Five Spiritual Faculties: Mindfulness And Wisdom

This is a highly engaging, insightful, and thought provoking talk given by Lloyd to the Insight Community of Denver, Colorado, on one of the Five Spiritual Faculties of Buddhist tradition - 'Mindfulness and Wisdom'. Note: This is Recorded live with some background noise.

Transcript

Up until June 30th,

That's the date that I wrapped up my 30th and final year as an academic.

Of course,

Maybe that never really happens,

Eventually I know it,

But at any rate,

That's when I got stuck and paid for it.

But still,

The old ways die hard,

So I want to have a little pop oral quiz here.

For those of you who were here the last time I was here,

And giving the talk and having a discussion about the factors of the spiritual qualities,

As the Buddhist would call them.

So,

Faith,

Effort,

Concentration,

Mindfulness,

Wisdom.

Can you remember what we talked about?

What was the nature of our discussion?

Maybe faith,

But maybe not.

Faith and not faith.

Or like Stephen Dasher calls it,

The faith to doubt.

That could have been in your beard.

It was one of those,

They all kind of won together after a while.

The same old mishmash.

Does anyone else have anything to add to that?

As to what you talked about?

As to what we talked about last time we were together.

I remember that you talked about how when we come out of meditation and we start warming the self,

And then sometimes we can start that process.

Yes,

Thank you.

Okay,

Now I'm not so depressed.

Something landed and took root,

Germinated,

It was good.

So,

Yeah,

In the eightfold path that the Buddha taught,

The means by which one can become spiritually awakened,

We have these meditative factors of effort,

Concentration and mindfulness.

The wisdom factors of right understanding,

Right view as they sometimes call it,

Or wise thought or intention,

And then the translation into action.

The sila factors,

The ones of applying the Buddha's teachings to living in harmony with others and with the world in terms of how we speak and act and live our lives.

So,

What we were focusing on was faith in relationship to effort,

And faith in relationship to concentration.

In the Buddha's teachings on effort,

He talked a great deal about wise or skillful effort and that effort which is unskillful.

When we talk about faith,

The Pali word,

The literal translation of it is to place the heart upon.

To place the heart upon,

As in to trust.

And what do you place the heart upon?

What do you trust?

I don't know what the matter with you,

I don't hear what you say.

Place the heart,

H-E-A-R-T,

Upon.

What do you place the heart upon?

Alright,

Thank you.

Very good.

And we looked at one of the most ancient texts,

Certainly in Chuan Buddhism,

Chinese Buddhism,

From about the 6th century of the Common Era,

Called the Sen Sen Ming.

And that text title is translated.

Probably the most commonly heard rendering of that translation is of the title,

Is Verses on the Faith Mind.

It has also been translated by scholars such as Stephen Mitchell as trust in mind,

Or the mind of absolute trust.

Another way to think about this concept of faith.

And one that kind of distinguishes it a little bit from how the connotations of that word is used in Western religions for the most part,

Is it really is a little different.

What do you trust?

What do you place the heart upon?

And it's kind of a conundrum,

We find there are a lot of conundrums in Buddha Dharma,

And this is one of them.

Because he talks about the importance of trust in mind.

And yet,

When we begin to learn about the mind,

We begin to learn that the mind,

At least the discursive mind,

The self-creating mind,

Is suffused with attachments and aversions and delusions,

And what point is there in trusting that?

In fact it seems like a really bad idea,

The more you learn about the nature of mind.

And that is in fact not really what the Buddha meant.

We can think of discursive mind,

Small d,

Small m,

Which is basically essentially a sequence of processes.

The storytelling mind,

The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who others are and how the world is and whatnot.

And then we can think about mind with a big M.

Zen teachers sometimes refer to it as big mind,

In fact,

Right?

And in all the Buddhist texts,

Including the Theravada texts,

You hear these references to the mundane and the supramundane.

That kind of everyday mundane doesn't mean inferior or lesser,

It means of the world,

Compounded reality.

As distinguished from this all-knowing facility that the mind has,

There are big M's,

There are big mind,

Right?

Mind,

The great vast spaciousness within which there occasionally arises the discursive mind.

And it's that great vast knowing,

Wise awareness,

Wise compassionate awareness that the Buddha is referring to and that the 3rd Zen elder was referring to when he wrote the Zincingming.

