Guided Meditation; Dharma and Concern for the World

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation; Dharma Talk: Dharma and Concern for the World. 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 03, 2022. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning everyone, and welcome to IMC. It's great to be with you all. Just a friendly reminder: if you have a cell phone or anything else that makes noise, kindly silence it or turn it completely off. Thank you.

Most of you know that this center runs totally by donation. Everyone here is offering the dana^[1] freely at their own expense to get here. So if you're inclined to donate to either the operations or the teacher, there's a donation box with the teacher's name near the front door, an electronic kiosk next to the library door, and you can donate online as well.

We're happy to have Matthew Brensilver here this morning. I'll read his bio: Matthew Brensilver, PhD, is a member of the Guiding Teachers Executive Committee and the Teachers Council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He previously served as Program Director for Mindful Schools and for more than a decade was a core teacher at Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. He lectures at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center about the intersections between mindfulness and mental health. Before committing to teach meditation full-time, he spent years doing research on addiction pharmacotherapy at the UCLA Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine and is interested in the unfolding dialogue between dharma and science. Matthew is the co-author of two forthcoming books on meditation during adolescence.

Good morning, Matthew. Thank you.

Guided Meditation

Thank you, Martha. Thank you. Thanks for having me, and thanks for the warm welcome. Is the sound good? Okay, thanks.

So, we'll sit. I'll lightly guide us till the top of the hour and then offer a talk.

Like a nectar falling to the bottom of a glass of juice, we settle. [unintelligible]

And sometimes it's skillful to stop right on a dime to begin implementing a very concrete technique, to specify precisely where the attention is directed. And other times, a certain kind of openness, just to see how the nectar needs to settle. To see what needs attention, what needs patience, what needs love. And to breathe and arrive.

Just let everything remind you of the dharma.

Just forgive all phenomena and rest.

Just forgiving thought, and sensation, and affect, and sound. Unentangled.

Marshalling the attention—the spotlight of attention—takes a little bit of energy. There is nothing wrong with expending energy and effort on this path.

But then sometimes it is useful to see what is effortless about awareness. A dimension of awareness that you can't stop, don't need to direct, and requires no effort to prop up. And we just rest there.

Dharma and Concern for the World

The way I've approached dharma practice is less as a set of answers, and more as a kind of open question—a method of inquiry. This talk is in that spirit.

So many people these days seem kind of ragged. And people who care about other people seem especially ragged and weary. The pace of the news seems unrelenting, unsustainable for a lot of people emotionally. There's a sense—and we're always warned against this sense when we have it in a moment of meditation—but there's a sense, maybe deluded, like it's hard to imagine it getting better. There's some sense of all these different karmic streams converging in ways that make it hard to imagine feeling a lot lighter, at least.

I was thinking, just like there's a consumer confidence index of economic expectations and attitudes among the public—what do you think about interest rates, or what are your buying intentions?—there's also a kind of humanity confidence index. And our humanity confidence index right now is kind of shaky.

There's a sense that we maybe can't keep going the way we've been going. We've been mining the world, the earth, and now we are mining ourselves. This is a notable quote from Justin Rosenstein, a tech founder who's concerned about these things. He said:

"We live in a world in which a tree is worth more financially dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations aren't regulated, they're going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it's destroying the planet and we know it's going to leave a worse world for future generations. This is short-term thinking based on the religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow magically each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What's frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will wake us up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we're the tree, we're the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we're spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we're spending time living our life in a rich way. And so we're seeing the results of that. We're seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention towards the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives."

At some point in life, we realize that the time we have left is less than what we've already lived. And it can feel the same for societies. Have we hit a kind of apex point, and feel like we're in descent? Is this particular generation the unique, extraordinary, fortunate, and unfortunate inflection point? Or is that just the vanity and grandiosity of our generation? Because just like every person thinks they're special, every generation thinks it's special. So maybe we're just being seduced into a certain kind of grandiosity of this as an inflection point. But for people who care about people, it's intense.

