This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Sitting in the Bones; Dharmette: Nihilism, Disenchantment, Vastness w/ Matthew. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Sitting in the Bones; Dharmette: Between Everything Means Everything and Nothing Means Anything - Matthew Brensilver

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

Introduction

Hi folks, welcome. Some of you might have started the stream, but it got started on a private feed somewhere in some region of the interwebs. But we're here chatting, saying hello. It's a good night to be together. So, let's settle in and practice together.

Guided Meditation: Sitting in the Bones

Take some fuller breaths, the kind of breaths that reach everywhere in your body. The kind of breaths that soften your belly; the kind of breaths that signal to the cells of your body that it's actually okay to relax.

Sit down into your bones. The head and the heart can be more like air, more like space, but the bones are earth. There's a heaviness to them, a groundedness. So as this instruction goes, sit in your bones.

There's a gentle sense of the downward pull of gravity, the Earth offering itself unwaveringly. There's a heaviness to the body, but it's not a dullness; it's a heavy aliveness. Grounded, steady.

As the attention perhaps drifts upwards towards the head, towards the gaze—the kind of apparent headquarters of visual thinking—just keep pouring the attention down into the body, into your bones, as if the awareness emanated from your belly.

There's a growing stability of our body, a kind of rootedness. Thich Nhat Hanh uses the image of a mountain, a body like a mountain.

Relaxation, tranquility—it doesn't mean we have to do something. It means we're invited to stop doing most everything. Whatever strain or effort, this "doingness," you can relax. Just relax that and trust that the awareness that doesn't depend on you, the small self you, that's going to be enough. That's beautiful enough to stay awake. Grounded, sitting in your bones, a radical permission for life to arise and cease.

Because the awareness doesn't need "you"—that whirlpool of contraction that we call "me"—it can relax.

Although this stability is associated with restfulness, tranquility, and peace, we cannot forget our debt to love. Sometimes, when the body is tranquilized and restful, it's like one drop of love just flavors the whole space. The blooming, collapsing, and blossoming of body sensations becomes a way of radiating mettā¹, loving-kindness. Sometimes we practice mettā not because we're inclined to, but because we know we must.

Dharmette: Between Everything Means Everything and Nothing Means Anything

Okay, it's good to sit with you.

When I was young, even as a young kid but especially as an adolescent, I remember feeling so let down by institutions—by school, the religion I was born into, and the kind of cultural models proffered about what is meaningful, what's a reasonable life. In that disappointment, there was some discernment for sure, but mostly I was angry. It was kind of just aversion spraying everywhere, sort of fire hose style. And yet, lurking in that anger was a kind of earnest hopefulness. Maybe even amidst the cynicism, it disguised some kind of utopian fantasies, just wanting institutions to be more fair, more honest, more attuned to what happiness actually is.

Again and again, my heart would break. It was almost like the First Noble Truth constellating at the level of the group or the institution. We know the dukkha², suffering, at the level of the individual, but it also constellates at the level of the group, and it's its own unique species of dukkha.

So against that background, years later when I heard the phrase "disenchanted with samsara,"³ I was very interested. Samsara, this human realm of cyclical suffering—I associate it with the loops of suffering. "Disenchanted with samsara" seemed almost like the most profound way of expressing my disillusionment and heartbreak. It's like, "Okay, I give up. Get me out." There's one way of reading the Buddha's life, the wish not to be reborn, as something akin to "get me out of here." We know that rooting for the world guarantees a tremendous amount of suffering. For sure, that's not the end of the story.

On the one hand, disenchantment is so important because our default position is to be essentially mesmerized by samsara. To be mesmerized by samsara means that everything is real. All appearances, all phenomena, lead us to forget the vastness of space and time. We become very myopic. The appearances all mean so much—this thing, that thing, my life. All the problems are problems of conditions, and the solution is adjusting conditions. When we're mesmerized by samsara, we're often very self-absorbed, with a lot of energy in the clinging, the strategizing, and the controlling. There's a lot of hope that we might achieve a steady state, fix the brokenness. Some part of me wanted out, wanted protection. Get me out. "It's too much." That phrase has been a kind of trope across the decades for me.

As I emerged from a five-day retreat and saw the news, it was the same feeling: "too much." Caring too much or caring not at all. I could feel the pull of nihilism. I've felt that pull at various points, but the Buddha warned really clearly about that—that nothing means anything, a kind of emptiness that acknowledges no form. Rage, disappointment, and the heartbreak of institutions—aversion can masquerade as disenchantment. Nihilism can masquerade as disenchantment.

But what is it really? Disenchantment lies between "everything means everything" and "nothing means anything." "Everything means everything" is a kind of recipe for melodrama. "Nothing means anything" is cynicism. Between these two, we find our life. But to be in the middle, to hang in the balance between those two, the view must be very vast. To be neither melodramatic nor nihilistic about heartbreak takes incredible strength.

A moral philosopher, [Sidgwick?]⁴, used the phrase in a different context, but it struck me intuitively: "the point of view of the universe." That's a pretty nice encapsulation of the vastness of which I speak. A view, of course, is more than a belief. It's not a narrow cognitive thing; it's visceral. It's a felt sense, it's about perception, how we actually perceive phenomena. The view informs how we perceive everything. It's about our body, the body I was pointing to in our sit. The view is almost like the body in a certain shape of openness.

The vastness knows change. It knows just how deeply that's woven into the fabric of being. It knows dukkha, suffering. It feels like geologic time. The point of view of the universe tempers my own grandiosity that this moment in time, this life, this place, this space, means so much. The vastness of the view holds a palpable sense of the vastness of time and space—millions of light-years of space. This view doesn't discount suffering, and it doesn't discount freedom. The vastness, we could say, is simultaneously knowing emptiness and poignancy.

Empty phenomena rolling on, empty phenomena tumbling on. Who can be harmed? What can be harmed? You need solidity for something to be harmed. We've been here before; it's always been like this. Maybe it's like a very wise grandma seeing her five-year-old grandchild crying over a small cut, except the child is the universe. From that view, it truly does all belong. It can never all work out, and yet we engage our love. But it's not a confined love. If there's even a scintilla of control in the love, the heart will break again.

If we truly understood the characteristics—dukkha, anicca,⁵ anatta⁶ (suffering, impermanence, not-self)—at depth, how vast would our mind be? How vast would the view be? I sometimes talk about equanimity⁷ as love in the face of helplessness, the end of our power. In a way, the vastness is a kind of acknowledgment of the near completeness of one's helplessness, but it's married to love. And the love gets big and peaceful.

Thank you for this consideration. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you in this way.