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Guided Meditation: Resting In What We Cannot Stop; Dharmette: Passivity & Action - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 14, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Resting In What We Cannot Stop

So, good morning, folks. Happy birthday, Mary—75th birthday, one of our Sangha¹ friends here.

Please settle in, and let's see what happens. Just settling into posture, you can say yes to making whatever adjustments you need.

Feel some gratitude just for being alive here together, conscious. An incredible number of things have to go right for us to be aware. Of course, it won't always be like this, and so we kind of rejoice in awareness as we begin here together.

There's effort in practice—a kind of subtle effort of directing attention preferentially to the breath, the body feeling, the mind. The effort of letting things be amidst imperfection, choosing not to fiddle with some sensations². But we also want to attune to what is effortless, what requires nothing of us, what doesn't create a sense of burden on the meditating self.

So there's an aspect of awareness that doesn't depend on you. It can't be initiated by an act of will, nor can it be stopped. But when we are in fact aware, we can appreciate the effortlessness of it—that this doesn't actually burn any attentional calories. Just awake, because it doesn't depend on you. Whatever you think "you" is, you can completely take your hands off all the levers and knobs.

Because this dimension of awareness doesn't depend on you, whatever "you" is can completely relax. It's a little like the awareness blooms and collapses, collapses into an object, into a thought. And then come to appreciate mindfulness as a certain kind of grace.

We come to witness a process that does not involve our willfulness. Sensing the limitations of our willfulness is a way of practicing. And of course, there's a time for effort, and there's this dimension of effortlessness. Whatever you can't stop, rest there. The awareness that you can't stop: it's rest.

Dharmette: Passivity & Action

The theme has been the more assertive and more receptive qualities of mind, and today I wanted to say something about action and being passive, activity and passivity.

There is a common question, maybe the most common misunderstanding of equanimity³, which is that it's tantamount to passivity. But Shinzen Young⁴ has nice language around this: that equanimity is a relationship with sensory experience, not apathy about the objective conditions of the world. A relationship to sensory experience, not apathy about the world. So equanimity now does not equal passivity in the next moment, or tomorrow, or whenever.

We are soft animals who are compulsively trying to optimize experience, and consequently, Dharma⁵ teachers often emphasize the passive, receptive dimensions of practice. But a lot of that passivity is actually in service of action, and a Dharma life requires a lot of action. We practice being passive so that we can discern what action buys us and what it costs us.

Retreat practice, which many of you have done, is a kind of experiment in passivity. We relinquish almost all choices. There's a schedule; almost every minute we're told where to be and what to do. So we relinquish almost all decision-making. We sort of take our hands off all the knobs, and we practice a kind of radical form of passivity. It is an experiment: experimenting that exactly what this moment offers is enough, or maybe we say is right.

While in retreat, for example, we're no longer using this moment to predict the trajectory of our day, our week, our life. This moment has really no meaning outside of this moment. I don't know whether it's right, but it seems to me like maybe we're practicing a kind of momentary nihilism. We're momentary nihilists just right now. But in doing that, we begin to understand where our habitual actions come from, what they accomplish, the agitation they cost, the relief that they buy us, and the relief that never, never comes.

And so, this is a cultivation of our own heart, and it makes life—whatever it brings—richer, more poignant, freer. We could just say better. It makes life better to cultivate this. And these kinds of experiments in passivity also help us become more effective in our action. It is maybe not emphasized so much, but practice shapes our mind, and then our mind shapes our life. It's a kind of virtuous cycle.

So part of Dharma practice is about making our actions more effective and efficient. It is not just the receptivity; it's about making our actions more effective and efficient. And part of how we do this is through developing our understanding.

Like, if we do not understand this foundational Noble Truth that there is dukkha⁶—there is incompletion, the moment is incomplete—if we do not understand that, if we do not understand anicca⁷, that the world trembles in all directions as the Buddha said... If we do not understand these things, our actions are actually less effective. If they're made on the assumption of permanence and utopian fantasy, they're less effective. If we do not understand the unquenchability of the craving mind, we waste so much energy, time, and money. If our actions emerge out of the fever dream of craving rather than the sobriety and balance of desire, we're less effective. Because desire doesn't forget the First Noble Truth⁸; craving always does.

So many of our calculations in our life go something like, "Well, if I do this, I get that, and if I get that, I will feel like this," whatever "this" is. But the basis of wise action is really understanding that action only changes some karmic⁹ streams and not others. So we have to know ourselves really well. We have to understand pleasure really well in order to be well-calibrated.

We talk all about the present moment, but we're actually getting better at the future: at prediction, at forecasting our own reactions, predicting the chances of success, and predicting or forecasting the responses of others too.

Understanding others... I was reading Alison Gopnik¹⁰, a developmental psychologist and researcher. She's studied how children's minds develop, and she writes, "Love itself depends on knowledge and imagination. From the time they're very small, babies are figuring out theories of love based on what they see the caregivers around them do and say. For babies who are so utterly helpless and dependent, no theory is as important as a theory of love." That's so beautiful somehow. No theory is as important as a theory of love for a helpless, dependent baby.

And maybe as adults, we of course keep refining our theory of love, and those refinements, those calibrations of our theory of love—this helps us live and make choices. We develop a theory of love. We develop a theory of our self—self-knowledge—and come to be very aware of our strengths and goodness, and also our limitations. We come to appreciate our limitations in an utterly non-moralistic way. There's no ground whatsoever for shame. It's just, "Ah, these are the limits of my equanimity."

To know the limits of our equanimity and respect those limits is important in actually acting wisely. We talk about believing in ourselves and trust and all this. Yeah, that's right, but we also have to know what our nightmares are and the places where we just have to honor the depth of our own clinging. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. It's just like, "Oh yeah, I know I can't let go. When conditions are like this, I can't let go." And so then we need to choose another strategy for dealing with that in some way.

Maybe it's like, "I need to do what I can not to put myself in that condition." And so we cultivate a kind of respect for the power of our own habit energies. We want to work with them; we want to expand the capacity of our heart. But in determining a wise course of action—we do it subconsciously, but in determining a wise course of action—the limitations of our equanimity have to be a premise in that argument.

Our actions are made more effective by understanding others. Empathy, a theory of love. We know their goodness, are moved by it, inspired by it, reminded of our own goodness by others. We bow down to it. And we also understand the egoic fragility of others, the pressure points in their egoic structure. If you do not understand the egoic fragility of others, you wind up often trespassing on sacred terrain, and this is not good for relations. We have to, in a sense, respect the zones of clinging of each other and treat those with a certain kind of care.

And so, in receptivity and passivity, we develop certain heart qualities: goodness and goodwill. And goodwill dissipates a lot of problems. I don't even really know what The Secret or the law of attraction is, but everything I do know, I don't like. It just always struck me as the self-congratulatory grandiosity of the privileged. Did you manifest this misogyny? All this racism? No.

And when love begins to seep from your pores, generally people become less afraid of you and less defensive. And with that, a lot of good things start happening. So we shape our mind, our mind shapes our life. We practice; Dharma shapes our inner life, and our inner life shapes our world. This is the virtuous cycle.

So, passivity and action. I'll close here and wish you all a good day. Moments of receptivity, moments of action. We'll gather back for a last day together tomorrow. Okay, thank you. Thank you all.