This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Pervasiveness of Craving; Dharmette: Craving....Suffering, Suffering...Craving. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Pervasiveness of Craving; Dharmette: Craving>Suffering, Suffering>Craving - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 01, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Welcome, folks. It's nice to see some names over there, a lot of warm associations. So, welcome. We'll sit as we do. I'll guide something, I don't know what, we'll see what the moment brings and we can enjoy each other virtually.

Guided Meditation: Pervasiveness of Craving

So, just gently take your Dharma posture, a posture of your heart.

Tranquility and alertness in some dynamic tension. Sometimes we stretch up towards the sky, our spine, but then give the rest of our body to the downward pull of the earth, gravity.

Craving, clinging, holding on, attachment creates waves of tension. It's so hard to control experience. Some part of us never wants to let go, maybe another part of us is really ready to surrender. Surrender to the goodness and the imperfection of this moment. And in that gesture of surrender, the possibilities become more apparent.

So before we even try to pay attention to something, we notice the little whirlpools of holding on and control, of shaping ourselves, of proving ourselves, getting somewhere. And we deeply relax.

And you don't get to have the exact life you thought you wanted. Nobody gets the exact life they wanted. So whatever heartache there may be, in a very small microcosm way or big, we just breathe into that.

And here, here is my life, this moment, this breath. This is what it's like to be me, to be human. Then let me honor it by not pushing and pulling on it, molding and shaping.

And so now, paying attention to our breathing is not a test, it's not a task, but a kind of pleasure.

That we can influence our life creates the illusion that we control it or we own it. But we don't exactly own our life, and meditation is a way of honoring that.

In management, it's said you give an employee a lot of responsibility and very little power. So, very painful, very compromised. And that's kind of how our mind feels: a world of responsibility, not much power. And so we're very anxious, frantically adjusting any knob we can get our hands on. Can we trust awareness?

Thinking is coping. Nothing wrong with coping, but maybe we don't need to cope with this moment, but instead can receive it. The heart can be penetrated by it, can trust this moment to become wisdom, love.

Dharmette: Craving>Suffering, Suffering>Craving

Okay, so good to sit with you. It was a little bit of a somber meditation, but my heart is good. A question that was submitted some weeks ago says, "S.N. Goenka says attachment and suffering are always found together. He says we're addicted to the condition of craving; the object is secondary. Craving becomes a habit we cannot break. This is interesting to me because when I look at the object of craving, then it fades, a kind of letting go. Could you talk about the condition of craving and how to feel that? It seems it would be going more to the heart of the matter."

So, I thought to let that be the launching point. The Buddha said to study the Dharma is to study causality, cause and effect. Causes and conditions, supporting conditions—this is the realm of science, where in an experiment you sort of control everything to isolate the cause and then see what the effects are.

Generally in Buddhist circles, the interest is in one particular effect, namely suffering. And suffering is the effect of causes. The tradition highlights craving and clinging. Attachment, clinging, is the kind of elaboration and strategizing sponsored by the craving. But suffering is not merely an effect; it's a cause. It can be the cause of tremendous goodness or tremendous destruction. A lot of our path is asking, how can suffering be a cause of goodness? Our suffering leads to the critical realization of, "I don't know what's going on exactly. Maybe I've been wrong. Maybe there's a path." Suffering can be a cause for purification, the untangling of the heart from greed and hate. Suffering can be the cause of love and understanding. And suffering, of course, can be the cause of more problems—bad strategies that grow out of our suffering, meant to manage suffering but compound it.

The cyclical nature of it. Normally the formulation is craving leads to suffering. Craving and clinging lead to suffering. But I think, as Stephen Batchelor added, also suffering leads to craving. The reverse. Suffering leads to craving. Unhappiness leads us to crave. So much of our compulsive acquisition and materialism is a function of that. So much fantasizing about some perfect pleasure, that fantasizing emerges out of a sense of incompleteness.

