Why Self-Hatred Makes No Sense | Matthew Brensilver

This episode explores a compelling Buddhist question: does self-hatred, or self-love, make sense if the self is an illusion? Matthew Brensilver, PhD https://www.matthewbrensilver.org/, is a clinical social worker and experienced teacher of meditation retreats. He also worked at an organization called Mindful Schools, which teaches teachers how to teach meditation. This episode also explores: How and why to view your anger with skepticism The relationship between self-love and personal ethics What to do if you think you're a good person but have no interest in changing your behavior to get better How to handle a nagging sense of moral un-justifiability And how Matthew has arrived at a place of relative peace with his own mortality. Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? We've got a compelling Buddhist question. Does self-hatred, or self-love for that matter, do either of these concepts make sense if the self is an illusion? I'm going to be chewing over that and many other fascinating questions with one of my favorite guests, Matthew Brensilver, PhD, who is a clinical social worker and also an experienced teacher of meditation, including deep meditation retreats. Aside from the question about whether you can love or hate yourself if the self doesn't exist, we're going to talk about how and why to view your anger with skepticism, the relationship between self-love and personal ethics, what to do if you think you're a good person but you have no interest in changing your behavior to get better,

• 1:04Dan Harris?

  how to handle a nagging sense of doubt that you may have about the morality of the way you're living your life, and how Matthew has arrived at a place of relative peace with his own mortality. A little bit more about Matthew before we dive in here. Aside from teaching retreats at places like Spirit Rock, he has worked at an organization called Mindful Schools, which teaches teachers how to teach meditation. And as a social worker, he has treated severely and persistently mentally ill adults and adolescents. He's an utterly fascinating person, and I got a lot out of this conversation. Quick note: This episode is a rerun from February 2022, and we loved it so much, we're bringing it back. Before we dive in, and on a very related note, I do want to tell you about something I'm doing over on danharris.com.

• 1:49Dan Harris?

  All week at 4:00 PM Eastern, I'm going to be doing live guided meditations where I focus on specific forms of meditation that were designed by the Buddha as an antidote to anxiety.

• 2:02Dan Harris?

  As you may know, there are four related meditation practices that are collectively known as the Brahma Viharas, or Divine Abodes. Not my preferred branding, but really, I've found these styles of practice to be immensely helpful in my own life, and you can think of these four interrelated flavors of meditation as a way to take it easier on yourself and more skillfully navigate the world. These styles of meditation have stood the test of time, having been practiced for 2,600 years, and are increasingly being validated by modern science, which suggests these practices can have psychological, physiological, and even behavioral benefits. So again, I'll be doing live guided meditations all week over at DanHarris.com.

• 2:45Dan Harris?

  Again, head on over to Dan Harris and get all the details. We will get started with Matthew Bren Silver, right after this. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow.

• 3:30Dan Harris?

  And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at DanHarris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow.

• 4:12Dan Harris?

  Follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Matthew Brensilver, welcome to the show.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:53Dan Harris?

  Glad to have you. So as I understand it, you have an interest in concepts such as self-love and its opposite, self-hatred. And I'm just curious, how do you think about self-love or self-hatred within the context of a tradition where it is argued that the self is an illusion in the first place?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, sometimes I think about the terminology. There may be a better alternative to teachings on quote, not self. It might be that the phrase is something like not ownership or something like this. And there's a lot of confusion that seems to happen. And so rather than thinking of a kind of tension between the teachings on the illusory nature of self, the empty nature of self and self-love, I construe it more as a kind of spectrum of the density of self.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  And on one end of the spectrum, at the far end, is self-hatred and its kind of flipside of grandiosity and arrogance and the kind of melodrama of all of that. And that's where the sense of self is very fixated and very solid and oppressive in a way.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  The movement towards not self, like includes a movement towards self-love, which is actually a much more fluid, flexible way of relating to the self. And for me, self-love is actually an expression of a certain kind of non-clinging. It's not like some tight ideas about my greatness or something like that. That's just another expression of the kind of more dense mode of self. Self-love is more akin to a deep understanding of oneself and a deep forgiveness for oneself and a deep appreciation, acceptance of our own limitations.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  And so the movement from self-hatred into self-love actually gets us closer to understanding the emptiness of self. The self that is hated is much more difficult to forget than the self that is loved. Yeah, self-hatred is a kind of preoccupation and fixation. And the self that is loved, it's so easy to forget because it's not bound up with a certain kind of vigilance and defensiveness. And so this moves us in the direction of like, to use language from the Zen tradition, forgetting the self, that famous line from Togan.

• 7:50Dan Harris?

  So I'll see if I can recapitulate a little bit of that and you'll fact-check me. Love is not the same thing as not self or not ownership of self or emptiness of self. But it is a step in that direction, in that loving yourself in your conception of love here isn't kissing the mirror or standing there, hugging yourself, telling yourself how great you are and you're better than everybody else. Self-love in this sort of more capacious understanding of the word love.