When they talk about trust in mind,

That is what they are referring to.

And so a lot of spiritual growth is essentially learning to distrust the discursive mind and to place greater faith in your spiritual faculties,

Your big mind.

And then the Buddha talks about this inevitable period of difficulty that arises along the spiritual path,

At the time during which we still are pretty much controlled by and driven by and have this abiding faith in the eternality of the discursive self.

That's the culture we were raised in,

That's how we were taught things are and whatnot.

So we have this firmly established sense of self that then encounters the Dharma which says,

You know,

The self is the problem.

When our awareness,

When the concentration,

The effort are such that we can begin to perceive that that's what's going on,

It is an especially difficult period in spiritual maturation or difficult period along the path.

Because what happens during that phase is that the self develops an aversion to self.

During this phase what occurs is that the mind having recognized that conjuring the self is in fact the problem,

The self develops an aversion to self.

It's kind of like the spiritual or psychic equivalent of an autoimmune disease like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus,

Right,

Where the body attacks itself,

It perceives some aspect of its own being to be the enemy and it attacks it.

That's what autoimmune diseases are.

So this is kind of an autoimmune condition of the soul or whatever passes for one in Buddhism.

What's going on is that the self has realized that it is the problem.

So then it develops an aversion to itself.

The Buddha talks in the Second Noble Truth about the source of this particular kind of suffering or dissatisfaction,

Which he calls craving or clinging.

Craving for things like gratification of sense desires,

Craving for or attachment to rites and rituals,

Thinking that they will lead one to enlightenment.

Attachment to views and opinions.

Attachment to the idea of a permanent and abiding self.

Buddha calls that a desire for being.

As the self begins to recognize that it itself is the problem,

Begins to develop this aversion to self,

What can then arise is what the Buddha called desire for non-being.

Desire for there to not be a self.

And this desire for non-being can become pretty strong.

It was very strong in the Buddha before he became an enlightened being.

When he was this really gung ho meditator trying to discover what it would mean to become enlightened,

He followed this very extreme ascetic path where he came really pretty close to starving himself to death.

And the belief that if he were able to finally starve the body and the senses and the submission,

That finally that would result in an enlightened state.

And all he ultimately realized is that when he was coming pretty close to killing himself,

Which was not going to work out because there wasn't going to be anybody around to experience enlightenment.

And as he began to teach,

As a way of trying to get his followers disengaged from attachment to self,

And from attachment to sense desires,

He would teach these meditations on the loathomeness of the body.

Meditation is actually embedded in the greater discourse on the establishing of mindfulness.

Where he has you thinking about the pus and excrement and bile and all the nasty stuff that's in the body,

And the fact that it's going to get old and die and rot and whatnot.

So yeah,

It was a really fun practice.

But he was trying to loosen up his followers' attachment to being.

And what happened instead is that some of them got so depressed they started committing suicide.

And he realized he had kind of gone overboard and he had to kind of dial it back a little bit and begin to focus on things like the importance of compassion in your practice.

And having some regard or respect for the preciousness of this human existence.

Because in the understanding of the Buddha Dharma,

This plane of existence is the only portal through which becoming fully awakened is possible.

So he began to teach and to offer teachings on how to become mindful of the desire for not being.

And how to use the power of mindfulness to inquire into the self's aversion to self.

And he had this very interesting simile that I find quite useful.

He said,

The self's aversion to itself is like a dog chained to a post.

And the dog is struggling to get free.

And so it keeps lunging against the chain that has it tethered to the post.

You know,

That's attached to the iron collar around its neck.

And the more and the harder he lunges,

The more he injures himself.

And it's a futile enterprise.

He said,

At some point when you've been inflicting that kind of harm on yourself for long enough,

You begin to realize,

Wow,

That kind of hurts.

And it's not having any kind of beneficial effect at all.

It's unskillful effort.

And so once that's realized,

Then you need to begin to pay more attention to what constitutes skillful effort.

And one of the insights that arises,

The Buddha said,

When you can think about this,

That simile,

That kind of lunging against,

That relentless self aversion,

He said,

That arises from the belief that the self can exterminate the self,

Which is an impossibility.

