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Sit with Matthew Brensilver; Dharmette: attention, awareness, mindfulness

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 30, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Okay, welcome folks. Good to be with you. It's nice to see the names and locations. Alright, we are going to meditate. I do not know what I'm going to say. I do not know exactly how one should teach meditation, but I am starting to get a hang of the practice myself, I feel. Beginning. So let's see what happens.

Guided Meditation: Relax and release (link)

Relaxing that body and mind.

If we were sentenced to live this moment, this moment for all of eternity, how deeply might we let go?

The future weighs so heavily on the heart-mind. The sense of 'next' structures our moments and days and weeks, years. We just fall into the present moment.

It may be skillful to consciously point your attention somewhere there to nurture stability, clarity, alertness. But don't let the technique become captured by clinging, by greed and aversion. Can you direct your attention in such a way that it's not a reiteration of doubt and craving and control?

We could be tying up the loose ends of the human condition until we die. We could be fantasizing about all the ways this moment might get better. We could be trying to game out an uncertainty. We practice letting go, renouncing. Sometimes renunciation is very gentle. Sometimes renunciation calls for a measure of ruthlessness.

We've been licking our egoic wounds forever, trying to keep things together, trying to keep all the familiar egoic lighthouses up and running.

Take refuge. Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha.¹ Refuge. Your enoughness is never in question.

There will be a time to make meaning, to speak of our love and sorrow and insight. But we're just now, don't insist on making any meaning. Become comfortable with nothing meaning anything other than itself. Maybe we can say the meaning of everything is: let go.

Dharmette: attention, awareness, mindfulness (link)

Okay. So, mindfulness. You know, honestly, I'm still trying to figure out what that is.

You could say our practice involves directing the attention in a kind of pointed way. I made a few comments to that effect. But it's also a kind of receptive awareness, and they're not identical. So it involves exerting a kind of attentional autonomy. When I said, "Okay, you may preferentially select breathing or body or something," it involves that, but it also involves surrendering to what you do not own. And so it's a kind of dialectic of activity and receptivity.

Sometimes the effort that we make is the effort of starting something. Often the effort is the effort of stopping, putting down. We're studying our attention, and where and how we place our attention has profound effects. It really, in some sense, births our sensory world. You know, all things come into being through attention. The sutta says all things come into being through attention. And attention is considered a neutral factor, not meaning not inherently good or bad. It's how we use it that determines its value.

Attention is considered a kind of spotlighting function, bringing something to mind, brightening it with attentional light—the breath, for example. And so we spotlight one phenomenon, or many in a kind of choiceless awareness, which is a kind of sequential spotlighting of particular phenomena typically. As our attention develops, we have a very rich, intimate processing of the object of attention. And generally, we say there's concentration when the spotlight becomes brighter and brighter and there's zero light escaping there. Whatever the object of attention is, the breathing is very vividly lit and everything else is then pitch black night.

In the scientific study of attention, attention is often divided into three components. Alerting, which is not directing it anywhere, but it's a kind of readiness or receptivity for an impending stimulus. Suzuki Roshi called mindfulness "soft readiness." Then there's secondly, orienting, the selection of a specific object from a range of stimuli. And then the third component, executive attention, where we're monitoring and resolving conflicts amongst thoughts and feelings and actions. And that's very involved in goal-directed behavior.

Samadhi², concentration, involves a high state of readiness, precise orientation, and very robust executive attention functioning.

Attention, I would say, is primarily object-focused. And I realize as I'm saying this, I'm trespassing on the ground of cognitive scientists and Buddhist scholars and philosophers of mind and a lot of stuff, and they would not approve. I know that they would not approve, but I got to keep going, you know.

So attention feels primarily object-focused. Antoine Lutz and his colleagues say when one is seeking to find a person in a crowd, off-target objects, meaning like other people, do not present themselves phenomenally as strongly selected, but the state nevertheless seems to bear strongly on an object, namely the person sought. That captures something important about the kind of object orientation of attention.

But mindfulness is not attention. They're not synonymous. Mindfulness is broader, not simply about the focus on an object, but also the kind of background, you could say, the knowing epistemic context of one's object-focused experience. If you get too focused on a tight connection with the object, it tends to generate a lot of tension and clinging. That's what I was saying, like, is it possible to lavish the object of attention with a kind of rich brightness without reiterating the craving? Often that's not the case. Often our attention is a kind of appendage of our wanting.

And so the Buddha says we begin with right view, a mind infused with letting go, with tranquility, with equanimity. So it's possible to be very object-focused but be animated by a lot of engineering and control and all the things we try to make happen, even meditative things. Often, control is masquerading as curiosity. And the cue that we're trying to make something happen with our attention is when we're not relaxed. The kind of background contracts. The context of our knowing contracts.

Relaxation, we think of it as just, "Oh, okay, I want to be relaxed, not hyper-aroused," or whatever. But you cannot cling without tension. And so relaxation runs deeper than mere ease; it's about letting go. And awareness, we could say, is what that background context is, what makes attention mindful. To be mindful means we're aware of how our attention is functioning. We're not merely attending; we're aware of how our attention is functioning. When we're just attentive, just trying to focus, we're not actually deeply aware of how our attention is functioning. We're aware of the object, and that's fine. A lot of what we do does not call for mindfulness. We just trust the information processing of our brain to do the job well.

Maybe we can say, and I'm just putting this together for myself, that attention models the object (the breath, for example), and awareness models the object and the mind knowing it.

So we can experiment with how we're relating to an object, the breathing or whatever it might be. How much are we just attempting to have pure fidelity to that versus how much are we also checking the background context, how the attention is functioning, what control is being exerted?

I would associate samadhi and concentration primarily with attention, primarily with the perception of anicca.³ And I would associate awareness in the background context with mindfulness and the perception of anatta.⁴ I'm saying too much for a dharmette, but it's too late.

So what we're observing is different from how we're observing. Meditation is sometimes called attention training. It's about training the attention and learning how craving shapes the movements of the mind and the construction of the world and self. There's no one place to look for craving. There's subtlety that's needed. We can't just attend to one thing to see if there's craving. Mindfulness needs to be open to the gravitational effects of craving.

We practice deeply allowing the arising of craving, of aversion. And to allow craving and aversion is not to acquiesce to them. The allowing takes the thorns out of the clinging. In other words, clinging depends on doing it unconsciously. And when the awareness is there, the clinging becomes an object rather than a commandment. Awareness cannot cling. If it's clinging, it's not awareness. Attention can cling, it seems to me. As soon as we begin clinging, the attention fixates on an object, reifies it, differentiates. We begin strategizing. There's no strategy in awareness.

In other words, a moment of mindfulness is, from one perspective, very ordinary. From another perspective, it is quite free. Quite free.

Q&A

I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up what's useful and leave the rest behind. I put a link for questions. If you have questions to submit, maybe next week I'll try to respond to something that someone asked. So that's in the description on YouTube.

I wish you all a good week. It's been good to be with you. See you next time.