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Sit: Moving towards compassion; Talk: Opportunities & Complexities of Speaking About Awakening

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 11, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Okay folks, so welcome. I appreciate the suggestions on meditative themes over there. We're converging on something like love.

One of the yogis sent me a very brief poem from the 18th-century Japanese haiku poet, Kobayashi Issa¹, who, from my understanding, had a quite tragic life. The very short but very to-the-point poem:

This world of dew is a world of dew, and yet... and yet...

So let us settle into our posture.

Guided Meditation: moving towards compassion (link)

What are the conditions that support love? Some measure of tranquility. And so we soothe our heart as we begin. Some measure of samadhi², the unification of mind. So we gather ourselves. The more still we become, the more uniformly love flavors the mind.

Strangely, our love is supported by our capacity to put the world down temporarily, to relinquish covetousness and distress with respect to the world, as the suttas read.

We just establish some mindfulness. Awake to this moment. Awake to joy. Awake to sorrow.

Whatever heaviness is in our heart, we begin to sense that. It might be significant, might be quite subtle, might be specific. And it may be just the sorrow of being human. In whatever ways we suffer, whatever ways we are not free, we become willing to have a thoroughly undefended relationship to that suffering, to whatever heaviness might be there, whatever helplessness might be there.

The more vividly, soberly we experience our own pain, the more obvious the necessity of love becomes. So we start very close to the ground level of being human: that we suffer. And then we begin to pour our love into that pain, letting it mix, letting the love bless the pain.

Maybe there's some visual thinking, visual imagery that supports this process. Maybe you're silently whispering words in your own mind to evoke the care.

The poignancy of love meeting suffering becomes a kind of home, a Brahmavihara³. It's a sense of protection of that species of love.

When we come to know how utterly impersonal our suffering is, come to know its universality, come to know it as the thread that weaves us together, it becomes more natural to begin to wish that other beings suffer less. The abrasiveness of cruelty is so obvious in the light of awareness. And so we turn to this kind of love.

And no, it's not sufficient. No, it's not the last word. But do not let either of those facts rob you of the experience of knowing love deeply and abiding in it.

Just resting, softening.

Our body is a kind of antenna of sorts, resonating at a certain frequency and then radiating, broadcasting the same frequency. Just beginning to line up your being in the direction of compassion.

Just resting in such a way that we plant seeds of nonviolence in our heart-mind, that we become fundamentally alienated from cruelty, that our love becomes much closer to the surface. Just one breath, one memory, one word, and the dharma rushes in. The love rises up. Maybe very quiet love, but love nonetheless.

May my life be a cause and condition for less suffering, more understanding.

Dharmette: Opportunities and Complexities of Speaking about Awakening (link)

Good to practice with you. Just before I left to come teach, I was with my 11-year-old nephew, and I said, "I got to go. I got to go teach. Give me a pep talk." He's like, "What?" I'm like, "Okay, it's the bottom of the sixth inning in baseball." He's a baseball fan. "Bottom of the sixth, we're down one run. Runner on third. I'm at bat. What do you say to me? Give me the pep talk." And he said, "You're going to strike out." [Laughter] I told him I'd remember that, keeping tabs on these kind of brutal assaults on my dignity.

So, it's a good thing to cultivate the capacity, no matter how robust, to have well-being independent of conditions. It's one way of talking about freedom.

I was recently on retreat and we got a question asking why we, the teachers, weren't speaking more explicitly about awakening. And so I thought to try to speak to that. What are the pros and cons of being explicit about awakening? And what are the benefits and complexities of such a discussion?

It's worth just checking in right now. What does that word do to your mind? Does it uplift or confront or inspire? Or does the mind become dense with self as we contemplate awakening?

Of course, the Buddha was not shy. It was striking how forthright and frequently liberation was discussed. This beautiful quote from the Majjhima Nikāya⁴:

The purpose of the holy life does not consist in acquiring benefits, honor or fame, nor in gaining virtue, states of concentration nor insight or the eye of knowledge. The unshakable deliverance of heart, the sure heart's release. This and this alone is the object of the holy life, its essence, its true goal.

