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Guided Meditation: The Five Faculties

Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started. Welcome to the IMC Monday night sit, and I hope you're doing well this evening, or whatever time of day it is for you.

We'll begin by settling into the sit. Find a posture where you can be upright and also relaxed, somewhere where you'll be comfortable for the half hour or so that we'll be sitting. Gently allow your eyes to close, and bring the attention inward to the feeling of the body sitting. If you're lying down or standing, whatever posture you're in, take a moment to gently let go of whatever you were doing before coming here, and allow the mind to be present.

Sense into the body. Perhaps notice the contact point where your seat is on the chair or the cushion, where your legs or feet are against the floor, or maybe you're lying on a surface. Just feel where the contact is, where you're being supported, and find some balance there. Sometimes, if I'm sitting, I'll rock back and forth slightly—just a little bit—or forward and back, just to find that central balance point where the body can be upright. If you're lying down, it's also possible to tune into the straightness of the spine, the balance of the body against the surface.

Perhaps on the next exhale, let go a little bit farther into that support, allowing it to support you.

It can also help to deliberately soften some parts of the body that we often hold tense. Perhaps soften the muscles of the face, letting the expression on the face be soft. Soften the eyes and the eye sockets; they tend to get a little tense when we're looking at a screen. Soften in the throat and the neck.

Feel into the shoulders. We might let the shoulder blades slide down the back so that the shoulders are dropping without rounding forward. Move down through the chest area, feeling the front, back, and sides of the ribcage. Down into the belly area, letting that be round and soft. We can let go of any layers of tension. Move down into the hip joints and into the thighs, softening the knee and ankle joints, and connect into the feet and the hands.

Just invite ease through the body. When the body has some ease, it's actually easier to be mindful.

Then, perhaps return to the area of the chest, having a sense of openness or even a slight lift to the heart area, as if someone were gently touching our back right between the shoulder blades. This focus on the bodily posture can actually evoke a slight sense of confidence in the mind. It's just a reminder that what we're doing is valuable, worthwhile, and effective.

It can be very supportive for practice to touch into our degree of confidence or trust in this practice, which we all have to some degree since we're doing it. Maybe just for a few breaths, let that confidence pervade the body and mind, and then settle back into the breath or the body, your usual object of meditation. Notice if there might be a slight sharpening of the energy in the mind when we feel our confidence in the practice, to whatever degree.

As we settle a bit more into the meditation, you may begin to notice the quality of the attention in the mind. How is the mindfulness? If there's a bit too much energy in the mind, you may wish to calm it down a bit and focus the mindfulness a bit more. Or, if the mind is a little dull, you might sharpen up the attention, perhaps through a stronger connection to the body. Notice what the mind feels like when it has mindfulness present.

It may be that the mind is still quite busy—minds will do as they do. But to whatever degree you have a sense that the mind is a bit more gathered together than it was when you started, you can appreciate that. Perhaps there's even a subtle joy in being present with experience. Some ease, some joy, some peace; to whatever degree these are present, appreciate them and allow that to pervade the body.

As we move into the last five minutes or so of this meditation, you might bring to mind the knowledge that you carry, the benefits of dharma practice or meditation. Perhaps even just in the course of this sitting, you've been reminded of the value it brings, and that in turn feeds back to the confidence that we began with. Just bring that knowledge to mind, and then let it fade back and rest again in your meditation object. Let this understanding resonate in your system.

As we gently approach the end of this sitting, perhaps bring to mind any wish that you have for the benefit of others through your practice. Do you have some intention that what you do here will benefit yourself and others, both out in the world? Just bring that to mind.

The Five Faculties and Life

Okay, so this evening I'm going to start by tracing backward from the world into our own mind, and I'm doing so in a particular way.

