This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: How far is freedom? Dharma talk: "Protect Empathy as All Costs and Live Groovy Lives". It likely contains inaccuracies.

Meditation: How far is freedom? Dharma talk: "Protect Empathy as All Costs and Live Groovy Lives"

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 02, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Good evening and welcome. It's good to be practicing together. Please find your posture, and we'll sit together.

Guided Meditation: How distant is freedom? (link)

How far away is peace? And how do our ideas of distance contribute to distance?

Just feel all the practice you've ever done, all the effort and renunciation. All the moments of willingness, all of the suffering and all of the love. Just all right here.

Maybe you have a sense of the lineage, the kind of shelter afforded by thousands of years. The practice of wisdom, compassion, a sense of finding ourselves in that stream. And just taking our cues from that as we breathe. Feel our bodies.

Discerning what kind of orientation to the object is optimal. Say, breathing. How penetrating should your attention be, or how light? How much fidelity to just that is conducive to mindfulness?

How often or how continuously are you served by relaxing? Clinging in the attempt to control is correlated with tension. As we consciously relax, we can be more confident we're not trying to control so much. We give the mind boundaries, but that doesn't feel like control.

It feels like we have to do a good job. But mindfulness is actually a recognition of all that we do not govern. A kind of harmonizing of the heart with ungovernability. This is not another forum for your governance.

There's already more than enough. We don't need to go foraging for goodness.

Meditation is the trust that the moment will not harm our heart. That we need not keep tabs on everything right and everything wrong in this moment. Keep tabs on our preferences. Keep reiterating story, self.

Just take our cues from the silence.

Dharmette: 'Protect Empathy at All Costs and Live Groovy Lives' (link)

Okay, folks. It was good to practice with you. I won't be here next week; I'll be back on the 15th.

I read an interview yesterday with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, who did Mystery Train and Ghost Dog, among other films. He just made a new movie, a kind of slow-burn film about a family—father, mother, sister, brother. The interviewer says, "You know, Jehnny Beth from Savages..." I don't know who that is. "...Jehnny Beth from Savages," she says to the interviewer, "I like her attitude, her music." She said in an interview, "Art doesn't have to talk about politics to be political. Change the world. Artists are here to open us, to make us feel more in touch with others, connected and empathetic. It's what art does."

And Jarmusch says, "I was like, gee, I wish I said that. To not directly talk about politics does not mean something isn't political. But for me, the political thing is to protect empathy in a way."

The last time I saw Joe Strummer—also don't know, but from The Clash, it's probably really embarrassing to admit that on YouTube. [Laughter] The last time I saw Joe Strummer, who died in 2002, he was in New York. He walked me back to my home from a restaurant because I had the flu or something. He stopped at my door and looked me in the eye. And I'll never, ever forget this. He said, "Jim, our job is to protect empathy at all costs and to live groovy lives." And then he left into the rain. He died five weeks later.

I've been trying to live by that. Protect empathy at all costs and to live groovy lives. Trying to do both. Trying to enjoy the strangeness of my life. But I am trying in my work to protect empathy.

Usually, we don't think about dharma as art. In some respects, it seems superficial. It ignores aesthetics as trivial. It's all tarnished in some way. Become disenchanted with samsara.¹ Yet I would add that the dharma is an artistic path. There is an aesthetic to goodness—a kind of elegance, cleanliness. We try to honor that.

The dharma is many things. One of them is the process of turning one's heart into something like art. And you have to do a lot of hard work to turn your heart into something beautiful. You also don't have to do anything whatsoever to turn your heart into something beautiful. Many times, I have these moments where I kind of perceive the heart of sometimes my teachers, sometimes students. And the beauty in that moment sort of eludes words. There's a kind of awe that I feel as I contemplate all the mind moments that shaped and informed their heart in that moment.

And Sangha² is many things. It's a grief ritual and it's a pep rally. Most crucially for me, it's a kind of collective sensitization to goodness and dwelling in it. In their role, dharma teachers receive a lot of gratitude and love, and I'm in no way dismissive of that. But I've never wanted to be loved, but I've desperately wanted to abide in what we both love. And abiding in what we love—that's Sangha, spiritual friendship.

Sangha is the collective practice of empathy.

First, in our practice, we direct empathy to ourselves. The dharma is a training in self-directed empathy. That's the nature of awareness. What is it actually like to be human? Conscious experience is always like something. What is it like? The poignancy of being a sentient creature in a world that trembles in all directions—that poignancy dawns unmistakably. And there's care for our self, empathy. And then that circle expands. The empathy expands and expands again across space, across time.

Our species had a very tough time moving from the geocentric model to the heliocentric model. It was kind of brutal for our grandiosity to recognize that the Earth was not the center of the universe. And yet now, we're trying to do something even harder, which is to move from an egocentric model, where the self is the center of the universe, to a truly empathic life. An empathic life where the set of conditions that we name as 'me' are not worthy of such dramatic elevation over other sets of conditions. This means that we stop taking our own side every time, everywhere. "Me, me, I win again." No. Lose.

As our understanding deepens, we no longer treat others as kind of objects in our personal world. It's easy to do that. We actually start to enter the world of others. The dharma connects us in this way to others. It's resonant. Maybe we say its nature is empathic. It's very easy to live what is effectively a solipsistic life, only vaguely sensing that the other exists when we're not looking. It is very easy to box a loved one into the role that they play for us: father, mother, sister, brother, sibling, spouse, child.

In the research world, empathy is often defined as something like perspective-taking—the ability to consciously put oneself in the mind of another—and the capacity, the willingness, to become affectively aroused by the other's inner life. Affectively, emotional, vedanā.³ And there's some empathic concern where we're motivated to—we're not indifferent—we're motivated to care for another's welfare. That's what it means to truly understand each other, to learn to be open systems.

In a way, it can feel like a strange phrase maybe, but it's like we take our cues as best we can from the mind of the Buddha, listening. Over time, we develop a kind of highly detailed topographical map of our goodness and our neurosis. And that high-resolution map dramatically expands the possibilities for empathy.

So Strummer said, "Jim, our job is to protect empathy at all costs." And that, as Jehnny Beth said, is its own political act. It doesn't feel sufficient, for sure, but she seems right to me, too. In the long run, our world does need an unbroken lineage of love and care, of empathic concern. And so let us do our part. I think we are, in our own ways, doing our part. That's not where our effort ends, but it's certainly a good starting point.

Here on these Wednesdays, if you're listening, you can hear that every week we're talking about this country. And also every week, talking about what's been here before this country and what will be here after. The dream recedes to time, delusion. This is not the dharma's first rodeo. Let us protect empathy.

I offer this for your consideration.