• 8:19Dan Harris?

  Gets you towards seeing that the self is not as real as you thought in the first place?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's great. That's what I meant. In a way, maybe we could think of it as a kind of spectrum of how deeply we are accepting the arising of the phenomena that comprises self, you know, and at that far end of arrogance or self harshness, there is an incredible amount of friction and an incredible amount of resistance. And as we move towards self-love, we're really unclenching the hand of grasping and it is closer to something like acceptance

• 9:05Speaker 01

  of what we perceive when we look inwards. And we continue along that same spectrum to appreciate the more subtle aspects of the sense of I am-ness. One of my teachers, Shinzen Young, talked about like the coagulation of the sense of I am-ness. And as we pass through these realms of self-acceptance, of self-love, we begin to fold the elements of I am-ness into awareness and those too become empty. And then that realization, the kind of emptiness of the self,

• 9:47Speaker 01

  it's like this actually leads us back into a deeper kind of compassion and tenderness for oneself. And so the insight into the emptiness of the self actually dramatizes the pain, the congealing of self. It dramatizes the pain of the predicament of being human. And so it then can kind of feed back into a deeper appreciation of the intensity of the human condition and the drama of being someone and its attendant pain.

• 10:28Dan Harris?

  Let me see if I can ground this in something very concrete, just to help people get a toehold here. And maybe this will work and maybe it won't. I'll talk a little bit about how this has worked for me, given that my understanding is limited. And that might be a generous way to describe it. But I would say

• 10:47Speaker 01

  I don't know, Dan. I don't know. Okay, okay.

• 10:52Dan Harris?

  Right. Maybe false modesty is too much selfing. So there you go. You didn't say that, but it was implied in the okay, Dan. For me, one of the biggest plot twists in my meditation practice was adding in high dosage meta or friendliness or loving kindness practice. I realized after doing, you know, a long retreat, long, you know, nine day retreat of nothing but loving kindness practice where you're repeating these phrases, maybe happy, maybe healthy, while envisioning various beings, including yourself. I realized in the course of doing that, that my mindfulness practice, where I was supposedly viewing everything that came up in my mind

• 11:37Dan Harris?

  with some non judgmental remove, actually had a subtle and hitherto unseen aversive flick in it. And that actually, when I suffused the mind with this art of sort of, I'm using the word artificial, but it's that maybe that's unfair because you're just uncovering what's already there. But when I suffused the mind with warmth and I was seeing whatever came up in my mind with really accepting it. That felt to me like what I might describe as self-love. It wasn't an acceptance in terms of resignation. It wasn't like, great, I just saw some like spasm of bigotry go down. It's more like, oh, well, that's

• 12:19Dan Harris?

  the result of, you know, endless causes and conditions, the culture in which I grew up, the conditions in this moment. I don't need to beat myself up for it. And then the next step after seeing whatever comes up in my mind as a function of causes and conditions, as the organism, as Jack Kornfield likes to say, as the organism just trying to protect itself, however unskillfully. The next step was to see that it also is not personal. There is nobody here.

• 12:51Dan Harris?

  No humunculus of Dan inside my mind deliberately creating and tossing out these thoughts. I can't find it. It's a mysterious process with no apparent conductor. And so that, to me, is how I went from what I would call self-love of viewing whatever comes up in my mind with some warmth, to actually viewing that real self-love is to see that there's no self at all, because you're not placing any responsibility for all of the inner chaos and cacophony. Anyway, I just said a lot of words there. I wasn't planning on doing that, but I did. Does any of that make any sense?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, good words, good words. Yeah, I do think that speaks to what I'm intimating in this, that the insight into not-self brings with it a whole raft of self-forgiveness. And I like the word sometimes innocence, the kind of innocence of our being. And that comes out of really seeing dependent origination, really seeing the multi-causal nature of our being, of our thoughts, of our feelings, that what feels so intimately like me originates

• 14:07Speaker 01

  very much outside of anything I could call me. And that creates a certain kind of forgiveness and an understanding, and also a courage to do more self-exploration, because it means that the ego is no longer at stake in the process of seeing. The hallmark of the ego is a certain kind of defensiveness, and that short-circuits the kind of wild reckless investigatory nature of the meditative endeavor.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  And as we come to see a certain kind of innocence or the forgiveness that you describe, the centerlessness of our own being, the poignancy of our condition begins to bear down on us with more and more weight. And the possibilities for love, for self-love, for loving others, these possibilities multiply, but hatred becomes less and less tenable. And so that sense of, yeah, that there's nothing that I might discover about myself that would make self-hatred more tenable.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  There's nothing I could actually see that would make a better case for self-hatred. No, it's, I may see a lot of habits. I may see my greed, my aversion. I may see delusion, but none of that actually becomes an argument for more self-harseness.

