This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Willfulness & Self; Dharmette: Functions of Dharma Pleasure w Matthew Brensilver. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Self and Willfulness; Dharmette: Functions of dharma pleasure - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 06, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Self and Willfulness

Welcome folks, welcome to you all. Okay, let's meditate.

Maybe just examine what you started to do when you started to meditate. What you think it means to begin to meditate. Maybe stop doing all the things you began. We can pick up certain efforts later, but for now, put all of them down. Anything you can stop doing, stop doing.

It maybe feels like we have to do something, but sometimes the feeling of having to do something to make something happen is a certain lack of trust in our mind. So what if you begin to trust your mind? Begin to trust the awareness that doesn't depend on your willfulness.

Just enough with the suspicion of yourself, your mind.

If I give you an intentional anchor and say to attend to your breath, attend to your body, attend to the soundscape—they are beautiful instructions, but it gives a lot of room for a self to be born. The self that takes my instruction and orchestrates the attentional focus.

So what can you trust that doesn't depend on you? The truth is, whatever depends on me is not so reliable.

Maybe we could say the anchor is everywhere.

In a sense, the self's job is willfulness. If we don't give self a job, do we need a self?

The self, one of my friends said, is experienced as tension. So what if we do anything, we relax and we trust awareness to find us.

We just keep letting our doingness dissolve into the openness of awareness.

Maybe the only job we give ourselves is to surrender. Trust.

Your meditation practice doesn't need you.

Maybe we can say self is death and awareness is life. How alive may we become?

Dharmette: Functions of dharma pleasure

Okay, so this friend, I mentioned him before, a long-time practitioner, and it's really kind of like he's living in a Dharma talk. It's inspiring, actually. It's like he's just always actively working with something in his practice. And so whenever we talk, it's like he's midway into a really good Dharma talk he's giving to himself, then he just starts giving it to me. And he's persuasive.

I remember one conversation, he was like, "You know, we say to everybody, 'Let go and open to anicca¹, open to uncertainty, comprehend suffering, comprehend dukkha².'" He said, "It's too much. It's just too much. We need to teach pleasure. I'm in this path of pleasure right now." And he wasn't talking about hedonism exactly, but the path is indeed about a certain kind of pleasure we call happiness, peace. There is such a thing as the wholesome pleasant. The pleasure that leads not to more craving, but actually to well-being, to satiety. Like we are full. You know, craving never culminates in satiety, but in a cycle.

So I wanted to speak a little bit about some of the different species of Dharma pleasure, but more centrally, what are the functions of Dharma pleasure?

The species of Dharma pleasure, you know, many things we could go on forever probably, but a few that come to mind for me: just the pleasure of having a path. That there is a path that has been walked by other Dharma ancestors before us. That there's a path, actually, that someone has made sense of the intensity of the human condition. There's a lot of pleasure just in that.

There's pleasure in having one's Dharma heart known, understood, seen, not misconstrued. We call it the delights of spiritual friendship, kalyāṇa-mittatā³.

There's the pleasure of more closely aligning our deepest ethical intuitions with our behavior. And maybe there's always some gap between what we know and what we can do, what we can pull off, but Dharma practice brings us into deeper alignment between our commitments and our acts, and this feels very good.

There is the pleasure of non-shame. Because we've sort of worked through all the ways that the self constellates shame. We've worked through all the ways in which we're out of step with our values. We've worked through all the things that feel like they testify to something wrong with me. There's the pleasure of... we can't be found out anymore, you know? Can't be found out. It's not that there aren't different dimensions of our own being, but we've sort of left no stone unturned with this fearless self-investigation. And wherever there's shame, we air it out. We realign, and there's a sense of like, "Ah, can't be found out."

There's the pleasure of love, all the species of love: of kindness and compassion and delight, joy, gratitude. All these, they feel so good. They're pleasure. We know hatred simply does not work given the architecture of our nervous system. It cannot work. It's inherently painful, and love is not.

There's the pleasure of concentration, the unified mind we say, samādhi⁴. And samādhi is the kind of resolution of ambivalence, the resolution of being pulled in different directions. And it feels so good. Anytime in our life we've come to resolve some measure of ambivalence, it feels very good not to be split. Feels very good for the mind not to be split against itself, for our wanting not to be split against itself.