But it's not just objects that cause craving. It's not that there are things out there in the world and that causes the craving. Even if donuts had never been invented, no human had ever heard of a donut, I would still want donuts. It's not that the objects cause craving. Craving points us back; the seeds lie within. Maybe we say craving is the condition of needing anything to change. It's a kind of tension, and craving is the sort of natural response to suffering when we do not have equanimity¹, clarity. It's the natural response to suffering. Something's wrong. "All right, what do I do?" Crave something. Crave some answer, some soothing, some pleasure, the riddle to be resolved. And so craving and suffering are very, very closely knotted together.

I say that, and that's kind of bold language in a way, but don't get idealistic about it. "Should I not crave oxygen, not crave food or something?" No, just don't try to find the far-end case and then sort of reason your way out of it. No, just study your mind. To be free of craving, free of compulsivity, that is at the heart of freedom. And there's something in us that so deeply longs to be free from craving. We essentially want that more than the object. We can only imagine the end of craving by getting what we crave, getting fill-in-the-blank. But sometimes I almost see that as the whole world longing for Nibbāna², longing for the Dharma, and yet we try to get there through Amazon, whatever. What we want is the cessation of craving because it's so painful. And yet, in this cycle of dissatisfaction and craving and acquisition, that's been reinforced just endlessly, endlessly.

And so it's something like: incompleteness or suffering, craving, acquisition, partial fulfillment, partial heartbreak, repeat until we die.

I try to be careful about what's called "concept creep," you know, using a word like "addiction" or something, which is the example at hand, using a word in broader and broader ways, defining it down. I want to be careful about that, but there is some parallel with this kind of cycle. I don't want to say that a casual longing for a nice piece of clothing or a tasty bite of food is addiction or something, but there are some parallels to the cycle.

George Koob³, who's a prominent addiction researcher, leads the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, characterized this cycle. So Koob writes, "Addiction can be conceptualized as a three-stage recurring cycle: binge and intoxication, withdrawal and negative affect/feeling, and then preoccupation/anticipation/craving that worsens over time and involves neuroplastic changes in the brain reward, stress, and executive function systems." He goes on to say, "The concept of an anti-reward... we normally talk about drugs as rewarding, pleasures as rewarding, right? But there's an anti-reward system... was developed," they say, "to explain neuro-adaptations in response to the excessive utilization of the brain reward system. There's compelling evidence that the brain stress and emotional systems are recruited as a result of excessive activation of the reward system and provide an additional source of negative hedonic valence (unpleasantness). The combination of a deficit in the reward system and the recruitment of the brain stress systems provides a powerful motivational state mediated in part by the anti-reward system." Our body punishing us when we don't get what we are conditioned to want. It's a bad cycle. There's a lot of pain in that, and that reaches its peak in the context of addiction. But even below the threshold of addiction, we can recognize ourselves in some of that.

So how do we deal with craving? Well, it's partially the whole path, but a few things come to mind.

Partially, we become awake to the disappointment involved in that process. The disappointment in it. We don't focus on the object of craving; we actually start to notice how painful the condition of craving is. Even for that which we love, we pay attention to the unfulfillment, the partial heartbreak, the withdrawal, the negative feeling, the cyclical loopiness of the whole thing.

And sometimes we really renounce for a while, like on a retreat or even just a sit for half an hour. We really renounce, and that actually winds up sensitizing our system to pleasure. Just like the anti-reward system in response to the bombardment of our reward system, to actually sober up, and then we actually become more sensitized to pleasure. We need less of it to feel really good, to feel happy. And maybe just a nice day, a nice sunset, is more than we need.

Sometimes we bore right into the belly of the beast: equanimity with intense feeling. Craving is a kind of commandment to act. It feels like every cell in our body is conspiring to get us to move, to make a move, and we just stay.

And then sometimes, just in a moment, sometimes very gradually, we get happier on the path. And the more fulfilled we are, the less incomplete we feel. We don't need to be completed; we already are. And so craving is a kind of strategy that, at least temporarily, is unnecessary.

I offer this for your consideration and am happy to dwell in this path with you. I'll be away next week, back on the 14th. So hope to see you then, and I wish you all well.