This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Faith in Silence; Dharmette: Faith in Letting Go. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Faith in Silence; Dharmette: Faith in Letting Go (5 of 5) - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 15, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Faith in Silence

Sometimes it occurs to me that all thinking is coping. "Coping" maybe has a pejorative tone, but we think to cope in one way or another. It is very powerful that we can do that as animals, and so it gets reinforced at such a deep level. The Dharma is about doing something a little new.

To actually release our coping strategies, our moment-by-moment coping strategies, we need something like faith. We need a faith in silence, a faith that it is safe to let go, a faith in love. We need a faith that it is safe enough to stop reading the signals of our body—the affective stimulation, the emotional activation, the state of arousal—as indicative of threat or opportunity. In a sense, all the feeling that we feel means the same thing: to let go.

So we will practice and explore. Finding a posture that feels sustainable.

Just bringing some soothing to your body and mind.

Everything looks different from the perspective of tranquility. So maybe take some fuller breaths. Relax the jaw, the area around the eyes, the temples. Relax our belly. Soft belly.

Some reassurance that it is not neglectful to put down complications, the loose ends of our life, the problems that need to be solved. It can feel like neglect not to chew on those at all moments. It is okay to put them down. Not neglect.

In the end, our thinking cannot protect us from life, but our heart training can do so much. So we nurture a kind of faith in silence.

The present moment doesn't wish to hurt you. Letting go doesn't wish to cost you.

It is our deep habit to over-read all phenomena, to make them mean too much. Maybe today, just for a moment, we stop.

The movements of our mind are so innocent. So innocent that we scramble and cope. But if all we do is scramble and cope, fear takes the heart. The silence doesn't care even a tiny bit who we think we are. We come to listen to the silence, take our cues from it, trust it, keep letting go into it.

Dharmette: Faith in Letting Go (5 of 5)

I was reading a book about William James, and it got to the potency of the Dharma. This is a quote from his dad, actually—kind of an intense quote. James's dad, Henry James Sr., says:

"Every person who has reached even their intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters."¹

It is a little grim, maybe, but speaks to something important. Life is no farce. "Great is the matter of life and death," as the Zen folks say.

So what are we doing here? What is actually on offer in this path? What is the Buddha's promise? To meet the existential intensity of the human condition with some modicum of dignity. To meet it with some modicum of dignity takes training. Not thinking, but training.

It is easy for it to happen this way, but we are not here to graft the Dharma into the infrastructure of our neurosis. We are actually doing something that is new—something that is different and new and takes courage because it is unfamiliar to the habit energies that run our lives.

Ayya Khema² says, "On the spiritual path, we have to try something new. In fact, the spiritual path takes quite a lot of courage because it means chucking out the old without knowing what the new one is actually like. If we don't have that courage, we can't go on such a path."

This path of relinquishment, surrender, silence, letting go—all of that feels like risk. It feels like risk. There is a certain sense of the extra vulnerability we encounter. That is what I was alluding to when I said it feels like neglect almost to put our thought down, to put the knots of our life down, to put our problems down. Not to try to solve them in every moment feels like neglecting a loved one or something. It feels like risk. It leaves us feeling especially vulnerable.

And so we hold on in our lives. We hold on in our meditation. We hang on to what is familiar, and we just keep pinging to all the familiar reference points. But there are many Dharma places to which we cannot bring our knowing. Many Dharma places to which we cannot bring our preferences. Many Dharma places to which we cannot continue to hum the song of self. We are doing something new, and to even get a taste of the newness, we have to relinquish something of what we have always done.

Nisargadatta Maharaj³ said, "The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it will destroy the world in which you live."

The search for reality is dangerous; it destroys the world in which you live. We have sort of acclimatized to our own world of personal meanings, over-reading the signals, over-reading our feeling and thought. Dharma practice is relaxing all of that energy of over-reading.

This is hard. It is hard to trust that we actually find our power by opening deeply to helplessness. It is very counterintuitive for our system that we actually find our power, our dignity, in opening to helplessness. Maybe that is the kind of faith required to let go. We trust in the silence. Finding our power entails consciously experiencing helplessness—the helplessness of dukkha⁴, of the First Noble Truth that there is suffering, the helplessness of the dearth into which the roots are plunged, as James said.

We find our power in this way. We find our peace when we don't insist on it. We find ourselves by relinquishing ourselves. So letting go moves us towards freedom, but often hurts some. To trust that the suffering we encounter in practice is effective suffering—it is not the suffering that compounds suffering, that leads to more suffering—to trust that this effective suffering, that this hurt is not harming, that takes some faith.

And so we hold on to something we trust, even though we are not sure it will support us. It feels like a thin strand. As Ajahn Sucitto⁵ says:

"Awakening is based on the process of letting go. Letting go is about carefully revealing assumptions, biases, life messages, and releasing them. You can liken the process to a gradual disentanglement out of the tumult and gridlock of your personal world into the free space of the unconditioned. It's rather like lowering oneself down a rope. To know how to do that, it's a matter of holding on to something you trust even though it seems like a thin strand, then letting go little by little, trusting the downward pull. This is the trajectory of non-engagement and abandonment. The descent out of the gridlock of your personal world."

We make that descent with faith, actually. Faith. Many of the gateways that we get to, thresholds in our Dharma practice—a door where we are letting go more deeply, understanding something in a fresh way—when we get to that gate, what opens that door is not our willfulness but our faith. Our faith that whatever is on the other side of that gate will not harm us.

So we trust that downward pull. This kind of gravity, maybe we say, is safe. And into that wondrous, dark, open space of relinquishment, there are fewer and fewer signposts. In some ways, our life is just lived; we keep orienting to this and that. What happens when there are fewer and fewer signposts? The signpost of preferences, the signpost of the story of self, the signpost of self and other, past and future. It is like all the accoutrements of self—we just relax and trust that downward pull.

To care more about awareness than our life, more about this moment than my problems—even if that is just for a moment—that takes faith. And even if it is just for a moment, that moment detonates something in the heart. And we begin to inherit the Dharma, share it, and be grateful for it.