So, if you know things just as they are this is enough. We just keep coming back to that one, don't we, but from lots of different angles.

Each one of these angles might be useful to you at different times, and having a few little lists to look at as we walk our path can bring fresh perspectives and keep us from getting stuck.

The Five Spiritual Faculties have also been presented in another order that can be useful: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration and 36

The Five Spiritual Faculties

wisdom. In this order, they apply to each of the Three Trainings. We have faith that training in morality is a good idea and that we can do it, so we exert energy to live up to a standard of clear and skillful living.

We realize that we must pay attention to our thoughts, words and deeds in order to do this, so we try to be mindful of them. We realize that we often fail to pay attention, so we try to increase our ability to concentrate on how we live our life. In this way, through experience, we become wiser in a relative sense, learning how to live a good and useful life.

Seeing our skill improve and the benefits it has for our life, we generate more faith, and so on.

We also may have faith that we might be able to attain to high states of consciousness, so we sit down on a cushion and energetically try to stabilize our attention. We realize that if we are not paying attention, being mindful, then this is impossible, so we work on mindfulness of our object and of the qualities of the state we wish to attain. We develop strong concentration on an object, stabilizing more consistently. We attain to high states and thus gain an understanding of how to navigate in that territory and the uses of doing so. Our success creates more faith, and so we apply energy to further develop our concentration abilities.

We begin to think it might be possible to awaken, we have faith, so we energetically explore the sensations that make up our world without exception. With an alert and energetic mind we explore this heart, mind and body just as it is now with mindfulness. Reality becomes more and more interesting, so our concentration grows, and this combination of the first four produces fundamental wisdom. Wisdom leads to more faith, and the cycle goes around again.

The teaching of the Five Spiritual Faculties has also been explored at great lengths in many books, and there really is a lot to it. In its simple form you can easily apply it, and it can really help sometimes. Balance and strengthen. Strengthen and balance. These are the cycles we go through with these faculties, and there is no limit to the level at which they can be mastered.

One other thing is accurately said of the Five Spiritual Faculties as they apply to insight training: when they are balanced and perfected, this is sufficient cause for awakening.

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6.THE SEVEN FACTORS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The Seven Factors of Enlightenment are mindfulne ss ,

inve stigat ion o f the truth , energy , rapture , tranquility , conce ntratio n and equanimit y. So, we have three concepts from the Five Spiritual Faculties and four that seem new but have actually already been touched on to some degree. The order here is actually closely related to the stages of something called “The Progress of Insight,”