This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Lightly Guided meditation with Matthew Brensilver; TS Eliot and the Mystical Dimension of Buddhism. It likely contains inaccuracies.

TS Eliot and the Mystical Dimension of Buddhism; Lightly Guided Meditation - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 18, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Lightly Guided Meditation

Hi folks, welcome. Good to be with you. Nice to see the names. Let's practice just relaxing your body and relaxing control.

Our preferences, at some level, are one of the ways we reiterate ourselves to ourselves—to forget, even for a moment, who we think we are. We have to put down our habitual reactions to the contents of consciousness. To truly let pleasant be pleasant. To truly let unpleasant be unpleasant. It's relaxing.

Alive in the head, heart, and belly. The awareness infusing our body.

And it's largely equanimity that allows non-proliferation. We only need to speak to ourselves about phenomena that feel like a problem, feel like a command, or have instructions for our life. Equanimity allows unpleasantness to just be the end of a sentence. Nothing more to say or do. It's very alive to this moment.

We regard the universe in this moment as a kind of exquisitely trained masseuse, only pressing on pains that need healing. Respecting the integrity of our body and mind. Willing to be softened by anything, everything. Courage to meet it all. Confident that whatever we find or feel into will only make the argument for love—the case for love—stronger.

TS Eliot and the Mystical Dimension of Buddhism

Hey folks. This is William James¹:

"Normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness. Whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question, for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes, though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region, though they fail to give a map. They forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. As if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity."

There is much about this path that is not mystical. It is the kind of ordinary, honest, manual labor of the Dharma. And that's so much of it. And paths and articulations of the practice that fetishize mystical experience get pretty weird pretty fast.

As Joseph Goldstein once said, "An experience is not a path." Some mystical experiences become woven into life, become a kind of reference point, or access point, or north star in some way. And some experiences are more like a kind of acid trip, signifying nothing.

And still, we cannot dismiss mysticism. Sometimes the kind of secular mindfulness is critiqued for leaving out sīla², ethical conduct. I've never found that to be right. Insofar as secular articulations of this path—the secular mindfulness domain—leaves something out, it's often renunciation. The depth of renunciation that's asked, and maybe we could say mysticism, too.

Any path that suggests a kind of radical break with ordinary suffering is almost by definition a mystical path. And any path that suggests that ordinary consciousness is suffused with clinging, friction, unsatisfactoriness... breaking out of that requires very different modes of consciousness.

Mysticism is many things, but one of them is the destruction of the grandiosity of ego. It involves bowing to the limits of agentic control and the dominion of willfulness. It becomes much harder to sustain our arrogance when all sense of ownership has been obliterated. Not all mystical states involve some kind of self-transcendence, but many do, and the kind of ordinary egoic reference point doesn't withstand mystical experience.

All this is to say that the Dharma is a mystical path.

To capture the mystical—and that word has so many connotations—we often have to turn to our poets. T.S. Eliot³.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know, You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess, You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not, You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know. And what you own is what you do not own. And where you are is where you are not.

I'm not a scholar and I don't know how to read poetry truly closely, and there is much ugliness in T.S. Eliot's life, but all that is familiar. This is often read as a kind of species of Christian mysticism or a hard turn to Anglicanism in his life. But mystics really tend to sound like each other, whatever their core spiritual home base is.

So, "to arrive where you are." Where we are is not where we are. There's a kind of journey to here, arriving in the same place.

"You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy." The path of emptiness includes some very, very incredibly dry terrain. And dry is just a kind of metaphor, but captures something. Welcome to the desert of the real—Laurence Fishburne's character in The Matrix⁴, right? All phenomena are interchangeable with all other phenomena, and the juiciness is usually in the preference. And now the juiciness is in distinctions. And here, in this way wherein there is no ecstasy, the distinctions stop and everything tastes exactly the same.

"To arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance." Ignorance of ignorance is delusion. And in such bewilderment, we can't help but keep colliding with other people and things—bumping up, hurting, being hurt. We're always trying to keep our egoic footing. It feels like our proprioceptive sense⁵—you know, the sense of balance. Our proprioceptive sense is measuring load and velocity and position. And to keep our egoic footing, our egoic balance, we cling to our knowing, keep reiterating models of self and world. And the reiteration is partially what keeps our balance.

But now we must go the way of ignorance. There are many Dharma places to which you cannot bring your knowing.

"In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession." In order to arrive in a subjectivity that feels like home, you must go by the way of homelessness. We are homesick in some way. And Dharma is an attempt to respond to the sense of homesickness. But we must abide in not knowing, become alienated from all that we thought we knew, all that we thought we owned.

I had friends who would sit all night, meditate all night, and they made one mental note. It wasn't "breathing in, breathing out." It was one mental note and they would make it out loud, for all phenomena. Anything they noticed, one note—partially to keep each other up. And the note was: "Don't know." Imagine a night like that. Very strange friends.

Relinquish all that you do not own. The Buddha says, "And what do you not own? Everything. The aggregates⁶. Everything."

The formula slightly changes: "In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not." We must go through the way in which we are not. "Who am I?" Must be answered a thousand times: "Not this. Not this." "Who am I?" Cannot be answered. If we are anything, you cannot be in the ordinary self-sense to figure out all that you are not.

"And what you do not know is the only thing you know." There is relief there, kind of blessings of a profound equanimity with not knowing. Knowing sometimes is just another egoic charade or an emanation of fear.

In the Atthakavagga⁷, the Buddha says: "One who's attached argues over doctrines. How and with what does one argue with someone unattached, embracing nothing, rejecting nothing? Right here, a person has shaken off every view."

"And what you own is what you do not own. And where you are is where you are not." The folly of possession and ownership. The egoic fantasy of ownership. One way to understand anatta⁸—not-self—is something like non-ownership. Whatever ground you claim is... what is owned is obliterated by space. Where you are is where you're not.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know, You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess, You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not, You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know. And what you own is what you do not own. And where you are is where you are not.

I offer this for consideration. Take whatever is useful and leave the rest behind.

I wish you a good couple of weeks. Stay close to the Dharma. It's not a time to stop practicing it. You know, it may seem like it, but it's not. So, get Dharma cozy in some way and find a way to practice. I look forward to gathering in 2026.

Okay. Thank you.