Loving the Self to Death

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Matthew Brensilver: Loving the Self to Death. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 14, 2019. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Loving the Self to Death

Welcome. Thanks for having me, it's nice to sit with you.

This is from a talk that Michelle McDonald^[1] gave, and she's describing this interaction with, I think, her great-niece. Michelle is a meditation teacher in Hawaii and a long-term teacher at IMS. She has a bad back, and so the way that she described picking up her niece was that her niece would run and jump onto Michelle's back, because the gesture of actually lifting was too much. But if she jumped, it was okay.

So, this is Michelle: Her great-niece, Brenna, is a little over 50 pounds. She said, "I don't really have the ability to lift her up. She's running towards me, and I don't see the backpack on her. Just to let you know, also to set the stage, it was pouring rain and really cold out. We were right at the doorway to leave this school, and there were a lot of parents and kids running around. She's running at me, and I say 'jump,' and I pick her up. And I'm like, wow, I always think I can do anything."

"Carrying her out, I opened the door and I have a moment—and it's not a moment of willingness. I feel that cold air and I want my hood on. So I say, 'Brenna, why don't you put my hood on so I don't get cold?' She puts my hood on, and she puts it on over my eyes, like a kid will do. So I'm like, oh."

"I go out, and I get outside, and I don't know that the step is a gradual step. I start to take this fall. You know how everything slows down when you're taking a fall? The difference between everything going fine and everything not going fine is so thin. This is anicca^[2]. I start to slip, and I really fell swirling around, and we both fell. I got a pretty good scrape, I ripped my favorite pants, but what was worse was that I was worried she was going to be embarrassed. I was going for this fall and I could feel all the places in her mind she was going to go, and the worst part was embarrassment. So I decided to just act like nothing really happened."

"I just jumped up with her and I said, 'Brenna, that was a good job,' and I really meant it. She looked at me like my aunt is nuts. I took her mind off the embarrassment, but then I really praised her and I meant it. If she hadn't completely flowed with that experience, I would have been in serious trouble. She just trusted me and went with the fall so beautifully, she didn't get hurt at all. You know how you can protect a kid more than yourself? It was magnificent."

Do you relate to your falls like that? Do you relate to the difficult times in practice like that? Is there some voice in you that says, "Wow, you did a really good job with that fall"?

The Agony of the Comparing Mind

About 15 years ago, I was sitting a retreat with Shinzen Young^[3], and we were in a part of the retreat where a guided meditation was followed by some dialogue. Somebody gave a great report about how her meditation was going, and it was glowing. As I'm listening to this—and I think it was a two-week retreat—and hearing how well things are going, my heart is sinking. Just unadulterated envy. [Laughter]

There was no sense of mudita^[4], of sympathetic joy, of delighting in the spiritual flourishing of my fellow yogi. The comparing mind was the only thing in consciousness, really. That was a function of the fact that there was this kind of longing for the Dharma^[5], longing to understand my mind, to know what was possible, to know how deeply the heart could rest, and how expansive the mind could be. There was a very sincere wish for that, but it was all bound up with a lot of egoic clinging, where I was trying to turn myself into this spiritual being. In a certain way, anyone else's experience was a potential threat. That's just the folly and the agony of the comparing mind.

The envy of that moment is like everything in our practice: it's teaching us. The envy highlights the architecture of self-view. To actually understand the places of clinging, the ways in which I get fixated on who I am and what makes me of value, the envy is a kind of spotlight on the structure and architecture of that.

I'm sitting there, and it was intense enough that I raised my hand—I don't usually raise my hand—and I reported on my experience. I was quite settled and concentrated myself, so I gave a blow-by-blow experience of the agonizing comparing mind and envy, and all of this.

Loving Envy to Death

The teacher said, with respect to that experience which is arising and passing in real-time, his instruction was: "Love that envy to death. Love it to death."

What does that mean to love it to death? That might well be the mantra of Vipassana^[6] practice, actually.

Elsewhere, Shinzen has said that to have a complete experience is to love something to death and to know it to death, whether it's yourself or any sensory event. Because when you love it to death and know it to death, you're too busy experiencing it to make an object out of it. In a sense, it's not there, but it's not there because you're so busy knowing it. So it's more there. It's both more there and less there than normal human experience. A kind of completeness and a kind of nothingness at exactly the same time.

The things that cause us pain in this life, we generally try to hate them to death. We know that experience, and in a certain way, even with our own spiritual or psychological evolution, we're repeating that same pattern. One of my friends, Vinny Ferraro^[7], says, "You can't hate yourself into becoming a better person." How hard have we tried that one?