You can start by looking at the world, and we see in many ways something of a lack of wisdom. People are making choices that are not necessarily for their own welfare, the welfare of others, and the welfare of both. There's a text that says a wise person of great wisdom does not intend for their own affliction, for the affliction of others, or for the affliction of both. Rather, when they think, they think only of their own welfare, the welfare of others, the welfare of both, and the welfare of the whole world. But we see that this doesn't always happen.

We might ask, well, why is that? It does take a particular clarity and focus of the mind to be able to see how we can be of actual benefit, how it is that we could act for the welfare of ourselves and others. We need to have a clear understanding of how things unfold, how to think, and how things work. This requires some stability of our mind in order to do that, but we may not have that.

And so then, why is that? Why don't we have an ongoing stability of mind and clarity about how things work? Often, this has to do with not paying close attention and not remembering what is actually important to us. It takes some continuity of attention to see how things work, which means that we have to remember to pay attention. Of course, this is not easy in human life. Often, we're distracted by our phones, our relationships, our emotions, our self-image, and other things that come up. To be sure, our world right now does not make this easy for us to have a clear continuity of attention, but truthfully, it will never be easy. There is no time in the world when everything is simple and easy, so now is as good a time as any.

But we don't have this remembering to pay attention. And then why is that? In many ways, it's just easier to go along. Gathering up our energy for a directed purpose and being consistent and persistent about that may not be as high on our agenda as just being comfortable, fighting against things, or acting out our identity. We have other agendas in our life, so we don't put together the energy to gather ourselves toward this purpose of paying attention carefully so that we can act well.

And so then, why is that? Why don't we gather ourselves up? I think there are a number of reasons. Maybe we don't think it really matters. Maybe we don't know that paying attention has a good effect. We may know that external things are still out of our control, but we may not really believe that our attention can have that much effect to change the way we are in the world. Or maybe we don't know that real happiness is available through our inner life, through cultivating attention and other such things. Maybe we don't realize that there's any alternative to either fighting or complying with how things are.

What I've done is go backward through a list in Buddhism called the Five Faculties^[1]. The order I went in to go backward started with wisdom. We start with why it is that we're not able to bring benefit to the world, which is one of the definitions of a wise person. Well, we don't have enough concentration, stability, and clarity of mind. And why is that? Well, there's not enough mindfulness available to us. And why is that? We don't bring up the energy, persistence, and consistency to create that mindfulness always. And why don't we bring up that energy? Well, we may not have faith or confidence that it's worthwhile in some way.

This is a scenario for how things can unfold in ways that are not so favorable. But the Five Faculties—this wonderful list of faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom—are actually available to us all the time, and they can be used well. We may not think they're available all the time, but these are actually ordinary qualities of mind. The Buddha didn't say that these are special things that come into being through dharma practice. We all have them to some degree. The reason that we have them is they are actually the qualities of mind that we use in learning skills. Whenever we're learning something new, which we do throughout our life, we bring to bear some combination of these five.

That means that they're not automatically spiritual qualities. We have them, but they may not be connected to our spiritual life. They become spiritual when they are applied to the task of freeing the mind. In Buddhism, the liberation of the heart is considered the best benefit that we can offer. At the top of that list of wanting to benefit ourselves, others, and both, the liberation of the heart is considered the greatest benefit that we can offer. So, suppose that we want to begin acting out of our own benefit, for the benefit of others, and for the benefit of both. It might take some time to really come into that and cultivate it, but we can.

I want to talk tonight about these Five Faculties in their spiritual form—the way that we bring the dharma to life through our life, if you will, the way our life itself can enliven the dharma. Just to let you know in advance, we'll spend most of the time on the first faculty. This is the groundwork from which the rest can unfold, but we'll touch into all of them.

