This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Attention as Prayer; Dharmette: Faith in Love. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Attention as Prayer; Dharmette: Faith in Love (3 of 5) - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 13, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Attention as Prayer

A line from Simone Weil says, "Attention taken to its highest degree is the same thing as prayer."

Classically, attention is said to be a neutral factor—wholesome or unwholesome—but what I believe she is pointing to is that the more deeply intimate we get with experience, the more profoundly the sense of the "meditator" falls away. The meditator becomes the meditated.

The attention that normally feels like, "Well, I am operating the spotlight of attention behind the scenes in some way," falls away. The effortlessness of awareness—the emptiness of awareness—becomes enchanted, devotional, and inseparable from a certain kind of nonviolence. Attention becomes prayer.

Right view isn't something that gets added to attention; it is like the attention and view converge. We know what the Buddha was talking about, and there is something very deeply devotional and heartfelt that becomes prayer.

May we pray together.

Letting your body find its posture.

We maybe start practice with a more dualistic sense of the willfulness of some instructions.

Relax your body.

Release tension.

Allow whatever tension remains to remain.

Direct your attention to your body, or your breath, to the soundscape, or to some attentional anchor.

We begin to kindle the fires of devotion, prayer, reverence.

We offer our heartfelt forgiveness for imperfection. Our heartfelt forgiveness for samsara¹, this realm of cyclical suffering.

How deeply can you forgive? And of course, whatever you think "you" are is fully included in the forgiveness.

Sometimes our love and our attention migrate out to other objects—our love of safety, of pleasure, of knowing security. Even our worry testifies to a certain kind of love or protectiveness.

We recommit to this kindling of the sacred. It begins even when it feels like we are in low gear, or something feels clunky. We keep offering our attention until it becomes prayer. Until the effortlessness of awareness—that which is not "me"—is apparent.

And it no longer feels like the meditator is behind the control panel directing the attentional spotlight to the breath or the body. The clunkiness of "me" directing my attention towards the breath becomes the grace of awareness, emptiness.

That clunkiness of "I am-ness"—the clunkiness of self, of feeling like the meditation is all up to us—yields to that which implies we do not own, control, or direct it. Almost like we relax all the mechanisms of doing and "selfing" and let awareness find us.

The sense of self manifests as agenda, tension, a sense of responsibility to work out our redemption in the "rag and bone shop of the heart." But the meditator becomes the meditated.

A certain kind of faith in love, awareness. Then we can let go, be groundless, and something will catch us.

Dharmette: Faith in Love (3 of 5)

It is good to sit with you.

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —
love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
— Louise Glück², Crossroads

The theme has been faith—faith and the manifestations of doubt. I said yesterday that information is the reduction of uncertainty, and doubt can't take in information; it is all noise, no signal.

Today I wanted to speak about another aspect of faith that has been important to me, which I was alluding to in the sit: the faith we develop in love.

Love is said to be the glue of the universe, that which prevents things from disintegrating. We know this aversion, hatred, aggression—this runs so deep in us. This is with us until we are very, very free. To actually manage our aversion, to manage our hate, we develop something akin to a faith in love.

In our evolutionary history, across millions of years of our animal ancestors, aggression appeared before affiliation. Maybe we say it doesn't sound great, but hate predated love—something like this. It is a very potent force in us. It has been conserved forever.

Hatred breeds its own kind of fundamentalism. There is so much certainty in a mind that is mired in hate. It admits of no nuance. It is a very seductive force in the mind. It is like, "Well, what is the point? There is hate everywhere." It feels like the only way to respond.

But if there is a point to our life—if there is a point to anything—it will involve love.

Here, faith inserts a measure of doubt in the view forged by aversion. We cultivate a faith in love, a trust in its redemptive power. Where else are we going to look to redeem suffering, changingness, finitude, and death? Where else should we pray?

There is a kind of trust that develops over time, over the months and years of practice, that deep happiness is utterly dependent on love. They are inextricably bound. There is no closed-hearted happiness. For sure, there is closed-hearted pleasure, there is closed-hearted excitement, but deep happiness entails open-heartedness.

Maybe we say something like, "Love is somehow aligned with the architecture of our nervous system." If we are to be at peace, it will involve open-heartedness.

We have these very vivid, repeated, conscious experiences of the dead end of anger. Of course, I acknowledge that anger sometimes has something vitally important to tell us—that some boundary has been crossed, or something can't be condoned. Some "no" of love must be issued. I don't dispute that at all. For some people, coming into anger, embodying that knowing, permitting it, and finding ways of expressing it is a critical developmental milestone.

But whatever wisdom is there in our anger, in our aversion, there is always a kernel of delusion too. How many times do I need to feel regret about my aversion to learn that it can't end well? How many more times will I need?

We become devoted, faithful in love. We see the kind of confusion that must be nurtured to stay fully mired in anger. The Buddha said that to see causality, conditionality, is to see the paticcasamuppada³. To see paticcasamuppada is incompatible with hatred. There is no place to paint the hate. But paticcasamuppada is fully compatible with love.

It is important to see that in our anger, we fail to follow the chain of cause and effect far enough. We stop when it is convenient. We look, and then we stop because we have the sense that if we keep going—if we keep following causality, if we keep investigating conditionality—I am going to have to give up this anger.

As practitioners, we keep going. We don't get off the train of investigation that maintains our hate. We keep going. We develop a kind of faith in love: that emotion held with wisdom terminates in love.

We follow the thread of our emotional longing: "This happened, that happened, I felt this sense..." We follow that thread, and there is a certain kind of trust that it terminates in love.

Martha Nussbaum⁴ said, "Our emotional life maps our incompleteness." She says that all of our emotion testifies to need. All of our emotional life announces human need, and need, in its own way, is innocent.

So we develop this faith in love, and we follow the emotional thread to its root. We follow it to innocence. We practice in ourselves, consciously sensing the dissipation of emotion, the end of a feeling, the sensation of a feeling. What is left when feeling dissolves?

The lesson of that following—following the intensity, the dissipation, the ending of feeling—never leads us to the conclusion of hate, but to non-hate. A certain kind of genius of the Brahmaviharas⁵—of kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity—is that we follow the thread of our emotional intensity and our emotion terminates in one of the four Brahmaviharas.

So we follow the thread. We keep looking, and we have this trust. If we look fearlessly deeply, with this kind of profound attention, we don't land in hate; we find ourselves in kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

This faith deepens and begins to cast a shadow over our hate. It is the thing we can remember even as we forget so much in the grips of aversion, resentment, or hatred. The shadow of love is there. A faith we develop in love is there.

I offer this for your consideration. I wish you all a good day.