• 15:48Dan Harris?

  We've talked about self-love quite a bit in this conversation and its opposite, self-hatred. But how would you define love?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Well, you stop me dead in my tracks there with that, even though I use the word very casually. I don't know. It's almost become a kind of placeholder for everything good in the universe, which is very poor definitional discipline. But some people don't like that word. It's very Hallmark-ish or something, or it's too closely associated in some narrow way with romantic relationship or something like this. But for me, it is a bit of a placeholder for this general softening of the heart.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And it includes loving kindness and compassion, but it's not limited to those. The word that comes up for me is poignancy, just the poignancy of the human condition. And I feel that so acutely in this phase of... This moment in time, you know, with this sort of accumulating points of grief in this country. I felt that so acutely with COVID as it unfolded with George Floyd, with the undercurrent of a certain kind of authoritarian strain in American politics and culture.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  And so much really to grieve and it's too much without love. It's just too much. We turn towards apathy or numbness or just rage and trying to control all of the causes and conditions. And so for me, love, even the turn inwards to my breathing, to my body, to the kind of intensity of being human, to do that without love just seems reckless. And so there's a certain kind of convergence in my mind around the insight side of practice and the love side. You can certainly do loving kindness practice as its own discreet

• 18:11Speaker 01

  path, a beautiful path, as you described, doing nine days of just that. But in some ways, some other, you know, forms of love seem indispensable just in the process of investigation of truly encountering the human condition as it manifests moment by moment. And it's not a very discursive kind of love. It's a kind of softening to the poignancy of the human condition. And that to me feels like, oh yeah, that sort of underlies so many different aspects of practice.

• 18:47Dan Harris?

  I'm sorry to stop you in your tracks, although I guess that's a hallmark of a good question. But getting back to the definition, you said something like, I think of it as a catchphrase for all that's good in the universe. And I'm thinking, well, maybe that is a fair definition. Maybe love is, and I've been increasingly thinking of it as, you know, anything north of neutral. It can be a common sense friendliness that you can Have for your barista, just we're sharing the same oxygen supply. I hope you're doing all right. All the way up to, you know, the string music kicks in and John Cusack is holding a boombox over his head, you know, in a love scene in a movie or whatever, and everything in between. How you feel about your parents, how you feel about your kid, how you feel about your cats and dogs.

• 19:30Dan Harris?

  It encompasses civility, generosity, compassion, empathy, all of the, what the scientists call pro-social behavior. Why can't love just be all of that?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Thank you for not rejecting my loose definition, Dan. I appreciate it. Yeah, maybe it can be all of it. That's how I think of it. That's how I think of loving kindness as it manifests in the rhythms of one's life. And those are all subtle or sometimes dramatic expressions of a certain kind of care and love and appreciation for the existential condition of ourselves as individuals and of a society as a civilization. The more closely we look, the more reason we have to love.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  And the more deeply we look, the less ground there is, the less tenable hatred is. And so I'm an aversion type, so if I'm gonna suffer, I'm gonna suffer around resisting something I don't like. That's my favorite way to suffer. And so love is important for that personality constellation, you know? And so in my own experiences of anger, of aversion, potent or quite subtle, there is a kind of reminder that comes up in my mind, because I tried to train in this. The reminder of like, oh yeah, that aversion, that cannot end well.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  And it is never the last word, the hatred, the kind of divisiveness. It is never the last word. It always leaves something out. And so there's a certain kind of trust that

• 21:26Speaker 01

  If I follow this thread deeper into causality, there will be less and less reason for hatred, more and more reason for love, for forgiveness, for understanding. And so in the anger, the aversion, there may sometimes be a seed of wisdom. But there is always delusion coexisting with it. So there may be a seed of understanding of anger. You know, Ruth King said anger is can be initiatory, but not transformative. And what I take to understand from that

• 22:10Speaker 01

  is that it can signal something important. There's a seed of wisdom in it, but it cannot be the vehicle we ride forever on. And for me, as an aversion type, I do try to remember in the arising of anger, in the arising of aversion, like, oh, there's delusion here too. Whatever clarity, there may be no clarity. There might be a seed of clarity, but for sure, there's delusion present. And the certainty of that mind state needs to be undercut by a certain kind of skepticism. And so just to say to myself,

• 22:53Speaker 01

  ah, I need to look more deeply here. I know there's confusion here. I know the Dalai Lama would not have the same response to the situation that I'm having right now. I know there's more to be seen. And so we just follow that causal thread. And in my experience, just arrive at a deeper sense of love.

• 23:18Dan Harris?

