This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Trusting the Practice; Dharmette: The Five Faculties (1 of 5): Confidence. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Trusting the Practice; Dharmette: The Five Faculties (1 of 5): Confidence - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 15, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning, friends. It's enjoyable seeing people signing in and saying hello to one another here in the chat. I'm trying to resolve some little technical issues for myself but am glad to see everyone. I think I lost some of the early chat hellos, but good to see you, Samantha, Jamie, Lana, Leslie, Alice, Joyce. Welcome, and many others.

Welcome, I'm David Lorey. Let me just change my name here so you can see who's sitting in for Gil this week. There. Good morning, everyone. Good day.

Welcome. We'll begin as we begin, with a sit. Let me set up the sit by telling you what I intend to share this week. I'll share a teaching referred to as the Five Faculties, sometimes the Five Spiritual Faculties. This week I'm going to think of them as I share this teaching as the Five Divine Faculties. Another way to think of them, and a particular spin I enjoy, is to think of them as Five Human-Divine Faculties. These are aspects of our inherited capacity to be present and to be free.

There's no chance that in these various years teaching this five-weekday program that Gil has not also shared these teachings. You'll recognize and hear echoes of Gil's teachings, but one of the wonderful things about sitting in for Gil is the opportunity to share Gil's teachings—for each of us, Ying last week, myself this week, others of Gil's students in the coming weeks—refracted through the prism of our own practice and our own experience in life. So these will be familiar teachings, but they'll have a particular flavor. I'm going to make a point of sharing some of the ways that Gil's approach to these five faculties has shifted over time. That's sort of my teaser. Toward the end of our brief dharmette, after we finish sitting, I'll share some of what I take to be ways that Gil has come to appreciate these teachings in a new light in the last few years.

The Five Faculties, the Five Spiritual Faculties, the Five Human-Divine Faculties, beginning today with the confidence that grows as our practice deepens. It's in specific aspects of the practice that we can attune ourselves to the confidence that the practice provides us in life, and our confidence in being in the practice. I'll say more about that after we sit.

Guided Meditation: Trusting the Practice

After we sit and after we dedicate the merit of our practice together, I'll guide only briefly and only lightly. But find yourself into your meditation posture, whatever that is. No matter what posture of the various postures that we can adopt for the meditation, we seek to find balance in the posture—any posture and all postures that enable us to be here fully present, alert and awake, and at the very same time relaxed, receptive. Any posture that allows us to balance our attention between effort and allowing is a legitimate posture.

As we perhaps bring our eyes down or close our eyes fully if that feels safe and comfortable for us, we can notice a natural rebalancing that happens. In each of the Five Faculties we'll explore this week, I'll emphasize that these are capacities within. We're not reaching outside ourselves to acquire something that we don't already have. What we're doing is paying attention to a capacity within, and as we pay attention to them, we cultivate them. As we bring our attention to them, they're strengthened. We can do this as we first sit with just noticing balance taking place. Our eyes turn inward and our attention comes from the visual external realm to the inner life. At the same time, we can feel the attention moving inward and downward, sort of from the head to the heart, from the head to the heart to the body.

By bringing our attention to the breathing, we can notice the natural equilibrium that the breath establishes for us right in the center of our being. The breath is balanced. I like that the breath is so confident in what it does. It knows the right quantity of oxygen needed, the right quantity of carbon dioxide and other waste gases to expel. The breath doesn't concern itself with the future or the past. The breath just sits here, and by connecting our attention with the breath, we take on some of these qualities. Whenever we return our attention to the breathing, we reconnect with the natural balance in our experience, and again, as we connect with it, it strengthens.

When we return attention to the breathing after the mind gets caught up in things, snagged by thought, planning for or looking forward to the day, or reviewing if maybe the day has already passed, thinking about other people, thinking about ourselves—the natural field of the mind—whenever we bring it back to the breathing, nothing's gone wrong. We didn't do anything wrong. In fact, each time we come back to the breath, there's an opportunity to strengthen the capacity to be here. So we can celebrate each time we come back, instead of perhaps judging that we shouldn't have, or we're no good at this, or it doesn't work. Just kind of let go of those kinds of thoughts and just feel quite happy and content to be able to keep coming back here.

