This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video A Modern Take on the Five Faculties - GIl Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
I would like to talk about one of the really basic practice teachings in our Vipassanā1 tradition. In general, the teachings we give tend to be practice teachings; they’re teachings that really focus on how to support people to practice mindfulness. That makes the most sense on retreats, where that’s really the focus. But that retreat focus is so central to us that sometimes it spills over, and it’s one of the primary things we’re doing: giving practice instructions that are relevant for meditation. Then, indirectly sometimes, or sometimes directly, we talk about how it applies to everyday life.
These practice instructions that are coming out of the teachings of the Buddha, sometimes it’s amazing how modern they seem. It’s like, wow, this fits just into our world just as well as it probably did 2,500 years ago. But that’s a long time ago, that’s like the Bronze Ages. “Come to IMC and get teachings from the Bronze Ages.” I don’t know if that would give people pause to come here.
In recent years, I’ve been very fortunate to have some contact with some of the modern developments, especially here in the West, of new ways of understanding human maturation and human concerns. That’s had a big impact on me. One of them is the developing field of chaplaincy and pastoral care. There’s a whole set of values or human needs that are seen in chaplaincy that the chaplain meets in with people. That list is different than any list that I’ve ever seen in Buddhism, but they’re speaking to fundamental things about being a human being.
I sit on a local hospital ethics committee, and I’m inspired by how in the last probably 50 years, the field of medical ethics has really grown and developed. There are very clear ethical values that are held in hospitals these days. It’s inspiring to go to this committee and hear doctors and nurses and medical staff reflect on how to care for patients with these values. Some of those values also are not directly spoken about in Buddhism, and maybe even avoided.
Then the other is modern psychology, where there have been ideas of human development, the stages of human development, like Erik Erikson, I think he has five stages of human development. Some of those forms of psychology have positive states that are kind of the fulfillment of these different stages, and some of those also aren’t touched on in Buddhist teachings.
So that’s interesting. Do we just stay in a little Buddhist enclave and be content with that, or not? I find it very enlivening and interesting to see the interaction between these different worlds. Sometimes I feel like I learn from them, and sometimes I feel like the Buddhist orientation casts a different perspective on other things that are developing in the West and gives me pause or a different slant to understand them.
From chaplaincy, one of the things that is fundamental is the topic of meaning, meaning-making, meaning, and purpose. Many times, meaning has been ruptured in people’s lives. Even when it’s unconscious, the meaning they assign to their life, when that gets broken—and often in chaplaincy situations where chaplains are needed, it’s because something dramatic has happened that what gives people meaning in their life has been broken or ruptured, and sometimes betrayed even. So being able to respond and think about points of view from meaning and purpose is important. It’s seldom that a Buddhist teacher talks too much about the topic of meaning per se, or purpose per se.
When I was a Zen student, it was almost taboo. Because the teachers would say, if someone asked, “What’s the meaning of life?” they would bark back, “No meaning!” And “What’s the purpose?” “No purpose!” But what they didn’t then follow up on usually was to explain that this teaching of “no meaning” and “no purpose” fit within a larger context that had a lot of meaning and purpose. So if you didn’t understand the larger context of why they’d say that, it would be just confusing sometimes. There was meaning and purpose there, even though they’d say that.
In the world of ethics, one of the fundamental ethical principles there are autonomy and dignity—that everyone has autonomy and everyone has dignity. That is a little bit hard sometimes to fit into for some people if you’ve spent too much time listening to Buddhist teachers like me and they’ve emphasized not-self, not-self, realized not-self. And suddenly autonomy and dignity seems like, “But now we’re back in the world of self, and how are these supposed to work together?”
Then in modern psychology and stages of development, there’s the idea of maturation. That exists in Buddhism; the idea of maturation is sometimes called ripening because they use a metaphor from plants, fruit ripening, for this process of spiritual maturation. I love the idea of using the word maturation for how people develop in Buddhist practice because some of the classic ideas of the stages of development are kind of quantum leaps. You make this big leap into a whole different way of being, a transformation, and then there’s almost like a status difference between people who enter these different levels and people who don’t. It’s a little bit arbitrary to make these kind of absolute, quantum ideas of leaping. I think the idea of maturation as a slow and gradual process of developing and growing is much more peaceful, it’s much more socially polite. It just allows us not to be so caught up in goals and being perfect or attaining something. We want to just allow something to slowly grow and develop. It might look like stages, like Erik Erikson has these five stages or phases of human development, but even there, I think it’s a little bit problematic. Because who wants to be identified as someone who never grew out of the first stage when you’re a little kid? But if you see these things as being five different areas of maturation, and different areas where we need to develop.