It's not how it works.

He said,

You need to give up on the idea that you can will the self out of existence.

That's just not how it works.

He said,

You think of me as an enlightened being.

He said,

Well,

As a matter of fact,

I am.

And what you have also assumed is that because I have gotten to the point where the torments of the mind no longer control my state of being,

The attachments and the aversions and the delusions,

That the mind's effort to continue to try to create self has likewise vanished,

And it has not.

He said,

Even in me.

The self,

Or there is an aspect of mind that continues to try to shape or to conjure a self.

But I recognize it when I see it.

Kind of like Justice Franfer's definition of pornography,

You know,

And they were doing the first amendment cases.

He says,

Well,

I can't explain it in so many words,

But I know it when I see it.

So the Buddha would talk about how when the mind was seeking to conjure self,

He could watch that effort as it began to arise.

He even gave it a name.

He called it Mara.

Kind of personified it.

But that's really what he was talking about.

And it's referred to in the Theravada text as the evil one or the dark one or whatever.

But basically,

All he was doing was kind of a gestalt.

He was talking about these aspects,

These little seeds in the mind that are so deeply programmed into the consciousness that even after he had become fully awakened,

He could still see these efforts,

These very substantially weakened and disempowered aspects of mind that would still try to move in the direction of I-making and me-making.

However,

They were without the ability to any longer do it.

And the reason that he talked about Mara and the reason he talked about these things continuing to arise was as a means of trying to show how to instill faith in oneself,

How to have trust in your mind.

Because he said,

If you have the understanding that I am not really an enlightenment being,

That I am not really fully on the path as long as I-making and me-making continues to happen,

He said that's a wrong view,

It's not correct.

If you have that view,

That's basically the self at work.

It's the self having some notion of what it means to be light.

So he said you need to come into full acceptance of the fact that the mind is from time to time going to continue to try to conjure the self.

Sometimes it's going to get away with it,

Maybe most of the time.

But the whole purpose of mindfulness is awakening sufficiently to that phenomenon when you see it happening.

So that's where he was coming from when he was speaking about right or wise effort.

And in the sense in Ming,

Tseng-Stan says,

When you try to stop activity by passivity,

Your very effort fills you with activity.

As long as you remain in one stream or the other,

You will never,

An extreme another you will never know oneness.

He says,

Although all dualities come from the one,

He's talking now pretty much about Daoism,

Do not be attached even to this idea of the one or oneness,

Because if you have some concept of unity or emptiness,

It's your discursive mind having a concept,

An entertaining concept,

Which creates that in the mind,

That's something that I want,

That's something separate from me that I want,

Which is not the nature of things.

He said,

When the mind exists undisturbed in the way,

Nothing in the world can offend.

And when a thing can no longer offend,

It ceases to exist in the old way.

When no discriminating thoughts arise,

The old mind ceases to exist.

When Tseng-Stan is talking about the old mind,

He's talking about the discursive mind,

The self-creating mind.

When no discriminating thoughts arise,

The old mind ceases to exist.

When thought objects vanish,

The thinking subject vanishes.

And when the mind vanishes,

Objects vanish.

So when the mind gets to this deep state of relaxation,

When it comes into this state of being,

Where there is no effort being made to bring the self into being,

That's when Tseng-Stan and the Buddha talk about being able to see things in a new way,

Fresh and undisturbed,

Because there is no subject,

There is no object,

There is no me,

There is no it,

There is no I,

There is no that.

There is simple,

Naked awareness of things as they are.

Insofar as the Buddha's trying to correct his followers' views when it comes to desire for non-being,

He says,

If you wish to move in the one way,

Do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas.

Indeed,

To accept them fully is identical with enlightenment.

So nothing shines,

Nothing left out.

A very different way of understanding what the mind is capable of,

What it's capable of understanding.

So as the mindfulness becomes stronger,

Especially as the mindfulness is increasingly imbued with some sense of self-compassion,

And even humor,

My friend Wes Nisker,

The crazy wisdom guru,

That's kind of a specialty.

And Ayat came up and she talks about joy.

She says,

Without joy,

Meditation has no chance.

That it's really useful if you can come to appreciate the humorous aspects of the self trying to rid itself of self.

It doesn't know any better.