And of course, I'm thinking about Roe^[2], and I'm thinking just more generally about the ascendancy of, and the way that greed, aversion, and delusion are dignified culture-wide.

There was a moment in September 2020. George Floyd was killed on May 25th, and it was a very dangerous and still unstable political situation. There were fires—a big fire down outside Fresno somewhere, and then up north. The air on the ground was okay, actually, but whatever the atmospheric conditions were—maybe you remember this day—the smoke was held real high and had this wild, distorting effect on the light. It was dark in the middle of the day, an orange dark. That day I was at a Buddhist teacher meeting on Zoom, as we all were then. It was grim. A very painful day.

There's a certain kind of collapse that happens in the mind when the badness—the different points of pain in the body politic and the world—do not add up together. They are synergistic. It's not badness plus badness, but madness multiplied by badness, multiplied again. It's a distinctive phenomenology: that sense of the collapse of the mind, this inward heart collapse. There is no space. A Zen master said, "Hell is no space."

Two days after that meeting, I gave a talk on the 19th anniversary of September 11th. Normally that group is about 125 people, but it was double that day. I talked about love. Just holding on. I thought of the Tom Waits song, Hold On:

Down by the riverside motel, it's 10 below and falling
By a 99-cent store she closed her eyes and started swaying
But it's so hard to dance that way when it's cold and there's no music
Oh, your hometown's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing a song called 'Hold On'
Hold on, babe, you gotta hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you gotta hold on

One of the things that happens in moments like that is a collapse into a certain kind of nihilism or desperation—a frenzy. The Buddha warned against nihilism; he felt like it was a potential risk of opening to the contingency of all things. Maybe we intuitively know that it's not satisfying for our heart. Once we've seen the poignancy of the human condition, it's hard to just devolve into nihilism. So then we want to act. We move into the more frenzied, desperate mode, but are almost immediately confronted with our own nearly complete helplessness.

Maybe suffering—dukkha^[3]—and helplessness are almost synonyms. I read that people cry for many reasons, but one of the reasons we cry is from a sense of helplessness. Tears are a kind of social plea, saying something like, "I need you." But now we cry for others, and it often feels like no one's coming.

All of this portrait I'm painting can scramble us. There's a firehose of negative affect—that sense of just spraying negative affect in all directions. And then, enter Twitter. We are scrambling to try to find a view that's satisfying, to try to find an outlet for this firehose of negative affect.

All of this can undercut faith in the dharma and the path. It makes us wonder in moments: maybe it's not such a meaningful thing. Or it makes us wonder: is it self-indulgent to even care how I'm doing? Is it self-indulgent to even try to potentiate my well-being, to fiddle with the nuances of my own suffering as the world burns? We can get into this mode of practicing where we're trying to save ourselves and trying to save the world. It's a form of multitasking, and practice does not flourish when we're multitasking in it.

And so we're stuck. So what to do? And this, of course, is where I'm supposed to pivot and give you answers. [Laughter] Your laughter conveys to me that you know I don't have them.

But it's worth interrogating the view that fosters the dilemma I laid out and to make a few suggestions. Now, I'm always cautious about anything that actually blunts the force of what I've just shared. I'm cautious because sometimes with the depth of that pain, you just want to wiggle out of it in whatever way you can with vague platitudes or palliative measures and thoughts that just take the edge off the intensity of the need and suffering. And I'm very conscious of my own fortune, privilege, and social location. Anytime I talk about progress I'm very conscious of that, because to talk of progress can seem like it is diminishing the enormity of the existing suffering. So that is an important caveat.

But many, many things are getting better. And not to see that, not to attune to that, is its own kind of delusion. Look at the global burden of disease, the trends over the recent decades in international human rights, trends in terms of violence, and trends in terms of extreme poverty. It costs more now to save a life than it did. The cost is going up, and that's actually good news, right? Because to intervene in a way to save a life that otherwise would have been lost costs more because fewer people are dying needlessly from conditions that could be prevented through very basic interventions. This is a good thing that it costs more to save a life now. So this perception that everything is always getting worse is not right. That's an important corrective to us attuning to the enormity of dukkha.