  So if somebody in your life has really pissed you off and you truly sit with it in an investigatory way, you can get under the hatred and anger to love, you're saying?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  No, Dan, not in my life. I'm just recommending it to your listeners.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  No, yeah, we can do this. We can do this. It may take some time. We may have to sort of innovate in one way or another. And it's about training. It is about training ourselves because in the mind state of aversion, it's such a certain kind of mind state and it admits no ambiguity. And so we can't remember much in those moments. But I have tried to train with varying success, but I have tried to train to remember there's more to be seen. There's more to be seen. And you can kind of sense when you're making your case against

• 24:25Speaker 01

  the person, yeah, whether that's a member of one's family or anybody, in making the case, one is always leaving out certain premises in the argument. You can kind of sense the mind sort of shuffling through like a sloppy lawyer, kind of like shuffling through, trying to hide some little bit of evidence as we make our case for the justifiability of our aversion. And you start to be more discerning and sense that, like, I'm leaving something out. I sort of jumped over from this premise to that premise, and I left something out.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  But if I include that, it weakens the case for my anger. It weakens the justification. And so we just have to be rigorously honest when we see our mind cobbling together its case in that way to pause, look more deeply. And we have many experiences of just seeing the kind of folly of our aversion in the rearview mirror, sometimes only in the rearview mirror. But in the rearview mirror, it's so apparent, like, oh, I really left that

• 25:46Speaker 01

  big piece of data out from that case, you know? And it leads us into something like care, understanding. That doesn't mean that we forget that incident entirely. That may be important, actually, to honor what's been seen in somebody else's behavior or something like this. But we arrive at a place of deeper love than where we started.

• 26:13Dan Harris?

  Coming up after the break, Matthew explains why you should not take your shortcomings, some might even say your ugliness, personally. And we talk about the relationship between self-love and the Buddhist concept of seela, or ethical conduct. That's right after this.

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• 27:35Dan Harris?

  I just want to double-click, to use a little corporate speak there, on what you said about the rearview mirror and what you said before that about how it may take some time. I don't want to leave people with the impression, and I don't think you do either, but please correct me, that this is, you know, easy or rapid. You know, the getting underneath the aversion and hatred, in certain cases, that could take years, if not lifetimes. Am I wrong about that?

• 28:01Speaker 01

  No, you are not wrong. And this is one of the very humbling aspects of practice, that to see the depth of the kind of roots of these habits, it's humbling. It's humbling. And...

• 28:21Speaker 01

  This is a part of why there's a kind of gradual training in this. We are training in the same way an athlete trains their body. And the accumulation of skills, of strength, is often gradual. There may be some moves that we can make in the moment once that suffering has arisen. But so much of the fruit of our practice is actually a function of this gradual training, of not getting backed so deep into the karmic corner where our reactivity just feels so overpowering. And when we do get backed into that corner

• 29:05Speaker 01

  and it just feels like we are going to suffer, there is not one degree of freedom in this.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  In those moments, my aspiration is, this is humbling for sure. May it not be humiliating. Yeah? May it not be humiliating. May it, for sure, it's humbling, it's necessary. That humbling quality of practice is quite important. But humility is different than humiliation. And the humiliation is really a function of the drama of self in that moment. And so, may I take this pain, this habit, less personally. It is not a commentary on the deepest

• 29:55Speaker 01

  layer of my being. And in that pain, backed into that corner, when nothing works, when all of my mindfulness moves do not work. We're at an important place, actually. And it does usually devolve into frustration or self-hatred, humiliation. But it's actually a moment where we can...

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Again, come back to love, that the heart is being softened by the intensity of our habits. And in that certain kind of surrender, it actually consolidates our motivation to practice. And it softens rather than hardens our heart. It can do that, even in that kind of sense of abject defeat. It's just, ooh. But there is a kind of opportunity for very deep kind of compassion for ourselves. And then it overflows from the bounds of our own heart to others.

• 31:10Dan Harris?

  I think you've just brought us where I was hoping to go. But you're talking about, if I understand correctly, you know, the how our relationship with ourself can impact the way we are with other people. And that got me to the question I was hoping to ask you, which is, what is the connection between the, we're now several paragraphs removed from our discussion of self-love. Again, in the broadest kind of conception of self-love. What is the connection, though, between this self-love that as you are describing it, and our ethical stance vis-à-vis the world, or what the Buddhists might call sila, S I L A, which is, well, I'll let you define what that is.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  So there are a number of connections my mind is moving in different directions. So one piece of it might be that the movement out of the kind of more congealed modes of self, out of arrogance, out of self-hatred, into a kind of deeper acceptance of self, of understanding the emptiness of self.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  This is a movement away from defensiveness. And as I was saying, we could think of one of the hallmarks of ego is defensiveness. It means that we stand guard at the gates of self, kind of patrolling visitors, VIPs, intruders, everything. Yeah. And that is a very fragile way of living. That means that at any time, any person, anywhere, can do something destructive to my own

• 33:10Speaker 01

  inner environment. And the move away from some of that defensiveness into a certain kind of acceptance, love, a deeper understanding, that is actually very important as we evolve ethically. We are being called, I feel, to evolve ethically. And the Buddhist path makes very clear all that we ought not do, all of the sila, the rules

