Sometimes people wonder what teachers do all day on retreat.
I used to wonder that.
I'm like,
Where are they doing?
They're not in the hall.
What are they doing?
I've learned that they spend their whole day stressing out about trying to come up with something interesting to say in the evening.
Tonight I'm going to talk about faith.
There's a saying that you've probably heard many times in the Dharma world.
They say that Dharma is good in the beginning,
Good in the middle,
And good in the end.
You've probably heard this before.
I recently found out what that refers to actually is this Pali term,
Sada,
Which is translated as faith.
It's good in the beginning,
In the middle,
And in the end because of faith.
The Buddha said that faith is the beginning of all good things.
So it's such an important aspect of practice.
And I have to say,
I don't think I've ever given a talk on faith,
And I don't really know why.
I can speak a little about maybe why.
I have very mixed feelings and to some degree suspicion about this word faith.
I think I got interested in Dharma practice because I had a sense that that faith wasn't required here,
And I kind of like that.
I'm not being asked to believe in anything.
That's interesting.
I don't see that a lot in the world.
Usually there's a belief.
And so a lot of times I think in many ways we associate faith with belief.
And I think that's just kind of baked into the culture.
I think that's a hard idea to get away from.
And I think in Dharma,
Faith is really very far from that idea.
It's not really about belief.
And sometimes I go backwards and I try to track my path and my practice in my Dharma doors.
And I think the one thing,
If I'm really honest,
The one thread that has really saved me really from the very beginning is probably faith.
So on one hand,
I have some degree of,
I'm even a bit uncomfortable even bringing it up here now.
I have some discomfort and some suspicion around the word.
And on the other hand,
I think it's like the most beautiful thing that we could have access to.
It's so important,
Whether you like it or not,
Like we got to have it.
And I think so part of my kind of encouragement tonight is to,
I think that we all have to go through whatever internal struggle or whatever you need to do to make the term work for you.
I really think you should take that on because as an English term and a concept,
It's such a beautiful thing to have faith in something,
To have something to stand on,
Something to hold into,
To believe into,
To trust.
If we don't have that,
We just don't do very good.
And also,
We probably,
You all,
Myself included,
We probably all have a lot more than we realize.
We're probably not even necessarily mindful of the fact that we have it.
I mean,
You certainly wouldn't be here right now if you didn't at least have a little bit.
You have some faith that sitting in a room quietly by yourself all day might be a good idea.
There's lots of other things offered out there,
Right?
But seem a lot easier than this.
So you just kind of start off by like trying to get into the territory of what they're probably talking about in the early discourse.
Faith in this Pali word sada is a hard word to translate.
The most accurate definition that I've seen of it that Sharon Southberg pulls from her book,
But I've also heard scholars talk about it.
It really means to place the heart upon.
What a beautiful idea,
Right?
To place my heart upon.
What do I place my heart upon?
Or even in a more practical sense,
We might say,
What do I put my attention on?
So whatever I put my attention on,
I'm having faith in that.
That's what it is.
It's a movement of the heart.
It's a movement of the mind.
To some degree,
It's a choice to say,
I'm going to put that here.
And we think about all of the foolish,
Unfruitful things that we put our hearts and our attention on and the consequence of that.
And if we really just get really technical for a minute,
And I'll talk more about this tomorrow,
The technicalities of the mind is this word contact.
We make contact with the moment.
Every moment's experience is contact,
Which is probably what paso means,
To touch.
But there's two sides to that.
Whatever I pay attention to,
I'm touching that with my mind,
But you know what it's also doing?
It's touching me back.
We say that too,
Right,
In a nice sense.
Somebody sends you a card or gives you a nice compliment,
And you say,
Oh,
I was touched by what they did.
We usually say that in a positive sense.
So whatever you touch,
Touches you back.
Whatever you put your heart upon,
Whatever you place,
That object,
That experience,
Has an affective quality,
Which is what we call vedana,
Feeling,
Right?
So we touch it,
We feel it,
There's a back and forth going on all the time.
So be careful what you put your heart on.
Be careful where you put your attention,
Because it will affect you.
And if we think about it that way,
Faith becomes a little bit more of a high-stakes situation,
Doesn't it?
Because,
Well,
If that's what's going on,
I need to rethink this whole faith thing.
It also can mean trust.
It also can mean confidence.
It can also mean faith.
It also can mean refuge.
Interestingly enough,
The Pali term refuge,
Which we usually take refuge at most Buddhist retreats,
And again,
Refuge is another concept I have very mixed feelings about for some reason,
Refuge is also where you put,
It's placing,
Refuge is encouraging us to place our heart,
Our attention on something that's actually trustworthy.
So there's a little bit of a subtle distinction that's made.
So faith is where we place our heart,
And refuge is,
Make sure you put it somewhere trustworthy,
Because if you don't,
You will,
There will be consequences.
