This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Awareness and Effortlessness; Dharmette: Fear and Language. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Awareness and Effortlessness; Dharmette: Fear and Language - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 02, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Awareness and Effortlessness

Welcome, folks. I will say a few words, and then we will sit.

To let go of our narrative project—what we call our life, "my so-called life"—is hard. It is difficult not to embed all phenomena in a coherent narrative web. We sort of just keep adding the moment to the story of "me," just keep adding a tiny, thin little chapter to our autobiography. We don't check that habit at the door when we start to meditate. It is as if every meditative phenomenon—every experience with concentration or distraction, with pleasure and pain—all of that gets incorporated into this narrative structure. It is sometimes like the Morgan Freeman Dharma voiceover with our meditation. It is very natural and adaptive in a lot of ways.

But awareness renounces language. I have been beginning to pick up on this theme. A week ago, I was reading a book by Thomas Metzinger¹, The Elephant and the Blind. It contains hundreds of case reports. Metzinger is a very interesting character, a traditionally trained analytic philosopher and meditator. I think he got something like 1,400 reports from meditators about awareness. He is using philosophical precision with a lot of direct reports and his own practice.

At one point he writes:

"Phenomenologically², deep silence is the uncontracted quality of silent knowing itself, empty cognizance lacking any form of grasping or inner agency. It’s not only non-conceptual; it’s also characterized by a principle of mental inaction. It never reacts, it never makes a choice, it never initiates an action. As one participant put it, 'Pure awareness is that which never speaks.' Pure awareness is that which would not even say 'I am.' That which says 'I am,' that which never speaks, is something else. This is an entirely silent and non-conceptual experience of the phenomenal character of awareness itself."

When the object is just the capacity to know, all the ordinary phenomena of awareness fade out. The capacity to know the phenomenal character of awareness itself is what is known.

The meditation instructions, what we say to do, are in a way mimicked by the qualities of deep silence. We say "let go," we say "don't fight," we say "choicelessness," we say "relinquish willfulness," we say "tolerate the disorientation of non-thinking." We give all these instructions, all these things that in a sense we try to do. But when we have done them, these become actually effortless, natural qualities of awareness itself. All of the relinquishment, the willfulness, the choicelessness, the depth of the surrender, the way in which we are no longer tinkering with samsara³ at all—this is the quality of awareness.

I will give instructions, things maybe we do, or things that plant Dharma seeds in the mind. In a sense, we are just developing trust that at the end of our doing, there is effortlessness. All these instructions are pointing to something. Instructions mirror the fruit in a way. I may be venturing out of my Theravadan⁴ territory—I am not really sure, to be honest—but this is what is occurring to me.

So, let’s sit.

Maybe take a really full breath, just relaxing whatever can be relaxed.

[Silence]

Developing a certain kind of frictionlessness with the First Noble Truth⁵, frictionlessness with imperfection. Friction requires a narration. Where there is friction, we have to understand it; we have to embed it in a narrative, game it out.

[Silence]

So equanimity⁶ is a kind of stance in relation to experience where we are not fighting, not generating friction with imperfection. This way, we invite a kind of silence.

[Silence]

Perhaps we make some effort to attend to, say, the breathing. Make some effort so at some point we can relinquish all willfulness, all choice-making. It is like all the forks in the road that we always imagine dissolve.

[Silence]

Who you are, what you want, and what you hate—all the administrative details of any given life—just lose their seductive power. The moment is no longer a problem to be solved, to be optimized.

[Silence]

So we do, but only so we can not do.

[Silence]

Maybe we can say we trust silence more than sound.

[Silence]

Your life doesn't depend on you. Awareness doesn't depend on you. It is not something you do. So it comes to feel safe to rest.

[Silence]

Dharmette: Fear and Language

It is good to sit with you. Just to say that I sort of presume some familiarity with practice in these sessions. Unfortunately, if you came here to learn meditation as a first go, there are lots of good resources at IMC—intro classes and great recordings. I am not trying to absolve myself completely of irresponsibility, but just to flag that.

Sometimes when a monastic gives a Dharma talk, the Sangha says at the end, "Sadhu, sadhu⁷." Sometimes that is rendered as "well said" or "it is well," but it connotes that the words have been received, that there is some kind of nourishment in the words.