• 33:48Speaker 01

  of training, the guidelines that lead us away from suffering rather than towards it. The Buddhist tradition articulates what we ought not do, but it is more quiet about the positive duties we have to other people, what we ought to do, what we owe to others. And those are very egoically provocative questions, I find. And this kind of sense that as we see, as we look at the country, at the world, as we have a deeper appreciation.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Of history, of the future, of existential risk, of climate, you know, of all of this. There's a sense of being called to grow, to evolve ethically as individuals, as a species, that are our well-being. The well-being of the civilization probably at some point will depend deeply on a certain kind of ethical evolution and gesture of love. And what I find is that I want to think of myself as a good person, but I don't really

• 35:10Speaker 01

  want to change my behavior. That is a bit of a jam, you know? And we think of our ethical life as we kind of grow up and we find our commitments and then we just enact those commitments for the rest of our life. But our ethical life, we could think of its evolution as kind of wild and unpredictable and full of twists and turns. And part of meditation practice in dramatizing the intensity of the human condition, of witnessing

• 35:51Speaker 01

  just what it's like to have an itch on our face and want to stay still, just what it's like to have a pain in our back, just what it's like to have our heartache. In dramatizing this, we become more sensitive to the kind of moral fabric of the universe, that wherever there is suffering, there ought to be seva. Wherever there is suffering, there ought to be ethical commitments, and there's suffering everywhere. And so we start to perceive this, the poignancy of the human condition. And we're called to grow, to evolve ethically.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  And for me, I've been struck by...

• 36:45Speaker 01

  This experience of a certain kind of moral incoherence or moral unjustifiability, like my life as I live it, I perceive as less so now, but still so morally unjustifiable. The depth to which I privilege trivial pleasures and comforts in my life over the very lives of other beings, often on the other side of the globe. Like, that induces a certain sense of moral incoherence, that actually my life as I'm living it is not quite justifiable.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  And normally, when we sense that, we immediately shut down or rationalize it, explain it away.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  And I remember when I was in college, reading in the college library in a comfortable cushy chair, and I was reading a book, Peter Unger, "Living High and Letting Die", that was illustrating just the degree of inequality of well-being across the globe and my privileging of trivial comforts in the face of the enormity and tractable suffering of the world.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  And that scrambled me and my heart in a deep way. And I've been living, in a certain sense, with those questions and with that sense of moral incoherence for a long time. And sometimes I've gone on autopilot around it. Sometimes it's catalyzed more clear, significant action in my life to try to think about the suffering of the world and what I owe. And this ties in with this whole realm of affective altruism, which has been very meaningful to me. And it's really the question, I would say, of the kind of...

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Those folks that I feel like they're trying to answer the question, what is the modern Bodhisattva? What does compassion look like in a world where we actually know a lot about suffering? Where we know a lot about suffering that is neglected, suffering that is tractable, that can be addressed? And that, to me, kind of hangs over so much of my Buddhist practice and how I think about sila and how I think about love and how I think about my debts to others. And as my own suffering has been diminished,

• 39:49Speaker 01

  I still suffer plenty, but it's been diminished in dramatic ways. There's less and less energy that's needed to tend to one's inner life. And so that frees us up to open our eyes more completely to the world. And we see suffering and we see the absence of suffering. And that, I feel, leads us deeper into a commitment to meet the conditions of the world more fully. But it entails a measurement of disorientation, tolerating disorientation.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Because the egoic mechanisms are always scrambling to regain their footing. And so when I say something like, "I want to think of myself as a good person and I don't want to change my behavior," that will tend to induce a sense of a certain kind of dissonance or something and will feel a little disoriented. And to actually tolerate that in this realm of ethical evolution, in our own understanding of difference, of racial difference, other forms of difference, that tolerating disorientation feels quite important. And our Dharma practice is indispensable in that

• 41:18Speaker 01

  because we actually get more comfortable amidst the free fall, amidst the ego.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  All the kind of familiar reference points not being there in the same way. And that will tend to generate a certain kind of panic and scramble to reestablish ground. But no, it's safe to fall. It's safe to take the backward step and fall into a certain disorientation. And so it's one of the threads of connection that occurs to me.

• 41:54Dan Harris?

  You mentioned the effective altruists. This is a group of people, perhaps the most famous proponents, this young man, Will McCaskill, is a philosopher, I believe, at Oxford or Cambridge, one of them.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 42:05Dan Harris?