So there's some ownership,
Some autonomy in that,
And of course in the Buddhist context we take refuge in the Buddha,
The Dhamma,
The Sangha,
The refuge in our trusting in ourselves,
I'll talk more about that towards the end of the talk.
But that's the kind of space that we're in when we're talking about faith.
So it's actually not so important that you know what faith is,
Or that you can define the term,
Although there's some benefit in that,
It's really more important to know when it is,
To know with mindfulness when faith is in the mind.
So in Buddhist psychological terms,
Faith is actually a mind state,
It's a mental quality.
Faith is actually in the Abhidharma under the beautiful mental factors.
Faith is a quality of mind,
It's a mind state,
Which to me is way different than the way that I think of faith and the way that I grew up with faith,
Religious faith we might say.
So from a Buddhist perspective,
Faith is a quality of mind that stabilizes and clarifies the mind.
Very important things.
The mind is clear,
The mind is stable,
That is the characteristic,
Literally the characteristic,
The lakana of faith,
Is the mind is clear and the mind is stable.
It's bright.
And it's what allows it,
It's the beginning of everything that's good.
And from that place of clarity and stability,
We can do anything.
So,
Now I feel like I'm,
I don't even feel like I'm talking about faith anymore,
I'm like,
What is this other thing I'm talking about?
There's other things that come to mind,
Mindfulness,
Or clear comprehension.
But really,
This faith is a psychological experience that comes and goes.
And faith is not something that you either have or that you don't have,
Right?
It's something that's dynamic,
It's something that comes and goes,
Sometimes you have it,
Sometimes you don't,
Sometimes you have a lot,
Sometimes you little,
Sometimes you have a little bit.
It's dynamic,
It's always,
It's a mental factor that can arise in the mind,
Probably many times a day.
But we wouldn't probably think about that mind state in those terms,
And maybe we should.
And so,
Also another place it shows up,
It's the first of the five spiritual faculties,
Which is one of the lists that we've been studying,
It's one of the seven bodhichandras.
And the first factor,
The first spiritual faculty is an indriya,
Is faith or sada.
And what an indriya does,
Indriya is a faculty,
It's something that does something.
Like,
For example,
The sense faculties are indriyas,
Like the eyes see objects,
The ears hear sounds.
What does the faith do?
The faith clarifies and stabilizes the mind.
That's its function.
It's a support faculty,
It's very supportive.
So it does show up in some interesting places that are actually quite important.
And what brings it on,
It's brought on by this Pali term that's a very unique term,
It's called samvega.
You might have come across this term,
Samvega.
Sometimes it's translated as spiritual urgency,
But it's really more like spiritual courage.
And when I say spiritual courage,
It's not about doing some courageous act in the world,
It's an internal courage,
It's an experience where we kind of fall in love with the Dharma,
We come on fire for this kind of like,
Wow,
I'm going to fucking get my shit together.
I'm going to do it.
I don't care how hard it is.
And it's an emotion that's a Dharma emotion,
Meaning that you don't see this word anywhere else.
It was kind of an early invention.
And when people would come into the monastery,
Or people would hear the Buddha,
Or they would hear a discourse and they would come on fire for the Dharma,
That would be,
They would have this samvega experience,
Which is usually followed by the experience of faith,
Of an inner light.
It's oftentimes talked about as an inner light that gets turned on.
And once that light gets turned on,
In many ways it will never be turned off.
It's more like the other analogy,
It's like a candle that's flickering in the wind,
It kind of comes and goes,
But once that light is there,
We're good.
And so just to even have that kind of experience with practice is so valuable because there's a knowing capacity.
And what that is,
That faith that's in the mind,
It's clarifying.
You feel clear about this,
You feel stable,
You feel like,
I don't know what this Dharma thing is,
Or this mindfulness thing is,
Or whatever this thing is,
I don't know what it is,
But something about it feels right.
That faith.
And that really is such a motivating force in practice.
So we want to take ownership of that.
There's also,
The other thing that has been on my mind,
I've been,
There's a philosopher named Martin Haeglund,
I always forget,
I always think of philosophers as people who like,
There's people who are still philosophers today,
Like there's modern philosophers.
And there's a Swiss guy named Martin Haeglund,
He's a teacher at Yale.
If you see him speak on YouTube,
He looks like he's about 14.
He's brilliant.
And he wrote a book called This Life.
And the subtitle of the book is Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.
Which is why I picked it up.
I was like,
Ooh,
That sounds good.
And he's very informed by existential philosophy,
Very brilliant thinker.
And he really talks about this faith as being the object of our faith.
The object of our faith is entirely dependent upon the practice of our faith.
So he doesn't make a distinction.
He's saying that secular faith,
Or really I would even say dharma faith,
Is whatever you have faith in is totally dependent and correlated and connected to your practice of that.
So what does that mean?
So if I have faith in metta,
Or kindness,
If I have trust and confidence that cultivating that is something that I believe in,
It has no value unless I put it into practice.
