This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Cannot Know Oneself While Fixing Oneself; Dharmette: Measurement w/ M Brensilver. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: You cannot know oneself while fixing oneself; Dharmette: Measurement and the Immeasurable - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 15, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: You cannot know oneself while fixing oneself

Okay, so welcome folks. It's nice to see a lot of familiar names, and welcome to new folks. I'm happy to be with you, happy to be practicing.

So, let's sit, or whatever posture the body's in, and just take that posture consciously.

Just sensing what it would mean to be grounded in this moment.

Perhaps the spine reaches ever so gently towards the sky, then we surrender everything else to gravity.

We're practicing not being alarmed, fed by samsara¹, by this realm of pleasure and pain, gain and loss.

We might use our breathing as a way of smoothing out the energetic field of our body and mind.

We're practicing putting down the project that we call our life. We're not trying to fix or help things along, just kind of trusting that as we surrender, help is on its way. We don't have to find it.

It's just getting so simple. Is this body breathing? Silence beckoning us.

Help is on its way and doesn't require your willfulness.

Phenomena arise, fears arise, thoughts arise. We may become intimidated by them, by what they might mean. And so we freeze time and we try to make meaning, try to reassure ourselves. It's fair enough.

But we are practicing knowing all phenomena as empty.

Experience becomes so vivid but also attenuated, wispy, space-like. So there, and barely there.

If all we ever do is try to fix ourself, we will never know ourself.

Maybe we can say the anchor is silence, and every bit of noise is met with infinite patience.

Dharmette: Measurement and the Immeasurable

Okay, so it's good to sit with you.

I was teaching a young adult retreat last week, mostly with folks in their 20s, and somebody asked a question very relevant to that developmental phase about the comparing mind—the mind that compares. That is, of course, a time when identity is being forged, and a key way that we know who we are is by looking at others and making comparisons and judgments: greater than, less than, equal to.

There are really two dimensions, maybe we could say, of this comparing mind. There's the coarser level of me comparing myself to another, and then the second dimension is almost more fundamental: it's about measuring, measurement, any sense of territoriality.

On the coarser level, we compare ourselves to others, right? We kind of turn ourselves into a noun, into a thing, an essence. We turn others into a thing, and then we assess the differences, kind of like laying our vision of ourselves against another, almost like two sheets of transparencies put against one another, seeing what the differences are. This is a very painful realm. We all know the pain of it. This is the realm of arrogance and pity and envy, of pride and shame.

There's an evolutionary psychologist that described pride and shame as the "universal grammar of social valuation." When I saw that phrase, I was like, "You know, that does sound right, but it also sounds very gross." The universal grammar of social valuation, evaluations. The essayist Joseph Epstein was talking about the seven deadly sins—lust and gluttony, greed, laziness, wrath, pride, and envy—and said, "Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all." Right? And that is maybe the hallmark of the comparing mind, the gesture of being a spectator observing the object of self. This is very painful.

Matthieu Ricard² says, "In every instance, envy is the product of a wound to self-importance and the fruit of an illusion. What can other people's happiness possibly deprive us of? Nothing, of course. Only the ego can be wounded by it and feel it as pain. These are the results of our having forgotten our innermost potential for affection and peace."

But it's not just feeling less than that's painful; even feeling greater than, or even momentarily equal to. The Buddha says we have to get out of the game of comparison altogether. As we develop a more fluid sense of self—and maybe we say a not-self—that's the most true form of self-esteem. As our insight deepens, the less impulse we have to do any comparing, to substantiate ourselves, or to deprecate ourselves.

Then there's a more subtle sense of comparison that involves any measurement. The Buddha says something like, "Whatever one's obsessed with, that's what one is measured by." This is, in a sense, getting into a kind of boutique level of suffering, but any measurement—being here but not there, being greater or lesser, there being any other side to our love, any other side to our knowing, ascribing any characteristics to "me"—all of that has suffering. It's not sublime.

In the Godatta Sutta³, a monastic said, "Greed is a making of measurement, aversion is a making of measurement, delusion a making of measurement. Greed is a something, aversion a something, delusion a something. Greed is a making of themes, aversion a making of themes, delusion a making of themes." The defilements—greed, hate, and delusion—are all about measurement, about options and optimizing, about a sense of dislocation and lack. Me here, the object there. Me here now, my happiness somewhere out there in some future. Me here and now, and the ideal version of me just beyond my grasp. Me pinned between a messy past and an ominous future. Clinging involves a lot of cognition, of measurement, of strategizing, and this carries some burden on the heart. We might say defilements—greed, hate, and delusion—are a "something" rather than a nothing. They're a theme rather than themelessness.

Freedom is much less of a something, themeless. So what we ask is, what's the alternative to making measurement? The alternative to somethingness? The alternative to making themes? And of course, it's okay to measure sometimes, but if all we ever do is measure, something fatigues in the heart.

Sometimes the Brahmaviharas⁴, the Divine Abodes, are described as the Four Immeasurables: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. The Four Immeasurables. This is alluding to a non-dualistic love. Metta-sahagatena⁵—the mind made vast with love. This is a kind of love that can't go wrong. There's no unfolding that disqualifies this love. There's no other side to it, there's nothing excluded from it. It's not based on measurement; it's not expressed as a measure.

Again from the suttas: "There's the case where a monastic keeps pervading the first direction with an awareness imbued with goodwill, likewise the second, likewise the third, likewise the fourth. Thus above and below and all around, everywhere in its entirety, they keep pervading the all-encompassing cosmos with an awareness imbued with goodwill—abundant, enlarged, immeasurable, without hostility, and without ill will." This is called the immeasurable awareness release.

This is alluding to flavors of samadhi⁶, flavors of formless samadhi, where the landscape is reduced, all measurement falls away, and the world of experience is reduced to one thing: to space, to knowing, to emptiness. And the space can be pervaded by love. There are no phenomena being modeled by our brain except that space flavored with love, not even our body. We just keep dropping distinctions. We keep not caring. Weirdly, to develop this love, we keep not caring.

We trust that all the alarm bells that go off in samsara, that go off in the circuits of our body, are false alarms. That no phenomena will hurt me, and so I don't need to tend to it. There's a kind of relinquishment, the silence of letting go, letting phenomena fade and thin out. There's so much relief in not measuring. I have a measuring mind, and there's so much relief in not measuring, not being measured by the world.

And then distinctions are reborn here and there—body and mind, you and me, liking and disliking—but it's hard to forget just how simple the mind can be and how free one might be when measurement goes silent. This sounds maybe like, "Oh, these are rarified states or something to crave," but we don't crave our way to non-measurement. This is more measurement. We don't crave rarified states for themselves or to solve our problems. We really honor the immeasurable mind. We honor rarified states for the gentle, tender shadow that they cast over the rest of our lives. The way our measurement is haunted by the immeasurables.

So I offer this for your consideration. It's sweet to think of you wherever you are. And even though we're on like an eight-second time delay, it feels very intimate right now.

Okay, see you next week.