To begin this journey of becoming a real benefit to ourselves and others, we'll start with what in Pali is called saddhā^[2], or faith. There are other translations also, but before I get to those, this is the idea that there is another way. There is another way to live our life besides just running around, being busy, and chasing after pleasures, our identity, or other things. So we have this word saddhā, this idea of faith. This doesn't mean blind faith, but there is some initial movement toward something that we don't know, some idea or aspiration that we have. Sometimes people use trust, or perhaps later we would use confidence. I'll probably use faith this evening just because it's an easy word to say and because I've come to appreciate it, but I'm aware that for some people that word doesn't work. You could substitute one of the other ones.

This is from Rodney Smith, another teacher:

"The first moment of our spiritual journey may begin with a glimpse of a possibility that offers relief from all this stress. We hear a talk, read a book, or deeply sense something that suggests there could be a different way to live. This touch calls us from beyond toward a mystery that re-prioritizes everything and provides a context for our struggles. This calling does not fit neatly within our conventional lives, but we cannot shake it off. A spark has been ignited, but we are not sure what to do about it."

This is the very initial spark of faith that we might have, and often it's ignited through suffering of some kind. Suffering has a way of pulling aside the veil of our life where we're just going along. You might consider if there's some experience like that that you've had. Rodney Smith uses this word "calling," and this calling, which is a positive response to suffering, I would say is another word for faith. Interestingly, it's also the first glimmer of wisdom, but it needs to be unfolded more before we get to that. The first glimmer of faith is also the first glimmer of wisdom.

So then, how do we unfold this? How do we go forward from this first spark that we're getting?

There are plenty of external suggestions for objects of faith, and they're helpful. Sometimes we need to start with something that comes from the outside, or some suggestion from another. In Buddhism, we would usually refer to the initial object of our spiritual faith as the Triple Refuge or the Triple Gem^[3] of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

We could even talk a bit about these terms. The suttas^[4] talk about faith in the Buddha's enlightenment, not necessarily the person of the Buddha, but we have a sense at a heart level that freedom is possible. We have some sense that, "Yeah, somebody really did this. Maybe this is really true. Maybe there's somebody who has done this and knows what they're talking about, and describing it or offering instructions for it." Then we would connect with those instructions, with those teachings, and this is the dharma. We can come to have faith in the process of the dharma. We can't maybe see or even imagine the endpoint of where we're headed toward, but we trust that it's going in a good direction.

This is sometimes how I think about faith in the dharma as: well, I don't necessarily know what this process is going toward, and sometimes it can be a little uncertain or uncomfortable what it is that the dharma is asking of us, but I do have trust that it goes in a good direction and that it's worth following in that way. That's the kind of confidence we might have in the dharma and the quality of the teachings.

In addition, we can find either a teacher or some mature spiritual friends who are actually embodying the qualities that we respect and value. We have some kind of a living example of what the teachings are pointing toward, and hopefully some guidance about how we might be able to follow those ourselves. So we also have some trust or confidence in the sangha.

I'll mention also that as we're exploring this quality of faith, confidence, or trust, there's a connection between faith and joy in the teachings. I'd like to emphasize that we need some kind of positive basis. We can ask ourselves, what might we do each day to nourish joyful faith—this positive sense of aspiration, or sometimes even excitement about walking the path?

As I think of this, I'm reminded of a time that I practiced in Sri Lanka for a little while, and I noted that they have a very faith-based practice. Maybe more so than we do, definitely more so than we do here in the West, at least in the Insight movement, and I found it quite delightful. I was staying at a monastery, for example, where at a certain time in the morning the monks would come walking out of the monastery for alms in a neat row. Walking together with their bowls, you could see the mindfulness in the way they were walking. We were at a retreat center that was just next to the monastery, so we could watch them come out from a position on the walking paths of the retreat center. When the monks came out, the retreatants would stop walking meditation and just watch. It's kind of a cultural thing that we would just watch quietly while the monks went by.

One day, one of the Sri Lankan yogis turned to me—she spoke English—and she just said with a smile on her face, "It's so nice, you know?" She just meant being there and watching the monastics go by. There was this nice feeling that we were celebrating this faith-based quality of the dharma, and it nourished our retreat practice for sure.