As we come toward the end of this period of meditation, maybe once again we can touch in with that sense of rebalancing that happens when we direct our attention back to the center of things, back to the here and the now of our experience. We can do this by touching back in with the breathing, the sensations of just this in-breath here, just this out-breath here.

We can be sure that this coming back to center is good. We can reinforce this habit of mind, this ability to come back to complete presence, simply by noticing what it feels like when we come back to the center. This is a pleasure of coming back home, or coming back here from wherever the mind's gotten wandered off to or caught up in. This particular pleasure of return in the meditation—returning to equilibrium, returning to center, returning to ground, returning to home—the teachings encourage us to enjoy. It's an important signal to the brain and the being that there's a wholesome pleasure here in the meditation. So we can feel confident that this is a good place to come back to.

Sometimes it's good and enhances the sense of return to bring a couple of phrases to mind. Whatever's coming up in the practice for you, that's what's supposed to be coming up. We can trust the practice to lead us toward wholesome mind states and skillful action. There's nothing that's coming up that needs to be excluded or rejected. And you don't need anything more than what's right here, right now. We don't need to reach outside. We have sufficient right here inside our experience. Sometimes it's useful to use the phrase, "I belong here."

We can share this sense of confidence with others simply by returning here. Gil sometimes points out that the world that we live in, the world around us, really needs people who can be confident in their direct experience, who can be settled, who can cultivate a peace of mind that can hold strong during moments of turbulence.

So we can share the confidence we feel in the practice with other beings everywhere, wishing all beings well, wishing all beings safety and security, wholeness in body, comfort and contentedness in mind. May all beings know something of this sense of balance and home that we can experience in the meditation. May all beings be benefited by this practice, and may all beings be free.

Dharmette: The Five Faculties (1 of 5): Confidence

Welcome again, everyone. The view I have of you is the lovely greetings you share with one another in the chat. I appreciate everybody being here, and I see bowing emoji, so I return a bow.

I want to talk about the Five Faculties this week, the Five Spiritual Faculties as they're frequently known, Pañca Indriya¹ in Pali. I had the wonderful experience of teaching the Five Faculties last week down at the retreat center in Santa Cruz, the Insight Retreat Center, with my wonderful colleague Andrea Castillo. We taught together in Spanish for a week, and the notes I have to share about these teachings are in Spanish. I'm going to sort of just let them come into English as they do.

When you take these teachings and you bring them into practice, each time they have a lovely way of expanding to meet the circumstances of a particular place in one's practice. What I think will come forward this week as we talk a little bit about each of these five faculties is the way in which they're innate capacities within each of us, and possibly in all beings, and that we cultivate them by bringing attention to them. This I find really reassuring and quite a gift of practice—that we don't have to look outside, we don't have to go anywhere, we don't have to be any different. The capacities we have to be fully awake are right here and always available. We may not see them clearly, we may not be as aware of them as we can in practice, and that's what we do when we explore them as teachings and bring them into the meditation.

The first of these faculties is Saddha², which I like to translate, following Gil, as confidence. I also like the word trust. What I wanted to bring attention to in the guided meditation today—and I was a little thrown by some of the challenges I was having with the IMC YouTube account; I think we wrestled and sharing the Dharma won today—but in the guided part, what I hoped to point to is that it's in our direct experience of the breath, of being here now, that we can have confidence. There's a lot where, as soon as the mind starts adding judgment, for example, around having the mind get caught up in something else; as soon as the mind gets caught up in adding extra to our experience—preference, or wanting something different, or trying to push something away or exclude something from experience, "this shouldn't be here, this shouldn't be happening"—as soon as that starts to happen, we sort of lose contact with direct experience. That is our primary experience, the things that arise in our experience before we add stress to them, before we get caught up in them. In that direct experience, we can have absolute confidence.

That's one of the reasons we keep going back there in the meditation. It's not important that we're not there all the time. This practice isn't about hanging on by our fingernails to the breath; it's about coming back to the breath over and over again. The sense of return, the sense of rebalance, the sense of refreshment and pleasure that come from coming back to here and now—that's the manner in which we remind ourselves of this innate capacity to be here. As we come back each time and we reconnect with direct experience, our confidence can grow. "Oh, this is what's happening now." We can start to feel that what's happening now is what's meant to be happening in the practice. It's not supposed to be otherwise. We don't have to exclude anything that comes up in the meditation, none of which, practically none of which, is random as being not appropriate here. The things that come up, and the things even that draw us away, those things want attention. They want the gift of our attention, and once given the gift of attention, they ease up. We can come back to center. We'll talk about that particular aspect of the five faculties later in the week.

