The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello and welcome to this fourth talk on the five faculties and the five to translate a little bit more

literally from Pauli maybe the five divine forces within us, divine guides within us.

Literally the qualities or the aspects of Indra, the great supreme god of the ancient Indian pantheon. So this idea that we have

divinity within us that somehow our capacities, our potentials, our faculties of faith and making effort,

energy and mindfulness in today concentration,

that there's something divine about them.

They're special.

May I dare say the word sacred?

We can take them for granted, we can take them for granted,

we could take them for just of course

it's just being human, nothing special about them.

But in fact in Buddhism, all that we can do is special.

This is where the world of the sacred or the

of liberation of nobility of dignity of begins in our engagement.

And so hindrances, we talked about last week,

are those that prevent us from engaging in the world in a free way, in a liberating way, in a beneficial

way, they hinder the capacity for engaging with mindfulness,

mindfully or with a sense a real purpose.

And so these faculties kind of are the alternative.

And so faith is the alternative

to sensual desire, greed,

...