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Dharmette: Believing that Special People Exist; Guided Meditation: It's all come to this - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 05, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: It's all come to this

Okay, welcome folks. Good to be with you. I realize I need to meditate, which is maybe fortunate timing, maybe not. But here we go. So settle in, find a posture, get cozy, and alert.

Just try as best you can to recall all the moments of willingness, all the moments in which you've offered your heart up to the Dharma. All the moments of sitting or lying down meditation, or walking, or retreat, or listening to talks, or being with Dharma friends. I realized yesterday I've been practicing for exactly half my life. So just as we begin, gather up all the goodness from your practice. Just bring it right in front of you. Feel it. Let it seed your mind.

Now, all those moments of practice, all the moments of pain, of greed and hate, wisdom, love—it's all come to this. And so, in attending to this moment, we actually honor and bless all of that. Gently tending to your life.

The question "how might it have been otherwise" becomes meaningless. Just this breath. Body. Our life as it constellates in this moment. Gentle, nonviolent with all experience.

We plot out our pleasure, budget our pleasure, as a way of taking the edge off the intensity of the human condition. We devise ways out of anicca¹—uncertainty. We game out the contingencies, try to soothe ourselves into safety. We rehash the past, trying to think our way through it so as to digest it, learn its lessons. Such innocent movements of mind. Who could blame us? But there's a deeper refuge on offer. Go for refuge.

Just letting the winds of change blow right through you, trusting they won't harm you.

Dharmette: Believing that Special People Exist

Good to sit with you. I read Rachel Kushner's recent novel, Creation Lake, last week, and there's a line that struck me. One of her characters says, "Charisma does not originate inside the person called charismatic; it comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist."

My heart kind of leapt up at that line. It invites the question in my mind: What is my need to believe in special people? Is idealization—the making of special people—just a facet of the human mind? There are certainly people who express particular gifts—we could say paramis². But "special people" gets us into the realm of projection, idealization, and comparison. "Special people" turns a quality into a person. It turns a verb into a noun.

So, what is it about our need to believe that special people exist? Where does that come from? And what are the pleasures and also the costs of idealization? For each of us to consider: What is your default assumption about yourself, your power, your relative place amongst the special people, wherever they are? And how do you position yourself in relation to specialness?

Some people identify with the special ones—"I want to be on that team." Some people want to own the special ones. Some people are sexually titillated by specialness. Some people get competitive and want to tear something down. Specialness evokes jealousy and self-doubt in some, arrogance in others.

In reflecting on it, it struck me that maybe part of the belief in special people comes out of the dynamics of childhood, where our lives depend on the power of others. We so want a parent or caretaker to be omnipotent, to control. Our safety is contingent on their power; our safety increases with their power. And then there is the disillusionment or fear engendered by the realization that this parent, this caretaker, is not special—they are very human. This person doesn't exert much control over the world at all.

We grow up, but as Adam Phillips³ once commented, "Adulthood is not a cure for childhood." We're kind of left with an unresolved relationship to specialness. Maybe there's some transitional role for idealization—seeing someone as special—but that can't be the last word.

Part of Dharma practice is about untangling specialness and goodness. Maybe we say specialness requires a self, and goodness does not. Sometimes teachers start to think that they are the goodness, or that they own it, but it's just nature refracted through a particular body. And by the way, if you have some theory that I'm massively shading Gil and Andrea or something, that's not it. This is just Rachel Kushner getting me started. It wasn't like I saw something horrible.

So, we start to notice the childlike longings that lead us to put special ones on pedestals, to make them special. It's not like we have to disparage a person we look up to, but we notice the movements of our mind in relation to specialness. We do this in part because we know specialness can never be sustained; there's always disillusionment.

Part of spiritual maturation is opening to some measure of ambivalence. That is the hallmark of the human realm: loving even amidst ambivalence. A love that's a little less naive, with less and less specialness, but there is reverence. The reverence is not really for a person; it's for goodness itself. Seeing goodness still makes me want to get on my knees, but I'm not bowing to "special."

To touch into goodness, to actually feel it, to let it reverberate with our own hearts—that doesn't bolster or threaten self-worth at all. It doesn't make me feel "less than" as I look up, and it doesn't evoke the urge to possess or to be on that team. It's just a deep honoring. I know goodness when I see it. I don't need to deify it into some form of specialness. I don't need to turn it into a noun.

There is something in that kind of full recognition of goodness—and this can be goodness of a million different varieties—where we partake in it. It's like two bells resonating at the same frequency. Nothing is owned. No selves are needed. Comparison—the whole grammar of comparison—is a million miles away, so beside the point. Maybe we say this is like mudita⁴ in some way, sympathetic joy.

Our aspiration becomes more and more about being ordinary than becoming special. Special is just the charade, the egoic charade. But the paramis feel so ordinary from the inside; they only look special from the outside. So there's this progressive sense of ordinary. Goodness is so ordinary, even if extraordinarily beautiful.

Norman Fischer⁵, in Training in Compassion, discussing mind training, says: "Although we can enjoy the applause that we will probably receive for practicing it, practice mind training not for the applause but because we know it's right, we know it's necessary, and anyway, there is no choice. When people applaud us for our wonderful achievements, really what they are applauding is not us and not those achievements. They are applauding life. They're applauding goodness. They are applauding their own lives. They are applauding the human capacity to appreciate something wonderful. So it's good when they applaud. Let them applaud, and we will graciously accept it, knowing what their applause really means."

So I offer this for consideration. Please pick up whatever is useful, leave the rest behind. Good to be with you. I'll be back certain Wednesdays; we have encountered a period of regularity. I'm doing Gil's group next week. It's a lot of Brensilver. It's too much, in my professional opinion. Too much Brensilver. But feel free.

Okay folks, see you next time.