In spiritual practice, we want to look at how we turn ourselves into a kind of battleground: me versus my ego, me versus my emotions, the spiritual self versus my animal self. This dynamic of hating something to death arises in a lot of different ways, and we turn awareness into this battleground. But awareness has no enemies. There are no enemies in experience.

We're actually moving the heart and mind in the direction of loving it to death. I would hear, "Of course, Matthew, you don't need to do this. You don't need to practice in this way. You don't need to turn your inner life into this kind of battleground and allow the clinging to flavor the trajectory of practice." I would hear that, but I really wouldn't totally believe it. I kind of believed it, but there was a part of me that just felt like somehow unless I was doing some kind of battle, spiritual practice wasn't advancing. We have to learn these lessons in our own time. We kind of cling and suffer our way into freedom.

The Peaks and Valleys of Practice

Some of what we're learning to do is to develop a certain kind of grace, patience, and wisdom with respect to the peaks and valleys of spiritual life. This is most evident on silent, intensive retreat, but it can be discerned in our ordinary daily life. It feels so much like the peaks are the point of practice. But the truth is that the peaks, the valleys, the ascent, and the descent are the point of practice.

That takes a long time to trust. I'm so familiar with that feeling of the descent. When there's some peace, or clarity, or goodness, or love, or the mind is open, life feels complete, and nothing's left out. Then there's this slow decay of the mindfulness. The descent begins, and it's like, "No, please, no." We scramble and grapple and try to claw our way back up that descent, even as our fingernails are making marks down the side of the mountain. It's like there's no way this is the point of practice. There's no way that's the point.

But it is the point of practice. Each place on that roller coaster ride of peak and valley, descent and ascent, has something to offer the heart. We have to actually open in a certain way to learn from every place along that continuum.

Sometimes nothing we do works. We do everything we can to reestablish a certain balance or to open in some way to be nourished by this particular moment of practice, and it feels like nothing is working. That too, of course, is a Dharma experience—namely, the experience of helplessness. We miss that. We miss the moment of "Oh, this is what helplessness feels like." In the pantheon of the most aversive human experiences, that's up there.

Sometimes we won't have the energy to do it. But the learning on offer in those moments is for the heart to be softened and humbled in a more radical way. When nothing's working, a deeper love can grow out of this. When the ego is all out of moves, [unintelligible] many people have acceptance issues, sometimes very strong. But I would suggest that we all have acceptance issues. I have acceptance issues. Being a self is extremely busy, and to my mind, comfortable.

You really have to cultivate this intentionality above all: just to have the deep, loving acceptance of the mess of it all, without taking it that there is something wrong with you. We're all in the mess on the self level. Some of us are better at handling it than others, some of us are less deeply tragically wounded by it, but we're all in that slightly fragile state.

There's a sense of real loving acceptance. "This is about as open as you can be right now. Okay, that's fine. This is about as grounded as you can be right now. This is about as quiet as you can be right now." Just keep sensing that quality of caring and loving. These resonances do keep washing through, and they begin to reassure and calm. We find here is the ground. The ground is in the quality of loving acceptance, not in myself or my strategies, but in the loving acceptance of myself and my strategies.

In the model of practice in this world of mindfulness, of Vipassana, as I've been alluding to these cycles, Michelle uses the language of purity and purification. Peaks, and then some kind of descent. In a way, it's the peak, the clarity, the openness, and the love that actually makes more room for what is unresolved in the heart to arise. There's this kind of rhythm through which we spiral down or up, developing grace with what practice looks like now. We have so many reference points of what that looked like last sit, or yesterday, or last year, or the last breath. But instead, we're actually developing this commitment to just learning, being softened by life, no matter what is arising. This process of spiraling keeps going until we're more and more free, until there's less and less that can ambush the heart and mind.

Love and the Undigested Past

In this process, of course, to love it to death is about love. In the spirit of Martin Luther King, it's sort of a spirit of non-violence directed inwards. In a way, we are investing love, or beginning with love, and growing love in the process.

Jesmyn Ward^[8] said, "A spiritual awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has aroused them in vain." Love is said to be the kind of glue of the world. Sometimes you reflect on what it's like in the absence of love—the ways things disintegrate, and fracture, and harm is done.

To love something to death is not necessarily to like it. We usually think about hating and liking, really liking, and then we get to love, and it's all on the same spectrum. But we're not actually trying to re-engineer our preferences. What you like and what you dislike is not a battle you want to pick. We can not like something, but love it. We can not like the descent into some new phase of purification in practice, but we can love it.