There's the pleasure of reverence. We all need something to revere. And you see, when people don't know what to revere, don't have something to revere, they go crazy.

The highest happiness, the Buddha says, is peace. The phenomena not stimulating chitta⁵, not stimulating heart-mind. That was just a beginning catalog of species of Dharma pleasures.

Okay, but what is a different question? What's the function of pleasure? How does pleasure function on the path, other than just feeling good? And that's very good.

Well, one function of Dharma pleasure is simply to keep us going on the path. If it's all grind, sometimes we can stay with it for a while, but it's harder. Faith is induced by pleasure. This weird way in which we really deeply link pleasure and progress—and sometimes that's really wrong—but in this case, okay, yeah, fair enough. That Dharma pleasure signals something. This is a worthy trajectory.

Dharma pleasure is rich. It's a satisfying pleasure that doesn't generate more craving. We know the pleasure that kind of compounds the cycle of acquisitiveness: getting, tasting, whatever the pleasure is, the partial satisfaction and partial heartbreak of it, and the kind of disappointment, and then the doubling down and the reiteration of that cycle. Dharma pleasure is not like that. It doesn't reinforce the cycles of compulsivity. And Dharma pleasure replaces some of the other sense pleasures we might be busy chasing. So yeah, generally speaking, we continue to do activities that are rewarding. It's like operant conditioning.

Because in the early parts of practice—and early parts might be many years—there is a lot of thawing of delusion that's painful. There's a lot of purification and tumult and intensity, and there's maybe not so much Dharma pleasure, and the motivation can kind of wobble. So the pleasure sort of helps us consolidate our motivation when it starts to kick in. Meditation starts to be actively rewarding, and it prepares us for deeper growth.

Pain generally attracts the mind; pleasure broadens the mind. Pain and suffering, it narrows our attentional focus. It's almost inherently... suffering is inherently self-absorbing. You know, suffering and the rigidity of self, the contraction of self, the attentional claustrophobia, those are all correlated. This pleasure is about beginning to broaden the mind, broaden the field of awareness.

And it's notable that happiness, some kind of happiness, some kind of pleasantness, some kind of pleasure precedes concentration and insight. Normally we think, "Well, I want concentration, I want samādhi, I want insight so that I can get happy." But it's actually happiness that's the precondition for those goodnesses sometimes. For sure, pain can be very good for concentration—there's nothing but the pain—and I spent a lot of time just like that in practice. But the mind fatigues if that's all, if all we ever do is see what's right in front of us. That kind of focus, the way pain narrows the attentional bandwidth, can be useful. But we also enjoy, as humans, as animals, looking out from altitude over distance. And amidst pleasure, we sort of perceive our life from a higher altitude, and the vigilance that we often live with dissolves. The landscape of the mind is more open, and there's a feeling of trust because we kind of just biologically trust pleasure. It signals there are no problems to be resolved.

So much of our insight on this path comes out of the noticing in the peripheral view. When we're looking for goodness or understanding, for solutions right here in front of us, it can contract the mind. And pleasure helps widen the field. It's almost like when I'm looking very intently right here in front of me, "Where's my insight? Where's my goodness? Where is my concentration?" When I'm looking in that way, there's a kind of more rigid model of the self. It's almost like new discoveries about what we are, new models of what we are, need to kind of sneak up on us. And our narrow focus is a kind of reiteration of self sometimes. With the broadening of pleasure, we start to learn from our peripheral vision. A lot of learning comes from there.

With the deepening of pleasure, there's more room for purification, which is still always going to be a part of our path until we're done. The path is a kind of dialectic of feeling good and feeling bad, efficient suffering. A dialectic of feeling good and feeling bad. And there's pleasure and love and refuge and delight and purity, and then there's purification. And the pleasure makes more room to digest the pain, the pain of our past, the habits that get us into trouble. The pleasure is almost like a robe that is broad enough to wrap up our pain.

So, yeah, many species of Dharma pleasure, many functions of it. And let us not be any more afraid of pleasure.

I offer this for your consideration. Thank you, and we'll gather back next time here next week. Okay folks, you take good care.