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

Dharmette: Faith in Ourselves (4 of 5); Guided Meditation: Lightly Guided Meditation - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 14, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Lightly Guided Meditation

Okay, welcome. Nice to see the names.

Just finding a posture in which you can be receptive to the Dharma, receive your own wisdom.

Ajahn Sucitto¹ said something like, "What we don't listen to, we become." What is not received in awareness, we become identified with. What is pushed to the side, disavowed—in our resistance, we paradoxically become it.

And so, just as we begin, we just listen deeply so that we don't become our resistance, don't become identified with it. It's received.

The awareness keeps backing up, keeps noticing the attention that creeps in around the project of meditation, the project of "me." We notice the subtle transactional mode, making something happen, a subtle demand we issue to the moment.

We notice all of this. Bit by bit, some of the static melts away. We come into the spaciousness that involves the frictionless.

Unless we notice what we want—the kind of background agendas of wanting—our knowing is suffused with the wanting.

And so we notice some of these agendas: this tightness, this tension, this transaction, this bargaining we do with the moment, the way we leverage the present for some future. We notice all of this, and in this way, the knowing becomes less entangled in those agendas. The knowing of the breathing body, sound, feeling.

Faith in awareness is a kind of confidence that after all my doing, all my effort, all my strategies—after all of that is dissolved—we can trust what's left. We can trust the awareness that doesn't depend on me.

The less we grasp, the more self-evident the Dharma becomes.

Michele McDonald² asked the question: "Is the agenda to connect or to control?"

Maybe one aspect of faith in Dharma is that it is okay to let go of control. Something will hold us even on the other side of our control.

To clearly know clinging, control, is to want to release it.

Dharmette: Faith in Ourselves (4 of 5)

Okay, that's good to sit with you.

Faith.

There was a period in the last couple of decades when the educational system was aggressively supporting the development of self-esteem. It is very understandable in a lot of ways. If you have a more positive view of the self, it will support academic and social development. But as it turned out, it didn't really work out that way. The improvements in self-esteem, when they could be made—it's not so easy to make—but when they could be made, they didn't translate to that much.

To really make changes... the deep models of self have been reiterated so compulsively that it's like a song we've been humming to ourselves for many years, non-stop. And so it takes something of industrial strength to actually change that at a deep level.

And so this week we've been exploring faith. Faith, and what does it mean to have faith in oneself?

Faith in oneself—does it mean that we have a kind of rigid model of what we are, and that model is positively balanced? I don't think so. It's more like, when you know what you're not, then we can actually have faith in ourselves. When you are no longer taking refuge in the stories of self, you can have faith in yourself.

The story—all the elaborate "I-making," "my-making," the egoic story—is a kind of static, really, that actually muddles our knowing, our sensitivity to this moment. The congealing of the sense of self is a kind of static, and it serves to buffer our connection from what's here.

And so, faith in oneself is not a kind of inflated story about the self. It's not grandiose stories.

I don't know why this came to mind, but I am not a musical person. I have a terrible ear, I can't read music, I don't play any instruments. I took piano lessons when I was a kid, and—it's kind of harsh to say it about a child, but I was bad. I know effectively nothing.

But sometimes, when I go to the symphony and I see, whatever, Dudamel or Esa-Pekka Salonen³, sometimes I feel like maybe I could be the conductor. Just maybe. In my head I have my hand position, you know? Shouldn't I just have faith in myself? No.

Anatta⁴, or not-self, is the truest form of self-esteem. The impersonality of one's strengths and weaknesses.

This insight is the end of trying to prove oneself. It's the dissolving of arrogance and shame, which is the underbelly of self.

And then we start to develop a different kind of confidence, a different kind of faith in ourselves. We're very grounded in where we are. We come to trust our view, we come to trust our body, trust our mind—not the kind of story of self. We relax into anatta, and there's a lot of trust that emerges from that insight.

At times, maybe the default is that there's a certain kind of deep wobble in the self, and we don't trust our view, we don't trust our knowing. We defer to others to understand what's real. We sort of... checking, checking... looking to this person, that person to gauge, "What should I think?" There's a subtle way we just keep pinging to others or the prevailing winds to see what we ought to do.

Faith in oneself, as we become faithful in ourselves, this changes. We start to have this much deeper trust in our intuitive knowing.

Maybe it's something like intuition. Some intuitive knowing. In intuitive knowing, there's very little doubt and there's very little self-justification. It's a very clean, very simple kind of knowing.

We know those times where it's like, "Ah, should I? Is it this? Is it that?" A lot of doubt, a lot of wobble, a lot of uncertainty. Or the other side, where we pick some view or something and then we spend a lot of time justifying it to ourselves—"Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah"—kind of rationalizing it, making the case.

This kind of intuitive knowing is much simpler. And it often, for me, is just like "Yes" or "No." "This can work, it's wholesome." "No, this is not going to work out."

We just become more and more attuned to that, and we become more and more sensitive to the mechanisms of self-deception, the trail of self-deception. We can, of course, still pull a fast one on ourselves, but much less, and less costly. We've become so sensitive to how we've deceived ourselves in the past that it's harder to be taken in by the kind of mechanisms of rationalization, self-justification. We're clearing out some static. We're listening more deeply.

As we listen more deeply, we refine our philosophy of happiness, of what it is to be happy, what it is to have a good life. We become better at predicting what will make us happy, what will make others happy.

It's very important in this kind of path of intuitive knowing. We say "be present, be present," yeah, but it's actually also about making better predictions about what completes the heart, what doesn't.

And so, okay, given the totality of conditions, given my strengths and limitations, what can work?

This is a kind of incredible intimacy with oneself, of really receiving the totality of data from our own system, of listening more and more subtly, taking more and more subtle cues.

For me, it's a lot in the kind of subtle affective, feeling cues. "How is this going to be? How is that going to be?" And I sort of listen in. It may be a very quick process, but there's like, "Yeah, I actually can feel something relaxes, opens." Or maybe something gets tense. And that's good data. We have to learn that's good data.

Faith in ourselves is not discounting that knowing. It's learning to distinguish between the commands of our defilements⁵ and the clarity of our knowing.

And so we cut through more and more of the static—the static that is the story of self—and then we begin to actually establish some faith in ourselves, faith in our view.

As Phillip Moffitt⁶ says, we become accountable to what we know. We come into deeper alignment with what we know.

And so, what do you already know? The knowing that's free from doubt and self-justification. Can we stay true to that? This, to my mind, is how we nurture faith in ourselves.

Okay, so I offer this for your consideration. As always, please pick up whatever is useful and leave everything else behind. Okay, till tomorrow, wish you all well. Thank you.