All of these ideas, external cues, reflections that we have, or watching monastics, are actually meant to serve to strengthen our inner sense of faith. These outer ideas point toward the actual feeling in our own heart.

I have a friend who was doing Tibetan practice. Sometimes people begin that by doing a hundred thousand prostrations^[5]. We don't do that in our tradition, but it's something that takes a while to do, of course. This person found that this discipline of doing lots and lots of prostrations each day, and adding them up to make sure he was getting to a hundred thousand, resulted in him being very clear about his deep motivation for undertaking this practice. You have to be connected with that in order to continue all the way through that many prostrations, so he started to realize that was the point of them. It wasn't that he needed to get his body in shape to be able to do that—although he did—but he realized, "Oh, okay, what this does is it really instills that inner sense of knowing why you're doing this practice." This is a very healthy, good way to start.

Nonetheless, as we go along, this quality of faith will slowly get replaced by knowledge as we have direct experience in the practice. There's a story in the Theravada teachings of Sāriputta^[6], the Buddha's chief disciple, where the Buddha asks him if he has faith that developing the Five Faculties will lead to awakening. Sāriputta says no, and he then goes on to explain that he has direct knowledge that developing the faculties leads to awakening, and so he doesn't need to have faith in a statement like that.

There is this understanding that they proceed from faith, through the others, to wisdom, to knowledge. We may want to be careful about jumping too early to the conclusion that we know something, and maybe instead just deciding that we know something well enough to keep going. Nonetheless, there is this transformation.

There's also an image given in the teachings that says: just as at a crossroads on level ground, a great banyan tree becomes the resort for birds all around, so the person endowed with faith becomes the resort for many people, monastics and lay followers alike. This same sutta says later that people who have this quality of saddhā will get more opportunities. People will ask them to do favors for them, which connects them and gives them the chance to practice generosity. It even says that people with faith in the teachings are more likely to receive teachings; somehow teachings will come their way because they value them.

The idea here is to consider what the quality of confidence or trust will attract into our lives. This is interesting, right? We're not talking about blind faith at all, but a very clear sense of what we value and placing that at the center of our life as a way of honoring it. This is a teaching on causes and conditions. Faith is a quality of the mind or heart that can be cultivated and which has real effects on how our lives unfold. If we have faith in the teachings, or confidence, trust, or conviction, then our practice will unfold differently than in the case of not really having that heart connection well established.

How does this work in the context of these Five Faculties? The next one after faith is energy or effort. When we understand that something is important to us, and we have some confidence that it will bring good effects, then we demonstrate that by acting upon it. This second faculty of effort is often equated with perseverance, sticking with the practice, and having some continuity. That takes some energy, since the mind might not be used to devoting itself to the dharma or to practicing in this regular way.

I find that these middle three of effort, mindfulness, and concentration kind of form a set that play off of each other. Doing things plays off with paying attention, and they mutually reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. There's a little bit of an iteration that goes on where we put in effort initially, but then we have to pay attention to the effects of how we're practicing and how our effort is working out. Through that, we realize that we might need to make effort slightly differently, or we might need to change it over time, and then we again pay attention to that. Over time, we have a gathering of the mind around the effort that it's making, the attention that it has, and the intention behind the aspiration that we're carrying.

Concentration is slowly developing this gathering of the mind, and all the while the mind is letting go of things that are not useful for its effort. The perspective it has and the playing field, if you will, keep changing. I don't want to present the Five Faculties as just a linear chain that we have to do one, and then the next, and then the next. It's more that they really begin to mutually reinforce over time.

When the attention and the effort are getting harmonized, we can feel the mind settle into this more unified state, as if all the disparate components of it get aligned. It's a state of high energy and high attention at the same time. This is the fourth quality of samādhi^[7], concentration, as the fourth faculty.