The classic teaching I want to mention today is called the five faculties2, five capacities that we have that can become strengths as we mature. The usual way of describing these five in English is Faith, Effort, Mindfulness, Concentration, and Wisdom. I would like to present them in a different way today. I’d like to present them as Confidence, Freedom, Love, Wholeness, and Meaning and Purpose.
So, Faith I want to call Confidence. Effort, or energy or exertion, I’d like to call Freedom. Mindfulness I’d like to call Love. Concentration, or samādhi3, I’d like to call Wholeness. And Wisdom I’d like to call Meaning and Purpose. I think that switching the words like that provides us a very different orientation to understand how profound these five faculties are, these five capacities we have, and how as they get developed and come into fulfillment, become strong, they bring us these wonderful qualities. They bring us confidence, they bring us a sense of freedom, they bring us love, they bring us wholeness, and they bring us meaning and purpose.
Classically, these five are sometimes paired, so that faith and wisdom are paired, and effort and samādhi are paired. Then mindfulness never needs to be paired or balanced with anything else; it just stands for itself. So in this schema, I think it works. The confidence and meaning and purpose work together. If we have a clear sense of meaning, what is meaningful for your life and what purpose, then we can talk about having confidence for that meaning and purpose. If we have a clear sense of it.
Then the pairing of freedom and wholeness, in my mind, it implies that we can’t really talk about a spiritual or really mature, humanistic kind of freedom if we’re not whole. There’s a lot of emphasis on freedom, as many of you know, in the United States that is kind of selfish. It’s kind of like, “I should be free to do whatever I please,” to be polite. And there’s the freedom to shop, freedom to do all kinds of things. But what I’d like to propose is when it’s selfish or self-centered freedom, it actually is not healthy for the person doing it because the person is not whole. If we have a sense of real wholeness that comes from samādhi, comes from meditation practice, then we’ll feel how we become divided in ourselves, fragmented, when the sense of freedom we have is selfish. But for freedom to come out of a sense of wholeness where we don’t fragment ourselves provides much more meaning and purpose for the freedom we live.
Then mindfulness, I relate to love, and partly because that’s what I discovered in the years I practiced it. It’s hard sometimes to separate the kind of clear attention to something that is mindfulness from love. Somehow seeing clearly is an act of love. As I’ve often said, this is represented by the experience of young children or adults who come and talk to me and say that as young children, they feel they were never seen. The parents ignored them or overlooked them, or the parent was too busy or too angry or too drunk or something. And so they felt like they never were seen and cared for. Not to be seen as a child is equivalent to not feeling loved, and it can be really detrimental. To be seen is a form of love. For adults, maybe the equivalent is to be listened to. To be really heard is a way of being, a way to hear someone well is a way of loving someone. It’s such a deep need we have to be heard and understood. So mindfulness is that; it fits into this capacity to see and to hear, and to do that for ourselves. To really be mindful here clearly is a way to have love for oneself, to bring love. To see the world through the eyes of mindfulness is a kind of love, is a kind of care for the world.
So the first one, confidence, paired with meaning and purpose, paired with wisdom, is that the idea of wisdom in Buddhism, early Buddhism in the Bronze Ages, is that wisdom has to do with understanding that we have a capacity to not suffer. We have a capacity to not do things, engage in activities that afflict us, that diminish us, that undermine our well-being, that drain us. And we have the capacity to do the opposite. We have the capacity to do the things that make us feel nourished, develop what’s wholesome in us, develop a sense of well-being and goodness in us rather than badness in us. That distinction is necessary in Buddhism for the ultimate purpose of Buddhism, which is to grow and mature in a way that brings us to the end of suffering, to Dukkha4, brings us to the end of the emotional pain that we contribute to ourselves. There might still be emotional pain, but it’s not something that we’re contributing to. Our heart is not adding suffering, our heart is not divided, our heart is not contracting, our heart is not involved in activities which undermine us.
