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Guided Meditation: Letting the Dharma Soak into You; Dharmette: Fear and Love and Dana - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 28, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Letting the Dharma Soak into You

It is good to be with you. I am happy to be practicing on this day, this quiet, strange holiday week for some. I don't have my headset, which means you can see my ears—which are fine, they're just ears. I'm not embarrassed, but I'm used to my gamer's headset, and here I am in a hotel without it. So, flexibility.

It is good to practice in this time. I am conscious that some people may be inundated with people, while others are feeling a lack of people. A lot happens in this time, and it is easy to get disconnected from the Dharma¹. A kind of fog comes over, and it is easy to forget a lot. So, we are here to remember, of course. Let's sit and find our way together.

Beginning with whatever sweetness of the sit there is, we are linked up here by technology, sincerity, and love, by a lineage of 2,600 years that has seen it all.

We find a way to settle in, to bring some measure of soothing into your body. Just feeling your body on the earth, a kind of embrace of gravity.

Meeting whatever agitation, tension, or numbness remains with a sense of patience and tolerance. We are very willing to lavish our unsettledness with awareness and a quiet love.

Sometimes the Dharma just feels a little remote; the muscle memory of wisdom and love isn't there. The rich set of associations and silences feel distant. Don't try to brute force your way into the Dharma field. Just lovingly tend to the wall that seemingly separates you from it.

We recall Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha² to help us remember. We enter this realm of sensitivity and care. You remember the poignancy, the great urgency of this matter of life and death. Our hearts become more supple, simultaneously more strong.

It is the courage of meeting this moment as it is, never satisfied that we fully know what this moment is. We keep looking, willing to be surprised by this practice.

We don't insist that the Dharma work; we just keep offering our heart up to it. No strings attached.

Dharmette: Fear and Love and Dana

It is good to sit with you. One of the hallmarks of successful animals like us is the ability to stay secure and protected. In a sense, if you want to be safe, you better know a lot about danger, and you better have a robust threat detection system. Fear serves that function.

Brain scientist Kay Tye³ writes:

Fear is an intensely negative internal state. It conducts orchestration of coordinated functions serving to arouse our peak performance for avoidance, escape, or confrontation. Fear resembles a dictator that makes all other brain processes, from thinking to breathing, subservient. Fear can be innate or learned. Innate fear can be a response to environmental stimuli without prior experience, such as that of snakes or spiders. In humans, fear associations are the most rapidly learned, robustly encoded and retrieved, and prone to activate multiple memory systems.

In other words, our system is pretty good. You could say, "How many times has fear kept me safe?" I don't even know how you count—a million, right? And how many times has the alarm bell of fear gone off but there is no actual threat? Probably a hundred times that. So on the one hand, I'm glad we have fear mechanisms, but we've probably overlearned the lessons of fear.

Why do I begin with all of this? A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the difference between sensitivity to suffering and fear of suffering. I was very cognizant of being sensitive to suffering even as a kid, but I maybe haven't realized just how much fear is still bound up—fear of suffering, particularly the suffering of others. Today I wanted to continue around this question of fear, but thinking about the relationship between fear, love, and generosity.

There is a story I just came across again; I read it seven years ago when it was published and saw it again this week. The author writes about a quiet man named João⁴ who quit his job running the human resources department of an insurance company in Rio de Janeiro and began selling french fries from a street cart. The fries quickly proved popular, in part because they were delicious—thin, crisp, and golden. Even more enticing, João often served them up for free. All he had to do was ask, and he'd scoop some into a box, no charge. What money he did take in, he frequently gave away to children begging in the street or used to buy them sweets. Day after day, he came home to his wife and son without any money in his pocket.

In his previous life, João had been stern and serious, prone to squirreling money away. But after surviving a health crisis at the age of 49, he wanted to live differently. "I saw death from close up," he would often say. "Now I want to be in high spirits." And nothing made him happier than giving.

What's most interesting about João, though, is that his new outlook resulted not from a spiritual awakening but from brain damage caused by a stroke. His neurologist says he became "pathologically generous," compulsively driven to give. His carefree attitude towards money led to confrontations with his family, especially his brother-in-law who co-owned the french fry cart. But even when his family berated him, and the cart went out of business and he was reduced to living on his mother's pension, João refused to stop giving. It simply made him too happy.

So what's the lesson from this? It was maybe a surprise that it pivoted into a brain injury rather than some spiritual awakening. Is the lesson maybe that if you don't have a brain injury—if you have normal brain functioning—you're right to be less generous than João? Maybe. Maybe not. Our brains, we have to remember, are designed to help us survive, not be free.

As the story unfolded, we learned that the nature of the damage to his brain was in regions associated with long-term planning and goal-directed behavior. In a certain sense, you could say it eroded his capacity to worry. It eroded his capacity for certain types of fear. And of course, this is a loss in some ways. His family was suffering as a function of his generosity. Fair enough; maybe we say that's not honorable.

Here is how the story concludes:

We can talk about generosity in terms of dopamine hits or Pavlovian stimulus-response theory, and that's not necessarily wrong. But it overlooks something important about João: that giving truly did make him feel happy and fulfilled. The neuroscience researcher said João was one of the happiest people he's ever met.

That made me wonder: I don't want to throw away all of the mechanisms of my fear, but what would my love look like if I were less afraid? What would your love look like if you were less afraid? Even if it were just 5% of João, what would your love look like?

I can sense in me that my love feels constrained by different forces. It's not that I'm not a loving person, but I can feel that it is still constrained. It's constrained, among other factors, by fear. Fear puts us into the deepest, innocent but very primitive corner of self where the world is populated essentially by threat. That's the only salient feature of the world: what is threat, what is not threat.

How different would our vision of life be when the most salient feature of the world is not threat, but instead goodness and need?

My love feels constrained by social custom. In some ways we celebrate generosity, but we view it with suspicion in others. My love feels constrained by the prevailing standards of how much we're entitled to privilege our own well-being over that of strangers.

Reading about that story, there was a deep delight in it. It didn't feel sullied by the fact that it was a brain injury rather than a spiritual awakening that led him to give away all those fries. I actually get the delight in doing that. There is this latent love in all of us that is somehow constrained. We're self-conscious, or there's fear that limits us in some way, or there are social niceties—just conforming to standard models of what goodness entails.

But I want to give away some fries bad, you know? And I know if I did that for 15 minutes each day before meditating, that would be a nice sit. That would be a nice life. I think the condition of my heart and mind would be improved by that.

The encouragement here is to understand the relationship between fear and love more deeply. I'm cautious about simplistic formulations—that the opposite of love is fear rather than hate, or something like that. That intuitively makes a lot of sense, but I'm sure it's complex. But it is worth even considering as a kind of thought experiment: what shape would your heart take if the nagging worries, control, concern, and fear abated? Even just a little.

Thich Nhat Hanh⁵ says:

The only way to ease our fear and truly be happy is to acknowledge our fear and look deeply at its source. Instead of trying to escape our fear, we can invite it up to our awareness and look at it clearly and deeply.

It is my sense that in gathering some of our courage and feeling a little bit more secure in opening to finitude and mortality—knowing we all already know how the story ends—that helps melt away some of the worry. We become more radical. Our love becomes okay.

This is for your consideration. Thank you all, I'm happy to be with you this evening and look forward to next week.