautiful way to view it. Lots of people have talked about the path as a certain kind of homecoming.

But we all know that spending all our time at home is not good. We venture out into the world to be startled. We feel that startling quality when we feel estranged from our prior models, our prior understandings—the staleness of what we took to be so. There is a sense of possibility and deep aliveness when the current mental model, the current frame, the current Dharma understanding, starts to develop a little crack. Part of us wants to patch it up, and there is some fear there: Wait a second, I am losing the ordinary reference points. But then there is this incredible openness in that disequilibrium.

This can happen in a lot of ways. It happens when we look at the world, at the enormity of it. It happens when we see just how deep the Buddha's First Noble Truth of dukkha⁴ runs. It happens when we look at the immensity of goodness and beauty, the Buddha's grace.

That disequilibrium can happen when we look into the eyes of another person—but don't look in that familiar way where they lie a foot behind the plexiglass of all our accumulated concepts. We just look at somebody, maybe into their eyes, or maybe we just gaze at them and see that deep mystery of their being.

Disequilibrium happens when the song of self that we have been humming incessantly stops.

Scientist Judea Pearl⁵ said, "You cannot answer a question that you cannot ask, and you cannot ask a question that you have no words for."

Maybe part of what the Dharma is about is finding words for new questions. New questions about ourselves, our life, our deaths, and others. New questions about love and death, and what consolation is possible given the ungraspability of all things, the unpossessability of all things. What is possible? What consolation is possible? What kind of peace might be invented?

I look forward to our questions together, and to being changed by their articulation. A deep bow to you all. Welcome, and see you next week.