And those two are correlated.
So he talks about secular faith as being actually a practice.
And that's very much in line with the bhavana sutta that I spoke of yesterday.
That we can wish for anything,
But if it's not put into practice,
Then it has no value.
In fact,
It can be dangerous.
And that's this distinction that he makes between religious faith and secular faith,
Is that he actually talks about despair and sadness and loss and tragedy and trauma as the finger that points to everything that's important to us.
Which is a very interesting distinction.
That we don't buy into the eternalism,
We don't buy into life after death,
We understand that we live in a permanent,
Finite experience.
And that the wisdom that comes from the things that we lose,
The pain,
The anguish,
The things that we go through,
What that does,
That's the finger that's pointing at everything that's meaningful and important to you.
Clearly,
Right?
And so,
It behooves us and it inspires us and encourages us to say,
We need to practice the things that we have deemed valuable and important.
And it's very like make the hair on the back of your neck stand up book.
Because the conviction that he speaks of it,
In a sense,
And he almost talks about it as this is something that we haven't quite done yet as human beings.
Although the dharma tradition is rich with these ideas.
Maybe he doesn't know about this.
So again,
The object of our faith,
And it's not just the object that's singular,
We probably have quite a range of values that we all share,
Right?
Maybe it's trust,
Or confidence,
Or kindness,
Or compassion,
Or gratitude,
Or equanimity,
Or mindfulness.
Those are all things we practice.
Because we trust that developing those is going to be good for us.
And none of this really would happen if there wasn't some degree of faith in the mix.
And so I've also been reading this book.
Sharon Salzberg,
Who I'm sure you're all familiar with,
Who's very well known for her work around loving kindness,
Has a book called Faith,
Which I think is her best book.
And it's the book that nobody seems to know about.
And she goes through these things.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the range of faith,
So we can kind of get a big understanding of how big the universe of faith actually is.
And that is starting with the journey of faith.
And so I have to say,
Really,
I think the thing that really.
.
.
I had a tremendous experience of samvega,
Of faith in the practice,
Because I immediately saw the benefit of whatever the thing is that we're doing here.
And so the one thing that I think to highlight that makes faith more attractive for me is to really understand what is it like to live without it?
What is it to live without faith?
And probably for the first,
You know,
At least from 10 to 18,
Somewhere in that range,
I lived without it for sure.
I had zero faith in anything,
Zero trust in anything.
And so when we don't have.
.
.
To live without faith is really to live in fear,
To live in despair,
To live in anguish,
To live in meaninglessness,
To live in apathy.
So if you start thinking about it on these terms,
You see the concept at least gets a little bit more and more attractive the more you drill down.
When we think,
What is it like to live without it?
And which is why,
If we think about despair,
And faith,
And fear,
And we're all gonna die,
And all of these things,
This is where religion generally gets its meat hooks on us,
Right?
It's like,
Oh,
Don't worry about all that,
We got it all sorted out for you.
Which is why it's such a tasty carrot for people.
Because we are self-aware,
And we do have enough of existential awareness as human beings.
We know it's all going down,
Right?
We know where this ends.
And that can.
.
.
And somebody throws you,
It doesn't matter what kind of life raft of faith that gets tossed with you,
Anybody,
We're gonna grab onto whatever we get offered.
We have to.
Right?
And throw in a high ACE score,
Some of you,
Like myself,
Maybe have high ACE scores,
Been through some early childhood stuff.
I'll tell you what,
You'll take.
.
.
If someone throws you a cinder block,
You're gonna go diving for it.
Right?
Because when there's that level of despair or confusion,
We're so vulnerable,
Right?
We're so vulnerable,
We so need something that we can try to maybe hold on to that will maybe help us make sense of all these things.
And I just feel endlessly grateful that the first one that I ever got tossed was the Dharma.
You know,
That didn't deny any of the things that I did.
Yes,
We are all gonna die.
Yes,
This is a meaningless universe.
Yes,
Yes,
Yes,
To all the things that you're feeling.
And guess what?
You can do something about that.
You can do something about that.
And it doesn't mean that you need to surrender your authority,
Your autonomy,
Right?
So that's that kind of faith,
The Dharma faith.
I'm like,
Oh,
I didn't know that I had agency over all the things that I have agency over.
I thought I was just a victim of my mind.
Just to be a victim of the mind and a victim of the tragedy of the world and just,
Like,
Surrendering to that.
Like,
Well,
I guess this is just how it is here.
Thank God there's drugs.
You know?
And so I was looking at the Brene Brown thing again today,
Thinking about this talk,
And what she's talking about is places we go when we're hurting.
Places we go when the rug gets pulled out from underneath us,
Especially if we're young,
And we just kind of are spinning.
Where do we go?
We go to despair.
We go to hopelessness.
We go to anger.
Shouldn't we go to grief?
