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The Four Roads to Spiritual Power

There's a particular teaching of the Buddha that ever since I learned about it, maybe some 30 years ago or so, I've ignored it. And even though it has a very central place, the Buddha organized his practices and the mind states that develop as you practice into a list called the thirty-seven wings of awakening^[1]. So the four foundations of mindfulness, the five faculties, the seven factors of awakening, the Eightfold Path—there are these lists of lists that add up to thirty-seven.

And there's a list of four, sometimes translated into English as the four roads to spiritual power or psychic power. The word is iddhi^[2]. I think maybe in Sanskrit it's siddhi, but in Pali it's iddhi. And it's a little bit strange, the formulation of it, and it's never clear what it is, and there's no discussion about it. So what does this mean? It has this word iddhi which means psychic power, and I just kind of thought, "This is too much to handle for me."

Then last week I read an article by a wonderful colleague of mine, a wonderful teacher in our tradition named Ruth King. In this article, she explained it in a very ordinary way. She denatured it, or demythologized it, or made it ordinary and accessible. I said, "Wow, this is fantastic, I loved it."

She did what the Buddha did with things in his own time. He would take these wonderfully supernatural or psychic power ideas that existed back in those times, and he would regularly say, "Oh yes, we do that too, but let me tell you how we do it." Inevitably, what he did was he made it ordinary, into something that human beings can do, rather than some of the more supernatural dimensions that sometimes existed in his time. He already had a custom of doing that. So when I saw Ruth King do it, I said, "Oh." I was a little bit inspired by her, a little bit borrowing from her way of doing it, and I'm going to offer my take on these four.

Sometimes they're called the four practices or four roads to success. For any kind of success, in any endeavor that you want to do in life, no matter what it is, to include these four approaches can help you be successful in what you do. Applied to Dharma practice, I think it's particularly significant as a support, as an aid. They offer some power or strength to your success as a meditation practitioner or a Dharma practitioner.

These four roads to power—or power to success, whatever it might be—are desire, effort, thought (thinking about things), and investigation. That's a very rough translation of these.

Desire

So the first one is desire. What's nice about these four is that it's very easy to listen to Dharma teachers like me and hear somehow the opposite idea—that you're not supposed to have desire in Buddhism, that you're not supposed to make strong effort (you're supposed to be kind of chill and relaxed), and you're not supposed to be thinking in meditation (that thinking is bad), and I don't know about investigation maybe. But here the Buddha puts center stage the idea of desire.

I like to think of it as dharmic desire. The word for desire is chanda^[3]. This is important because for the problematic forms of desire, the Buddha has different words. For example, taṇhā^[4], which literally means thirst. This is the kind of desire that's considered to be a source of suffering, that compulsive desire. It's not any old desire. The word chanda is an umbrella term for all forms of desire, but in this list, it's dharmic desire.

Desires that have a quality—what makes them dharmic? One of the things is that there's no clinging involved with them. Clinging is a source of suffering. Can there be desires without any clinging? And can there be desires that are for the Dharma, for practice, for liberation, for compassion? Yes, the answer is of course.

The Buddha talks about marshaling that kind of desire, standing behind it, gathering it together, and having it be strong for you. So if you want to have success in what you do, become clear about your desire. Sometimes people emphasize being really clear about intention. But intention and desire, I think, overlap quite a bit. Intention seems more inspiring, it's probably more sophisticated maybe, or intention doesn't quite feel like desire, which you're not supposed to have. But we're resurrecting the word desire, and here in a useful way, an important way: you have to want something.

If you don't want something, why would you do it? Why would you pursue it? Why would you engage? You have to want to come to IMC [Insight Meditation Center]. I don't think probably any of you just happened to be walking down the sidewalk and someone pushed you in. You have to want to be here; something has to bring you. To sit down to meditate on a regular basis, there has to be a desire for it.

How to have that desire be without clinging is the art. How to have the desire without compulsion, without expectation, without being attached to results. This is part of the art of learning how to hold desire, but still to be clear about the desire, to be clear about the intention. I spent a good part of my Dharma life reflecting on intention, and I would ask the question regularly to myself, "What's my deepest intention here?" My teacher might ask, "What's the heart's deepest wish? What does your heart most want?"

