This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation - Attention and Sustaining Openness; Dharmette: Emerging from Doubt. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Attention and Sustaining Openness; Dharmette: Emerging From Doubt - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 12, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Attention and Sustaining Openness

Okay folks, welcome. In a moment we'll sit, but just to say that there are a lot of different ways we can break down sitting to illuminate the different facets of what is entailed by meditation. One distinction that feels important to me is that we are learning to train the attention—that kind of attentional spotlight—and we are learning to stay open, to not let the awareness collapse even when intensity is running through our system, through body and mind.

We can get over-identified with the attentional facet of practice: focus, breath, stillness, seclusion. But part of why we do that is actually to strengthen the capacity to just stay un-collapsed amidst intensity. We study collapse at a kind of micro level. It may not happen in some major meltdown during a sit, but there are little micro-meltdowns where even just the urge to scratch an itch is a subtle kind of meltdown that we pay attention to. Okay, how did that happen? How did we get kind of overrun?

We pay attention to those little micro-collapses because they happen in more significant ways in our lives. So, what does it mean to actually stay open even as the affective, emotional channels are stimulated and might lead us to the kind of awareness collapsing into that intensity? We're directing the attention and then keeping a certain kind of poise amidst the intensity.

So, let's practice.

Without laying too many conceptual maps on what meditation is, we just take our posture. We kind of trust that there's enough goodness here to fuel our meditation forever.

The intensity that is life seems to beg the awareness to collapse into the claustrophobia of problem solving. But we practice staying open, broadening the awareness. Raising the threshold of intensity that can be tolerated without devolving into problem solving.

And we notice with patience and forgiveness the ways that intensity lures us into the problem solving mode. Awareness collapses—very innocent movements of our mind. And here we're exploring just knowing intensity without being seduced into the fantasy of solving it.

So we establish this openness, a certain kind of reverence for the First Noble Truth that there is dukkha¹. Intensity.

And then when we direct attention to our breathing, or body, or soundscape, the attention doesn't feel so brittle. The seclusion, settledness, refuge, and stillness is supported by relinquishment.

Any given moment is imperfect, but awareness makes it good enough.

We're attending in a simple way and we hear that kind of siren song of maximization, optimizing the moment, solving problems, carefully tracking threat and opportunity. Awareness collapses. You just reestablish that openness by blessing the intensity with okayness. Reestablishing a sense of the open field of awareness.

And maybe before it feels safe again to just be with a kind of attentional anchor like the breath or the body, we may just have to reestablish the sense of okayness of intensity. It's okay. Let the energy unwind in the body.

The only thing better than solving our problems is not solving them.

Dharmette: Emerging From Doubt

Okay, good to sit with you. "The only thing better than solving our problems is not solving them." I mean, what is that? I don't know where that came from, sorry. It makes sense in the moment.

Okay, so... Faith and doubt.

The Buddha said that if we get stuck in doubt, it's like being lost in a desert without the map. One conception of information is that information is the reduction of uncertainty. Every moment is rife with uncertainty. We are so hungry for data to clarify the moment, exactly as the Buddha said—so open, hungry to reduce the uncertainty of the moment. The information that we get is through our senses and through the mind, and this reduces the level of uncertainty.

Doubt is the absence of trustworthy information. Uncertainty and indecision abound, and we don't know what to trust. In doubt, we don't know what to trust, where to look, or where to harvest data from. There is this kind of frenzy in the looking, hungry for information but can't find it. And we don't know how to interpret what we do encounter.

It's all noise, no signal. People in doubt tend to really bounce around from one mind-made narrative to another, kind of swinging or vacillating between different stories that may be highly incompatible. It's like grappling with the static. All these mind-made plans, ideas, and frameworks emerge not out of any kind of deep sense of groundedness or embodiment; they are just trying to overlay some conceptual narrative on this basic sense of uncertainty.

In that state, we might be especially influenced by the views of others, over-trusting others. We look to see what the prevailing views are—maybe that's it, maybe I get my information from there. We tend to really get lost in a world of thought and rumination. Thoughts just feel so real; they feel like the most important data. It's a little like we keep taking our thoughts out for test drives, but the ride never feels quite right. Float it, float it.

Part of why people get mired in doubt is that they ask the practice to do things that it can't do. We get mired when we are asking the practice to do things it can't do. The practice will not insulate us from the ungovernable tides of pleasure and pain. The practice cannot insulate us from the changingness of all things.

We get mired in doubt when we try to outsmart the First Noble Truth. That's part of what I was alluding to in the sit: can we just not collapse amidst the intensity of the First Noble Truth? Even just here on this day together, in this lovely sit, just to stay still is intense. And that encounter really with the First Noble Truth can lure us into the fantasy that if I just could think hard enough, could harvest enough information from my thoughts, I'd find the answer. But often there is no answer. There's not exactly an answer to the First Noble Truth. Dukkha is coming for all of us regardless of what we are thinking.

And so, to try to imagine the kind of dukkha-free path when we're at some fork in the road... that leads us into doubt. You know those moments where it's just like, "Oh, let me see, I'm at this fork. Is it just a two-pronged fork? Is there a third way? Is there some dukkha-free path?" And we just spin in doubt. Sometimes our craving for certainty is what actually creates the doubt. Certainty is going to elude us, right? But our craving for it is what leads us to spin into doubt.

Aristotle said something like, "Wisdom is satisfied with the degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and doesn't seek exactness where only the approximation is possible."

In formal practice, doubt manifests sometimes as uncertainty about technique. Should I do Vipassana² or Metta³? It's like this kind of Dharma FOMO—like I'm missing something. Or doubt manifests as the kind of rush to fit all the puzzle pieces of the Dharma together, just to make everything square with everything else. Or doubt manifests as getting mired in theoretical questions. Sometimes doubt is a sense that we're performing meditation for someone, even if that someone is just our own inner audience—our own meditation super-ego—or performing for the teacher. That is an expression of a certain kind of doubt.

Faith simplifies things so much. Relaxes. Amidst faith, we're no longer hungry to confirm that we're on the right path. We're no longer kind of so preoccupied with doing it right. We know we're just going to keep going. And of course we're doing it right and wrong, and we're going to learn, we're going to grow.

Sharon Salzberg speaks about faith in her book Faith as the process by which you come to trust your own experience. I think that might even be the subtitle of the book: coming to trust your own deepest experience. There's a kind of power in that. In our faith, a certain kind of independence grows. We start to know what to trust. And it engenders patience. It doesn't matter anymore how long something takes, how long the path is. We're going to keep going.

Ajahn Sucitto⁴ likened faith to a hinge point on the door. Once that hinge is set, the door is going to swing open sometime.

The teacher's job is mostly to get people to the point where that hinge is set, or the point where, in a sense, there's no going back. Once a person's there, once there's no going back, mostly the job of the teacher is just cheerleading. That door will swing open. And so the Dharma doesn't feel like a choice we have to keep making.

There is faith. So, I offer this for your consideration. And yeah, I wish you a rich day of practice, of attending, of staying open and poised amidst intensity, and entrusting your heart to what's trustworthy.

See you tomorrow.