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Guided Meditation: Unseduced by the Mirage of the Future

Good morning to you all. It is sweet to see the names. I know a lot of these names; you all are YouTube chat famous at this point. [Laughter] Very sweet. Okay, let's do that whole meditation thing.

Just sense into what you think you're supposed to do when you start meditating. In many ways, you force yourself into a slot of one kind or another. Let's just see how natural we can be in these first couple of minutes. Subtly, we can be trying to prove something to ourselves, to the teacher, to the Buddha, to someone. But you don't have to prove anything in your practice.

And so we relax. Truly relax. And then if tension remains, we let it remain. But we relax the energy that turns us into a project—the energy that turns us into the project manager. And we sit together.

Maybe it's skillful to highlight some phenomena with the attentional spotlight: breath, body, sound, the darkness behind your closed eyes. But we attend not in a brittle way, not attempting to prove anything to ourselves. We attend knowing that the ingredients of waking up are more present than we might imagine.

To try and prove something to ourselves or to another entails that we fixate ourselves. We subtly imagine a sense of who we are, of a kind of trajectory of where it's all going, what we will be when we get there, or what we will be if we don't. We kind of sandwich ourselves in time, the dizziness of time. But we don't have to prove anything.

Unseduced^[1] by the mirage of the future. True, the future is coming, but it never comes exactly in the form we imagine. We never arrive in that moment. When it does come, we realize that wanting is always different than getting.

And so we say, "Enough. This is good enough, safe enough." We surrender into the bottomlessness of the present. Many phenomena are egoically titillating, but we don't need to spin out into the outer orbits of egoic machinations. If we can just absorb the body blow of phenomena, just this pleasant or unpleasant, it can just stay, resting back in the openness of awareness.

Dharmette: Sourcing our Motivation from Love Rather than Fear

Okay, it's good to sit with you. I think I'm really accustomed to the YouTube situation here, so thanks for having me. Yesterday, I introduced this theme about different Dharma pleasures and spoke specifically about the pleasure of having a path. Today, it's the pleasure of sourcing our motivation from love.

When I was just out of college, I worked in a residential treatment center. I was not qualified for this, incidentally, but when they pay nine dollars an hour, you kind of get me. So, I was working in a residential treatment center for adolescent boys with serious psychiatric stuff that was acute enough that they couldn't be in homes. It was six kids in an ordinary house in the middle of L.A., and it was such intense and beautiful work. As a counselor, my job was to run groups of one kind or another, do fun things together, play, cook for them, take care of them, and implement a behavioral modification program. There were points for good behavior and the loss of privileges for bad behavior.

You could see how you could run the behavioral modification program on fear or love. I remember working with a whole cast of characters—all of us counselors. Fear, at least initially, could be more effective. It was easier to change the behavior of the children if there was some measure of fear of the counselor. But in the end, I think love wins out. If their behavior is going to change in a sustainable way, it's going to be a function of love, conditioned by love, shaped by love.

My question for you is: what kind of behavioral modification program are you running on yourself? Where do you source your motivation from? We have to source our motivation from somewhere; we want to change and grow. There's that line from Suzuki Roshi^[2]: "You're perfect just as you are, and there's room for improvement." There's much we want to do. We want to love more fully, to be less neurotic, to take good care of our body, and to minimize the harm we do to others and to ourselves. There's a lot.

How do we actually motivate ourselves to grow and evolve, to make progress? The Dharma pleasure that I'm speaking about is coming to source our motivation from love and care, rather than self-harshness, fear, or the egoic machinations of proving ourselves. Self-hatred has many functions, some of which are actually soothing, but one of the functions is a kind of behavioral modification program we run on ourselves. It's all stick, no carrot. It's this commitment to, "Okay, I'll punish myself to motivate myself to achieve something that I think is worthy."

In that framework, we often get very preoccupied with the gold stars and imagine how we'll feel when we actually get the gold star. But getting the gold star never feels like wanting it. It almost creates the sense of, "Well, I'll be a grown-up once I do that, once I grow in this way." But no one ever feels like a grown-up as far as I can tell. We repeat the habits of self-harshness in our practice. We can be harsh or sometimes really kind of cruel as we come up against our limitations. When we know we need to let go, but we cannot. When we're trying to be tranquil, but we're agitated. When we're trying to be equanimous—trying to be okay with something—but we're really not. We come up against certain moments of limitation, and we are trying to shape ourselves through mechanisms of fear and harshness.

That system of motivation can fall away almost completely. One meditator touched me; she said, "I realized my inner critic loves me, they're just confused." When our limitations and our neuroses are no longer a commentary on who we are—when we're at least a little bit free of these egoic pressures of proving oneself, proving the object of self to someone, even if that audience is just us—that starts to fall away. Our neurosis becomes a source of curiosity and humor rather than shame. We know we still have to grow, we have habits that get us into trouble, but our neurosis becomes a source of curiosity and humor rather than shame.

One of the features of practice I've noticed is that it has really become such a delight to laugh at myself, to laugh deeply. And I'm not talking about laughing at a little habit that's innocent; I'm talking about laughing deeply in the face of real problems, real neuroses. In that kind of laughter, I can almost feel what might become self-judgment or a shame-inflected state just release. We do want to grow and mature, but the desperate urgency of ego is gone. That is not where we're sourcing our motivation from.

The poignancy of the human condition is etched deeply into our being, and so that's there for us too. We begin to source our motivation from love, from tenderness, care, and sympathy with ourselves and with the plight of suffering. There's this sense of, "Oh yeah, there's nothing left to prove to ourselves or to others." We're not growing and changing in order to prove something. Then, all of our projects—our exercise schedule, meditation commitment, or you fill in the blank—come from care. They come from this very sober appreciation of our strengths and weaknesses^[3]. It just feels so much less entangled.

When we feel less entangled, when we feel like nothing we discover about who we are is going to break our heart, then there's a lot of curiosity, a kind of urgency of discovery, and lightness. Sourcing our motivation from love rather than fear is a Dharma pleasure for sure. I offer that for your consideration.

Announcements

I mentioned an optional Zoom session this evening from 7:00 PM to 7:30 PM. The link is on the website, so you can just go to matthewbrensilver.org; it's on the first page. It'll be an opportunity to sit together for a few minutes and have some questions. So that's it in about 11 or 12 hours or so. You are warmly invited. If I don't see you there, I will see you tomorrow morning. Thanks so much, I look forward to being together more.