I’m writ­ing today’s blog entry before my med­i­ta­tion, unusu­ally. I was lis­ten­ing to Gil Fronsdal’s talk on the Five Fac­ul­ties in this week’s Audio Dharma pod­cast, and this was very use­ful as a kind of map for me, a list of things to bear in mind as I carry on with my practice.

I don’t think they have to be applied in any par­tic­u­lar order. From what I can see, they can all grow at once, sup­port­ing each other, and you prob­a­bly don’t want to develop one very far ahead of the others.

So far I appear to be doing okay on the effort/persistence front. I’m doing it; I’m mak­ing the effort to sit daily. I’m stick­ing with the prac­tice, and have been for 56 fairly solid days now.

Mind­ful­ness I’ve been strug­gling with. I have prob­lems being present, but I know I have to work on that. My fif­teen min­utes of med­i­ta­tion have seemed to be length­en­ing, stretch­ing out, and I get the impres­sion from Gil’s talk that a lack of mind­ful­ness can lead to a sit­ting feel­ing like it was over with in the blink of an eye. So per­haps my apparently-lengthening med­i­ta­tions are a sign I’m being more mind­ful. One can only hope.

I’m not too sure about con­cen­tra­tion yet. I’m not entirely sure of the dif­fer­ence between mind­ful­ness and con­cen­tra­tion, so that’s clearly some­thing to study fur­ther. Accord­ing to this Wikipedia page:

• Mind­ful­ness refers to focus­ing on the four satipatthana.
• Con­cen­tra­tion refers to achiev­ing the four jhanas.

So I’ve just put “Look up what sati­patthana and jhanas are” on my to-do list (along with “do the laun­dry” and “put bins out”; it’s not a specif­i­cally spir­i­tual to-do list…)

Gil described con­cen­tra­tion like this, as best as I could tran­scribe it:

“Focused calm, stay­ing focused enough to see more pre­cisely and more pen­e­trat­ingly, ‘What’s hap­pen­ing here?’… You can’t see your reflec­tion in a pond that’s rip­pled by the wind. The pond has to be still… Same with the mind.“

I’ve not really touched on dis­cern­ment at all. This seems to be the wis­dom, the under­stand­ing you need to guide you along your jour­ney, the abil­ity to make the right deci­sions. So per­haps that’s what I’m start­ing to do right now — look for direc­tion, and try to under­stand where I am and the path I want to take from this point.

Finally, there’s faith — although this comes first in the list, it seems, I don’t think I’ve thought about it much. I sup­pose start­ing med­i­ta­tion is a bit of a leap of faith — the faith that the hours I’ll spend (only about 14, so far!) will ben­e­fit me in some way, make me a bet­ter per­son, and improve my abil­ity to con­cen­trate. But I’ve not really thought about it much from there. I sup­pose faith has prob­a­bly kicked in on those occa­sions where I was sit­ting for days and didn’t seem to be improv­ing — some­times you need a bit of faith to stick with things, when you can’t dis­cern (and I use the word advis­edly) results.

This makes sense, I think, given what Gil said about faith:

“Faith is sup­posed to be bal­anced with [dis­cern­ment]… our abil­ity to be dis­cern­ing, to be wise… If peo­ple rely too much on faith, your prac­tice can go askew. If you rely too much on intel­li­gence, on think­ing about things, maybe you don’t relax enough. Our faith helps us relax.“

Any­way. That’s prob­a­bly given me far too much to think about dur­ing today’s med­i­ta­tion. We’ll see how I do. I prob­a­bly don’t have time to write the med­i­ta­tion up as well as actu­ally med­i­tate — it’s 11:14 PM — so I might have to check in on today in the morning…