This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Just Knowing; The Five Faculties (5 of 5): Discernment. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Just Knowing; Dharmette: The Five Faculties (5 of 5): Discernment - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 19, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Alright, welcome everyone. Good to see everybody, and a wonderful Friday to you. I hope the week's been good to you.

Today we'll wrap up with our exploration of the five spiritual faculties, as they're called. Monday we talked about confidence, Tuesday about balancing energy in the practice, Wednesday about complete presence, yesterday about collectiveness of mind—the steady mind—and today we'll talk about the fifth faculty, which is generally called wisdom. But because wisdom can be sort of a high bar (it's a great aspiration, of course), we'll take a look at it in terms of discerning and seeing clearly—verbs instead of something to acquire, accomplish, or achieve like "wisdom." We'll bring those verbs into our practice. So first, let's sit together.

Guided Meditation: Just Knowing

We can adjust our bodies and find our sitting posture. You can bring the eyes down or focus them in the middle distance. And maybe do just a brief check-in of the body, feeling its weight in the chair or on the cushion.

Maybe feel any tension in the body, any holding, any bracing, any echoes of the day or hours past, any sort of stress that's around preparing for what's to come in the rest of the day or what remains of the day. And if we can, just sort of soften around those areas of tension. We don't have to fix anything. We don't have to make things better. There are ways in which this is a practice not about feeling better quickly, but about feeling more. So just being aware of all that comes into our awareness.

And in the middle of it all, we can find our way to the breath. This morning, in keeping with the theme for the day of discerning, seeing clearly, when we find ourselves back with the breath, each time we return to the breath, maybe instead of focusing so much on the breathing today, we can focus a little more on the way we know the breathing. What can be noticed as we come back to the breath is how effortless the knowing is that knows the breathing.

So let's bring attention to the breath, connecting as we have been the last few days with some of the natural characteristics of the breathing: the balance, the simplicity, the relatively slow pace of the breathing. And just connecting in a way where there can be a little delight taken in the way when we connect our attention with the breathing, some of these characteristics that are just natural and easy for the breathing sort of rub off on us, rub off a bit on the mind. Every time we return, there's a chance, an opportunity to rebalance, to touch in with simplicity, to slow down a little bit, maybe to unwind a little bit. And just rest here in the breathing and the sensations of the rise and fall of the abdomen, the chest, the shoulders, or perhaps noticing the breathing in the mouth or nose.

Of course, the mind will roam. The mind will get caught up and snagged by things. This is the mind being mind. And because we rely on the mind to do these things for us, I always feel a certain appreciation before I bring the mind back to center, back to the breath. Appreciate the mind's ability to do all those things: to think about the future, remember and rewrite the past, to think about other people, to think about myself. All those things have their place, and sometimes I find it nice to just express some gratitude to the mind for its willingness to try to help, maybe provide some solutions or suggestions or ways to fix. And then I just go back to the breath. Right now, without pushing those aspects of mind away, I'm just coming back to the breathing here and resting the mind, steadying the mind, gladdening the mind, resting the mind like we did yesterday.

And today when we connect with the breathing, let's notice how the breathing is known. This knowing that goes on so effortless, so light a touch. This knowing that happens in itself is free. The knowing that happens effortlessly when we reconnect with the breath, we can notice in itself is free of agitation, free of attachment. It's just knowing, knowing and indistinguishable from what's known.

So easy. So this knowing can know the agitated mind without itself being agitated, can recognize and register strong emotion without itself being colored by those emotions. This knowing can connect with pleasant and unpleasant body sensation without being affected by the pleasant or unpleasant. So when we reconnect with the breath each time this morning, let's notice the knowing, just the ease of the knowing. We can rest too in this effortless knowing that's free of agitation.

As this meditation period comes to a close, we can once again reconnect our attention with the breathing and take account of the knowing that's happening and the quality of this knowing. And maybe if some gladness of mind and some steadiness of mind have become present, you can notice that this knowing seems to register change, changing intensity in what's known or changing quality of what's known. But this effortless, unagitated knowing is an innate capacity that we can cultivate in the practice, maybe letting it lead a little bit, following its lead.

