This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: non-referentiality; Dharmette: Understanding, Forgiveness and Unconsciousness. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: non-referentiality; Dharmette: Understanding, Forgiveness & Unconsciousness - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 06, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Okay, welcome folks. Nice to see your names there. We did a short experiment with simultaneously streaming on Zoom, but it was a little too much for me to work with both streams and I got a little distracted. Then there were some kind of Zoom prankster kids, and it was just too much. So for right now, I thought we could do both or just do Zoom, but then folks wanted YouTube. So we'll just be simple and have it here. Let us practice together.

Guided Meditation: non-referentiality

Just find something that feels good. It might not be that good; it might coexist with much that is not good. But it's a certain kind of equanimity, actually, to stay with the subtly pleasant. Make the rest of the complexity a little less sticky.

Sometimes I've heard the instruction to crack an almost indiscernible smile. Just tiny. And just feel the kind of ripples of sensation as our mind seemingly takes cues from our body.

It can feel like in meditating we go to some room in our mind or some vantage point, like our body-mind is a certain kind of territory. But maybe we gently lay down these notions. Instead, wake up to unpartitioned space. Renounce your orientation. Referentiality. Fear needs distinctions, and love levels them. Measure this. It's kind of how we just keep impulsive track of the credits and debits of our life, of this moment. It couldn't be more innocent. Yet we're invited to relax more deeply.

The more grasping and aversion¹, the more solid phenomena become. The more solid self and world become. So we practice not bracing against time, against pain. No way. The "me", it's just added after the fact to awareness—a kind of artifact of grammar. There.

Dharmette: Understanding, Forgiveness & Unconsciousness

So, I got another question to respond to. The person wrote anonymously:

"I did something very unskillful a few years ago and caused a lot of harm to someone I cared a lot about, and by extension, to myself. I spend a lot of time reliving moments from that experience and decisions that I made at the time. But the primary sense I have is one of disbelief. I cannot understand how I could have made the decisions I did. I can't tell a story that makes sense about it to myself, let alone anyone else, like a therapist. It's like watching a terrible scene unfold, but my inner world and reasoning at the time feels inaccessible, and I feel a lot of judgment towards that version of myself.

My question is two parts. Is truly understanding your past harmful actions essential to healing and moving forward? And two, is my sense of not understanding myself indicative that I'm not really looking honestly—that there are aspects of myself hiding that I haven't exposed to light—or is it a function of oneself changing over time (anatta², not-self) and so not really a problem? Thank you in advance if you're able to answer this question."

There is much in that question. It's a question of remorse, the long karmic reverberations of harm, and the opacity of our behavior to ourselves. The ways we surprise ourselves in the crumbling of the illusion of "I know all of myself." Forgiving that which we don't understand, blessing the past with awareness, honesty with oneself—there is a lot in there.

Forgiving oneself is supported by understanding, but grieving doesn't exactly require understanding. Just bearing witness. And to fully witness, including witnessing our own incomprehensibility, is part of the witnessing. There is so much we don't understand, but we can still place our grief on the altar and pay our respects.

Part of seeking forgiveness—and I don't know the context at all—is sometimes the willingness not to be forgiven. We have to bear that sometimes. Sometimes that's our gift to the other: "For now, I do not insist on your forgiveness." We take our vows. We dedicate ourselves to non-harming: to not harming ourselves, not harming others. And the questioner really knows that practice is no joke; it is necessary.

The grief may be prolonged until our thirst for understanding is quenched. If one doesn't know why one acted as one did, it's hard to feel like we've extracted all of the wisdom from that pain. And unless we tell a coherent story of the conditions leading to our behavior and our apparent decisions, it's hard to feel confident that we might prevent it from happening again. It is as if there's some illegible secret locked up in our memory, in our history, and that unsettles us.

But sometimes understanding causality is very complex. We understand really in two ways. We understand with reasons, which are a subjective account of why we behaved a certain way. And then causes, which are more scientific, objective, third-person facts established through systematic observation. But we can't see causality. The best we can do is give reasons. Our life is stitched together with the stories we tell about reasons. And still, reasons and causes don't always match.

The stories we tell about causality are constrained by the data available to conscious awareness. But the world beneath the radar of awareness is infinitely larger than the world above it. In a way, you're being asked to forgive your delusion. You did not know what you were doing, and maybe lacked a clear relationship with some parts of yourself.

That doesn't mean you're being dishonest with yourself. In physics, you don't have to perfectly understand, you just have to sincerely try to understand, and be willing to risk self-view in that exploration. And whoever wrote that clearly has that courage. It's just that we're always a little more mysterious than we think we are.

This strikes me as the disruptiveness of the unconscious. The unconscious forces that, when they emerge, illuminate the limits of willful self-control. Where we are opaque to ourselves, what we do often emerges as a kind of overdisclosure. What we said meant too much; what we did did too much. We're exposed. And the gap between our preferred self-conception and our surprising behavior is often filled with shame.

But it's really just a jarring aspect of the insight into not-self. Our self is not unified. We are, as Freud says, ambivalent animals. There are a few condensed lines from Adam Phillips: "Wherever we hate, we love. Wherever we love, we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can frustrate us. And if someone can frustrate us, we always believe that they can satisfy us." We are ambivalent about anything and everything that matters to us. We are ambivalent about ambivalence: about love and hate and sex and pleasure, and each other, and ourselves. We're never quite as obedient as we seem to be.

Elsewhere, Phillips wrote that monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum. I find that quite touching. Like that fidelity with another is an attempt at fidelity to one version of yourself. There's some renunciation in that.

Can we maintain fidelity to our preferred version of ourselves without disavowing the other selves? I think so, but maybe not always. Can we renounce without disowning? And can we rightfully grieve the unlived lives that shadow our life?

We really are children about pleasure. I don't mean that harshly or disparagingly; I'm including myself in that. But we're children about physical and emotional pleasure. And maybe we can say that Buddhism is the path of becoming an adult about pleasure.

In the mistake in that memory, to which version of yourself did you have fidelity? I don't know, and I'm not excusing it, but sometimes our unconscious knows things that we don't. It's not a purely destructive force. It's not pure kilesa³. Sometimes it's a kind of wildcat strike, an unauthorized action against the hegemony of our idealism.

As one yogi said to me, "Just love and heartbreak. Love, heartbreak." And of course, even the heartbreak, we dedicate that to love. So, I'm grateful for your question, and I wish you well. Okay.