Some researchers—Thalia Wheatley, Dan Gilbert, and colleagues^[4]—did a series of studies where they described a phenomenon where, when the instances of badness grow less common, the concept of badness expands and becomes more prominent. As there's a decreasingly gross, yucky context, the examples of badness become more prominent. They write:

"Many organizations and institutions are dedicated to identifying and reducing the prevalence of social problems, but our studies suggest that even well-meaning agents may sometimes fail to recognize the success of their efforts simply because they view each new instance in the decreasingly problematic context that they themselves have brought about. Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems—from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality—the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism."

So we attune to this. And not just to blunt the pain of the reality of dukkha, but because to not know that fosters its own kind of delusion.

With all that said, I'm pivoting between depressing and uplifting. And we're making another pivot here: all the positive trends that I've enumerated, that you can see in the data that are very striking, are threatened by larger risks. As I was saying, every generation thinks it's special. You always hear, "Oh, back when I..." or whatever. There is a generational grandiosity that mirrors the egoic process of an individual. So I'm generally skeptical of pivotal moments, hinge points. But these couple of generations may actually be that.

This is Toby Ord^[5] in The Precipice:

"The threats to humanity and how we address them define our time. The advent of nuclear weapons posed a real risk to human extinction in the 20th century. With the continued acceleration of technology, and without serious efforts to protect humanity, there's strong reason to believe that the risk will be higher this century and increasing with each century that technological progress continues, because these human-generated risks outstrip all natural risks combined. They set the clock on how long humanity has left to pull back from the brink. I'm not claiming that extinction is the inevitable conclusion of scientific progress, or even the most likely outcome. What I am claiming is there's been a robust trend towards increases in the power of humanity, which has reached a point where we pose a serious risk to our own existence."

He goes on to say:

"Recognizing that people matter equally wherever they are in time is a crucial next step in the ongoing story of humanity's moral progress. Our own generation is but one page in a much larger, longer story, and our most important role may be how we shape or fail to shape that story. This approach is animated by a moral reorientation toward the vast future that existential risks threaten to foreclose."

He suggested that humanity is maybe in its adolescent phase, where we have a lot of power and aren't sure what to do with it. A lot of power, but naive in important ways. Adolescents are in peak physical health, and yet die at much higher rates than you would expect. There is a sense of, yeah, we're playing with fire. That does not seem to me to be catastrophizing. That seems real. To worry is not unreasonable.

So amidst the vastness of suffering and the possibilities of the future, what stance will I take? What does this mean for my heart? How do I want to be informed by this moment?

We bump up against the blessings and consolation of the dharma, and the limitations of the dharma. For some forms of dis-ease, the dharma seems to me like the only medicine there is. I can't imagine any other medicine being adequate treatment. But that doesn't mean that the dharma is the medicine for all forms of dis-ease. In other words, dukkha is an interdisciplinary problem. In a way, if we expect the dharma to answer all species of suffering, it may fail to answer those species it can. And so we look to all the wisdom of the world—to science, art, philosophy, movement building, philanthropy, and all of it.

Now, as I engage with the world, I want my suffering to be efficient. I'm willing to suffer to engage, to avoid the deadness of apathy or nihilism. I'm willing to enter the public sphere and suffer. But I want that suffering to be efficient. I don't want to waste it.

As I look back on my life, there are some patches of suffering that seem totally necessary, onward-leading, important, and generative. It's like, "Oh yeah, I had to suffer in those ways." And I know there are ways in the future that I will need to suffer that will be the redemptive form of suffering, the onward-leading form of suffering. And I can also look back on my life—maybe anybody can—and see patches and strands, threads of suffering that appear almost utterly meaningless, cyclical, and unnecessary. It just didn't lead anywhere. It didn't accomplish anything. It was just me circling in some kind of little vortex of confusion and pain, not knowing how to break it.