In life, samādhi can feel like what's sometimes called flow. We know what we're doing, our energy is well directed and without tension, and there's a stability such that we can't easily get knocked off course. When the mind is in a state like that, we get to experiential learning, and that becomes integrated into our system, which is also what wisdom is about.

When we're able to manifest what we originally had faith in, this is wisdom: being able to act with benefit for ourselves, others, and both. Somewhat paradoxically, although there was a lot of setup to get to this point of being able to manifest what it is that we were first valuing, the state actually feels quite natural. We start to get a sense of the dharma as a way of life. We have to do all this setup just to be natural, if you will.

I want to kind of bring things together at this point. We often talk about the dharma as if it's a fixed thing, but in its most basic definition, dharma actually just means nature. The dharma arises in our life in the way that we evoke it, and part of the art of dharma practice is to learn how to be natural. We mostly prevent ourselves from being natural. We need to stop doing the things that are getting in the way of being natural and being in line with the dharma. Cultivating the Five Faculties is one way to get into this alignment so that they're supportive dharmic forces carrying our life along.

I'm relating this now to an image from an essay that Gil^[8] wrote, and I like it because it talks about needing a skill. Remember that the Five Faculties come into play whenever we're learning a skill. He writes:

"The way the dharma arises can be compared to floating in fresh water. Floating is a learned skill that depends on our having both the intention to float and the skill. When we float, we may say that the water supports us, but in fact the water alone is not sufficient to keep us from drowning if we don't know how to float and we thrash around in fear, or only relax and trust the water won't hold us up. So the dynamic interplay of the water, our body, our intention, and skill creates the floating."

He analogizes this to the dharma as a support for our lives. The dharma is like floating. The dharma is not found simply by letting go, any more than floating safely in water simply requires relaxing. There are certain skills and intentions that need to be present for the dharma to appear and to function, and it's through the way that we live that the dharma can have a role in our lives.

I like that a lot. I picked it out in particular because with this floating image, I think with not too much effort you can pull out all the Five Faculties from that short reading I did. We do have to relax and trust; we're not thrashing around in the water. But this isn't the only thing. We don't stop with faith. We go on to make some kind of intentional effort, having some energy in our ability to float or to bring the dharma into our life. We'll need to be paying attention as we do that to our body and the water, and how the floating is working. Then we'll need to balance all the different factors—the dynamic interplay of the water, our body, and our intention. All of that means that we're gathering ourselves around this idea of floating, and so we have a concentration factor. Through all of this, we come into a genuine experiential knowledge of how to float, so it becomes easy. Similarly, we can gain this intuitive knowing of when and how to do things in order to float on the support of the dharma.

We'll end by going back through the Five Faculties in our life. As we begin to trust in approaching life in a different way than we do when we're just busy and scrambling around, we have some trust that there's another way. Then we will start to make effort that's more harmonious. It's less about just getting what is pleasant and getting rid of what is unpleasant, and more about developing what is wholesome and renouncing what is unwholesome. Those are very different kinds of effort, so we move toward this cultivation of the wholesome.

Then it's natural that we'll be more attentive. We have to watch and remember to stay present in order to keep our mind and body in a good state. As we do that, we will see more and more clearly, and will feel more and more aligned and stable in our heart. As we have that stability of attention, we'll be able to see how it is that we can actually be of benefit, how it is that our life can be more aligned, more harmonious with the values that we have. The fruition of that is that we will be of benefit to ourselves, others, both, and the whole world. We will come to embody wisdom.

These Five Faculties really do lead to a harmonious and balanced life, and when they're applied to the dharma, they can also lead to liberation. We can come to maybe at least have faith in that, and I hope that someday we will all know that for sure.

It's not maybe so easy as I laid it out in that nice arrangement, and yet it is kind of easy. Kind of like floating—not so easy, but pretty easy when we get into it.

So these are my thoughts for this evening on the Five Faculties and life. I wish you all very well in your ongoing cultivation of each and all of them. Thank you, be well.