This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Letting the moment soften you; Dharmette: Disenchantment & Engagement. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Letting the Moment Soften You; Dharmette: Disenchantment & Engagement - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 13, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Letting the Moment Soften You

Welcome, folks. Nice to be with you. Okay, let's either ease your way in or start on a dime and drop everything.

Sometimes we have to tunnel our way into the present moment; sometimes it's right there waiting for us with one breath. Sometimes it's skillful to palpate the psychospiritual body. Where does it hurt? What needs our blessing, love, or awareness? The loops of thought that won't unwind, the heartaches, the anxieties—we just do what we can to give our blessing to the surges of energy in body and mind. In this way, our heart becomes more and more available to this breath.

We're practicing being softened by all phenomena. By words and images, what we call thinking. By emotion and other sensation. By the breath. It's all phenomena, treated like the Buddha's whisperings.

And when the heart loses its suppleness, as it does and as it will; it loses its suppleness when we become identified. When imperfection feels like a problem to be solved. When it feels like we must retreat to the headquarters of self and rearrange samsara¹. When we lose our softness, we soften again.

We can actually feel something like this softening, this way that we trust our heart to meet the intensity of the human condition. In the transition from the clenched fist of clinging to the release of letting go, that movement is a kind of softening. It doesn't mean we're free of discomfort then, or that the softening itself is totally pleasant, but something about it eases the kind of anxiety and agitation of attempting to control this moment. That melts away, and just that is a deep relief to something in our heart.

And so, maybe we're breathing, feeling our body, or hearing sound. Practicing in whatever way we practice, then there's some noticing of brittleness. We breathe and soften.

All phenomena mean the same thing: let go. It's a path to freedom, but it's also practicing freedom, the way an athlete practices a basketball shot, a free throw, or something. We're practicing freedom. It doesn't mean we make the shot, but we practice. It doesn't mean we pretend to like what we don't like, or be okay with what doesn't feel okay, but we practice. We rehearse our own freedom.

Dharmette: Disenchantment & Engagement

Okay folks, that's good to sit with you. So yesterday was about effort and effortlessness, the effort that we make, and the momentum of goodness. I don't know whether it's momentum or inertia—somebody once harassed me about that, I'm not sure which kind of metaphorical stand here.

But today, today is about disenchantment. Disenchantment with samsara and the abiding care for the world, engagement. The Buddhist path really begins with a recognition of the vulnerability of the human condition: aging, sickness, death. They are the dimensions of human life that are defenseless, and that's generally construed as a problem to be solved, a condition to be exited. It's probably underemphasized in a lot of modern articulations of Dharma, but in a lot of the suttas, the sense of something like, "Get me out of here," is very present. It is too much. And it was, and it is. It's very understandable that one might be dissatisfied with the intensity of even a very fortunate life.

So the instruction, curiously, is to stay very deeply with sensory experience. As I was instructing in the meditation, to stay deeply with sensory experience—but when we stay that deeply, it actually takes us out of the ordinary sensory world.

This is famous from, right, Bāhiya²: "In the seen is merely the seen," and it goes on, "and the cognized is merely the cognized. Then you will not be with that. When you're not with that, you will not be in that. When, Bāhiya, you are not in that, then, Bāhiya, you will be neither here nor beyond nor in between the two. Just this is the end of suffering." There is a lot to say about that. But this way in which our immersion into sensory experience gives us a kind of foothold outside it, that's one way of dealing with the intensity and vulnerability of the human condition.

Modern interpretations of insight practice often celebrate vulnerability and its associated duty to care. The way that just perceiving vulnerability opens our heart, right? It takes a very hardened heart to see vulnerability and exercise cruelty. So we're in the early phases really of extrapolating a lay path from a monastic tradition. Are we renouncing samsara? Are we redeeming samsara? Are we doing both? Can a kind of disenchantment and love of the human condition fit together?

On the disenchantment side, we do have this deep conditioning that there's something we could acquire that might resolve all of our longings. The Buddha says no. Until some part of us gives up on the world, we're always expecting more than the world can give us, expecting the things of the world to give us more than they can. We don't grow much on the path unless there's some measure of renouncing the world, saṃvega³. I spoke about this at the daylong at IRC a couple weeks ago. There are just too many toys, bells, promises, and distractions for our spiritual practice to take root, unless there's some sense of, "My longings will not be satiated by this world, by sensory experience."

Quoting from Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu⁴: "Saṃvega was what the young prince Siddhartha felt on his first exposure to aging, illness, and death. It's a hard word to translate because it covers such a complex range, at least three clusters of feeling at once: the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come from realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it's normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so unconsciously; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. Buddhism is not only confident that it can handle feelings of saṃvega, but it's also one of the few religions that actually cultivates them to a radical extent. Its solution to the problems of life demands so much dedicated effort that only strong saṃvega will keep the practicing Buddhist from slipping back into their old ways."

We can be completely mesmerized by samsara's shell game from cradle to grave. Just looking, looking, looking: "Where is it? Where's my life?" We can be perpetually enticed into fixing, achieving, becoming, acquiring, and owning. And then it's time to die, and everything broken cannot be fixed, and nothing is owned.

Ajahn Sumedho⁵ said the hardest thing for a human being is knowing what's enough, because you can always want more. And so there is this movement in spiritual practice, this kind of turning away. The Dharma is not something for nothing. And this is a measure of disenchantment.

And yet, the pivot here: we only want to escape samsara⁶ because we care so much about suffering—our own and that of others. We care so much about it. Maybe in the movement of becoming disenchanted, we turn away from the world because, "Well, at least I can free my own heart, that's maybe what I can manage." And that's true. That was true in 600 BC, and that's true now. But times are different now. In a way, technology and science have scaled our defilements, but also our pāramīs⁷. They have made us obviously a profound existential threat to our own existence, but they've also developed our goodness in amazing ways.

We have tremendous power to engage and help others. We understand our bodies in incredibly nuanced ways. I was at a lecture and conversation just a couple days ago learning about global health. Diarrhea is still the cause of death for several hundred thousand kids less than five. Oral rehydration solution kits with zinc cost about $3 to deliver. If you do some math, medical statistics, and analysis, if you treat several hundred kids with severe diarrheal disease, you'll save a life. It costs about $2,000, is the estimate.

So what am I supposed to do with that, you know? Renounce samsara, go back to meditating, and fiddle with the old kilesas⁸? You know, the middle path. The middle path is between "everything means everything" and "nothing means anything."

As we actually loosen our grip on the world, this dramatizes the plight of humanity. As we get space through a measure of disenchantment and letting go, that space comes to be filled with care. Our gestures of love will not turn samsara into a utopia. The First Noble Truth⁹ will never be eradicated. But yeah, this little patch of suffering, I want to care for that.

Again, this is from Ryōkan¹⁰: "When I think about the sadness of the world, their sadness becomes mine. Oh, that my priest's robe were wide enough to gather up all the suffering people in this floating world."

And we know the robe will never be wide enough. But that it were so. One foot out of this world, and one foot really, really in it.

I offer this for your consideration, and we'll be back tomorrow, probably. Sorry for any confusion about the stream; it keeps defaulting to a private stream, so I apologize if there's any confusion. May we all have a good day of practice, in the broadest sense of that word. Okay.