This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Relaxation & the Tension of Self & Clinging; Dharmette: Love & Time -M Brensilver. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Relaxation and the Tension of Dukkha, Self, Clinging; Dharmette: Love and Time - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 13, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Nice to see the names over there. Happy to be with you. So, welcome. I'll say a few things and then we'll sit.

I was at a family gathering this past weekend, and a member from the extended family has a very adorable three-year-old. He was telling me that sometimes in the middle of the night, the three-year-old wakes up and gets his dad, says, "Papa, papa, I'm so tired." And aside from being extremely cute, something about that made me think of meditation practice. I don't know what the equivalent is, but maybe it's something like, "Papa, how do I become aware? Papa, where's the Dharma?" Right? Maybe there's "more right here."

So on this theme of "more right here," I heard about a retreat some years ago. I don't know anything more about it than what I'll tell you, but it was a retreat, and all of the practice was done laying down. The theme was something like, "Awakening through the deepest relaxation." I think back then when I heard of it, I was like, "Well, I don't know about that." But there's probably something to that.

I was speaking with a longtime practitioner who described, in a very lovely way, something that happened on retreat as a "sizable relaxation," and that lasted some days. On the one hand, we don't fetishize relaxation or tranquility, which gives the notion that tension is the enemy or something like this. And on the other hand, tension, or we could say non-relaxation, is the signature of many different currents of suffering. So we could say clinging is tension, we could say selfing is tension, suffering is tension, greed is most definitely tension, hatred is tension. Maybe even delusion has its own kind of tension—the tension of being out of step with the way things are.

Sometimes we don't have any idea how tense we are until we actually relax deeply. We don't know the kind of layers of suffering to which we've acclimatized. Basically, usually we talk about the desperation of getting rid of suffering and fidgeting our way out of Samsara, these kind of things. But there may be certain ways in which we're actually resigned to the suffering, or we barely even detect it as suffering. And sometimes with a sizable relaxation or some kind of deep release, the tension that's been subtly coating our body-mind falls away, and we realize what we had been holding.

So, without turning tension into an enemy, into another object of craving, we look for ways we can relax, ways in which we can detect the tension of greed, of hatred, of clinging, of self. So what's here? Papa, I'm so tired. But the bed's right here.

Guided Meditation: Relaxation and the Tension of Dukkha, Self, Clinging

Sit together.

Maybe the way we actually relax is to give tension permission to do whatever it wants to do in our hearts.

Maybe we look for a way of breathing, of directing our breath, that brings even a kind of whisper of ease, relaxation.

When we hike up a steep hill or something, gravity is not our friend. But here it is. The soothing effects of the downward pull of gravity. Maybe our spine extends ever so gently towards the sky, but then we give everything else to gravity, soothed by gravity.

The signature of self is that kind of tension, a kind of density in our mind, a contractive force. Can we breathe into that, relinquishing ownership over everything? Nothing more to prove to oneself, to others.

You cannot be found out.

Clinging is majorly complicated. Maybe like trying to fit our heart-shaped heart into a square hole or something like that. Letting go simplifies everything. There may be the grief of not getting, but it's a very simple grief.

Our hatred can never, ever work out. It seems that that which is deeply objectionable, even horrific, warrants our hate. No. We relax.

The delusions of permanence and morality, some permanent pleasure that ends craving—it's delusion. It requires us to avert our gaze from what is so, and contains some tension. So we just keep relaxing, softening, loving our attention to death. As teacher [unintelligible] would say.

Keep putting things down until awareness feels weightless.

Dharmette: Love and Time

Okay, good to sit with you. I'll be away next week. It's Juneteenth. There'll be a special program, not on this channel, but at this time, I believe. So check the website, and I'll be back on the following week, the 26th.

So, I was asked to give a kind of blessing at a family event, a kind of religious rite of passage ceremony. And friends and family gathered, and just in the days before that, I sat down to reflect, "Okay, what do I want to say?" And two words immediately arose in my mind: love and time. Love, time. Those are not words that I usually pair together, but there they were: love and time.

Love only becomes meaningful because of time, the limitations of time. For anything to matter, in a sense, we have to believe in the kind of unique, irreplaceable value of something, someone. And so meaning and finitude are deeply linked. This writer-philosopher, Martin Hägglund¹, for anything to be intelligible as mattering, they write, "for anything to be at stake, we have to believe in the irreplaceable value of someone or something that is finite. The recognition of finitude does not offer any guarantees that we will lead a responsible life and take better care of one another. But without the recognition of finitude, questions of responsibility and care could not even take hold of us. To turn toward you, to focus our gaze on another and attach ourselves to what we see, is the deepest movement of secular confession. We are turned back to our lives, not as something that is our property, but as a form of existence that is altogether finite and altogether dependent on others. This is not the end of responsibility; it is the beginning."

So immortality might very well destroy our meaning. Our love matters because of finitude. And sometimes I think about superhero movies. I don't just think about them; I sometimes watch them. Not that often, but sometimes. And the hero is almost kind of invincible, but not completely, right? If there were no such thing as Kryptonite, there'd be no drama at all. Right? And so finitude, mortality, loss, the kind of inevitability of grief that's encoded in every moment of love—that's part of why I tend to elevate grief above the swamp of afflictive feeling. It's a special one, I believe. And it's tied, grief is tied to time, to love. I just cannot imagine a spiritual life somehow divorced from grief.

Time enriches the quality of our love. There are certain kinds of love that just depend on some measure of continuity across time. You know, just across the years, there's a kind of richness to love that seems to contain all the time before, all the moments before, contained in this present moment of love. The kind of depth of karmic entanglement, the love over time. The way love is bound up with repetition, with continuity, with evolution. The richness of love grows with time.

So I say, yeah, love is meaningful because of time, but time is only really meaningful because there is love. Our lives are meaningful because there is love. What are we here to do anyway? You know, really, what are we here to do? Fight? You know, to enact as much craving as is humanly possible in one lifetime? The kind of folly of it. So much of our life only makes sense in light of eternity, as if this doesn't end, as if this goes on forever. Yeah, I could justify that if I were never to die, but we need finitude to sober us up.

Time is meaningful because of love. And love can look many different ways, but for our lives to be meaningful depends on love in one form or another. This Buddhist tradition, love is likened to the glue of the world, that which prevents disintegration. I like that image of just like, oh yeah, that love holds things together, holds people together. "The world trembles in all directions," the Buddha said. Maybe love is what prevents disintegration, and the kind of barrenness of life in the absence of love. The absence of love makes every horror possible.

And there are so many species of love that might make a life meaningful. You know, classically, it's the Brahma-viharas², the divine abodes: kindness and compassion, joy, equanimity. Yeah, those are beautiful species of love, but it's just the beginning in a way, just the beginning of the ways we might love. And maybe it's worth just reflecting on all the different faces of love in relational life, which is on my mind at this ceremony. You know, the intricacies and the beauty and the particularities of the heart of the other, whether that's a friend or a lover, child, partner, family of one kind or another. It's like their particularity, their sort of beauty, and even their neuroses, their idiosyncrasies, the particularities of the heart of others evokes its own species of love. You know, it's like our heart constellates in a very particular way depending on what's in front of us.

And so how many ways are there to love? We sort of just keep looking, exploring. Love and time. It's good to mark time, to keep track of our time, to keep an eye on finitude, to keep track of our love. And maybe we treat each day as a kind of rite of passage. You know, each day a kind of story about love, one way or another. It's a story about love, each day.

I offer this for your consideration and wish you a good couple of weeks. And we'll gather back then, on the 26th. Hope to practice again with you. Very happy to be with you. Okay, folks.