Let's dedicate the merit of our practice today to all beings. May all beings be safe and secure, whole in body and mind. May all beings live at ease. May all beings be free from suffering.

Dharmette: The Five Faculties (5 of 5): Discernment

So welcome again, if you weren't here for the earlier welcome. Welcome.

Today we will finish with this brief exploration of the five spiritual faculties, so-called, these five capacities of mind that we each have within and that can be cultivated, strengthened as our practice deepens in ways that reflect the deepening of practice and also support practice.

The fifth faculty, Paññā in Pāḷi¹, is frequently translated as wisdom. As I said at the outset, sometimes that can seem like a high bar, wisdom, and so a perfectly legitimate alternate translation that Gil points to among others is discernment, or to make it a verb, "discerning." We can say discerning, we can also say seeing clearly. Something about making these verbs, I think, brings them more into the realm of something we can actually do in our practice. So we can let wisdom remain as our aspiration, and then we can practice day to day, moment to moment, sit to sit, we can practice discerning, seeing clearly.

First, something about discerning. This is something we do all the time. We walk into a room, we walk into a space, and with this effortless knowing that I was making reference to in the guided meditation, we pick up what's going on. We probably see some of it pretty clearly, and then there are other things we see less clearly. It's like this in the meditation too. We walk into a room, that is, we find ourselves in a particular moment of the meditation, and we can be aware of what's going on. And within that, we can, by degrees, see more and more clearly. Ah, this is what's arising: this emotional current, this thought pattern, this bodily sensation. And we can just take it as it comes. We can take it without judging, without preference, without making up our mind about anything, without reacting quickly.

This is this gift of discernment, that we can know what's going on and we can pause. We can take it in as it's coming on its own terms, without immediately reacting in perhaps a way that we've reacted many times before. So this is a key thing about discernment: it makes it possible for us to change how we respond. Possibly, it points out the direction of response and that sort of leads us toward a place of greater ease, greater skillful action, and the like. At the end of the meditation, I talked about letting this knowing lead instead of me leading. What if I let the knowing lead? What if I let discerning lead? What if I let this seeing clearly lead? Then what happens? Maybe something new.

Discerning allows greater creativity in meeting a moment. So to give some examples, what's being discerned? Things in the meditation, but also in daily life. Like, what's the attitude of mind toward what's happening here? What's the predominant mood with which I'm meeting this experience? Various ways of asking, what's my relationship to this experience that is being known? We can ask, what operating system has been engaged here? Is this reaction 1.0? Which particular set of reactive impulses have been activated or triggered by this situation? Is the mind operating with a lot of wanting in it, a lot of aversion in it, a lot of concern with self in it? This can be discerned. Does the relationship that I have with this experience have stress in it, have suffering in it? Just like walking into a crowded room, we can start to get very good at figuring out what's going on here.

And then, how to respond. The discerning also helps figure out what we might do in response to a particular experience. In other words, from here, seeing more clearly—if not perfectly clearly, sufficiently clearly—what's going on, we can frequently sense which direction leads toward less suffering and less harm, and which leads toward greater harm, greater suffering. This is a really important thing to notice: that all we're doing is paying attention. The direction is usually very clear, not always, and yet when we get good at this, or when discerning becomes second nature, taking a careful look, seeing clearly, becomes more second nature, it also becomes more obvious which way of inclining the mind leads towards greater suffering and which way of inclining the mind leads away.

We practice this in the meditation so that it becomes easier in daily life. It's not the only reason, as I said yesterday. We practice it in meditation because it leads toward deeper and deeper and more enjoyable and refreshing and healing meditation in and of itself, but it also helps us lean in towards what's skillful and away from what's unskillful in our daily life.