  Yeah, and he bases much of his work, or at least some of his work, on the philosopher Peter Singer, who quite famously talked about, with apologies to everybody involved here, might be mangling what I'm about to say, but Peter Singer, I believe, talked about how, you know, spending on ourselves to live high while others die is a bit like walking by a pond where there's a drowning child and not wanting to save the child because you don't want to get your suit dirty or something like that. And Will has argued that, you know, since we know $2,500 will save a life in a malaria-prone country, it's very hard,

• 42:43Dan Harris?

  if not impossible, to justify spending $2,500 on anything beyond your basic needs, given that you're essentially walking by a drowning child. I think I'm restating that view correctly. And so, given that, where do you, Matthew, fall in your day-to-day life vis a vis something like a latte? Do you allow yourself any measure of living high?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  For sure. Not a latte. The effective altruists, they're always vegans, you know, and the vegans got to me and convinced me. And so, no lattes. But yes, plenty of indulgences. I think in some ways, the question of where does it stop? What's the threshold?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  It's a reasonable question, but we do have the intuitive sense like, oh, more could be done. I can do more. And what does that mean? And so I have tried to live with that sense of moral incoherence, and it spurred action for me, you know? I do still have the equivalent of lattes all the time and not living profoundly renunciate life or something like this. But we know that we can do more. And you mentioned Will MacAskill and some of these folks.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  And, you know, the movement has a very, is somebody called like a group of fussy nerds? That was how somebody described it. And that's fair enough. There is a lot of kind of rigorous analytic thinking and quantitative kind of efforts, you know? But at the heart of it is love. At the heart of it is love. And for some reason, I was in some kind of random lottery drawing, and I won a session with Will MacAskill. And I was on a Skype with him. And he's a, you know, serious philosopher.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  But just in seeing his face there on Skype, I started crying because I could sense that this is somebody who is asking the question of what it is to be a Bodhisattva. He would never put it in that language, I don't think. But to me, it is. This is like, what is the modern Bodhisattva? And I think that can take a lot of forms. But for me, the most important piece is that it lures the heart into deeper commitment, maybe a little bit more renunciation, a little bit more commitment to caring for the welfare of others.

• 45:38Dan Harris?

  For those who don't know what a Bodhisattva is, can you define it?

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's not even language from my tradition of insight meditation in which I've been trained exactly. But what I take it to mean is the deep, abiding, almost relentless commitment to the welfare of others and to make one's heart and one's practice and one's life of benefit for all that we encounter. And it's really quite a radical commitment. And I've had opportunities

• 46:18Speaker 01

  to take a Bodhisattva vow or something like this. And I haven't because I don't know what that would do to my life exactly. And there's a sense of I'm not quite ready to give informed consent to that depth of commitment, you know, even though I'm in training, I feel like I'm in training and I'm trying and.

• 46:45Dan Harris?

  What's that? There's that expression, Lord make me chase, but just not yet.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  That's right, exactly. But it's part of like, okay, if we're gonna take a vow, that is no joke. To tie one's heart in that way is a kind of, it's a performative utterance. It's words that do something. They actually do something to our heart, to our lives. And when I'm really ready, because I don't know how much that might reconfigure my life. When I'm ready, I'll take it. I'll take it. Yeah. But in the meantime, let us do what we can.

• 47:21Dan Harris?

  Coming up, I asked Matthew about a quip of his that I really like. He has said, "How your meditation practice is going is none of your business." What does that mean? We're also going to talk about how he has arrived at a point of general okayness with his own mortality. That and more right after this. We talk a lot on this show about the quiet things that shape the way your home feels. Here's one that is very easy to overlook, the air in your house. If you wake up congested or your place feels dusty, no matter how much you clean, the air itself may be part of the problem. That's where today's sponsor, Air Doctor, comes in.

• 48:01Dan Harris?

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• 48:44Dan Harris?

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• 49:41Dan Harris?

  This latte question, I know you were using latte as a stand-in for all.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  I love lattes. I love lattes.

• 49:46Dan Harris?

  Anyway, this latte question is a pretty profound self-love conundrum because on the one hand, I think you can make a case that a certain amount of harmless, let's say, or quote-unquote harmless, or seemingly harmless indulgence, you know, is part of self-love, taking care of yourself so that you can be more available to take care of other people. On the other hand, I think a very enlightened view of self-love would see that there's so much joy and flourishing to be had from serving other people, that why wouldn't you help yourself to as much of that as possible? So this question of how high do we live while others die is, this is not an easy puzzle.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  It's not easy. It's not easy. And I want to be careful about being too idealistic. There's a way in which, in the Buddhist world, we can get too caught up on certain ideals, and that tends to cause the kind of erasure of certain elements of our own experience. I want to be careful about maintaining fidelity to what it's actually like. We really do want that latte, you know, and I don't want to minimize that. And I think the point

• 51:07Speaker 01

  you're making, and it's a refrain from somewhere in the effective altruism movement, if you passed a burning building today and you just kicked down the door and rescued a couple people and brought people to safety, that would be among the most meaningful, or maybe the most meaningful, day of your life, or certainly your year. And...