This generates a kind of indirect path to love. Opening with equanimity to difficulty has a byproduct of more and more love.

What do we love to death? We love certain habits to death. We see we're getting caught in some way: we want to do something the same way we always do, we want to tell ourselves the same story, we want to act out the same pattern. Just the willingness to stay is the beginning of the transformation of a habit. The directive, the order from the habit, is to do something, and we just stay. That requires a kind of patience with the unfurling of a tightly bound wire in our own body and mind. It usually means developing some equanimity with feeling, because the habit blackmails us into action, and its trump card is feeling. We're actually learning just to stay. That's how we begin to love a habit to death.

We love our past to death. Elie Wiesel^[9], in recollections of surviving the Holocaust while much of his family died, wrote: "In the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences."

In some ways, the present moment is composed of the past, the totality of the past. We sit down and we all talk about being present, but to be present, in a certain sense, is to have equanimity with the past. To make room in the heart for all of the karmic streams to enter into this moment, and to bless them with awareness. There's an important sense in which practice is a transformation of the momentum of the past, and a way in which we come to a deeper sense of completion with the past.

Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom^[10] described therapeutic success as "giving up hope for a better past." Which is a good line, but there's another way in which the past is not accessed, but constructed and reconstructed. It's not like we reach into this file drawer and there are these perfectly encoded memories. In a certain way, how memory gets encoded is a function of our delusion in that moment—how we construe things. How we reconstruct our past, in part, is a function of the level of delusion in the moment; that we actually were not able to see that experience with the Dharma eye, that we perceived it to some extent through the prism of the kilesas^[11] of greed, hatred, and delusion.

It often feels like memory gets locked in at that particular level of development in our own wisdom and love. There's an aspect of practice where, as we begin to actually bless our past with wisdom and love, the past is actually being transformed. Philip Roth^[12] said, "We don't just forget things because they don't matter, but we also forget things because they matter too much. Each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint."

We are acclimatized to our autobiography, this story we've told and retold. It's so much like the water that we swim in that sometimes just a glimpse, just a sense of that opening, can be liberating. Just becoming a little bit unconvinced by your autobiography, becoming a little bit more mysterious to yourself. Dharma practice is a way in which we come to be slightly alienated from our autobiographies, and actually begin to love our past to death.

In that process, the sense of who we are, where we've come from, and what our past even is, changes. Here we are, sitting, trying to mind our own business, and there's that memory, there's that habit, there's that very familiar autobiographical trope, and we love it to death. It's like blessing the past with wisdom and love, because we misconstrued the memories that get lodged in the heart and mind. They're calling out for attention. They feel like something undigested. Just like when we eat a meal that is too big for us to digest, our life has been too big for us to digest. Any human life at times is more intense than we can handle. Just being human, in a sense, is a little bit more intense than we can handle. That's the First Noble Truth^[13].

And so these things come up. If we sit enough, if we actually get still and quiet, everything undigested comes up pleading with us to be loved to death. We bless all our former selves with the Dharma. We forgive all of them. And in this process, you could say we are loving the self to death.

The Self as an Experience

In Buddhism, the self is not a thing, but an experience. It's a process that arises and passes, in the same way that sound arises and passes. To love the self to death is to actually see what feels like the ground of my being, to see that as an arising, flowing experience.

Dan Dennett^[14], the philosopher, described the self as the "center of narrative gravity." And as he said, like in physics, a center of gravity is not an actual point. It's a kind of abstraction. Useful for sure, but an abstraction. There's something very potent about that description. The sense of self as the center of narrative gravity is the point to which it feels like the ground of our being, but it's actually experience, and is impermanent. When it's not seen with clarity, when it's not loved to death, it creates the sense of being outside of experience, of being a person.

The density of self varies dramatically. As we start to get more still, we love the self to death. In that moment with the eruption of envy that I began with, there's not just the envy, but there's this elaborate sense of self-making, of autobiographical debris that's getting kicked up. We love it to death.

There's a continuum from self-harshness that moves more and more towards something like self-acceptance and self-love. Then we just keep loving the self more and more deeply, and we know anatta^[15] (not-self). Self-hatred is a kind of friction and preoccupation. We start with, "How can we love this experience? Love it to death." We start to come into, over time, a more gentle relationship with our own self. The attention gets more precise and more quiet, and then the actual components, the experiences that create the sense of I-am-ness, we love that also to death. There is no conflict between loving the self and forgetting the self.

I offer that for your consideration. Thank you.