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The What and How of Investigation; Guided Meditation: Activity and Receptivity - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 13, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

I was talking with some folks and thought maybe we migrate this to Zoom. I'm not sure of the pros and cons of that, but if you have opinions, the chat is open. You're on about a 10-second time delay from me, but happy to take in any thoughts about that. More generally, just what themes are alive and what I should hold in mind for these sessions. So you can share whatever you like, or we'll find our way.

Guided Meditation: Activity and Receptivity

So, let's find our posture and see what happens.

Maybe you just drop everything and jump into the body of water. Regardless of how ready your body feels, how the temperature of the water feels, just start on a dime. Or maybe you're very gentle, gradual. Now you metaphorically assume your Dharma¹ posture. Just letting feet get used to the temperature of the water. And in your own time, inching your way in until you're immersed.

Almost like we need to get permission, get consent from our animal body to let go. Does it feel safe enough to let go?

To some extent, the sense of gaining consent from our body to let go is a function of faith—confidence in a path of letting go. Clarity about the constraints of grasping. The recognition that most holding on is just holding on to an illusion. Illusions of control. So we let go.

The practice is a dialectic between giving and receiving. Between doing and surrender, between directing our attention and trusting that I am not one of the conditions on which awareness depends.

And different days, different times, our mind calls for a different balance between activity and receptivity. Sometimes it's skillful to just be very simple, directing the attention to the object of, say, breathing and body more broadly, or sound.

Sometimes receptivity and surrender is in order. Then in a sense the object becomes non-distraction. The object becomes stability, self-presence. We're careful about the kind of hierarchies that creep into our mind, structure experience, entangle us with grasping. You practice in a way that's consistent with the causes and conditions of this moment.

To be awake to mirror non-distraction means that phenomena are not sticky. The blur of meaning-making has faded.

We have to be respectful when our orbit of hopes and fears is compelling, sticky. Enlist us in meaning-making. Some compassion for ourselves, for the intensity of being human. Some reassurance that we're going to have to love our way through this anyway.

Finding our balance between activity and receptivity.

The What and How of Investigation

Okay. So, I got a question about investigation. A common question: when to investigate, what it is, when to let something be in the background.

Maybe the first point is that it's very natural for us to want a kind of algorithm for practice. The kind of fantasy that lurks somewhere of being told by a fully enlightened being which direction to go, like 20 times a day, or on retreat a thousand times a day. But I think the Buddha might remain quiet much of the time. He might say, "Wrong question." If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him.

So the first point is that most forks in the Dharma path are illusory. When we mature spiritually, it's not that we know the answer; it's that the question dissolves.

So the first thing is to investigate or not investigate—don't make a big deal of it. If you're sincere, whatever you do will be fine. You'll learn either way. If you're sincere, everything is fine.

So, what do we usually mean by investigation? Mostly that means we're honest. We want answers. We have problems and we want answers. And a mind that wants answers is not ready to let go. It's not ready to let go deeply. True investigation entails a letting go of the need to know.

At a deep level, we're an answer-seeking species. We have questions and problems, and we naturally want answers and solutions. And every answer in some sense is a solution to something. You say, "Well, of course, this is Insight Meditation. Of course we want answers. We want insights." Our tradition seems to justify that.

We can be nuanced in how we understand insight. Insight seems like the main currency of freedom, and insights are propositional knowledge. We could say them; we can say something about them.

Yes and no. In Dharma practice, mostly we're not so much trying to get an answer but cultivate our mind. And cultivating one's mind doesn't require answers any more than strengthening one's bicep requires answers.

Insights sometimes strike me as epiphenomenal²—kind of the smoke rising off the engine of neural change, or maybe we say heart change. But we get lost in the smoke and the signals, and we place so much hope in thinking. The various species of thinking try to essentially solve our way to liberation.

But as Daniel Kahneman³, the Nobel laureate, said, "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it."

I was looking at research on mind wandering—when it's more problematic, less problematic. We all know mind wandering; obviously sometimes it feels neutral or even onward-leading, and other times not at all. Sticky thoughts, repetitive, unintentional, uncontrolled looping—that is often problematic.

The research that I was looking at showed mind wandering increases with the self-reported stickiness of thoughts, and it's that stickiness that disrupts performance on a cognitive task and stickiness related to psychological distress.

Investigation cannot be merely acting out stickiness. Sometimes, in other words, it's better to practice the equanimity of ignoring rather than the equanimity of being with. We have the sense that equanimity is always being with. No, actually. Shinzen Young⁴ would often talk about the equanimity of allowing something not to be the object.

So, what is investigation? It is an attentional practice rather than an answering practice. I'm not trying to be all "Dharma Riddler," paradoxical, or whatever. But we don't get answers when we want answers.

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."⁵

And so the thirst for answers is more like every other thirst, and investigation can be a channel into which our compulsivity flows. The Dharma is about newness, new views, new modes of perception. Insight is a little startling; it can't be anticipated.

And so we notice the fidelity we have to our familiar view, the rigid models we bring—stubborn models of ourselves and the world and what happiness is—to each moment. Essentially compulsively reiterating our autobiography to ourselves, consciously or unconsciously. Reiterating our assumptions about happiness: what I want, what I need.

The deepest answers are inaccessible when our knowing is so entangled with wanting. When our attempt to know is suffused by the motivations around grasping, understanding, the compulsion to know.

So investigation involves a mode of perception arising out of an unmotivated state. We don't care what we find. We don't care if we find. This mode of looking arises out of an unmotivated state. In other words, investigation involves a deep tolerance for not knowing, for not having answers.

Can we relax the part of our mind for which answers are answers to our craving?

Sometimes you look up at the night sky. You look, and sometimes it's like, "I'm looking for a constellation." And you look and look, and you kind of, not seeing it, get tense. To see a new pattern, you might have to relax. You might have to take in space. Insight, understandings, the fruits of investigation—maybe often feels like it comes from the peripheral vision.

Investigation of phenomena. This is an attentional practice. Investigation is not about words but about magnification, clarification, saturation of phenomena with attention.

We want to be careful not to assemble phenomena into a story prematurely. We have to relax the urge to make meaning, which often has its own defensive grasping functions.

In other words, we come to know through a path of not knowing. That's how investigation unfolds, and through it we learn a lot. We learn a lot. But it doesn't feel like we had to go on some expedition to find it. It's a function of the character of attention, the willingness not to assemble understanding prematurely.

We gaze, in other words, into the dark night sky and await light from distant stars to reach us. You know that light, the light that might take thousands or millions of years to get here. It's dark right now, but we're poised in a kind of openness, awaiting that light from distant realms to meet us. The path is the goal.

I offer this for your consideration, and I wish you a good week.