Meaninglessness.
And that can be.
.
.
Not that this isn't true for everybody.
Some people have had happy childhoods and things have worked out.
I'm not one of those people,
And I know very few of them.
But some of us,
We've seen,
You know,
Early on,
We see how thin the ice that you're standing on actually is.
And so that's where the sandhya,
Or the urgency comes in,
Where there's that,
Like.
.
.
We see that,
But then we're offered a life raft.
We're offered a dharma.
We're offered,
Oh,
Hey,
Wait a minute here.
That's not the end of the story.
It's not the end of the story.
And that's one thing I love about the Buddha.
He doesn't deny any of that.
In fact,
To me,
That's all encapsulated in the First Noble Truth.
That's really what we're dealing with here.
This is the reality of reality.
And that's not the end.
That's just.
.
.
That is usually the fuel or the fire that can ignite this kind of samvega experience,
This spiritual urgency to say,
OK,
I'm going to rethink this whole thing.
I don't like what society is offering me.
I don't like what my parents are suggesting.
Actually,
Nobody seems to have anything helpful to say at all about anything.
Right?
And then we get that confidence.
Like,
Oh,
Maybe I'll figure this out.
Maybe I'll figure this out.
Maybe I'll try to figure this out.
Maybe I won't figure this out,
But I'll try anyway.
It certainly beats the apathy and the confusion and the bewilderment and the trauma.
I don't want to live there.
And so she talks about.
.
.
The first type of faith she talks about is bright faith,
Which is kind of where I'm talking about here now,
This kind of something happens and we get ignited.
This is why the dharma is good in the beginning,
Because of bright faith.
Now,
The thing about bright faith we have to be careful of is bright faith and blind faith.
.
.
Like,
I would say that blind faith is the near enemy of bright faith.
Because we can oftentimes get those two confused.
Where bright faith.
.
.
Or blind faith.
.
.
What happens in blind faith is we surrender our autonomy and we surrender our authority and we surrender,
Really,
Our power to some external figure,
Be it a religion,
Be it a teacher,
Be it a relationship,
Be it whatever it will be.
I'm sure you've done this before.
Like,
You make me better!
You'll make me better,
Won't you?
So that's that blind faith.
That can be very destructive.
It's very pejorative.
It's not really what we're after.
But blind faith and bright faith can look similar if we're not careful.
But what we surrender in bright faith is we don't surrender our autonomy or our authority.
What we surrender is our apathy and our cynicism.
We surrender that idea of the meaningless universe.
We let that go.
Because we see the brightness of that.
We see,
No,
There's this other thing.
I don't even know what it is or if it is,
But there seems to be this other thing going on here that is helpful,
That is useful.
And that's why the Dharma is good in the beginning.
It's good in the beginning because we get that.
We get this sense.
We practice.
We come in touch with the body.
We come into touch with the breath.
Usually what we get,
Which is what I got on an epic level,
Is we get a relief from the mind,
From the narrative,
From the story,
From the world that society or conditioning or trauma,
The world that we created in our mind that we totally believe that that's sort of how it is.
And then we realize,
Well,
Wait a minute,
That's just a mental construct.
Right?
That's just,
That's not really a thing.
That's not really even real.
And,
And,
I mean,
If that's all you ever get out of Dharma practice,
The whole thing is worth it,
Isn't it?
Especially for those of you who lived in that world where you're just like,
It's just all bad and it's just all wrong and it's just all terrible and I'm pretty sure it's my fault.
Period,
End of story.
Right?
And then you start to realize,
Well,
Wait a minute,
I have these other sensory experiences,
I have my breath,
I actually can put my awareness and my attention somewhere else.
I can be free from that.
That's that sort of red pill,
Blue pill analogy that Robert Wright talks about.
The whole movie,
The Matrix,
The whole Matrix trilogy is completely based on what I just said.
Right?
We live,
You know,
And so that's this conditioned mind,
The mind that's conditioned.
And we wake,
That's usually the first bright faith,
We wake up to that.
And we say,
That's all just mind.
We look around,
We see a sunset,
We see trees,
We see nature,
We see.
.
.
Wait,
There's another world going on here.
And of course,
As you probably know,
The unfortunate part is we tend to go bouncing back between the two still,
Don't we?
Like,
I still haven't given up on that for some crazy reason.
I still,
You know,
Participate in that.
But I don't,
It doesn't get me so much anymore because I have a lot more faith in whatever this other thing might be.
I have very little faith in that.
So we all probably have our various stories of bright faith,
And it's not always necessarily the Dharma,
Right?
Some people get into recovery,
Or they get into therapy,
Or they want to.
.
.
Actually,
If I teed it back a little further,
The first bright faith that I had was kind of pre-Dharma,
Was really actually when I moved from Western Massachusetts,
When I moved from New Hampshire to Western Massachusetts,
I think I talked about that last time,
And I really,
At 17 years old,
I don't think,
By the time I was 17,
I don't think I ever really actually had a friend.