This idea of what the heart most wants, the deepest wish, means to go through the layers. Underneath the conceit, underneath our fear, underneath our greed, underneath all these layers of places that are not really at the heart. The question presupposes that there's something very significant, beautiful, wonderful, a treasure to be found. If you can get deep enough to go to the heart's deepest place within, there's something really to honor and respect, and to maybe be guided by.

So this idea of bringing desire to the table means: reflect on desire, think about it, be clear about it. Don't just take the first desire that comes along, but drop down. What is it you really want? A fascinating exercise is if what you most want is something stated in the negative, you know, "I want to be free of fear." That's wonderful, but if it's in the negative, something you don't want, then ask the question, "If I could have that, what do I want then?" So if there was no fear, what then is my heart's deepest wish? That might bring you to a deeper level underneath it, and that might also change your relationship with the fear, for example, when you realize there's a deeper calling of your heart.

Effort

The second of these four practices for success is the Pali word viriya (v-i-r-i-y-a)^[5]. It is a word that implies a lot of strength, that's associated with the word vīra, which means hero. So some people like to translate it as courageous effort. So there's a kind of oomph. It isn't easygoing. It isn't like, again, here it's not all about being chilled. "Buddhists are supposed to be calm and easygoing and relaxed." I think that's nice, maybe it's true kind of, but it doesn't mean that we also don't make a lot of effort, serious effort.

This is important in this world of ours. For many of us—not everyone in the world, but many people in our neck of the woods—there are a lot of great things to do. There's so much. Unless we have too many wonderful things to do, too many good causes to be involved in, too many recreation opportunities, too many Netflix movies, too much, you know. And then there's a kind of neurosis of trying to have it all. Or if you're not up to speed, then you go to the block party and you're not holding your own in the conversations—you're supposed to know something about everything.

But a wise life that really looks carefully at desires, at what you most want, is going to start whittling away the things that get in the way of going deep, going seriously with what's most important. If you want to live your life skimming the surface of all these things, that's maybe a little bit unfortunate when you want to go deep. That's what Dharma practice makes possible. If this is important for you, really do it. Put effort into it, make energy for it.

Don't expect it just kind of like, you know, there's something called nightstand Buddhists, the people who just read little Dharma books in the evening before going to sleep. I don't want to knock the importance of that, that's a wonderful thing by itself, but if that's all you do, then it's like reading the menu all the time. You go to the restaurant, "This is a great restaurant, didn't I tell you?" And all you ever do is read the menu, you never order the food. If you just read Dharma books, it's just a menu. You have to engage in the meal, you have to eat it. You have to make effort.

This word viriya is such a strong word, it means courageous effort. What does that mean for you? I just love that the word courage in French comes from the word heart (cœur). So what's the heart's deepest wish? Now what's the heart's wholehearted engagement in what you're doing? To be wholehearted. Don't be afraid of making effort, don't be afraid of being wholehearted.

The art of it though is, what is dharmic effort? Dharmic effort is effort which is done without conceit. Conceit is where we bring ourselves along, measure ourselves, "I'm failing and I have to do better," or "I have to get a badge for what I do and show the block party how great I am in my effort and how I succeeded." Mostly Dharma practice is kind of like baseball: baseball batters mostly fail. How many times does your mind fall off the breathing when you meditate and go off into thinking? I mean, probably baseball players have better success than we do.

This Dharma effort has nothing to do with measuring. We don't measure it. The conceit of success and failure gets caught in the ordinary conceits. What's important is the engagement—how we engage wholeheartedly without strain, without measuring ourselves, without the ordinary conceits of being successful and being a failure. These don't really apply here. What really applies is wholehearted application. Then you're doing the best you can, and that's what carries the day.

Thought

The third of these four is the word citta (c-i-t-t-a)^[6]. Usually translated as mind, but citta in the ancient Pali language can also mean thought, thinking by itself. Some scholars who study it think that citta is the thinking mind as opposed to the whole mind, but in any case, here think of it as thinking.

That is: have desire, make the effort, but think about it. Spend time doing this in a considered way. Don't just be blind and thoughtless and think, "I'm supposed to do it because I'm supposed to do it." Reflect and contemplate and think and have conversations with friends and stretch your mind so you can do it in a way that's more intelligent, better informed, better considered.