I was talking all about silence, and then somebody said, "Yeah, but you love words." And it is true, I do. I love words. I try to be careful with words, try to use them as best I can to create a kind of atmosphere of Dharma where the sense of the Dharma is more palpable. I have always been kind of skeptical about attempts to essentially deify silence and demonize language. Sometimes when people say, "Well, the path or this experience is ineffable, it is unspeakable," I often have a sense of, "Well, I get that, but actually we can say a lot about that experience." We can say a lot about this aspect of the path or that aspect. It is not that we can't say anything; it is just that language sometimes seems to defile the beauty of such experiences. So we can say a lot.

I am becoming more aware of the ways that language functions as the primary tool in Mara's⁸ toolbox. Mara is this kind of embodiment of suffering, forces of suffering. I am becoming more aware of the connection between fear and language, fear and thought.

Thinking is usually described as the cause of dukkha⁹, the cause of suffering. We get that: wrong view, wrong understanding, all of that. Our life project becomes very muddled when we hold wrong view—when we hold the view, for example, that hatred works. Life gets extremely muddled. And so the Dharma is a kind of cognitive therapy that helps us change our thinking, our schemas, to reduce suffering.

But the flip side is also worthy of our consideration: that thinking is the product of suffering, rather than just a cause. Maybe we put it like this: where there is peace and security, we would not feel any compulsion whatsoever to speak or think about oneself or the world.

But fear, as the brain scientist Kay Tye said, has an authoritarian command over the rest of the brain. The challenge of anicca¹⁰—uncertainty—is so huge. Its effects are so pervasive. The Buddha put his finger right on it. The effects of the pervasiveness of grappling with anicca—this kind of small, very soft, fragile creature amidst unimaginably vast forces—what am I to do? Think.

We are preoccupied with arranging our security. And so we differentiate and conceptualize and categorize: friend and foe, threat and opportunity. We put everything into buckets, explain it in relation to everything that has come before. Information is sometimes described as the reduction of uncertainty. To have information is to reduce the measure of uncertainty, and we are so hungry for information. We are so hungry to decode this feeling or that sound. In our practice, we ask, "What does this mean?"

Anicca feels like risk, like a kind of ongoing threat. Meaning-making revolves around this kernel of fear. In other words, language is the tool we use to manage anicca, to reduce this sense of uncertainty. We talk about the pain of thinking, for sure—oh my goodness, for sure. But there is a deeply self-soothing quality we should also investigate. Even when the thinking is really bleak, as painful as thinking is, to not think is more painful.

And so fear sends us into the kind of dingy workshop of our mind, the headquarters that I call "Matthew." Clinging is the implementation of craving. Clinging is strategizing, and strategizing perhaps always involves some measure of language. Language is the tool we use to orchestrate our clinging. I use that word "orchestrate" deliberately. Language is the hammer; every problem is a nail.

The arising of a problem needs a subject—a kind of egoic form of awareness with me, Matthew, at the center. Every problem involves measurement and comparing and a subtle sense of alienation, the world experienced as heavy. The alienation of a subtle kind of dualism: object weighing on subject.

The Third Zen Patriarch¹¹, some 1,500 years ago or something, said: "When the subject disappears, there can be no measuring and comparing."

The very sense of self involves measurement and comparison. The sense of the weightiness of problems involves the kind of alienation of language.

Maybe we say Awakening doesn't solve our problems. Awakening arises when we have no problems. When we have no problems, we don't need language, and we don't need a self. We don't need to orchestrate the moment into a coherent narrative.

"Okay, yeah, but what on earth could it possibly mean to have no problems, given our sensitive bodies, given the First Noble Truth, given everything? What could that possibly mean?"

Well, all these words are just upaya¹², skillful means—maybe not even so skillful, but they are all upaya. This is one way of nudging the mind. But to have no problems means, even for just a moment, we trust letting go more than holding on. Even for a moment, awareness feels more urgent, more important than anything else. It is like awareness is fully satiating. There is such a deep sense of safety in that, that all phenomena are treated as false alarms. We are no longer trying to decode the meaning of this sensation or that sound. All phenomena are the Buddha's plea to let go.

And then we begin to really place a certain kind of faith in silence. Not a kind of willful gesture; it is like we trust the karmic momentum of our practice, of our wholesomeness. We place our faith in silence, and then everything gets very quiet, except awareness.

I offer this for your consideration. And do remember, every teaching can be used or misused. We do our best to use teachings so they may be of benefit for you and those you touch.

Wishing you a good week.