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Guided Meditation: Attention & Awareness

Welcome, folks. Nice to be with you. See the names over there. Let's meditate.

And just immediately when you hear that cue, "let's meditate," just notice what you do to move from the mode of chatting with friends to beginning formal practice. And maybe you do need to do some of the things you do, but maybe not others.

And so we begin by just being very natural at this moment. Not forcing ourselves into some slot that we think is meditation. Very natural. A certain kind of trust that the ingredients of wisdom, of love, are already here.

Relax whatever can be relaxed. Let go whatever can be let go. Our clinging necessitates a lot of agitation in our attention.

As we begin to make peace with the imperfection of the moment, to not be constantly seduced by the thought that something could get better, we make this kind of peace. The attention system settles. The spotlight of attention that illuminates phenomena—the breath, the body, sound, whatever—starts to glide more smoothly.

And sometimes we relinquish control even further, not even trying to direct the spotlight of attention anywhere. Come to rest back in awareness. And so if I told you to stop being aware, you couldn't do it. And whatever you cannot stop, rest there.

The attentional spotlight can be used for developing some stillness, focusing the attention. The attentional spotlight is also necessary for clinging. The awareness points to only ever letting go.

We're awake, and knowing is happening. The field of knowing is unpartitioned. But the knowing doesn't feel like it depends on me. The awareness no longer tastes like me.

Dharmette: The Pleasure of Spiritual Friendship

Okay, so, Dharma pleasures. We could have chosen from many, many, but we began with the pleasure of having a path, the pleasure of sourcing motivation from love, the pleasure of purification, the pleasure of tranquility of turning the dial down. And today, the pleasure of friendship.

A colleague of mine, Giselle Jones—who does a lot of couples therapy, she's a clinical social worker—defines intimacy... she comes as a guest speaker in this UCLA undergraduate class for the science of mindfulness and comes in each quarter to give a lecture to the undergrads. She defines intimacy in that context as the willingness and the ability to see and be seen. The willingness and the ability to see and be seen.

And I believe that we need to be seen at our best and our worst. We need to be seen at our best and our worst. If we're only known in our strength, we might become arrogant or defensive. And if we're only known in our pain, we might become deflated. And so it feels important to be seen clearly, lovingly, in both our strength and our desperation.

There are primary relationships, mostly family kind of relationships, where my defilements are known with such exquisite detail. You know those relationships, yeah? [Laughter] So there are several people in my life who could give a topographically precise map of my imperfection. Very precise. You know? And it actually feels great to be known in that way. Like, if you aren't, it feels like you're hiding, and that hurts. So to be known in one's imperfection feels vital.

But we also need to be known in our beauty. And sometimes loved ones do this, of course, but sometimes they're too close to see, or sometimes they may not know exactly what to look for. And so we have kalyāṇa-mitta^[1], the spiritual friends. And spiritual friends have many roles in our life, but one of them is to see the most beautiful parts in us. That's part of the role of sangha^[2]. We say sangha, this community of spiritual friends.

Now that does not mean that a spiritual friend is ignorant about our neurosis. But their attention—their attention is directed to goodness. Their attention is directed to goodness, and there's much pleasure in abiding with others in goodness. The poet Galway Kinnell^[3] said, "Sometimes it's necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness." And that's part of the function of spiritual friends: to illuminate goodness. We become sensitized to goodness, we start to see it everywhere, and our goodness is recognized. The intimacy of the ability and willingness to see and be seen.

We need good friends because we're so porous, you know? And we're way more suggestible than we think. We have this sense of, "I'm kind of an island," or something like that. Even if we think of ourselves as very relational, you know, we think, "These are my views. I'm Matthew Eric Brensilver, and this is what I believe. This is why I believe that." And it's like, please, who knows? Who knows where our ideas come from? All the places that shape the view, shape the nature of the fabrication, shape the confabulation of our life. We just take on the tone of what's around us. So I walk into a fancy store, and I start believing in wealth. I walk into a party with fancy people, and I start believing in power. And we need places where we believe in wisdom and love. We, in other words, must be continually reminded of our goodness.

And all this Dharma stuff sometimes seems so self-evident to us in a moment of peace or clarity, so self-evident, but it's very "inside baseball." It's very peculiar and idiosyncratic, and against the stream, and fringe. I was driving through California, from the Bay Area down through Southern California, through Bakersfield, and into a retreat at Big Bear in the mountains. And so many cities and towns and landscapes so particular, and it was intense. I felt like just in seeing it, I could infer something about the mind states based on the geography and the buildings and everything. And I did not see the Dharma many places. It looked like it would be very hard to sustain Dharma attention. And that's not that place's fault, but it's intense, yeah?

And so maybe we have conditions that remind us of Dharma, that reconnect us to the necessity of wisdom, of love, and we need our friends to keep reminding us of the urgency of that project. Our practice is—you know, Dharma practice sometimes I talk about it as making our heart into something like art. And I don't know much about art. An art connoisseur sees a painting, say, and they know so much about it. They literally see more than I do. But we're connoisseurs of goodness. That's what we're training in. And we start to see a lot of beauty in others, and they see beauty in us. And it's a delight to revere the same things. Something in the heart is quenched as we come to revere the same things.

And teaching—teaching this week, teaching anytime—is entirely about your goodness resonating with mine. A sense of mutual recognition, and a sense of a kind of abiding. Abiding. And I don't care about being loved, but I do care about being seen. And to the extent that we see and are seen together, that is a beautiful thing. And to come to abide in the goodness of our intention here to practice, that's very nourishing. That's good Dharma pleasure. It's all wholesome pleasure, and we're doing it right now.

So thank you. Thank you all. I appreciate your wholehearted participation this week. Thank you for being patient with me. And it's been lovely to be with you. So I wish you all well on your path. And the YouTube sangha continues. I'm almost certain Gil will be back—pretty sure that's the schedule. He's finishing a three-week retreat, which is a beautiful thing too. So okay, we will pause here. Thank you all. Thank you to Kevin who edits talks, getting them posted to Dharma Seed, and other IMC volunteers. Very appreciative of the work that happens. So yeah, thank you. Thank you all. And sweet to see these chats, and may we be well.