Sometimes people get the impression that with meditation they have to not think at all, and therefore, "I'm not supposed to think in my life." I think that learning how to think well is an art that we all should learn. Even going to the community college and taking a class in critical thinking skills, that's a good idea. Just really learn how we make mistakes in our cognitive understanding of things. Because we make leaps, we make assumptions, we believe things that shouldn't be believed automatically. We don't learn to question and look at what's going on here. So learning the art of thinking. If you want to do something well, really consider your desire, make the effort, and think about it well.

One of the ways to think about it well, a kind of guideline for it, is as you think about things, think about them in a way that makes you more peaceful. Track how you're thinking, and if thinking is stirring you up, making you anxious, or making you whatever, then it's not only what you think but how you think that's important. See if you can adjust how you're thinking so that the thinking itself starts to encourage a calmness, a peacefulness, and ease, rather than the opposite.

Investigation

The fourth of these roads to success is investigation, vīmaṃsā^[7]. This goes along with the others, and how I understand it is that when you engage in a thoughtful way, you want to learn from what you're doing. In some circles, it's called action-reflection. You act and then you reflect about what you just did.

From a Dharma point of view, it's often reflecting on: what are the consequences of what I do? Did this work out? What was the impact of this? Am I better off because I did this, or am I worse off? Am I more tense now, or do I feel more alive, vital, and relaxed now?

We want to track ourselves and monitor ourselves and learn from our mistakes, learn from our successes, learn from what works and doesn't work. That takes time to reflect and to investigate, to consider, to evaluate how it's going as we're doing it.

Having a sense of the consequences is central to the teachings of the Buddha. He was a consequentialist. He was regularly and constantly describing what we do from the point of view of the consequences it has. Consequences mean that you have to think about it a little bit, you have to reflect, you have to investigate, you have to track what's happening here.

Why this is quite unfortunate and why it's a drag to hear for some of you is that it's work. You have to give yourself time for it. And you have important things to do, right? I won't go through the list. And it is work, but it's a work that leads to rest, work that leads to the mind being de-stressed. We have to engage something, and it's a work that maybe becomes rejuvenating, vital, welcoming.

If we can reclaim the word work to be wonderful, as opposed to work being discouraging—"I have to do more work again, more work." I think for some people in English the word work is not a welcomed word. But I think if we learn how to do all this well, it becomes more and more welcome because we feel the benefits. It feels inviting and invigorating or revitalizing. We start discovering through Dharma practice this whole process of desire, engagement, reflection, and evaluation.

It feels more and more like second nature. It's almost as if it's what the heart does if we get out of the way well enough. If we have a clear sense of a desire that is healthy, and maybe it almost feels natural to have, then the rest can follow almost as if it's natural, and it doesn't feel like work after a while. It just feels like this is what life is, this is what we do.

For some people, what seems natural and who we are and what we do is be neurotic, because that's the habits that we formed and created. Fear and anxiety and all kinds of things become second nature because we repeated them so much, and it's inconceivable that it can be different. But it can be different. We can transform ourselves and change. We can develop other skills and ways of being that become second nature. One of the perspectives for understanding how to do that is these four roads or practices for success, which you can apply to almost anything you want to do in life, but in Dharma practice we apply it to our practice.

You might try it this week. Maybe you could take one of the four, one a day for four days, and write it down on a piece of paper, or the word, and put it on a few sticky notes. Put it on the steering wheel of your car, or your mirror, or someplace where you are—next to your phone, that's the place.

A day on desire, dharmic desire. A day on effort, dharmic effort, courageous effort. A day on consideration, reflection, thinking about it, dharmic thinking. And a day on evaluation, looking at the consequences, considering it.

Spend time with this and see if you get a hang of it, get a sense of it. Learn how to develop it, learn how to make it an art form or a skill or a craft that you've developed, so it becomes easy. It doesn't become this heavy work, it becomes vitalizing work, if you call it work.

What are your thoughts about this? Any questions? Anything you want to be clarified, or do you have any protests? Anything?

Q&A

Speaker 1: So it feels like almost, when I think about this, I need to start with the fourth one first. Because the investigation feels like the way to uncover the things first.