So you can ask yourself, in this situation, seen with discernment, seen with some clarity, what action of mind, of speech, or of body leads toward greater harm, and what leads toward avoiding harm? Or as Gil has put it sometimes, what might be born here? What's waiting to be born here? What might be born here that's new?

I think it's useful, as I've been trying to do all week, to take wisdom from its place as kind of a high bar and soften it, I hope, and make it more achievable by thinking of it as a verb. Something we do instead of something we have, something we apply instead of something we achieve or attain and hold on to as ours. In other words, not something we seek to perfect, but something we seek to learn to engage, learn to take with us as we meet experience. Something that is a way of meeting experience or a method for meeting experience and coming to a decision about what kind of action is an appropriate response.

Part of doing this too, we can invoke this idea that it doesn't have to be perfect. It can be sufficient. As we practice, we don't move directly toward skillful action in one step. What happens over time is that more and more we find ourselves in wholesome mind states, and from these wholesome mind states, more and more skillful action emanates. With time, the wholesome mind state and the skillful actions that follow become the more natural way that we meet experience. So the fact that we still don't see as clearly as we'd like, that we respond in ways that are the same old ways we've always responded, with frequently the same results—that doesn't mean that we can't at the very same time be on more and more occasions finding ourselves with greater clarity of mind, discerning more clearly what's going on here, what's arising in my experience, and meet that experience with something new, something that's more creative, something that is more of a skillful response than a reflexive reaction. Over time, that proportion of skillful action eventually swamps unskillful action, and we become more and more effective at being fully ourselves in the world.

In summarizing for the week—and this could be done in any number of ways, math was never my strong point, there's probably some way that this is a matter of combining five different elements in a myriad of different ways—but what I'm struck by in just saying what I've just said is that as we become more skilled at discerning, aware that okay, there's some clear seeing happening here, and in that clear seeing, or because of it, or on the basis of it, I can see that this way of inclining the mind, of speaking, of engaging in bodily action, this way is healthier for me, for others. This way is a wholesome mind state that emanates in skillful action. With that, our confidence grows—confidence being the first of these five faculties. With that confidence growing, the energetic balance that we talked about on Tuesday becomes easier and easier. Much less time is spent doubting, "Is this the right thing to do?" All the doubts that come up, you know, particularly the doubt around, "Do I have what it takes?" As we become more skilled at discerning, our confidence grows, less energy is wasted, or less heat is given off without any light in the area of the energetic balance. That energetic balance makes it much easier for mindfulness to come into play, to bring our attention to things without judging, because that's a lot of energy lost there with the judging, the bringing in all the extra stuff. We can just meet experience at ease with mindful attention that in itself is free of all that extra baggage. That provides a basis, as we said yesterday, for sustaining that attention in a way that brings great stillness and gladness to the mind.

So that's just briefly one way of relating these five faculties. We could do that beginning with any one of them and talk about how all of them are strengthened by considering it this way.

I'm going to end on this note. It's been a pleasant week in the chat. I noticed that there's some exchange for somebody who has just realized that this morning meeting has been going on for four years. I wasn't aware of it or I'd forgotten it. Gil began with an exploration of the Ānāpānasati Sutta², the attention to mindful attention to the in-and-out breath. And I just thought I would close—this isn't the end of a four-year cycle or anything—but it's been true, I think, throughout these four years, certainly when I've sat in, that those same instructions show up. Yesterday's instructions: gladdening the mind, steadying the mind, resting the mind. That's the third group of the four instructions of the sixteen instructions that appear in the Ānāpānasati Sutta. Today's guided meditation focusing on knowing the change that's going on—this is drawn, I wasn't thinking about it, but this is drawn from the fourth tetrad, or the fourth group of four instructions that are part of those 16 instructions in that discourse.

At any rate, I just want to say that we keep coming back to these foundational practices: the meditation experience and the way we meet it, the way we cultivate these faculties and these strengths of mind captured so well in that first discourse that Gil discussed. This is the heart of the practice.

Anyway, until we next meet, until our paths next cross, I wish you all well and I wish you all the best for your practices. Take care.