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Introduction

Welcome, folks. Good morning to those for whom it's morning. I'm going to presume I am audible and guide a sit anyway. It is lovely to see so many familiar names. The YouTube crew is going strong. Welcome to the Sangha^[1]. Let's sit together.

Guided Meditation: Letting the Breath Come to You

And when someone says to you, "Let's sit together, start meditating," what do you start doing? What gets tight? What loosens up? To where do you retreat in the headquarters of your own perspective?

And if I told you to stay just where you are, but stop meditating, what would you stop doing? And what cannot be stopped?

If I told you to stop being aware, you couldn't do it. As we begin, whatever cannot be stopped, rest there.

Just open, receptive. And we don't let the fact that we can direct our attention—direct the attentional spotlight to the breath, or to whatever—distract us completely from the openness of awareness. From a kind of awareness that in no way depends on what we call "me."

Maybe what I'm trying to say is, as we begin with wise view^[2], we launch our efforts from wise view. It is often useful to draw some line that distinguishes the object of attention from everything else. However wide you draw that circle, it may be useful to draw it, and often useful to draw the circle right around the sensations of breathing.

Receiving the rhythm of your own breathing. This breath that, in some sense, registers everything else. And so to attend to the breath is to honor the rest of your life, being nourished by cycles of your own breath.

Just because we draw the circle of attention around sensations of the breath doesn't mean that everything outside that circle is suspicious. All experience is equally innocent and should be treated as such. Gently inclining inwards, inside the circle of attentional space, letting your mind take its cues from the cycles of the breath.

Dharmette: Five Spiritual Faculties - Faith (1 of 5)

It's nice to sit with you. I forgot to introduce myself; I'm Matthew. Well, that's not a good introduction—I'm Matthew, and I teach meditation. [Laughter] I was happy when Gil^[3] asked me to spend time with you all, and I'll be here this week.

I thought to do a list of five: the five faculties, or the five spiritual powers. They are faith, energy, mindfulness, samadhi^[4] (concentration), and wisdom. If you look at that list, that is a powerful combination of forces.

Today we are focusing on faith. The path really begins not so much with faith, but with doubt. The doubt is, this isn't going to work out. That launches us into the sincerity of practice, and the sooner we realize that, the better. This isn't going to work out the way I've been approaching my life, the way I've been trying to govern samsara^[5], this ungovernable realm. This can't actually work out. That recognition sets us on a kind of course.

How is faith born? Usually, we understand suffering as an effect. Suffering is the effect of craving and clinging. But suffering is also a cause; it causes things. The Buddha^[6] says faith has a supporting condition. He says, "I say it does not lack a supporting condition." And what is the supporting condition for faith? Suffering, should be the reply.

Gil puts it this way: "Just as one first must know oneself to be lost in order to search for a way out of the jungle, so one must know one is suffering in order to start a process that frees one from that suffering. Between knowing one is suffering and starting to walk a path to freedom, there needs to be adequate confidence in the path and in one's capacity to walk it."

This type of faith is not dogmatism. It has a certain kind of respect for the empirical sensibility. The Buddha was very sophisticated on these questions, and we know that again and again, clinging to views is one of the wellsprings of suffering. Whatever the opposite of fundamentalism is, the Dharma is a path to it.

Ajahn Amaro^[7] says, "Belief fills the unknown with certainties. Faith trusts the implications of your experience."

I was interviewed a few days ago about Dharma stuff, and the interviewer asked, "How did you get into practice? How did you become committed to the path?" It struck me that it's a little like asking, "Why did you fall in love with that person?" When you ask a couple, "Why did you fall in love?" they tend to give very superficial answers. It's not very believable. They say things like, "Well, we both like spicy food." It's like, "Okay, that's nice, I like spicy food too. But I'm not so sure that's why you fell in love with that person." Who knows why we fall in love with anything? It often seems quite opaque to oneself.

Faith is a kind of form of falling in love. It's not so much a commitment to propositions or agreeing with tenets; it's like falling in love. The heart, in some sense of recognition, is returning to its native ground.

Ralph Waldo Emerson^[8] said the definition of spiritual should be that which is its own evidence. Teachers try to nudge us in this direction, but you can't force anyone to fall in love with anything. You can never really know where love is going to go, but you know that you have to see it through.

Just as one doesn't fall in love with a static person—you cannot hold another being still—the sense of the path and the love for it evolves, too. It changes, too. Maggie Nelson^[9] says, "Whenever the lover utters the phrase 'I love you,' its meaning must be renewed by each use, as the very task of love and of language is to give one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new."

I take refuge. I take refuge in Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha. I love you. These phrases are renewed with new inflections each time.

As a teacher, I see people cross a certain threshold where their faith stabilizes, or it's strong enough that there's no going back. To leave practice would be to abandon one's own heart. There's a certain kind of security in that, because up until then, there's a wobble in the path.

I associate faith with relaxation, with a certain kind of ease. We relax into our faith, and one of its gifts is that we're not compulsively looking for evidence that we're on the right track. We're not just trying to ping to some metric of our okayness that this is our path. No, that's actually settled. The heart has returned to its native ground, and we become naturally less self-absorbed. In faith and confidence, it's less about "me" and more about the path and our humble efforts to walk it.

As we develop this confidence in our practice and our heart, anicca^[10]—the changingness of all things—becomes at least a little bit less intimidating. Faith means that however life unfolds, we know our practice will be there. We have a certain confidence in the potency of awareness and love, and there's a certain kind of coziness I associate with that. It doesn't mean that the cracks in samsara have been healed by any stretch. Of course, experience will have difficult times, sometimes overwhelmingly so. But our faith, the Dharma, and our confidence in it will always be at least a subtle consolation, and often a profound one.

And so we breathe a little more easily, rest, and keep going. I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up what's useful and leave the rest behind.

Thank you all. I wish you all well, and we'll see you same time tomorrow.