This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Too Busy Knowing; Dharmette: The Wholesome Disorientation of Feedback. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Too Busy Knowing; Dharmette: The Wholesome Disorientation of Feedback - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 25, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Too Busy Knowing

Welcome, folks. Good to be with you. Welcome to you all. Okay, we'll sit.

Getting situated and finding your posture. Relaxing whatever can be relaxed, allowing any tension that remains to remain.

We relax in order to feel more. We relax in order to give our nervous system a little break. We relax because clinging always carries a kind of burden of tension. We relax because it feels good and because it conveys to life our confidence that we can meet it.

What would it be like if we were deeply unafraid of our inner life?

What would it be like if we just assumed our safety for these 30 minutes? That it was okay to deeply relinquish our vigilance. Rather than patrol phenomena, we surrender to them.

Breath might be an anchor, sound might be an anchor, the hands or feet or some pleasantness in your body might be an anchor. The anchor might be everywhere.

Even as we incline our minds towards surrender, relinquishment, non-vigilance, we're nurturing the clarity of the attention—high resolution, not foggy, not mediated by dense story.

Our attention snags on phenomena like a hangnail on fabric. We momentarily forget a nature of impermanence, and then we let go. Knowing experience moment by moment, but not holding it still.

You're too busy knowing to feel like you have a vantage point. Too busy knowing to keep tabs on who you are, how you're doing. Too busy knowing to keep track of the million things that are right and the million that are wrong in this moment.

You get caught up—not even the slightest problem. Just forgive yourself, and see that ground and get busy knowing.

Too busy knowing to have even the faintest clue about who you are, about your strengths and limitations.

Dharmette: The Wholesome Disorientation of Feedback

It's good to sit with you.

So, over the 12 years or so that I've been teaching full-time, I've received a lot of feedback. I used to be featured in a kind of video course that maybe 5-10,000 people would take each year. To complete the course, the learning management system required people to give detailed feedback. They could not get course credit unless they gave detailed feedback on the trainers, of which I was one.

If you think you truly understand anattā¹, read the feedback from 10,000 strangers.

Even still, I've always kind of valued it, even if sometimes it's jangly or something. I valued it because it illuminates; the response to feedback illuminates the architecture of self-view, the kind of sacred cows of self. We usually think, "Okay, I'll take in the feedback that's right and I'll refuse the feedback that's off-base," and that's fair enough. But I think from a Buddhist perspective, regardless of whether the feedback is right or wrong, if it highlights defensiveness, it's of value. It's a value because wherever there's defensiveness, there's clinging, and clinging can always lead us to harming self and other.

I say all of that as an introduction to a little piece of feedback that's been lodged deep in my brain, maybe like medulla oblongata deep, kind of like the part that regulates breathing. You're rooting for me, you're hoping it's not that bad. You're hoping I'm going to be okay. Just stop rooting. It's about to get real.

So this person, this guy, turned out to like me. This is in LA. But when he walked into the Dharma hall and saw me sitting up on the dais, his first thought was, "Who is this middle manager of Kinko's about to give us all a Dharma talk?" [Laughter]

RIP Kinko's.

Maybe I laugh about that so that I don't cry, or I laugh to diffuse some kind of shame or something like that. But honestly, when I heard that and when I say it, it brings a lot of delight. It brings a lot of delight, I think, because there's something true about it. This is not my self-hatred talking; my sense of self was not a casualty in that moment at all. But I do think that maybe I read a little bit like a junior manager of Kinko's. I think I read like that because there are, of course, certain aspects of practice that are underdeveloped.

The Dharma² has a thousand beautiful qualities, and if we cultivate even a few, we're fortunate. I was talking with a Dharma friend, and she also took the liberty of giving me some feedback. Just open season on the esteemed leader of certain Wednesdays. So, more feedback. She said sometimes she uses a very simple map of capacities: head, heart, belly. Head referring to clarity, discernment, the kind of pristine view, conceptual understanding, coherence that allows us to cut through the static and illuminate what matters. Heart referring to a kind of affective sensitivity and empathic connection and love and attunement and compassion. And then belly, referring to groundedness, presence, earthiness, the kind of weight, the force of a person's presence. It involves the belly, involves a certain kind of deep embodiment.

This friend, who I trust totally, said, "You know, Matthew, you kind of have developed two of the three." You can guess maybe which is underdeveloped. Belly. The weightiness of presence.

So why am I telling you all this? Am I using you as like a therapeutic mirror or something? No, not at all. I'm telling you this because a teacher cannot only share their wisdom but also their delusion. We share wisdom and delusion because I can't tell the difference between the two. And so sometimes it feels reasonable just to kind of come clean. Okay, I see clearly there are aspects of the path that I want to keep developing.

Nietzsche said, "One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil."³ I'm telling you this because the student is expected to exceed the teacher. I'm telling you this because it's fascinating how the Dharma grows and can accommodate our own neurosis in a graceful way, sort of. We can practice in such a way that there are certain aspects of the path that we really don't notice.

I've mentioned before the image of a tree branch that has grown entangled with a power wire on a telephone pole. The electrical crew deems, "Okay, we're just going to have to cut both sides of the branch," and then there's that chunk of wood that's just suspended by the thin line. There's something about that image that makes me think of the ways in which the gnarled pieces of us just grow around something, force it to accommodate our pain or something. And this is all fine. Generally, it's good to develop our strengths, but then we have to double back to what comes less naturally.

I'm telling you this because the Dharma is so wild. It has so many surprises in store for us. I don't know that those stop. The unwillingness to be startled is maybe a sign there's something deadening in us. Growth is always a little startling. We get comfortable in one mode of practice, and then the rug gets pulled out from under us. We get to some cruising altitude, and then there's some turbulence, something changes. The encouragement is to be open to being startled, to be open to having some vision of who we are kind of cracked open.

We practice... we cease to predict ourselves in the next week or day or moment. You can maybe sense the kind of openness of that. Growth is startling sometimes, but we do not shy away from it. That's the Dharma attitude, I feel. Do not shy away from it. We are here for too little time. We all are here for too little time, die too soon.

And so we trust that there's nothing you can discover about yourself that will be a reason to love yourself less. When you know that in your bones, then the self-exploration becomes reckless and... just all... it's all Dharma, all love.

So I offer this for your consideration. We'll be back next week. Okay, folks.