• 51:35Speaker 01

  It would be a cardinal event and we're actually offered that opportunity. Yeah, it's just the mechanisms of empathy and the proximal effects of suffering right here rather than distant that makes the examples seem different, but at a moral level, they're really not different. That said, I do believe it still leaves plenty of room for delighting in one's good fortune and enjoying the kind of pleasures on offer and taking good care of oneself.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  The main point for me is not going unconscious around the questions and just living with that question. And then you see what, how does that catalyze changes in one's own behavior? And that just that sense of almost a certain kind of like wonder for the evolution of our own ethical being, like, how might I grow? It's not a static thing where we just follow the precepts or something. It's like, how might my ethical being be transformed in the same ways that other aspects of myself is transformed by practice?

• 52:57Dan Harris?

  In our remaining time here, I want to digress pretty radically, maybe abruptly too. But so with apologies, I want to ask some maybe unrelated questions here. Every episode, somebody prepares for me a, I guess we call it a prep doc or a preparation document. And this one was prepared by our producer, DJ Cashmere, who has recently gone on a meditation retreat with you, Matthew. And he mentioned in the prep doc, a few things that you said on that retreat that were compelling to me that I thought I would enjoy just hearing you unpack them a little bit. So the first was you were. Talking to the people on this retreat where DJ was a retreatant,

• 53:42Dan Harris?

  and I think you were talking to people about this tendency that many of us have, I have this in a big way, to play what Joseph Goldstein calls the practice self-assessment tapes, where you're just obsessing on how am I, am I doing it right? How am I doing? How far am I getting? Am I about to realize Nirvana, whatever? And you said to the group something pretty compassionate, which is, how your retreat is going is none of your business, which I love. And I wonder if you could explain it and also explain whether it could apply to our daily meditation practice as well, because a lot of us, a lot of people listening will never actually do a retreat.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  So the habits of our mind keep us so compulsively oriented to past and future, and then the present feels like it's sandwiched between those two. And we're sort of always trying to gauge the trajectory of this moment. Where is it going? Where is it going? Is it going towards goodness or away from goodness? Is it going towards what I want or away from what I want? And that is very much bound up in our biology, I feel.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  And each moment is a kind of down payment on some future moment. And this moment, the present, is almost like a canary in the coal mine of the future. Yeah, so we're just like really vigilant. Is this, is everything okay? Like, are all the parameters okay here? And

• 55:32Speaker 01

  That gets recapitulated in practice, right? And so it's like, I take one breath, one mindful breath. And then I want to ask myself the question, Matthew, are you more concentrated? You know, how's this going, right? And on retreat, in the context of retreat, where there's less friction in the mind, and it can really go in different directions. We get even more compulsive about asking, like, is, where does this moment point? Yeah, is this working? Am I accruing whatever I'm meant to accrue? Am I doing it right? Is this enough?

• 56:14Speaker 01

  And so that kind of notion of just, one of my teachers, Michelle McDonald's, at one point said, it sounds so not meditative. But she said something like, you clock in and you clock out. Yeah, you just do your practice. And sometimes I've thought of the analogy that in lifting weights, if I were lifting weights, doing reps to improve the strength of my bicep, I would not, after doing a rep, look over to my bicep and have a kind of heart to heart of how it's going. You know, am I getting stronger? How was that rep?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  It would much more be like, well, a certain kind of surrender to just the practice itself, the exercise. I just did that rep. And we so privilege the kind of, what is accessible to us in consciousness, the sort of top layer of the mind, and especially the valence of it. Is it pleasant or unpleasant? And we use that as the barometer for the entirety of our practice. And that is just another, one of our weird preoccupations. It's so natural, but it's like, no, let's, let us just do our practice. Let us just do it.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  And then at some point, we sort of have that metacognitive awareness to appreciate what has happened, what has grown, what we've let go of, what we haven't. And we can do that at a reasonable cadence, but it's definitely not after each breath. Yeah. And so let us just this gesture of surrendering and it's almost unbelievable how intense the human condition is. We like cannot believe it just to pay attention to the breath and just to see the ways we're bombarded by sensory events. It's unbelievable.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  And so we are always assessing the the trajectory of it, but it's actually not so useful at various points in people's practice. And so, yeah, let it be not our business and let us just keep going with our sincerity, with our awareness, with our wisdom.

• 58:41Dan Harris?

  I love that. The other thing you said on this retreat, Per DJ, I don't know if he's a reliable historian, so.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure DJ is very reliable, but I'm always afraid when people quote me back because I'm like, what did I say? And maybe I'm going to be totally mortified by what I said in one context or another, but I'm ready, Dan. Go ahead. Hit me. What did I say?

• 59:05Dan Harris?

  Well, it's interesting you use the term mortified because I'm going to ask about death. Per DJ, you made some comment that was in the neighborhood of you're having, after all of these years of practice, a significantly reduced fear of death. Would that be an accurate restatement of what you allegedly said on this retreat?

