This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Matthew Brensilver Guided Sit - Establishing Tranquility; Dharmette: Faith in Our Dharma Practice. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Establishing Tranquility; Faith in Our Dharma Path (1 of 5) - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 11, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Establishing Tranquility

So, let's settle in. We settle into the posture and we see what the silence wants to tell us this morning, this day.

Maybe it is less like we tell ourselves what to do when we start meditating, and more like we listen to the silence and take our cues from that.

Relax whatever can be relaxed. Grant permission for whatever tension remains to remain. As we relax, maybe in dramatic ways or subtle ways, the view changes. The view from the vantage point of some tranquility changes; everything looks different. It is not that the problems of our life or the complexities of it all resolve, but everything looks different from the vantage point of tranquility. And so, even if there is just one degree of tranquility, you notice this.

Tranquility is supported by narrowing the attentional field. Not insisting that other experiences stop or turning anything into an enemy of meditation, but the attention spotlights some phenomena and leaves the rest of the world in the background, in the dark. And so maybe the sensations of breathing are spotlighted.

It is like we just make our home there, not bracing as the rest of the world knocks on that door, but our home is there. We become more intimate with the sensations of breathing. Our world, what we call our life, becomes much simpler.

Of course, our worry begs for our attention, demands our attention, and says, "There are so many things to solve." The contingency of our existence—each demands attention. And yet, if all we are ever doing is solving the problem of another moment—and it is very possible to live a whole life only ever doing that—if that is all we are doing, the heart gets fatigued.

So we consent to the kind of vulnerability, the exposure of non-worry, of not keeping tabs on every problem we have or house. We develop a kind of faith in the silence.

I will be quiet for some minutes as we deepen the intimacy with this smaller aperture of attention.

[Silence]

Stabilizing the inner gaze. Even with our eyes closed, it is almost like visual attention is surveying the landscape for threats, problems that need to be solved. So we stabilize the inner gaze, a kind of soft gaze at the blankness behind our closed eyes. Keep feeling nourished by our breathing, whatever pleasure might be there. The way the inhale answers our oxygen hunger; the way our exhale expels what is used up.

Often our suffering involves some measure of a kind of hyperarousal—not always, but often. So we nurture this tranquility, a kind of refuge of making the aperture of attention smaller, the ways we feel less bombarded by experience. Then we notice how the view changes when there is some measure, even a tiny measure, of tranquility on board.

"All experience is preceded by mind."¹

Faith in Our Dharma Path (1 of 5)

Okay, so welcome. Welcome, folks. It is nice to sit with you.

The theme this week is facets of faith in Dharma practice.

That word "faith" has historically evoked some measure of suspicion in me. I thought that word was what people invoked when they didn't have evidence for believing something but wanted to believe anyway.

Early in practice, I intuitively sensed the power of the Dharma. It was pushing deep buttons inside me. In sensing that power, I sort of felt it was a little intoxicating. I could sense the intoxicating potential of giving myself over to something. I didn't know what I was giving myself over to. I wanted to be careful; I wanted to be careful not to give away too much of my mind. So I would kind of dip my toe into practice and then pull my toe out.

At the same time, I did have a sense that some measure of surrender was really required to deepen—that the gates of Dharma are closed to those who will not surrender. That was about twenty-five years ago, a quarter-century. It is really kind of wild. Maybe without knowing it, faith kind of snuck up on me, and now just animates Dharma practice to a large extent.

So what is this faith? It is not faith in samsara²—it is not faith that everything works out okay. It is not a naive hope, and it is not pretending that some data, some aspects of our experience, need to be discounted. We might think, "Okay, I can be faithful if I am paying attention to this, but if I actually allow all that pain in, then I don't know, the faith wobbles."

When we don't have trust in the path of awareness, it seems like some experiences must be disavowed. But that gets us into a kind of pretend mode where we write off some aspects of experience, pretend they don't exist. When we pretend, we confuse ourselves; we alienate ourselves. The Dharma never asks you to pretend. Your faith never asks you to pretend. It might ask you to check out a different view, but it never asks you to pretend.

And so faith is compatible with a kind of openness to all data and evidence. I have come to associate faith not with naivety, but with a certain kind of dropping of defensiveness. Faith is less a rigid set of views and more the heart's gesture of surrender. This is how we let go into our path.

Faith tolerates not knowing. It is not filling the unknown or uncertainty with rigid views; it is more a kind of trusting something about one's heart. Etymologically, the word apparently has a connotation of "to place your heart upon." Where do you place your heart? Where do we seek our redemption? Where do we invest our hope?

Ajahn Sucitto³ said something like: Generally, people say the path begins with Wise View. Then we establish Wise View; that is where the path begins. He said, "Yeah, fair enough. But the path truly begins when the Buddha walks into your heart." That is the arising of a certain kind of faith. I recognize that language parallels other traditions, but there is something about that that feels right: the Buddha walking into one's heart.

Faith, I realize, is a certain kind of optimism. That is a word I don't know if I have ever used in a Dharma talk actually—optimism. It is weird because we talk so much about dukkha⁴—comprehending suffering and unsatisfactoriness. All these years of comprehending dukkha, and yet at some level, it has made me quite optimistic. Optimistic about at least some things.

It is not an unwavering optimism about the world. I have incredible reverence for the destructiveness of greed, hate, and delusion; for the ways in which that gets scaled in our world, the ways in which it is being scaled by technology. Incredible respect for the power of that. So, not optimistic in certain ways.

But optimism about the heart-mind, and optimism about the capacity of our own heart. If I had to characterize them, I might say Buddhist teachers tend to be a little bit bearish about the future, but bullish about human potential.

There is an optimism about looking, about awareness—that no matter what pain is being known, the knowing of it makes something else also true. An optimism about this longing for veracity, this truth-seeking—that whatever we discover will make love more rather than less urgent. There is a faith in that. Knowing that, yeah, the truth can hurt—it can hurt a lot—but it won't harm your heart. And that is very different. It is a faith in something like... like the data⁵ will hurt for sure, but need not harm your heart.

Faith is what allows surrender to feel safe enough. Faith is a willingness to fall. A lot of Dharma is about falling—sometimes gracefully, often without any grace whatsoever. But it is about falling; it is about groundlessness. But a trust develops that in the groundlessness, in the falling, love will catch you. Awareness will catch you. The Dharma will catch you. So, faith in that.

When this arises, you really no longer wonder at all if you might be excluded from the Buddha's grace. You no longer feel like you are following someone else's path, or assimilating to someone else's tradition. No, you find your belonging in the Dharma.

And so this week: aspects of faith. Aspects of faith emerging from doubt, faith in love, confidence in oneself, faith and letting go. This will be the theme. So happy to be with you and feel connected, just knowing you are out there practicing.

Okay folks, wishing you a good day.