This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Introduction

Welcome, folks. It is nice to see your names over there in the chat.

There was a question about recordings. Those will be posted in a couple of days. A volunteer is working to edit those and get them posted to AudioDharma, but they are, of course, always available on YouTube.

Okay, very sweet. All right, let's sit.

Guided Meditation: Beginning with Goodness

Maybe we could summarize the Dharma by saying something like: we're becoming more and more sensitive to goodness.

The goodness within oneself. The goodness of others. The goodness of peace, love, wisdom. The goodness of the path. Sensitive to goodness. And the goodness that runs through us, surrounds us, becomes both very ordinary and very touching. It becomes the foundation of our practice, a kind of bedrock from which our efforts emerge, to which our efforts return, and how we live and we die.

So, sensing as we begin now the way goodness runs right through you. If we get tight or contracted, let's touch back in with any reminder of goodness, ensuring we're not alienated from it.

Poised in that goodness, we let the breath come to us. Noticing the relief that comes when oxygen hunger builds and we breathe in, saturating our body with exactly what it needs. Knowing the pleasure of breathing out when we've been nourished by the in-breath, the relief of exhaling what's been used to nourish our body. These cycles of giving and receiving constitute a life.

We can be clear, precise, and resolved. Higher resolution in perceiving the breath as it comes and goes. We can be clear, precise, and resolved without tension. A kind of devotion that is unhurried.

It's so natural to hedge our bets on this moment, to try and tie up all the loose ends of being human. So we allocate some of our love to the future, to worry, to the past. But maybe, suspended in some sense of goodness, of care, we relax our vigilance. We feel safe enough to devote ourselves to what's here—to your body breathing. You don't need to manufacture the sacred.

Dharmette: Five Spiritual Faculties - Energy (2 of 5)

That's good. Good to sit with you.

So yesterday we started with faith, the first of the five spiritual faculties^[1], and today we explore energy—energetic vigor, vīriya^[2].

Just a few days ago, I finished teaching a retreat at Insight Retreat Center with Inez Freedman. The theme was doing and non-doing. We would alternate Dharma talks, and she represented the effortful side, the doing, and I represented the dimensions of the path where we mostly get out of the way. It really is a dialectic between the doing and the non-doing, but the effortful side is no joke. This path is not something for nothing.

In the Aṅguttara Nikāya^[3], the Buddha said that he is careful never to rest contented with his skillful qualities. He says, "Relentlessly I exerted myself. Gladly would I let the flesh and blood in my body dry up, leaving just the skin, tendons, and bones, but if I had not attained what can be reached through human firmness, human persistence, human striving, there will be no relaxing my persistence."

You hear that and you can see how it lands in your mind. I think historically I've been quite inspired by images of warrior-like effort, and they've held a certain place in my heart and mind. But we want to interrogate: where do we source our effort from?

Sometimes it's okay to strive. Most long-term practitioners have periods of striving. There's some striving, there's some clinging, and just so you know, it's not like we spontaneously combust if we strive. But all the willfulness can actually reinforce a sense of self—a sense of me striving to make practice work. That striving solidifies wrong view.

I described a very willful mode of practice to a teacher once, and with incredible, really exquisite kindness, the teacher said to me something like, "Matthew, you're running a Dharma race from stupid to stupid." You don't forget that! It actually filled me with delight, just to feel in that moment released from this willful mode of effort. For me, somewhere early in my practice, vīriya (energy) and sakkāya-diṭṭhi^[4] (self-view) got yoked together. This effort and the contraction and tension of self got yoked together. The sense of who I was, my place on the spiritual path, my progress, my problems, my defilements—they all congealed in this sense of beginning with wrong view.

There's this real tangle of dhamma-chanda^[5] and conceit. Dhamma-chanda is longing, a longing from the heart, longing for the Dharma. The sincerity and beauty of that longing was mixed in with a whole raft of self-view. And in that self-view, in that conceit, self-harshness is born. Idealism and unbalanced striving are born. Comparing mind and competitiveness are born—a whole flood of pain.

So we make effort. We really do make effort. But we must also witness the limits of our willfulness. We must witness the limits of our work, to vividly encounter the willfulness failing us. To encounter the ways that sourcing our effort from that wellspring leads to tension. And so the question becomes: what does effort look like for you on the other side of your willfulness? That's a kind of koan.

Is it possible for us to rest amidst effort? I would love it when I had a teacher with whom we would do Qigong in the morning before retreat sitting started.^[6] The language he would use was, "Under-do it. Under-do it." We were still doing it—it was 6:00 a.m. and we were awake and moving—but under-do it.

Sayadaw U Tejaniya^[7] says, "Right effort is effort with wisdom, because where there is wisdom there is interest. The desire to know something is wisdom at work. Being mindful is not difficult, but it's difficult to be continuously aware; for that you need right effort. But it doesn't require a great deal of energy. It's a relaxed perseverance and reminding yourself to be aware. When you're aware, wisdom unfolds naturally, and there is still more interest. The mind is relaxed, the mind knows something about itself. The meaning of effort is to continue. Try to be patient. Try to be relaxed."

Effort is a major theme in the suttas. I'm not a scholar, but my understanding is that by numerical count, effort is right up there in terms of frequently mentioned themes. It is a major theme in the suttas because neurosis is often the path of least resistance. I talked about the pervasiveness of goodness, the sensitivity to goodness—that's all true too. But neurosis is often the path of least resistance, meaning my bad habits require precisely zero effort. The glide path to donuts is frictionless! Nothing wrong with donuts.

William James said we are mere bundles of habit. We are imitators and copiers of our past selves. That psychological, karmic, neural momentum makes us imitators and copiers of our past selves, and not all of our habits are conducive to our happiness. So deep growth is not always comfortable. Sometimes it feels like water running down a hill, but often it takes energy. It takes energy to listen to our own best advice. When we know what needs to be done, we often have some access to wisdom, but it's hard to listen to that.

Śāntideva^[8] says we hate suffering but love its causes. That is a remarkable distillation of so much: hate suffering but love its causes. One way of reading that is that clinging has partially worked. It's been reinforced. It's been conserved over time, certainly over evolutionary time, but even over the time of our own life, clinging has been reinforced. There's craving, clinging, acquisition, maybe momentary relief, and then disappointment. Then back to that unquenchability of craving that gives rise to a new cycle, another round. We try it again.

The Dharma looks at the ways that suffering has been reinforced. The partial satisfaction of clinging is like anger with its honeyed tip and poisoned root, as the Buddha said.^[9] That's just one example. But to put down the poison, we have to renounce the honey, and that takes effort, energy.

"Hate suffering but love its causes." Energy is often about not loving the causes of suffering.^[10] Thus, we do what we can to source that effort from wise view. From wise view, from relaxation, from sensitivity to goodness.

I offer this for your consideration. Oh, wow. That's lovely to think of you out there somewhere, all of us out there somewhere. And we'll keep going. So I wish you all a good day. May you not be alienated from goodness.