• 59:28Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, death has become much less imposing. There's still fear for sure. And we don't really know how afraid we are until it's happening. But I do feel like practice has engendered a certain sense of completion in my life, that my life has been complete. And do I want more? Absolutely. Do I want to die? No, absolutely not. But there is a sense of whatever else comes is gravy, you know, and that it was enough. And that's a reasonable question to ask, like, what makes life feel like enough?

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Otherwise, we kind of wind up just wanting, always wanting more. But even 500 or 1,000 years wouldn't feel like enough, actually. And so what creates a certain sense of completion in our life? And death is, has a very hallowed position in the kind of pantheon of Buddhist practice and reflections. And for me, just my own experience, family conditioning, I really feel like in ways I've been feeling conscious for a long time,

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  feeling like I was dying from very young. Yeah. Like, not in a kind of anxious way, but just this sense of the weight of mortality of my own, of everyone I love. That was a very acute sense from quite early on. And a sense that probably in some ways I got into practice and got it hooked into my heart because I had the intuitive sense that I was utterly unprepared to die and to lose people I love.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  That the enormity of that was such that it was almost unimaginable that that could be absorbed in a heart, not destroy my heart. And as a result, I feel in some ways, we don't know why we get into practice or why we keep going exactly. But at some level, it was and is an attempt to address the truth of mortality and to prepare for that and to live in such a way that life feels whole, that it feels complete. Yeah, that's what's arising in me now.

• 1:02:24Dan Harris?

  What is the mechanism of practice that would allow you to feel like the rest of your life is gravy? You're playing with the house's money? Life feels complete?

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  I think it's about exploring the many chambers of the mind.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  And I think it's about love. I think it's about some sense of having deeply explored the human condition, the possibilities for well-being, you know, for like very deep peace. It's about love. It's about, you know, when I volunteered in hospice some years ago. And so few things matter at the end of one's life. But the legacy of love, it's about the only thing that matters, from what I could see.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  And if it wasn't there, there was nothing I could do to actually often to support it, to support a better death. And there was a kind of sort of haunting realization of like, oh, I better love well, you know? I better be real careful with how I live. Because that kind of legacy is going to be what is most salient in the mind at that time of death, if I'm conscious. So loving ourselves deeply, just a deep appreciation for

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  all of our strength and goodness and all our foibles and limitations. Loving others in sustained relationships of growing and being nourished by the love of others. And then loving widely, you know, very broadly, radically, for those we'll never meet, actually, to know the boundlessness, the measurelessness of love, which I take to mean that there's nothing on the other side of it. There's nothing outside the threshold of it. It's like that radical.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  And we can know these experiences in our own practice. We can know the sense of... Nothing but love, just the mind pervaded by it. Not this kind of amalgamated state. It just, there's nothing but love. And that leaves a kind of impression on our heart, even amidst the intensities of daily life, amidst the aversion, amidst the anger, amidst frustration. That serves as a kind of north star. That sort of radical expansive love is our birthright.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  That is possible even for a very ordinary person like myself. That's possible to know that. And this makes life feel more complete and more ready to let go for that final time. All the training in letting go of unclenching, the fist of grasping. As I think Steve Armstrong used that phrase, like unclenching that fist. We've practiced that a million times, just sitting or in our life. And then I imagine the end of our life

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  is the kind of grand surrender of control of ownership. And so I don't practice with it in a very explicit way of contemplating it very actively, in a rigorous, technique-oriented way. But it's just everywhere in practice, too.

• 1:06:34Dan Harris?

  That's a pretty rousing send-off here. I think you give all of us, especially those of us, which I have suspicion it's most of us who haven't tasted what you've described. It's a good motivating sentiment to get us to keep putting our butts on the cushion. Before I let you go, can I get you to plug, if you're comfortable, you know, any resources that you've put out into the world where people can learn more about you, if not, maybe even contact you?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  I have a website that just matthewbrensilver.org, my full name.org. And that has recordings and links to Dharma Seed and Audio Dharma, places where there are talks that are freely available. So people are welcome to that, of course.

• 1:07:23Dan Harris?

  Thank you, Matthew. It's a pleasure to meet you and thanks for coming on.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, yeah.

• 1:07:32Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Matthew. Always love talking to him. Don't forget, all this week at 4 Eastern, live on Substack, I will be kicking off a meditation mini-series where I will be focusing on some styles of meditation that I refer to as the Buddhist antidote to anxiety. I'm talking about the Brahma Vihara, these four interrelated styles of practice, which include loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, and something called sympathetic joy, which you can think of as the opposite of schadenfreude. Every day, I'll talk for a few minutes, just setting up the Brahma Vihara that we'll be focusing on that day. Then I'll do 10 minutes of meditation, then I'll take your questions. By the way,

• 1:08:14Dan Harris?

  if you can't make it live, we send out the session the next day via email, so you can do it on your own time. Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

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