It's doing the best it can.

It just wasn't designed to do that.

Because it's the self that's creating the self and so the self doesn't have the ability to stop.

What does deconstruct the self is when the mind ceases to engage in what the Buddha called eye-making and me-making.

And that's where this blending of mindfulness and the wisdom factors begins to occur.

The wisdom factors are the first one is right understanding,

Or right intention.

So remember in the first lines of the first stanza of the first poem in the Dhammapada,

In that Svarang translation,

Where the Buddha says,

We become what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we create the world.

So that's what he's talking about there,

Is that realm of right thought.

The right understanding or right view has to do with an understanding of,

First off,

Of how the mind creates self and self creates the world.

And then you begin,

That's why we call it insight or vipassana meditation.

When the effort,

The concentration,

The mindfulness are well established,

And the wisdom factors begin to arise,

And insights begin to your own nature and the nature of all being begin to arise.

That's why it's called insight meditation.

That's the flourishing of the wisdom factors.

And it's useful in reflecting on the wisdom factors to be able to distinguish wisdom from knowledge and power,

Which are not the same thing.

They're related but they aren't the same.

In the 13th,

Right around the 12th,

13th century,

Down here in present day southwestern Colorado,

The Colorado Plateau in general,

There was a civilization of indigenous people that the anthropologists mostly over the years have referred to as the Anasazi.

Anasazi is a Navajo word,

And it means ancient enemies.

And so that word has kind of fallen out of favor,

Certainly with the progeny or those descended from those people.

They're now mostly referred to as the ancient Pueblans.

They inhabited areas like Mesa Verde and other places in the Colorado Plateau.

They had very well established urban communities.

Down in Chaco Canyon around the 13th century,

There was a city of 10,

000 people in Chaco Canyon.

And they had paved streets and they had all kinds of,

You know,

There was a lot of astronomy going on.

There was international trade going on.

There are artifacts there from Canada,

Central America,

Florida,

And the California coast.

It was a big,

Big trading center throughout that region.

And it was a large,

Robust civilization or society living there on the Colorado Plateau.

And around the 12th,

13th centuries,

Into the 14th,

It appears they got so big that they began to outstrip the carrying capacity of the land in terms of being able to grow enough food and take care of themselves as their societies had flourished.

They built more and more elaborate structures and had these really sophisticated irrigated agricultural systems established.

What happened then was 60 years of severe and sustained drought.

And it had the effect of causing an environmental crash.

And the peoples who had lived there all had to migrate to where there was more water.

So they migrated mostly down into places.

Their progeny now,

You know,

The ones who are descended from them are the Hopi and the Zuni.

And the peoples of the Pueblos of the Upper and Lower Rio Grande.

Taos Pueblo and Piqueris,

Acoma.

Those people are descended from the ancestral Pueblans whose civilization crashed because they outstripped the environment.

One of the ways,

And they still hunt like this,

One of the very effective hunting methods that the members of the Taos Pueblo and other Pueblos still use is they'll go up into the national forests around the Pueblo and they'll go around the top of the ridge of a canyon and they'll start working their way down the canyon beating sticks,

Beating bushes with sticks and making a lot of racket.

And it herds all the wildlife down the canyon slopes down into the draw at the bottom and then as the wildlife are all trying to run out then there are hunters there that kill them.

You know,

Deer and rabbits and some birds and whatnot.

Very effective means of hunting,

But it can also wipe out the ecosystem.

So if you go to the Taos Pueblo or some of the other Pueblos these days,

You'll witness something called a deer dance.

And the deer dance is a panama or a replication of that particular hunting method.

The women play the part of the forest,

They're dancing and there's this huge oblong clearing that they create at the Taos Pueblo in roughly the shape of a uterus actually.

And then the panamiming dancers come in,

Some of them are panamiming animals.

The hunters are white-faced clowns.

And they come in and they panamime killing these animals and they try to take them through the opening at the base of the canyon.

And there are these two tall tribal members and white buckskins who when they get down there release them and make them send the animals back into the canyon so they can be reborn and come back to life.

It was the warchief of the Taos Pueblo invited me to come down and see this dance.

I was meeting with him and one of the dancers afterwards at a dinner and was asking him about the meaning of the dance.