So what does it mean to have confidence or trust in direct experience? I like to think that the things that draw us away from the here and now, these are things that have sort of a destabilizing effect. They knock us off center, they take us away from the natural balance that we can find within. They distract us from a wholesome quality of mind and a way of knowing experience that is naturally free. And they can, in various ways, make us feel either that we don't belong in the practice, or we don't even belong in our own experience, or that we don't have what it takes to be free. To the extent that we engage in those kinds of thought patterns, we sort of diminish our own capacity to be confident in what we can know directly in our experience.

So when we return to here and now, we reconnect with the experience of this moment. "It's like this now." We can use phrases to remind ourselves that this is the way it's supposed to be in the practice. This practice that's developing right now is the one that is the right one, the correct one, the skillful one. We can trust what we come to know in the meditation.

The particular thing I'd point to today—and this can be a little challenging for people perhaps who come from some of our backgrounds, certainly for me—is something I tried to point to in the guided meditation this morning: we can trust the pleasure that's there in the meditation. The pleasure of the meditation, which the Buddha encourages us to cultivate. The Buddha says in various places that this pleasure of meditation, this pleasure that comes from connecting with our direct experience, the here and now, this pleasure is to be cultivated. This pleasure is not to be feared. This pleasure is part of the path. That's because the pleasure of the meditation doesn't depend on anything outside us, doesn't depend on external conditions, but rather is something that comes from within. And as a result, it is something that we can trust, that we can have confidence in. As we become more intimate with our experience, we can lean into that pleasure that accompanies the return to here and now.

There's actually something quite important going on in the brain here. The brain uses pleasure and pain as important signals, and what we're doing is retraining the brain a bit. We're encouraging the mind to notice that, ah, it's pleasurable to be here now. As we do that, we reinforce that important signal in the mind that this is a place to find home, that this is a place we can trust. This can be challenging because sometimes we, quite understandably and rightfully, are hesitant to take pleasure in things because sometimes it leads us astray. Sometimes we find that we're caught up in seeking pleasurable experiences, peak experiences, in ways that are harmful to ourselves or others. So this is an important reminder that this experience in the meditation of making direct connection with our lives, with the here and now of our experience—trusting that the practice brings us into the experiences that need attention—this particular signaling does point in a wholesome direction.

I promised at the outset that one thing I would do in these five days is reflect on the way Gil has most recently captured these five faculties. This faculty, this internal capacity, this ability to be present in this way, this first faculty is frequently referred to as confidence or trust or faith. This is something that we're reminded of as the practice develops. This direct experience is something we can have complete faith and confidence and trust in. The word that Gil has recently used to gloss, to characterize this faculty, is love. It's a wonderful thing to recognize, as Gil does, that this ability to feel comfortable and confident, to have trust and faith in our direct experience of life, allows us to—it, in a sense, is a form of love. It frees us up to share our love with others. When we're confident in what we experience, we can share it openly, share it freely. It allows us to connect with others and it allows us to get out of our own way, in a way that allows us to be present for others.

So this first faculty, this first inner resource, this first capacity of mind, is to be comfortable and confident enough in our own experience that we are engaged in a form of deep appreciation for the simple ability to be present in our lives, intimate with our experience, and share that with others in the world.

As we go forward this week, we'll continue to look at each of these in a way that hopefully is very... really comes right out of the meditation that we engage in together, and that also connects with some of these more recent ways that Gil characterizes these five spiritual faculties, or five human-divine faculties as I'm characterizing them this week.

Alright, best wishes to everyone for the day and I look forward to connecting again tomorrow morning. Tomorrow we'll return to the idea of balance. The second faculty is energy, Viriya³, and we'll take a look at how energy plays an important role in the meditation practice and also in how we can balance our energies throughout our engagement in daily life. So take care till tomorrow morning.