Part of our dharma practice is becoming connoisseurs of our suffering, and spending it wisely. Engaging in ways where we're suffering efficiently—not cyclically, not uselessly. So we consent to some measure of suffering. We're not giving up on samsara^[6]. And we're careful not to suffer meaninglessly.

I think of this to some extent in how we engage with media and news. What aspects of that engagement are redemptive, important suffering, and what parts just have that cyclical, spinning-the-wheel-of-samsara feeling? This is a place to inquire and to look: what am I doing to my mind? Is it useful? What can I actually open to? What do I have to blunt myself from feeling because I'm so overexposed? When I actually read the paper, my nervous system isn't really equipped to open to the enormity of the suffering of samsara all the time. What does that do when I kind of open and kind of close to it?

So we're careful in how we dose the information. But we also find something to do. That anxiety needs to be bound to action. Some of the compulsivity about news is a function of our sense of our own powerlessness. It's like, "Well okay, if I'm completely powerless, at least I can just keep consuming that, or speaking about that." Instead, it's like, no, we do something. We find efficient ways to spend our suffering, to consent to some measure of suffering and engage, hopefully, in efficient ways.

We are called at times to give until it hurts—time, money, or effort. We give until it hurts. This is not some incredibly mercenary manipulation to try to get dana from you, by the way. I'm not a psychopath. [Laughter] But no, we give until it hurts.

Sometimes we're in this mode of half-compassion, half-equanimity. In my experience, it's like, no, no, no: a hundred percent compassion, and then a hundred percent equanimity. We give, and then we really rest. We truly firewall some parts of our life and we really rest. Otherwise, it's this half-open heart, half-equanimous sense of recognizing the limitations of our own wishes to control samsara, and that half-equanimity, half-compassion is its own kind of fatigue. So we truly give. We try to serve in ways that are meaningful even in the face of the enormity of suffering. And then we rest, and we really rest.

I think of the dharma primarily as a technology for freeing our own heart of greed and delusion. I think there are other traditions of wisdom that are relevant for change at a collective level. Nevertheless, our dharma practice is relevant. It endows us with skills that are powerful for engaging the dukkha of the world.

We learn to truly care about suffering, for the earth-shattering poignancy of that to rain down on us. Just that closes the distance we might imagine between ourselves and someone on the other side of the world, or ourselves and someone in the distant future. The circle of empathy widens. We know how deeply we share the longing to be free from suffering. That is in our bones.

We learn how to grieve well, which is indispensable. If we want to open to suffering and engage it, but we don't know how to open to the rhythms of grieving and the inevitability of loss, we get spun in many ways.

We cultivate a deep patience—a deep patience that these are multi-generational efforts. The pāramī^[7] of patience.

We're learning to drain egoic investment from our views. The ways in which our views become charged with egoic energy. We think our self-righteousness makes us more persuasive, but it makes us much, much less. It is a form of clinging. And so we can actually sense the moral force of a view that is enunciated without clinging.

And we're coming to terms with death. That is so crucial, a part of our practice. Maybe a prerequisite, actually, for engaging with the broader world of dukkha at a societal level. Because when we have no freedom around our own death, it distorts our engagement in many ways. It's like our own death is Mara's^[8] ultimate trump card. Camus said something like, "Make peace with death; after that, anything is possible." In this realm, so much delusion, fear, and manipulation arises out of our own incomplete relationship with mortality, with the changingness and the loss of all things.

And so we find a way to serve, we let go of suffering that is inefficient, and we rest. It seems like a good enough life to me.

We'll sit for a minute.

(Meditation)

I offer these thoughts for your consideration. It's an idiosyncratic path, and you have to determine what is useful, what to pick up and investigate, and what to leave behind. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to ask some of these questions together. May we live well. Thank you.