The first piece to say is about context. We talk about dharma in groups and we talk one-on-one. In speaking to a group, the teacher is attempting to say things that maximize benefit and minimize mischief. And that's a complex calculation. It keeps us on our toes all the time because every teaching can be wielded by our wisdom or by our bad habits.

In speaking one-on-one with somebody, the conversation could be quite different and the calculations are simpler. There might be higher levels of disclosure and more explicit conversations. You're meeting the needs of that person rather than calibrating to a kind of group process. And yet, much of the dharma happens in the group context.

I still feel like there are genuine benefits to speaking about freedom, about awakening. It's real. You know, most change is gradual, but not all change. So there are kind of inflection points that decisively alter the spiritual trajectory of one person's life. Carl Jung described huge emotional displacements and rearrangements: "ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these people are suddenly cast to one side and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them." That's a kind of characterization of what's sometimes described in psychology as quantum changes.

Not speaking about awakening may erode people's confidence in themselves or make it seem like some mythical thing. I remember a teacher I sat with for many years, Shinzen Young, saying, "Don't get stuck in a good place." Sometimes happiness, some of the fruit of practice, can breed a measure of complacency.

Not all aspiration generates grasping and craving and clinging, striving. Often it does, but not always. Sometimes we can hold some aspiration and not be deformed by the desperate, self-driven strive. Jesse Vega-Frey asked this question to a revered Burmese teacher. He said, "On the one hand there's spiritual urgency, samvega⁵, on the other hand there's patience. How do these two fit together?" And the Sayadaw's⁶ response was, "You should have samvega and patience. No problem."

Not all aspiration is drenched in self. Some longings do emerge from the heart, and they tend to be vaguer, less transactional. They're outside of the logic of self. An explicit focus on awakening can help us stop tinkering with our conditioning. It can help us cut through the tendency to just keep making small modifications to this self-model rather than step out. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche⁷ said, "Do you want to keep rearranging the furniture of your dream, or do you want to wake up?"

It's important for us to know that much of what we consider the first arrow is the second, and that we might know forms of peace and well-being that we haven't really imagined. It's hard to imagine that this world is so overflowing with mystery, majesty, it makes you want to bow down.

And there are complications. There are complications about talking explicitly about awakening. In a way, I want to respect the many different fruits of dharma practice and not elevate awakening in such a way that it's the only fruit that matters. This is maybe me personally, but I'm sort of equally touched by many kinds of letting go, many kinds of healing. And sometimes the most beautiful growth comes when just huge chunks of psychological conditioning fall away. It's not awakening, but it's every bit as beautiful to my mind.

Talking about awakening is very tricky because it's almost always envisioned from the perspective of self-view. We can't imagine it as anything but a kind of accoutrement of the self. Awakening seems like the solution to one's problems, rather than a kaleidoscopic shift in which our "problems" appear entirely differently.

Generally speaking, the people who have awakening experiences do not care narrowly about awakening. They care about truth and renunciation and awareness and honoring an expression of reverence for the exquisite beauty of the dharma. They care about love. They don't even care what they learn, how they're changed, what they get. They are simply walking a path, and all the gifts are almost incidental.

Deeper freedom is not a transaction. It's a very deep suspension of the bartering mode of existence. And it's tricky to talk about awakening because you're talking to a self, but it's not you, the one planning the progress, that inherits the progress. That self is long gone once there's progress.

Causality is complex. It's hard to draw straight lines from one insight, one process in the heart, to the effect. It's hard to draw the lines of cause and effect. We think we can do it easily, but it's not so simple. It's hard to know the counterfactual of where our life was going were it not for this or that. It's hard to know.

So it's complicated. And as a temperamentally ambivalent kind of character, maybe cautious, I feel the need to speak to both sides. So, for what it's worth, I appreciate your attention.

I'll be away next week, and then restart on the 24th. Okay, folks. Thank you for your attention. Please take good care of your heart and of each other, and we'll keep going.