Gil Fronsdal: Fantastic. I think that's great because what that means is you're going to be looking at the consequences of how you're living your life now, and what you might discover might inform how you go forward and what desires you want to have. Yeah, I love that, thank you. Starting with the last one.

Speaker 2: I just want to make a simple observation. The comment that lady made reminds me of a circle. You investigate, you form a desire, you put a very sincere effort into the work to improve, and then you basically evaluate and reflect, and then the circle goes around.

Gil Fronsdal: Very nice, yeah. It's a circle, like a spiral. It comes around and around and it keeps developing and growing. Yes, that's a very nice idea. Yes, in the back.

(Microphone being passed) That's okay, there we go. It's a race. That's not very dharmic, it's the effort! [Laughter]

Speaker 3: I really appreciated the clarity around desire, around cultivating wholesome desire. Because for me, I've always been very driven, and I think for a long time in my practice I kept thinking that that was something I needed to get rid of, or not be so involved with. So when you described a desire without clinging or greed or aversion, that really landed for me.

Gil Fronsdal: Wholesome desire.

Speaker 3: Wholesome desire.

Gil Fronsdal: Yes. And it can be strong, it can be something we put a lot of effort into. Someone might think, "Wow, that person's putting in a lot of effort. I wonder if that person's too attached," and they ask you, and you say, "No, I just have a strong desire and I have a lot of energy for this and I'm given myself over to it." That's a beautiful thing to do.

Sometimes I have the aspiration—I say that I'm a wannabe obsessive, because I really like engaging and doing, and I just want to have sometimes more time to give myself over to one thing for a while. It's a beautiful thing just to do one thing, and sometimes I feel nourished by just doing one thing for a while, and just giving myself over. There's a kind of harmony that sets in in my system when I just really spend time with one activity. So yeah.

Speaker 4: I appreciate very much your wisdom today, thank you. It made me think about my own practice, and the practice of living in that fashion, which is for me mindfulness for the most part. What came to mind was Tara Brach's RAIN^[8]. RAIN, do you know that?

Gil Fronsdal: Yes.

Speaker 4: Okay, so I'm going to speak it just because I think it's so applicable. RAIN stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture, which the essence of that is self-compassion. I bring it up because if I stopped with the four roads that you just shared—and I have so very much to learn, I'm a beginner—the question I sat with was, well, as I investigate, what do I do with all the emotions? Because here I am in my human body, facing my habitual ways of being that may be problematic or may not be, and what do we do with that? And that's what made me think of Tara, because the only thing I can think of to do with that is when they arise, to let them be there and love myself through it. Right? Because inevitably there are things that come up that take me away from that space that you just described, which I do know and experience, but I certainly must practice to be there as much as possible. So thank you for the validation.

Gil Fronsdal: Thank you, I love it.

Speaker 5: Earlier in your talk, Gil, you talked about how the Buddha talked about clearing the path before you can see more deeply. For me, that took about 15 years of meditation retreats and the Dedicated Practitioners Program that gave me the forum in which to do what you're talking about. What I know about myself is, without a lot of support, I just don't have the discipline. I have the idea that I want to do these things, but in daily life, unless I put myself in some kind of a program, I don't stay with it.

Gil Fronsdal: That's fantastic. We can kind of evaluate what you just said from the point of view of the teachings. You certainly have a desire, as you reflect and look at yourself, and you find it's difficult to do it alone. The consequence of doing it alone is you don't do it. But you still have this desire, so what's the right effort? How to go forward with this? So for you, maybe it's to do it in community. You make sure you have community, then you do it in community, and you find, "Oh yeah, that works, I'll do more of it." That would be a simple example of using these four to address what you're addressing. But you're already doing this, I think, you just didn't have these categories to put them into.

And you might do it for another 15 years, probably take that for me! And then at some point, you might discover, "You know, this is nice, but I see the consequence has been good, and maybe I should try an experiment." Because a lot of the Dharma practice is good to think of as an experiment. "Let me try an experiment. Let me see what it's like now to practice alone. Let me do a self-retreat. Let me go off someplace for four days by myself and see if I can do a retreat without any support from anybody else, because I've been practicing for so long."

