This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video M Brensilver - Guided Meditation: Attention, Effort, Willfulness; Dhamette: Clinging Before Clinging. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Attention, Effort, Choice and Selfing; Dharmette: The Clinging Before Clinging - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 18, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Attention, Effort, Choice and Selfing

Meditation involves directing our attention. It involves making effort. It involves exerting a certain kind of intentionality and willfulness. All of those things generally invoke a sense of self: the sense of attentional agency, the sense of making effort, the sense of intentionality.

And yet, meditation is also about a kind of awareness that doesn't depend on attentional direction. It's about effortlessness, a kind of deep relaxation, or a pure kind of receptivity. It's about choicelessness. It's about relinquishing all sense of doing, all sense of willfulness, all sense of autonomy.

Really, it is about all this stuff. It's not like the self is bad and not-self is good. In a way, one of the effects of practice over these years is the recognition that, at a deep level, I really don't care how meditation goes. The viscosity of self that arises—it's not that one is right and the other wrong—but we are learning to use different chambers of the mind, different capacities.

Sometimes I'm going to talk about directing effort and marshalling the attention in one way or another, making choices. Sometimes we do that so as to enter realms of choicelessness, effortlessness, and the absence of willfulness.

Self is not the last word of the Dharma, nor is not-self. We're not trying to vanquish some alter ego in us or something. We are just studying the ways that the intentional direction of attention, the effort we make, and the choices we make can compound the sense of the meditator orchestrating all of it.

We begin by making some choices, by directing our attention, by rallying our energy. What's the meditative anchor? What is the kind of home base for the attention? What's inside the circle that we draw that we call the focus space, and what's outside it? Maybe inside it is just the sensations of breathing, and the rest of the world is outside it.

Maybe we marshal our effort, the effort to let go of discursive thinking when it grabs us. A very gentle effort of directing our attention, spotlighting the breathing, for example. A sense of some measure of autonomy, of choice making, of strategizing, and preference. All of that's okay. So we establish some stability.

Maybe we give ourselves little mini Dharma pep talks—reminders of the wisdom it would be wise to remember now.

It's quite natural for there to be a sense of the doer and the deed, the meditator and the object, the spotlight and the stage, the worker and the effort. So much Dharma goodness develops along these lines.

But we also don't want to miss this other dimension of practice that involves a kind of deep surrender of the doer and the doing, that leaves no room for the meditator to congeal. Where matter and the mirror merge.

This is not something we can do. The doing, the sense of responsibility, is exactly what forecloses this possibility. To the extent we do anything, we surrender. Relinquishment. Trust the silence. Offer ourselves up to the Dharma's grace.

The very notion of a kind of hierarchy—not-self higher than self—guarantees the congealing of self.

The Dharma contains so many different medicines. Just take what's offered by this moment.

Dharmette: The Clinging Before Clinging

It's good to sit with you.

In Dharma practice, we often find ourselves circling back to old loves—things that maybe we put aside as we were practicing or training, and they sort of become relevant once again. I was remembering an undergraduate philosophy class where a professor said, "We are all ideas in the mind of God." They were alluding to a phrase from George Berkeley¹, from the 1700s, and the philosophical school of Idealism—the idea that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas, with no material existence.

That phrase, "we are all ideas in the mind of God," just did something to me. The Buddha was not an idealist in that sense; he believed in the reality of things, of people, of trees, of chairs. But maybe we can say in certain ways that the Buddha was an idealist about one thing: suffering. The core of all things, the Buddha said, is liberation. And the experience of suffering is far more plastic, more fluid, than a table or a chair. We have taken our suffering to be more like a chair than maybe we should.

The Dhammapada² begins, "All experience is preceded by mind, made by mind, led by mind." This is not the claim that the world doesn't exist or it's all just an idea in the mind of God. It doesn't mean that. But what it means is we are always doing something to experience. Our mind mediates all of it as more plastic than we appreciate.

When we think about clinging—this core problem the Buddha highlighted—we usually think about the very coarse level of clinging. Very obvious grasping, the craving for some sense pleasure, is very obvious. The aversion towards some unpleasantness is very obvious. But before the clinging even begins, there is clinging. Some of what we're doing in our Dharma practice is noticing the clinging before the clinging—the clinging before the eruption of very coarse level clinging.

Maybe we have the sense that we're just sitting here, waiting for the world to greet us. There are sights and sounds and thoughts and feelings. It's almost as if we imagine having no mind until there is sense contact; until something in the world hits us, there's no mind or no place for clinging to arise. It is as if the models of the world that we have are entirely reactive—they just react to incoming sense data. They are inactive or quiet, and then with experience, the models reactivate, and then maybe I'll cling.

But our models are never idle. Mind does not idle. Our models are being reiterated moment by moment, even when it's very simple, even when there's not a lot of coarse grasping or aversion.

In the chain of Dependent Origination³, the sequence that is often highlighted is: contact, feeling, craving, clinging. There is a ton of action there, and that's part of why I think we speak about feeling so much—the valence, the affective arousal. But before that even happens, there is sankhara⁴—volitional formations. Ajahn Sucitto⁵ calls the sankharas "formative energies." Sankharas shape experience; they are woven into the model we have of experience and of the world.

Maybe we say that that's the clinging before the clinging. The subtle clinging before the contact and the feeling, and then the more dramatic clinging that can arise after the feeling. But as practitioners, we're becoming more sensitive to the clinging that precedes the clinging. We're becoming more sensitive to the ways our motivations suffuse consciousness even before there's the coarse clinging. We see the ways wanting and knowing are not strictly separable.

Just in the movement of our attention—as I was highlighting in the sit—our attention often functions as a kind of appendage of our wanting. It's a profound kind of journey, subtle work, to see what the mind is doing before anything happens—before the eruption of more coarse level clinging or craving. We look at the effects of the more subtle clinging in shaping the view.

Clinging is almost woven into our biology as a kind of strategy for control, for acquisition, to manage, or just to stay okay. It is very innocent in that way. We want to appreciate the innocence of that. But in order to orchestrate our clinging, we need to make the world more solid. Everything becomes a thing. We sort of freeze the world into things. The world gets divided into that which helps and that which hinders, friends and enemies. In that gesture, the sense of self becomes reified; it becomes more real, more viscous, more congealed. The sense of this fundamental alienation of dualism is born out of clinging.

Part of what meditation is about, part of what our practice is about, is detecting and relaxing these more subtle layers of clinging—the formative energies that shape the view. We start to see that to cling, to strategize, we basically need a self.

But letting go, relinquishment, does not. The Third Zen Patriarch⁶ said, "When the subject disappears, there can be no measuring and comparing."

The need to make sense of the moment, the need to narrativize, to tell a story about the moment, the need to measure and compare, the need to freeze experience into language—this is what begins to fall away as we relax this subtler layer of clinging.

There is no room for so many of the habits that get us into trouble. We surrender. There is no impulse towards measurement, comparison, and evaluation. Everything becomes much simpler and wondrous. We are simultaneously disenchanted with Samsara⁷ but amazed too.

So we practice. We'll keep exploring. Don't let the heart's gesture of relinquishment become ensnared in the doing of self.