I had some intimations.

And he said,

Well,

This is a dance of remembrance.

He said that the hunters have a lot of knowledge and skill and power.

They know how to kill a lot of wildlife in a short period of time.

He said what they lack is wisdom.

They don't understand that their application of knowledge and power is wiping out the ecosystem on which they defend.

And so when they get down to the base of the canyon,

The two men,

The tall men and white buckskins,

He said the closest English approximation of a name is probably something like wardens,

Caretakers,

Keepers of the species.

And it's their job to over and over remind the hunters what fools they are.

And without wisdom,

Their community cannot survive.

If their knowledge and power is not balanced with wisdom,

They will not survive.

And that's much the same way in which the Buddha talked about wisdom.

He said you can study the Dharma,

Right?

There's a lot of ways to gain knowledge from listening to Dharma talks or reading discourses or commentaries.

It's a way you can,

Just one means of learning.

You use the discursive mind to do it,

The storytelling mind.

That's different from wisdom.

Wisdom as it's discussed in the discourses is something that arises spontaneously.

And it arises based upon insights.

And the insights are gained from the mindfulness that's applied to watching how the mind seeks to create the self.

As you watch the mind in action with your knowledge of attachments and aversions and delusions,

And how over the course of our lifetimes we've all been conditioned to like and not like certain things.

Certain things about ourselves,

Certain things about others.

What happens at the moment of insight is that you gain insight into your own karma.

You gain insight into all the things that happen to you and others that cause you to perceive the world in the way you do at this moment in time.

And the Buddha talked about not only being able to look at how all your past karma,

All your past history,

Has given rise to how you create yourself in the moment,

But how we create the world around us at the same time.

So these insights into the arising of self,

The arising of all phenomena,

Can be one way to view the right understanding is through the lens of a set of the teachings by the Buddha called Paticca Samupada,

Or dependent origination,

Or codependent arising.

And it's a different way of understanding how all compounded phenomena come into being.

That everything is co-creating everything else all the time.

That everything is always arising and changing and passing away,

And arising and changing and passing away.

So when we do insight meditation,

That's what we're doing.

We're watching the arising and changing and passing away of all phenomena.

Whether it's a thought or an emotion or a sound or a bodily sensation,

Or awareness of the breathing.

We're just watching dependent origination happening before us.

And so when we become capable of likewise just kind of standing to one side,

Having this observing capacity,

That makes it possible for us to watch the mind seeking to create self out of our past karma or past conditioning.

Once we can see why we are creating self in the way we are,

It gives us the ability to start having some control over how we create ourselves in the next moment.

So the first wisdom factor is sort of insights into all the causes and conditions that gave rise to who we are in this moment.

And then right thought or right intention is insight into who we may be in the next moment.

So when the Dharmapada says,

We become what we think,

Although we arise with our thoughts,

With our thoughts we create the world.

You can substitute the word intention.

We become what we intend to become.

We become what our own volition intends us to become.

All that we are arises with our intentions.

With our intentions we create the world.

So that's the other wisdom factor.

So when we see an unwholesome thought arise and some possibility that it may manifest in the next moment as word or deed,

If we can recognize it as unwholesome,

We cannot give expression to it.

When we recognize something as wholesomely intended,

Then we can give expression to it.

And that's where the freedom occurs.

The freedom occurs in being able to restrain ourselves from saying and doing the unskillful.

And that arises from insight into our own intentions.

That's the shtick.

What do you think?

Questions,

Comments,

Reflections?

Please,

Gloria.

Does Buddhism use intention the way a lot of theist traditions use the notion of free will?

Oh,

Good question.

Can you repeat the question?

Yes,

The question was,

Does Buddhism use the concept of intention in the same way that in the West we think of free will?

And when people would come to the Buddha and ask him that question,

Was there free will or not?

And so essentially what his response would be,

Something along the lines of,

In order for there to be free will,

There needs to be a self that's either free or not free.

Therefore,

It's not a relevant question.

So when you put your hand on a hot stove,

Accidentally,

Okay,

Unless you enjoy an extraordinarily perverse lifestyle,

What happens when you put your hand accidentally on a hot stove?

You immediately remove it.

Because it's painful,

Right?

It's how we are,

It's how we care for ourselves in the world.

