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Guided Meditation: The Breath and Awareness don't depend on you; Dharmette: Coming Home and Leaving Home - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 09, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Welcome, folks. It is nice to see the names streaming on the side there.

One announcement: I will be away on retreat next week, so we won't have class. We will resume on the 22nd. I think there are enough teraflops of Dharma out there so we can make it a week. I was going to call the class "Certain Wednesdays"—it’s a little too cute, perhaps—given that I am very uncertain and that we would be meeting on certain Wednesdays. But "Wednesdays with Matthew" is what we ran with.

So here we are, ready to practice together. Let's settle in.

Guided Meditation: The Breath and Awareness don't depend on you

Part of why our breathing is emphasized is that our breath doesn't depend on whatever we call "me." It doesn't depend on that.

Whatever feels like the headquarters of "I-am-ness," the locus of our willfulness, the place where we must strive from, the house of our energetic vigor, our glory, and our shame—all of that... the breathing doesn't depend on any of it.

And so, just to breathe.

It can feel like, "Well, yeah, the breath does itself, but my job is to attend to it. My job is to point my attention at it, to not get distracted, to be a good yogi."

But in the end, the awareness doesn't depend on you either. You can't start it or stop it.

So, the egoless breath being received in the egoless awareness.

Emptiness knowing emptiness.

Trungpa Rinpoche¹ said we're stepping out of the bureaucracy of ego, the micromanagement of self.

We set aside a special category for self-related phenomena, but it is all made of the same stuff: rising and passing. The openness of awareness, the effortlessness of breathing.

When we are moving, our body keeps its balance with a sense of proprioception. The ego almost has its own system of proprioception—egoic proprioception—keeping tabs on self, keeping tabs on the egoic balance. So we just keep reiterating the sense of self, keep humming a kind of song of "myself." The image of our body arises, and the thinking and subtle thinking that create a sense of place within experience arise.

When this flies beneath the radar of awareness, the existence of "me" is unquestioned. But as we become sensitive to more and more of these phenomena, the self no longer feels like a home or a refuge. And modes of awareness that taste less and less like "me" come online.

Dharmette: Coming Home and Leaving Home

Dharma² practice is about coming home and leaving home. It is about loving what we have always loved and also learning to love new things. The practice is a kind of dialectic between incredible coziness and venturing out into the world in order to be startled.

We come home to what we have long known, long loved. We come home to what is familiar. Maybe we have been neglecting what we know or what we love, but when the Dharma is heard and our heart is ripe, it reawakens something. It has the flavor of recollection. Plato said all knowledge is recollection. It has that feeling of a very familiar kind of home.

Even though I had a fortunate childhood—maybe because I had that—I was on to the First Noble Truth³ early. And so, when I actually heard those words spoken, my heart just kind of lit up. There was a sense of recognition, of recollection.

As a teacher, I often have the sense that I am pointing to some love in you that perhaps you have forgotten. Something that is dormant. It is like I am connecting some dots or reawakening something you once had an intuitive sense of. It feels like a homecoming. A lot of the Dharma feels like the heart remembering itself, returning to some ancestral ground. A kind of, "Yeah, I've always loved this."

That sense of homecoming, of refuge, is so important because we are also doing something new. The path is both about loving what we have always loved and about learning to love new things. Learning to love peace more than pleasure. Space more than stuff. Awareness more than unconsciousness. Some of us have to learn dependency; others have to learn independence. The Dharma curriculum is perfectly tailored to the way you suffer, and it requires you to do something new.

Today I read a story about one of Freud's most famous disciples, Alfred Adler. At the first meeting, Adler would often ask the patient, "What would you do if you were cured?" Having the assessment, the first consultation, he asks, "Okay, what would you do if you were cured?" The patient would answer, and then he says, "Okay, now go do that."

It is compelling, right? But the patient usually can't do that. It is more complex than just a decision.

When someone says, "I want to practice more, I want to meditate each day but can't," what they are really asking is, "How do I love something new?" And when someone asks, "How do I stop hating myself?" they are asking, "How do I love something new?"

When we make New Year's resolutions, we are trying to value something new. But how does that happen? Have you ever tried to force yourself to fall in love? I can't make you fall in love with the path, and neither can you. It is not a kind of decision that you make.

What we value, what we come to love—maybe we could say it grows through small gestures. We take small actions that maybe seem insignificant. Small actions many times, small moments many times. And maybe through that, our love grows.

The philosopher Agnes Callard writes:

"We can all think back to a time when we were substantially different people, value-wise, from the people we are now. We care about things we once did not care about. How did this change come about? The transition from indifference to love cannot typically be effected by way of doing any one thing. No matter the strength of my will, it does not seem that I can muscle myself into suddenly caring.

To be sure, the path to valuing something sometimes includes momentary expressions of commitment: the moment when you say 'I do,' sign the adoption papers, or buy the one-way plane ticket to a foreign country. But these moments are themselves only part of the story, punctuating a longer process.

Coming to value something tends to represent a deep change in how one sees and feels and thinks. Acquiring a new value often alters the structure of one's priorities by demoting or even displacing something one valued before. Such changes take time, over the course of which one has done many things in service of value appreciation. The latter actions are shaped by the small changes that the earlier ones have engendered, in such a way as to allow someone to slowly develop new priorities, concerns, and attachments. The process as a whole is not structured by a single moment of intention or decision at its inception."

How do we come to love new things? We make these small gestures. As we learn to love new things, we sit quietly, or maybe we go to a group and practice with a Sangha⁴, or we reflect on goodness, or we have just a conscious moment of suffering. We are awake to it, and we plant seeds. You know, we want to do so much more, but in coming to love new things, we just plant seeds. It doesn't seem like a big deal at all.

But what does the acorn know of the oak?

And so, in coming to love things that are new, we tolerate the disorientation. We tolerate the sense of not knowing. We tolerate the loss of one's old home—this venturing out into the world to be startled by newness.

In this way, we begin to live into a Dharma life. Not something that happens at once. Not something we chose at one moment and then just begin to fulfill. But maybe at some point, there is a kind of moment where we look around and somehow—we don't know even exactly when—we realize, "I've come to love this. This is a new home."

It is very hard to track how the Dharma has transfigured our life, but it has. At some point, we wake up to this. And of course, we keep going. We are never done in coming to love new things. We appreciate our home, and we venture out. We rejoice in our home in order to leave it.

I offer this for your consideration. I wish you all a good couple of weeks, and we will see you on the 22nd. You be well.