Like,
A real friend.
At all.
Ever.
And then I made friends,
One of my first friends was Hahnemann Goleman,
Danny Goleman's kid who lived down the street,
And we became friends.
I was like,
Wow,
This person's actually interested in me.
Right?
And I think that was the first sense of bright faith.
And really,
That was a meta thing.
I was like,
Oh,
People are.
.
.
They're not all terrible.
This guy seems okay.
Some of his buddies seem okay,
Too.
And so that was really the kind of thing that just.
.
.
I think friendliness is something.
.
.
Sometimes that can just be enough to give us a sense of positivity or hope.
Like,
Okay.
There are some people out there who I can connect with that feel good.
Right?
And then being able just to be in that world long enough and meeting his parents and meeting a lot of these IMS teachers that I met at,
Like,
Thanksgiving parties and.
.
.
Because wherever his parents went,
I would always get invited to go because I think they just kind of felt bad for me,
To be honest with you.
Like,
Oh,
Invite your friend Dave.
We like him.
He's traumatized and interesting.
LAUGHTER And I started to see,
Oh,
There's this other thing going on here,
Right?
And I started to get to practice and really what it was.
.
.
I watched this IMS documentary.
If you haven't seen it,
It's really quite good because I met a lot of those people when I was 17.
I was like,
Oh,
My God,
Not only are there people who are friendly,
But there's,
Like,
Lots of people in the world who are,
Like,
Really doing cool shit who,
Like,
Want to help people and are interested in this whole mind experience.
And so we get that.
We all get that.
It's good that we track that,
Too.
Like,
That we get that.
.
.
There's those experiences we had.
Stu talked about it the other day,
About being a piacito.
We get these early on,
You know,
We get these.
.
.
We get glimpses of something,
Right?
We get glimpses of a possibility.
It might only be.
.
.
It doesn't matter how long it is.
Two seconds is worth it.
I mean,
I've seen that 10-day retreat where 99.
9% of the retreat was hell.
But there was that one thing that gave me that faith,
That bright faith.
I felt I had access to something.
I felt a sense of possibility.
I felt a sense of openness.
Something emerged in my experience that I felt that I had access to.
And then what it does is it gives you,
Really,
A sense of possibilities.
There's actually a lot of possibility here.
And so that.
.
.
But then we have to follow that up because a lot of times people will get that and fall back into the blind faith.
They'll fall back into the cynicism because it's hard to follow through with this practice.
I even talked to people I've known years ago.
They're like,
Do you still do Dharma stuff?
I'm like,
Yeah,
Kind of.
You know,
It's sad to see that.
I've seen friends of mine who I sat with years ago who just kind of have burned their lives down.
They just.
.
.
At one point they hadn't.
So that's the samvega.
And the faith is what continues us to just keep fighting at it.
Because also,
If we look again,
I didn't mention this,
To live without faith is also to live in doubt.
And when we start to doubt ourselves or we start to doubt the practice,
We say,
Well,
That retreat wasn't so great,
Actually.
We start to kind of fall back into that.
It's really hard.
This is why it's so helpful to have community and have other people because left to our own devices,
And I've been there before.
There have been times in my life where I completely stopped.
I was like,
Yeah,
This is.
.
.
Thank God I was doing other things like recovery and AA and doing other things that were also helpful.
But it's.
.
.
The world can kick you down to the point where you're like,
Yeah,
I don't know about this.
It's too hard.
It's not going to work.
It's too magical thinking.
And it can really.
.
.
It's hard to stay on.
It's almost just like that algorithm I talked about.
It's almost like sitting here.
You notice that when you're practicing,
The farther out you go into the mind,
The harder it is to come back.
That's not just true moment to moment.
That's true in the big picture.
You stop sitting.
You wanted to go on that retreat,
But you canceled it.
You stopped reading those books.
And it's just before you know it,
You're gone.
And usually it's not because you made a decision.
It just sort of happens.
You just kind of fall out.
And once you're out,
You're just like,
Yeah,
The doubt gets in there.
And that's painful.
And so it's almost like when we're practicing this faith,
It's almost a moment to moment deal.
Right?
So again,
It's not like either you have it or you don't.
It's almost like we have to fight for it every single moment.
Does anybody have any moments of doubt today where you thought,
I probably should have skipped this one.
And then five minutes later,
You're like,
This is the fucking best thing I've ever done.
In one 45-minute sit,
You go through the whole thing.
And in that 45-minute sit,
There were experiences and moments that were very trustworthy.
There were moments and experiences where you really could have put your heart upon that,
But you didn't.
And there was probably moments and experiences of things that were emerging that you really,
Really didn't need to put your attention on or your heart on,
But you did.