To be able to see this clearly enough can give a tremendous amount of meaning and purpose to a life. There’s meaning and purpose to come to the end of suffering. There’s meaning and purpose to do the things that allow our life, our inner life, our heart to thrive. The Buddha used the word “thrive,” to come into a sense of abundance, come into a sense of fulfillment, to mature and grow and ripen to become full. So there’s a very positive orientation to the capacity of human development in early Buddhism. The guide for it, the whole approach to it, is very simple. It doesn’t require any supernatural beliefs, it doesn’t require any great metaphysical beliefs. It requires a heightened sensitivity to feel how our body, our hearts, our inner mind, our inner life prefers to be whole, prefers not to add pain and suffering to us, add stress to our system. It prefers to be involved in those things which feel inspiring, feel good for us.
Maybe that’s not enough for some people to inspire them because they want really grand ideas, spiritual ideas, supernatural ideas, cosmic ideas, cosmic consciousness, great states of altered states of consciousness. That’s the purpose. In some ways, Buddhism is a pretty humble religion because its goal is simply only to end suffering. So to have a sense of that possibility and then to have confidence in that, that that’s meaningful, to have confidence in that as a purpose. Without the confidence that this is useful, then why practice? There has to be some confidence that that’s the goal, that’s the purpose, that’s what’s possible. So those two go together. We’re not talking about confidence in some abstract way. “I don’t have enough confidence, I’m supposed to be more confident,” but I don’t know what I’m supposed to be confident in. But this provides, the wisdom provides guidance for where we can find our confidence, where we can develop our confidence. As we develop, as we practice, then not only do we have confidence in the purpose, but we also now have confidence in our capacity to practice, our capacity to make a difference, to engage.
That comes into the second faculty, which is effort or exertion or application, which I tie to wholeness. So to apply ourselves in this practice, like to do mindfulness practice, meditation, because the meaning and purpose was to not suffer, not to add stress, we apply that confidently to how we make effort in the practice. I’ve sat down to meditate with the idea that, “I’m going to get really concentrated now. I’m going to really blast away all my thoughts, and I’ll just be like the Buddha’s gift to my town, my city.” And you know, I’d get a badge that says, “Look at Gil, I’m the great blaster-away of thoughts and can just not be distracted, and it’ll be great. I’ll be praised by everyone.” Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit how I thought, but something like that certainly went on in my mind. But those kinds of thoughts added stress. When something like that was going on in my meditation practice, it turned out it was actually very successful for me in terms of creating a headache.
So eventually, I learned that this doesn’t work, this attitude I have about how to practice, straining and pushing. Or sometimes I was really trying to avoid something. Something was coming up in my meditation, some emotions, some unresolved emotions that I really needed to look at, but I didn’t want to look at. I would put up walls, I’d put up resistance. I’d tense up so I wouldn’t have to feel it. Eventually, I learned that didn’t work either. What worked is to open, because the resistance is another form of undermining myself, is another form of being divided, is not understanding the meaning of purpose is to open to everything so we can find a way to mature through it, not to avoid.
This idea of having a clear sense of meaning and purpose is a protection for the effort we make, so that we’re kind of always checking out, “Am I practicing in a way that feels good, that I enjoy, or seems right to me when I have to face what’s difficult?”
Then wholeness. The idea that wholeness is, we start discovering all the ways we live in a divided way, a fragmented way. All the ways we’re pushing things away or we’re over-prioritizing certain parts of ourselves so we’re not present for the whole. If we have strong desires and ambition, we might miss the whole of who we are. If we have strong aversions and hates, we miss the whole of who we are because we’re so fixated and focused on an object of our desires, the object of our aversions, we don’t see the fullness of who we are. It turns out if you don’t see the fullness of who we are, the wholeness, the undivided, the unfragmented, that actually feels much more nourishing. It feels much more like this is the soil or the ground in which things can grow and mature. That’s part of the function of samādhi practice in Buddhism: to create the conditions that lets who we are, all of who we are, be complete, warts and all, so that it can be fertile soil for something to grow and develop, fertile soil for something to wither away which doesn’t serve us.
Then we come to the middle, which is mindfulness, that needs no balance. Because mindfulness is often seen as a form of wisdom, not the wisdom that you would necessarily articulate through ideas of meaning and purpose, but the kind of wisdom that comes from having direct, immediate contact with our lived experience here and now. The contact that feels that if you step on a nail, you would know you should not push down with your heel because you start feeling it going in. “Oh, better take it out.” You get the message right away.
