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Guided Meditation: Language as Safety; Dharmette: Reflections on a RJ Davidson Quote - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 25, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Language as Safety

Welcome. I have been thinking about you much today and am happy to sit together.

The most common misconception about meditation is that thinking is the problem. "If I'm thinking, I can't meditate," right? It is not that thinking is the problem, but perhaps our overtrust in the capacity of language to solve our problems is the problem. Language is like the hammer, and every problem, every unpleasantness, is a nail. Part of what we are doing in our meditation practice is renouncing the seduction of language. The Dharma¹ is a therapy not based in words, but in action and in awareness.

We will sit with this in mind. I will unfold this more after we sit. Find a posture that feels sustainable.

Relax whatever can be relaxed. Whatever tension remains, just grant full permission for imperfection. Part of why we relax is that the urgency to fix unpleasantness recedes when there is more neutrality. We do what we can to relax, and we do what we can to prepare our heart for the inevitability of unpleasantness, of imperfection, of all the things that feel urgent and become very sticky for our attention.

Rather than be surprised that any moment could feel wrong, we just know that is a part of the human condition. It drains some of the urgency to fiddle with conditions. Just resting. You don't need words to rest. Whenever feeling comes up, we are so accustomed to soothing and medicating that feeling with our words. Part of what we are doing in mindfulness practice is absorbing the intensity of the human condition without resorting to language as our savior.

With the breathing, we might have a subtle image or subtle thought of the breath arising and passing, but we are just feeling the breath. We don't need words.

How much uncertainty can we tolerate before we need to tell a story about it? God is not the enemy; there are no enemies in experience. We are emerging from our overtrust in language. We are renouncing the ways we habitually use our language or thinking to control our inner life.

There are times when this is not at all the case, but very likely right now, language doesn't make us any safer in this moment. So we let go into the world of feeling. We let go into silence. Relax our overtrust in words—the hammer making every intensity the nail.

Anicca² feels like risk, and words feel like safety. But the deeper safety is the cultivation of wisdom and love.

Dharmette: Reflections on a RJ Davidson Quote

It is good to sit with you.

I appreciate interdisciplinary dialogue where Buddhist scholars and scientists are talking, genuinely trying to understand. There is respect for the capacities or the many chambers of the heart, and also respect for empiricism—for the sense that evidence counts and we can always be wrong.

This comes from one of those interdisciplinary teams: Richard J. Davidson³ and colleagues. I wanted to read their very condensed version of what they hypothesize mindfulness meditation training does. The authors write:

Core capacities gained through mindfulness meditation training can be stated as follows:

The capacity to sustain present-centered awareness is facilitated by the moment-by-moment focus on the meditation object.

Meta-awareness is cultivated primarily through monitoring for distractions. When, as is frequently the case, a distracting chain of thought captures attention and pulls it away from the object, dereification is trained by recognizing that the thoughts are just thoughts and not reality.

Non-reactivity to experience is cultivated by rehearsing the non-averse or curious, non-judging stance towards experience.

Changes in self-related processing occur through dereification of self-concept and a decrease in autobiographical narrative thinking.

The movement of this path—and I am sort of on this trip around it these days—is towards a life less mediated by language. It is a progressive move towards a life that is less mesmerized by the realm of thought. It might seem like language is just what we use to describe the world—I am using it right now, of course—but actually, it shapes experience more than we tend to imagine.

The authors say we are training in "present-centered awareness." There isn't a thing called "the present" that we pay attention to. Really, what is often meant by "be present" is simply not to be identified with discursive thought. We use the meditation anchor almost like a snack that we feed our hungry attention. We feed our hungry attention something because we are cultivating non-identification with discursive, auditory thinking.

We initiate and sustain that contact with the meditative anchor, and then "meta-awareness is cultivated by monitoring for distractions." We are tending to the breathing, but the connection is fraying. The gravitational force field of thinking is pulling, and we can still feel the pull consciously before we are absorbed into it. These embryonic thoughts just beg us to think them. The feeling I have is that if they could talk, these embryonic thoughts would say, "I need you, Matthew. I need you. Do not neglect me."

I want to take good care of you; I'm a nice person. I am teasing, of course, but it is actually serious. "Don't neglect me, or you may suffer. Don't neglect me, or you may die," to make it the most dramatic. That gravitational pull feels like we must get involved. As I said in the sit, unreliability, uncertainty, and impermanence are felt as risk. The Buddha put his finger on something unbelievable: Anicca is felt as risk, and thoughts feel like the only tool we have to manage anicca.

We feel that gravitational pull, and it is like a black hole. I don't know anything about black holes, but I think there is a pulling, an event horizon. Before we are devoured, before we cross over the event horizon and the black hole does whatever it does to us, we reconnect that frayed connection with the meditative anchor. Once we cross the event horizon, we are gone. We are absorbed in thought. We don't know we are meditating; we don't know we are human; we don't know anything.

Then we wake up from the dream of identification, the bubble of that thought pops, and we train in what they call "dereification." Thought is known as thought. Mindfulness is about appreciating phenomena as phenomena, rather than phenomena as the world, or as the mirror of the world. We normally just take the world to be the world. We are learning to appreciate the six sense gates—the five sense gates and the mind—to appreciate phenomena as phenomena. We are no longer mistaking auditory thought as essentially God's word. We are appreciating it as phenomena that arises and passes.

You might say, "Wait, wait, wait, but some thoughts are true." Yes, for sure, some thoughts are more true than others. Lunch is before dinner, not after. Absolutely. But taking that very simple statement as true does something to the mind. When we are identified with thought, there is some confinement. If we are being poetic, we might say that not knowing is more free than knowing.

They go on: "Non-reactivity is cultivated by rehearsing a curious, non-averse stance towards experience." This is equanimity⁴. It is absolutely amazing how much smoke arises off the engine of resistance to unpleasant feeling. We practice what Shinzen Young⁵ called a "radical permission to feel." Equanimity is a radical permission to feel.

In a way, that present-centered awareness is parasitic on some measure of equanimity. Without equanimity, we are always rehearsing or clinging. Our contact with the present moment is buffered by the strategizing that clinging involves. We are releasing that friction so that we can make more and more unmediated contact with sense experience.

Then they make a little bit of a leap to say that "changes in self-related processing occur through dereification of self-concept and a decrease in autobiographical narrative thinking."

First, we see the emptiness of whatever stray thought we have. It is not so hard to see the thought about dinner. It is just phenomena arising and passing. The image of the object of sense pleasure arises, and then the identification is broken. We wake up to the fact that it is a thought. It is dereified. We were mesmerized by it for a moment, but it arises and passes. We become un-mesmerized, and while it is not like the thought didn't happen, it is just a million light-years away from the project of my life. That is a thought about dinner.

But thoughts about me? About Matthew? Oh my goodness, the pros and cons of Matthew—that is a big deal. Those thoughts are really real. "How is this night going? This Dharma talk is stupid." Those thoughts? Dereification? No thank you. Reification, right?

Wait. No. They are made of the same thing. The grasping and aversion we have with respect to our self-view, to the story of self, begins to dissolve in the same way that the identification with the thought about dinner dissolves. It is mere phenomena, not actually more personal than the thought about dinner.

And so, the most potent gravitational force in the universe—"Me"—starts to weaken. We don't retreat to the house of self to assess our life or to navigate the complexities of being human. The story of self becomes dramatically less sticky. There is less self, but much, much more life.

I offer this for your consideration, and I hope that it serves you in some way. I look forward to being back next time.