And because it happened so quickly,
You know,
It's the faith that allows us to lean into the discomfort and lean into the things that we want to avoid and to really not just be dictated by the hindrances,
Because that's largely what we're up against here.
You know,
The craving and the aversion.
Anybody have any craving or aversion today?
Did you want any of the moments to be different?
Yeah,
I'm sure you did.
Right?
Restless,
Anxious,
Any lethargy,
Like,
I just want to go lay down.
At least the beds here are nice,
Right?
And then the doubt,
Right?
That's really,
You know,
And this is all well,
You know,
The Buddha has laid all of this out in insane precision,
Right down to the most fine detail of the things that get in the way,
The things that hinder,
The things to abandon,
The things to cultivate.
And you can't do any of it if you don't have some faith.
It's sometimes I feel like it's just a bit easier to give in to the dark side,
Isn't it?
That's my personal policy.
I don't have a lot of personal policies,
But I'm like,
I'll take delusion over the dark side.
Like,
When I'm really confronted with dark side thinking,
Which in the world we live in right now is quite easy to do,
I'm like,
I'm going to go with delusion.
I'm going to watch funny cat videos on YouTube.
Like,
It's better than that.
Right?
Because the dark side,
You go to the dark side,
And it's just like living without faith and going to those places.
The places we go when we're hurt.
The places we go when we're upset.
Like,
Where do we go in these experiences?
And it's always going to be faith that's going to be really the thing that's always going to pull you out.
So it's such a crucial part of practice,
And to really see it,
To redefine it,
And to re-own it,
And to recapture it,
That word,
That concept,
So that it's really,
Again,
It stabilizes and clarifies the mind.
It cools the heart.
It has a lot of wisdom.
And if you look at the spiritual faculties it goes from faith,
Effort,
Mindfulness,
Concentration,
To wisdom.
So it's faith to wisdom,
Faith to wisdom.
And that's the kind of feedback loop that we are developing here.
And the faith gets stronger,
The wisdom gets stronger,
The faith gets stronger,
The wisdom gets stronger.
I want to read some things from Sharon's book,
Because it's so.
.
.
Right at the beginning of the book,
She talks about faith here.
And I like it because she starts just like the first page.
Hook me right in.
I want to invite a new use of the word faith,
One that is not associated with a dogmatic religious interpretation or divisiveness.
I want to encourage delight in the word,
To help reclaim faith as a fresh,
Vibrant,
Intelligent,
And liberating.
This is a faith that emphasizes the foundation of love and respect for ourselves.
It is a faith that uncovers our connection to others,
Rather than designating anyone as separate or apart.
Faith does not require a belief system.
It is not necessarily connected to a deity or a god,
Though it doesn't deny one.
This faith is not a commodity that we have or don't have.
It is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.
The Buddha said,
Faith is the beginning of all good things.
No matter what we encounter in life,
It is faith that enables us to try again,
To trust again,
And to love again.
Even in times of immense suffering,
It is faith that enables us to relate to the present moment in such a way that we can go on,
We can move forward,
Instead of becoming lost in resignation or despair.
Faith links our present-day experience,
Whether wonderful or terrible,
To the underlying pulse of life itself.
Talk about kicking it right off.
I remember getting this book at a used bookstore in Nashville.
I reluctantly bought it.
I was like,
Oh,
Faith.
I read that right in the aisle.
I was like,
Okay,
I'm getting it.
It's such an important capacity.
The second kind of faith is verified faith.
The bright faith,
Of course,
Needs to be followed up with verified faith,
Which is really kind of what we're doing here,
What many of you have been up to for years and years and years,
Which is really encapsulated in this word,
Ehipassiko.
Come and see for yourself.
Don't trust me?
Try it.
If it cultivates that which is good,
Then cultivate it.
If it doesn't,
Then abandon it.
What it does is it allows us to reclaim the right to question.
There's a lot of faith and strength in that.
Reclaim your right to question everything that's being said,
That's being offered,
That's being taught.
We verify that or we corroborate that.
This is why I think,
Especially the Burmese tradition,
Probably really only the Burmese tradition,
Ironically or kind of sadly,
That that Theravada school is really about academic study and practice.
You stand your practice against the study.
That's really what I've been kind of harping on for about 15 years now.
Which is why I don't have a problem saying,
I think you've got the formidable truth wrong.
I think that's where the Buddha wants us to do that.
He wants us to question it.
Because he probably knew over time some of his ideas would probably get skewed a little bit here and there.
He's always saying,
Try it.
Question it.
Stand it up to your direct experience.
Trust your direct experience.
Faith is about learning to trust your own deepest experience,
Not what's being said,
What's being written in the book.
That gives us a map,
But that gives us the corroboration in the evidence,
And the faith is developed in the laboratory of your own direct experience.
It's very empowering.
So we want to reclaim our right to question it all.
But we want to have,
We don't want to have that contempt prior to investigation.
Try it.
But try it.
