This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Not updating your autobiography; Dharmette: Confidence & Humility. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Not updating your autobiography; Dharmette: Confidence & Humility - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 11, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Not updating your autobiography

Welcome, folks. It's lovely to see your names. I'm hoping that you are hearing me, and we'll do the normal routine. I'll guide us and then offer some reflections. Thank you for the warm welcome. It's nice to see a lot of familiar names. Let's sit.

Just breathe in a way that smooths out the energy in your body. We're not trying to make what is painful pleasant. We're just integrating the felt sense of the body with our breathing, so that the awareness fills out your whole body.

Breathing into the numbed out or flat zones of the body—maybe the back of the body, certain portions of your body that tend to be unnoticed or don't have much access to sensation. Then breathing into the intensity, the kind of hot spots, so that they might be soothed in some way. And so the whole constellation of sensations that is the experience of our body is lit up from within by awareness.

Dharma¹ practice is about learning, but it's not about a continuation of the autobiography that we've been reiterating to ourselves. It's not the next chapter in that same autobiography; it's a radical relinquishment. It doesn't mean you can never have your story again, or that your past is meaningless, or anything of the sort. But we practice surrendering—surrendering such that it doesn't feel like this moment is tacked on to the story we've always been telling.

We remind ourselves of our autobiography in so many ways: what I like, what I dislike, what I want and need, where my life has been, where I want it to go. This meditation is sandwiched painfully between a past and a future. The headquarters of "Matthew," orchestrating, choreographing Dharma practice—we surrender all of that.

We don't try to drag all of that knowing into this moment. Instead, we get more precise: these thin slices of sensory experience. The body. The body breathing. We surrender the familiar reference points and fall into the present.

In any given moment, a million things are right and a million are wrong. But we're so perpetually startled by the way of this ambivalent realm. Part of the value of the practice of equanimity² is we don't need to sort this out anymore. Just take for granted that there's loveliness and imperfection. The sense of self, the freezing of our autobiography, is a little bit like a hologram cast by the spotlight of clinging. Equanimity is the practice of non-clinging.

We can only keep track of ourselves—who and what we are—when we're trying to leverage this moment, trying to make this moment about another, making this moment a down payment on something else. So we surrender. We surrender into a sense of futurelessness. This is a different kind of way of learning.

Dharmette: Confidence & Humility

It is good to sit with you. I hope those instructions made some sense. Just as a word, I presume that people have their own meditation experience. That would not be a good first meditation instruction, so I apologize if that was your first. Anyway, I'm happy to be with you. It's been a while since I've been here on YouTube, and I am excited to explore.

It's hard to talk about Dharma because what is wisdom in one moment is a mistake in another. I'm not saying that to be cute; what is wisdom in one moment is a mistake in another. There is no single Dharma drum that we can just march to independent of context, independent of the nuance of samsara³, this world. Wisdom really creates the path rather than follows it. It's not that there's a pre-ordained path and then wisdom is just following it; we're actually creating a path.

The way it strikes me, the way that delusion works is often not that we do the opposite of the teachings. It's not that the teachings say "do X" and we do "not X". The way delusion works is we pick the wrong teaching. We pick the teaching that allows us to act out our underlying habit energy or craving. We might need fierce determination and we pick self-compassion, or we need self-compassion and we pick fierce determination. Part of the skill in Dharma practice is knowing which teaching to reach for.

The Dharma is found in these dynamic tensions. Determination and self-compassion are pairs of values that we dance between. A couple of years ago on this stream, I highlighted a few pairs, and this week I'm highlighting more pairs of these values we dance between. This week, it's a dialectic of the more assertive qualities of mind and the more receptive qualities. So today, it's confidence and humility. So much confidence and so much humility. Maybe it sounds like those are in deep tension, but they're really complementary heart qualities.

The more deeply we taste the Dharma, the more devotional we become, the more confident we become. We don't have to be a devotional person. I don't know that I would cast myself as a devotional person or a devotional type. But when your heart is nourished by the Dharma in the way that it can nourish us, you just bow down. It breeds a kind of devotional reverence.

Gil⁴ wrote, "Awakening is not the end of practice. Awakening is the confirmation that the practice works. Awakening solidifies our confidence in Dharma practice. We understand that when done sincerely, a beginner's practice is as valuable and meaningful as that of an experienced practitioner. The greater our maturity with practice, the more often and more confidently we can begin afresh, always ready to keep practicing."

When I think about characterizing some of the effects of practice, one piece that feels important is that there's no more doubt that my real life is just out there somewhere. It's just this. And there's no more sense of dislocation—the subtle alienation that who I am, my life, is just beyond my reach, that I'm chasing something down, or that in my aspiration there's a sense of dislocation and alienation. No, just this. Enough.

And there's a deep kind of self-confidence, which I would say is something akin to a sense of complete sufficiency. Sufficiency. Not greatness, not amazing, not special. Complete sufficiency.

We come to learn, we understand more, we become more confident, better and better at predicting what leads us to happiness. So often in our life, we're surprised that when we get what we want, it's different than what we thought we were getting. We become more calibrated in this way. We're better predictors of our own happiness, and that breeds a kind of confidence. We become more confident that no matter what happens in our life, what befalls us, there's some way that Dharma can sanctify it. That forges a kind of confidence.

So yes, confidence. And still, it is such a humbling path. Oh my goodness, if you're not being humbled, you're not practicing right. We all have zones where we're a little bit bewildered by life, and it feels like, "Well, we're doing the best we can, but we're kind of making it up as we go along. We don't know how to do this." And with all the learning, and all the goodness, and whatever freedom is ours, we sort of just feel like children again, bewildered about what to do. "Don't know." It's humbling.

It's humbling to see the gap between what we know intellectually and what we have actually realized. It's only realization that changes behavior. And I'm not saying only enlightenment changes behavior, but only that which has been realized, rather than known intellectually, changes our behavior.

It's humbling to see how easily we can be deceived, seduced by our own mind, seduced by the very deeply camouflaged mechanisms of clinging. The mind builds a kind of house of cards, and we live in that house, and then it collapses. What we thought was truth was really a confabulation of greed and aversion⁵, a way that we've concocted something. We're not lying, but we've concocted something out of our clinging. To begin to wake up, to just see how easy it is to pull a fast one on ourselves—this is humbling. It might just be a micro-mood where we become convinced of something, and then the energy in the body-mind changes. We go outside, we look at the sky, we take a breath, we see a smile, we do something, and that house of cards falls. It's humbling to see.

Humility is a kind of openness to the data of this moment, and an unwillingness to cover over the mystery with self-serving certainties. We learn on this path, but we can never irreversibly rule out the possibility that wisdom is delusion. That sounds maybe haunting, but it's sort of thrilling to me. Like the structure of science, everything is awaiting disconfirmation. That doesn't lead us into a kind of instability, or feeling that it is just all tentative; we just have to keep looking.

I was reading something where research subjects, when they claim to be 98% certain about something, they're wrong about 30% of the time. When they estimate 99.9% certainty, they were wrong 19% of the time. And when subjects estimated 99.99999% certainty, they were wrong 13%⁶ of the time. There is something funny to me about that.

The permanent possibility of being wrong demands that we hedge. We hedge: "don't know." We hedge epistemologically about knowing, we hedge morally. To forget the permanent possibility of being wrong is the first step towards violence.

The humility of which I speak actually moves us in the direction of nonviolence. So much confidence, so much humility. I offer this for your consideration this morning. I wish you all a good day, and we'll keep going tomorrow morning.