And basically it's as simple as that.

When we see the unskillful arising in our own minds,

And we know from our experience,

We know from insight into our past,

If I manifest that state of mind in word or deed,

Suffering will ensue.

Suffering for me and others is okay.

If I put my hand on that hot stove again,

It's going to get burned.

So it becomes really as simple as that.

The more insight we can gain into the likely consequences of our speech and action,

The less likely we are to do the unskillful.

Is that responsible?

So in one way it's quite impersonal and quite automatic.

You just don't do that which is painful anymore.

It's a constant effect in the fingers on the hot stove.

Yeah,

That's where the wisdom factors come into play.

You become more and more and more insightful,

Not only into how your own past speech and behavior may have caught,

But others as well.

So you can see that interactivity arising everywhere.

What about people,

Lloyd,

Like Dan Berrigan,

Who choose out of free will,

To receive disobedience and go to jail over and over again,

Knowing that it's not going to be pleasant?

When you said it's that simple,

It struck me that my experience is it's more nuanced than that.

Well,

He's drawn to do what he can to alleviate suffering in the world,

And that's how he chooses to do it.

But he's also touching the stove by choosing to go to jail.

Maybe he finds it to be a greater kindness to himself to do time than to stay silent.

Like when Emerson asked Thoreau,

What are you doing in jail?

Thoreau said,

What are you doing out there?

When he was exercising civil disobedience.

Please.

If I could expand a little bit on your analogy,

When you touch a hot stove,

Your hand moves away before you know.

Yeah,

Quite automatic.

It's quite automatic.

Yeah.

That's the big mind.

That's that simple ouch.

There's no will necessary.

Well,

The desire to do no harm.

Yeah,

And the part that free will in the Western tradition is the exercising of ego,

Of desire,

Of self-aggrandizement,

Whatever is necessary to say,

What a good boy am I.

And pulling away from the stove is no,

There's no mind.

There's a big one perhaps,

But it's not.

Maybe you take a lesson permit.

But that lesson from my perspective is the engagement of thought and the thinking process.

It's a natural reaction to suffering,

Essentially.

And that the Buddha's teaching on this is that the big mind or the enlightened mind's natural reaction to suffering is to not cause it and to alleviate it.

So it's not like there's,

And in terms of how best to go about doing that,

There may be deliberative thought that goes into that.

But the underlying wisdom is basically simply no harm.

Yeah,

Please.

The way that I'm interpreting this is that there's an automaticity to behavior that's culturally induced and actually lead back through cultural cognition without individual mindfulness.

And there's actually two types of cognition.

And one is culturally conditioned.

And we have that way when we're in threat for that.

So I think free will is the application of intentional individual cognition and not being conditioned by culture.

But what he was talking about is actually the body's physical,

Innate reaction.

And that's neither of those.

As I was driving here,

I happened to turn on NPR,

Which is off in my habit.

And there was a segment on the Tao Te Ching.

Oh,

Yes.

Which just seemed really appropriate.

And the speaker was someone who translated from Chinese and also was a teacher explaining it.

But he was talking about how using the mind to become enlightened is a futile effort.

And it's sort of the entity that created the problem is not going to solve it.

So he was saying to one,

Let go of that and be around the people,

Beings that are in the state you want to be.

That was one thing he said.

And then to also to be around teachers who can guide you.

Hence the importance of Sangha.

So we get together and do this.

Here we've gone and blown another perfectly good two hours.

Let's take just a moment and get back into our sitting posture if we may.

We become what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we create the world.

Speak or act with unwholesome intention.

And sorrow will follow you as surely as the wheels on the cart follow the oxen who draw it.

We become what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we create the world.

Speak or act with wholesome intention.

And joy shall follow you as your shadow on the swerving.

Thank you.

Reviews

Great talk, thank you!

If I could add more stars I would! Clear instruction that applies to my direct experience is appreciated beyond words. It seems like I've tried to use my mind to change myself nearly all of my 65 years of life. The only way that's been helpful is to come to understand that it doesn't do the trick. There's a transformation that is mysterious that seems to originate from deep pockets of the heart and I experience it by creating a wellcoming environment. I loved this talk!!

Blessings. Very meaningful, important lesson. Thank you.