Andrew Olinsky helped me with this years ago,
Because when I was talking to him,
And I was just starting with just the beginning of me after I was living in Nashville,
And I got divorced from my first marriage.
I sort of moved to Nashville like two weeks after moving there.
I got five years sober,
And my life just literally exploded.
My life actually turned into a Merle Haggard song.
My girl left,
My dog died.
It was like fucking not funny.
But I was living in Nashville,
Tennessee,
Living out the Merle Haggard experience.
And I fell back in love with the Dharma from a bunch of conditions.
I was working with teenagers,
Teaching this stuff again.
And I started to get into practice,
And I went to Barry Center for Buddhist Studies,
And I started to kind of go,
I started to wake up to the fact that the reason why I had lost faith,
And I had kind of walked away from the Dharma,
Is because some of the teachings or some of the ideas I couldn't buy.
And I take full responsibility for that.
I don't blame the teachers.
It was my inability to sit and to practice and to try to see if I could.
I just dismissed them.
It was that contempt prior to investigations.
This stuff doesn't make sense anymore.
I'm not going to do it.
And he would say,
He said,
You should if it's something you don't agree with it,
Or it doesn't make sense,
And you find it confusing,
You should just think that I don't understand this yet.
Not yet.
I don't get this yet.
And you keep practicing,
And you keep practicing with it.
And Sheryl Sleen's really big on this.
It's like,
Things will the Dharma will reveal itself to you.
But we have to practice,
We have to put in the time,
We have to sit with these things.
But you maintain,
Don't ever give up your autonomy.
You maintain the authority.
You decide.
Does this,
Is this idea helping me,
Leading me to liberation and well-being,
Or is it getting in the way?
If it's getting in the way,
Let it go.
Let it go.
And as you know,
Not just with teachings,
But with people,
Places,
Scenarios,
In our lives,
We find ourselves a lot of times having to let go of things that once were beautiful or helpful.
That's part of the Dharma path that makes it so hard,
Is that the further down the path you go,
It gets more narrow,
There's less travelers,
The quantity of people in your life becomes less,
But the quality of the people in your life becomes really big.
And the further you go,
I can attest,
It just gets more and more like that.
But that's worth it,
That's a fair trade.
Just like we have to abandon and let go of some of these teachings or some of these ideas,
Because they don't help us.
We have to do that with lots of things in our life.
We do that with our relationships,
We do that with jobs,
We do that with views and opinions,
Like,
I can't hold this anymore,
I have to let this go.
This isn't helping me.
And it takes tremendous faith and courage to do that.
And we're always in that position.
So a lot of this,
This is why the Dharma is good in the middle.
Because this is what the middle looks like.
In the middle,
We're verifying our faith,
We're practicing,
We're seeing what's working,
And we're developing it,
We're seeing what's getting in the way,
And we're letting it go.
And we just keep doing that.
And then we get that,
Then we start to get that fruition of wisdom.
We just know now,
Like,
Yeah,
I can't totally let that go.
Definitely do that,
Definitely not do that.
And what does that do?
That clarifies and stabilizes the mind.
Which is also what wisdom does.
So these things just go,
Anything that clarifies and stabilizes the mind,
You can trust that that's a good development.
Even if it's painful.
And often it is.
To get clear at what cost,
It's like,
Well,
I guess at any cost at this point.
What does it take to really liberate the mind?
And the third kind she talks about,
And this is where the Dharma is good in the end,
She calls it abiding faith.
Which is where we find ourselves,
Right?
You've probably had moments of abiding faith today.
Where we just,
We can rest and we can relax and we feel contented in that.
The sense of like,
I'm on a path,
I've been on it for a while,
It's still working,
I can relax.
I can just let go.
I can trust into something.
And this is the really hard thing,
And this is the hard thing for me,
Because I tend to like control.
Even though I never seem to have any.
I do like it.
It's a tough give up.
Is that I think with this,
It's so hard,
And this isn't a blind faith thing,
But it can look like it,
Is I think at the end of the day we're being asked or challenged to trust something that we're just never going to actually understand.
I don't think we get to understand how this works.
We have a sense,
We have an idea,
We have an inkling,
We can,
And whatever amount of that you have is good.
And that's the thing that's hard for me.
And Joseph Goldstein,
It's interesting because it made me cry a couple times because this documentary I watched,
He said it like three times,
And I've been saying it for 30 years.
Joseph said it to me when I was really young,
He said,
If you take care of the Dharma,
It will take care of you.
And that is a very risky proposition,
Like what does that even mean?
Even if I wanted to do that,
What does that actually look like?
And it's like the most counter-cultural thing to do because you're trusting in this thing that's so kind of hard to pin down,
Hard to understand,
Hard to know.
But again,
It's back to that,
We touch into these experiences,
We touch into this Dharma,
It touches us back.
And that really,
Really rebuilds that faith.