And then you find, "Oh, this is hard, but maybe I have to find the discipline inside now, and not to rely on the group to support me. I think this is the next step for my growth." That's what happened to me, that very thing. I wasn't planning on it, I kind of stumbled into it. I'd done all my retreats and all my practice in Zen, where it's all group practice. And then I was introduced to this Vipassana^[9] practice in Thailand. The abbot of the monastery said, "Oh, go out there to that little hut at the end of the monastery overlooking the rice fields and stay there by yourself and practice all day, and then come see me tomorrow." So I went out there to do it, and I realized, wait a minute, I've never practiced all day alone. I realized I had to call on something inside of me I never called on before. I called it discipline then, but it is an inner motivation. That became a growing edge for me. So I'm agreeing with you, I just wanted to say at some point you might also find, as you do what is most supportive for you, you might find the question will come: "Should I experiment differently? Am I ready for an experiment?"

Speaker 5: That's so helpful. I really don't have a group in which to practice now. I probably need that. The idea of doing something alone scares me, but it intrigues me too.

Gil Fronsdal: Fantastic. So then apply these four steps to practicing alone. What desires infuse it or animate it in a good way? What's the importance of it? What are you really trying to do in a deep way? And then what's the right effort? Think about it for a while to really get clear about what it all involves, and then when you do it, start doing the feedback loop of action-reflection.

Speaker 5: Thank you, thank you very much.

Speaker 6: Being a discussion, I was looking for peace and safety, and I didn't have it for a little bit. So I've actually decided to go into self-retreat for three weeks prior to going into a one-week retreat with you in person. So I did it for two days straight, Friday and Saturday, about six hours straight. The way I handled it was having Dharma in the day I woke up. As I was approaching it, I was choosing the emotion or topics or dharmic idea that called to me, and listening to your talk, and then having a meditation, and listening to your talk, and meditation. I was able to go through that five to six hours, and I found incredible safety and peace just within me, knowing that I have some sensitive issues that I'm dealing with, and emotion.

What would you think, because for me, this is how I'm approaching it. I'm in a private retreat with you, whom I feel safe with, and I'm going to find the safety that I can create myself. Because ultimately, the fears or the anxiety or the strong emotions that I have, I really do need to take care of myself. I need to find it within me, to develop that. So what would you recommend? The way I was thinking about it is when I didn't want to get out of my home, I could reframe it: "I need to take care of my mind, I need to take care of my body, the body needs to relax. So I'm doing this for me." What would you do to prepare? I think I'm just going to keep this well until I get to the in-person retreat without too much expectation. Is there any other thing you could recommend within it?

Gil Fronsdal: A couple of things occurred to me. One is, it's wonderful what you described. Part of the action-reflection, thinking about what you've done, is that as you reflect the way you did, in seeing the benefits of what you've done, let it support or nourish your self-confidence that "Oh, I can do this." So that's one.

The other is when you come to the retreat center, you have a variety of options of how to practice there. If you found that it was beneficial to explore the edges of practicing alone, you might try, even at the retreat, to do some of the meditations in your room, where you're alone, and see if some of what you've been learning the last few days benefits you and you can carry it with you there. You evaluate: how is this working in the context of practicing in silence with other people? Is this making me feel less safe or more safe to have spent some time alone?

Speaker 6: Okay. And then during the next three weeks, I'm going in the intensive continuously, doing maybe not six hours a day, maybe three to four hours, just going deeper and deeper and deeper. I'm kind of doing the same thing that I had done in the past when I go into a one-week retreat, where I did this intensive retreat and it became intensive sessions for myself. It became much more meaningful when I get there.

Gil Fronsdal: This is wonderful. Keep reflecting on how it's going. Learn from how it's going, evaluate, study yourself carefully. Some days it might work really well, but you know we have all these emotional ups and downs in our life, right? So you're tracking yourself, and you might say, "Oh, today is a day to really do something different, because I woke up kind of feeling pretty vulnerable, so I think I better just read a book." [Laughter]

Okay, so thank you all for being here and coming. I invite any of you who want to meet me in the parking lot, if you want to pull a folding chair out from the cabinet—it's around the corner there. We can bring them out to the parking lot, take off our masks, and just continue this discussion if you'd like to. Thank you.