So with mindfulness, these messages come in. The stronger the mindfulness is, the more subtle the messages are from the psychophysical system. “This is good, this is not so good. This is nourishing, this is pleasant, this is enjoyable, this brings happiness and well-being. This doesn’t bring happiness and well-being, it brings the opposite.” But to really get quiet and still, to not override the experience with a lot of thoughts and ideas and expectations. That ability to have that kind of mindfulness that is so sensitive to the caring of what supports us and what doesn’t, maybe you start seeing it’s a form of love. Because we have inside of us something that wants to care for you, something inside of you that wants the best in you, that wants to avoid harm. It’s not so different than taking your hand off the hot stove right away. Something inside of you knows to do that. They say that instinct to take your hand off the hot stove never makes it to the brain, or it responds before the signal goes to the brain. It’s so basic in the whole nervous system that even the brain, the mind we don’t normally think of, doesn’t have to even operate. Something very deep inside of us, something built into our very structure of being human, I believe has something in it to want to care for us. And that I would like to call love.
So the possibility as we mature, as we develop in this practice, is to bring these five areas to fullness. It’s possible to come into a fullness around confidence. It’s possible to come into a fullness around a sense of freedom, a freedom to be able to act without restrictions, at least through our hearts, what our hearts are motivated to do as part of our wholeness. A fulfillment in love and care and compassion. A fulfillment in terms of a sense of wholeness, being complete.
Now that I’m getting to be old, you know, I’m 70 now, so some people consider that old, or on the edge, approaching it. It depends how old you are what you think 70 is. When I was 20, I would have looked and thought, “That’s old.” So it changes. But it is an age where I begin thinking about the end of life and what my life has been like. And I feel a certain satisfaction and feel like I’ve had a good life, and that feels full. That’s felt full because there’s a sense of wholeness in it. So that’s a nice thing to come to. But it’s not enough to rest on that, because the system that I have still wants to practice. It’s a constant coming into wholeness, coming into freedom, a constant kind of reference point to what’s meaningful and purposeful. So maturing into wholeness is always a process.
And then fulfillment, coming into completion, fulfillment, or a maturity into a real sense of meaning and purpose. So that’s kind of at the root, we’re rooted in it, we’re dedicated to it, it informs us. “Yes, there’s a real purpose that I want to stand in and be part of.” That’s different than going on Netflix or shopping on Amazon, different than what a lot of people tend to do to fill their time with. But what if that meaning and purpose is what has most meaning for you, is what you fill your time with? That’s one of the things this practice can be part of. Some people feel like this gives their life the most meaning, most purpose. And it’s not selfish, because in this system, in this meaning and purpose built into this psychophysical system, in the love of it all and the care of it all, is love and care for others and for the world. It can’t be any different, because our own well-being is intimately connected to our connectivity to others. If we’re living in the lived experience, we really know how to sense and feel and be present to listen and to see others, so that our seeing and listening is an act of love. Other people’s well-being is kind of like our own. So of course, there’s going to be love in how we live our life.
So these are the five areas that we become strong and develop. And this is my attempt to try to synthesize, bring together Bronze Age psychology with the concerns of pastoral care, medical ethics, and modern psychology. I hope that was okay to do.
So, confidence, freedom, love, whololeness, and meaning and purpose. Which of those is the strongest for you? Maybe none of them are strong, but which of them is strongest? And which is the weakest? Maybe they’re all strong, but which is the strongest and which is the weakest in you? Which of the five you think can be improved, you could work on? Which is strong that can be applied to the others to bring them along?
Confidence, freedom, love, wholeness, meaning, and purpose.
So I’ve come to the end of what I wanted to say. Thank you for being here.
Vipassanā: A Pāli word that means “insight” or “clear-seeing.” It is a traditional Buddhist meditation practice of observing the nature of reality. ↩
The Five Faculties (Indriyas): In Buddhism, these are five spiritual faculties that are to be developed to attain enlightenment. In Pāli, they are: Saddhā (faith, confidence), Vīriya (energy, effort), Sati (mindfulness), Samādhi (concentration), and Paññā (wisdom). ↩
Samādhi: A Pāli word that translates to “concentration” or “unification of mind.” It refers to a state of meditative absorption or mental collectedness. ↩
Dukkha: A Pāli word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a core concept in Buddhism, referring to the fundamental suffering or unease inherent in life. ↩