And we're just involved in this process,
We can just kind of abide in it and just be like,
You're doing it,
This is what it looks like.
I know sometimes it doesn't look that great,
But this is what it looks like to do the work,
This is what we do.
We all have relationships and we have busy lives and we have financial and social and political and we have secular dukkha scattered all over the place.
So,
If we can get to a retreat or to a year,
We're lucky.
If we can sit five or six days a week,
We're lucky.
That's probably the most any of us are really going to probably be able to do,
Right?
And so this is why we really want to integrate the rest of this path,
We have to bring these other factors in.
Because we talk all the time and we work all the time and we have to deal with survival all the time and we can't,
We have to bring those into the practice and say that's part of taking care of the Dharma.
It's taking care of your voice and taking care of how you live in the world.
And then actually what you abide in is the Eightfold Path.
You abide in these qualities of how we see things and our views and the directions that we move in and the words that we say and the work that we do and what we have to do to survive.
And the effort and the courage and the awareness that it takes to do that.
That's a lot.
I mean that's everything.
That's everything.
And so ultimately what we have in abiding faith is we have faith in ourselves.
That's where all this leads.
We have faith in ourselves.
And the existential stance that we're in,
It's not about being happy or having pleasure or those things.
It's really,
And the existentialists say this probably in better detail than anybody,
Is what we're up against in this world is either we fall into despair or we find meaning.
And finding meaning doesn't mean that you're necessarily happy.
It doesn't mean that things are easy.
It doesn't mean that you've gotten what you wanted.
It just means that you've made meaning out of this.
That's what it means.
Right?
And,
You know,
Doing things that are meaningful are often painful.
So meaningfulness is such an important word because it doesn't depend on conditions.
The conditions don't have to be favorable.
It doesn't matter what the conditions are.
Meaningfulness is a quality that can be developed in spite of whatever your conditions are.
And so again,
Back to the impermanence.
Everything is all going down.
And when we get a glimpse into the curtain,
Behind the curtain of reality,
And we see that it's all going down,
And ultimately we live in a world and a universe that's incapable of providing you with any meaning,
You have to do it.
Right?
And so all of our anguish and our pain and our suffering and all the things we talk about,
All they're doing is they're pointing at what is valuable and meaningful to you.
It's giving you all the evidence that you need.
We'd be crazy not to look at it.
That's why it hurts so bad.
Because it's everything that matters to us.
Right?
So when there's loss,
Betrayal,
Or abandonment,
Or any of these things that we sort of don't want to talk about,
All they're doing is freely offering to you everything that matters.
Right?
So we have to look at it.
It's all the data you're looking for.
And there's the way that I think about to be honest with you,
I actually feel more comfortable with the word religious than I do spiritual at this point.
And I'll say a little bit about that.
I actually feel like I have a fairly religious relationship to the Dharma.
I have really very little interest in Buddhism as a religion.
And there's a Christian existential philosopher named Paul Tillich who talks about redefining religion.
And he says that religious life is about living in contact with what you are most ultimately concerned about.
Living in line with the ultimate concern,
What that is for you,
Be it friend,
Be it family.
And this is all very individual.
What's my ultimate concern,
What's Eileen's ultimate concern,
I'm sure we have a lot of overlap,
But we probably have some stuff that's part of what we need to understand.
And when we live from our place of ultimate concern and find meaning,
He says that that's living a religious life.
And it has nothing to do with external belief,
Teacher,
Authority.
It's a totally inside job,
Which is why Paul Tillich was highly criticized by the Christian religion because he was such an outside thinker.
Very Buddhist thinker in that sense,
But also at the same time a very devout Christian.
Very strong Christian conviction.
And at the same time was able to really recapture these ideas in a way.
And that's really,
I think,
When we think about the noble truth of tasks,
The beginning of this is to have the faith to embrace life.
To have the courage to embrace life.
To say,
I'm going to participate in the things that are meaningful to me knowing at the end of the day they're going to fucking destroy me.
The people we love,
The things that we care about.
And that to me,
I don't think there's any more of a courageous way to live than that.
I'm going to participate in the things that are meaningful to me as hard as I can.
And I know at the end of the day they're going to take me down.
But what other choice do you have?
You can give in to prevailing social norms and distractions and hedonism.
There's a lot of alternatives here.
I'm aware of the alternatives.
But it's that faith to say,
No,
Actually no,
Not that.
I'm going to do this other thing.
And I'm going to choose to say yes to all of it.
And so even the word Dharma doesn't necessarily mean positive or good or happy.
It just means nature.
I'm either going to be in harmony,
I'm either going to say yes to all of it,
Or I'm going to fight with some of it.
And by saying yes to all of it,
Then you just know that you're moving in the direction that's going to guarantee a journey of faith that's going to just mean something at the end of the day.
It's going to matter.
And then of course you find other people who are brave enough to try,
And it makes the whole thing worth it.
So let's just sit for a few minutes.
