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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello and welcome to this third talk on the five

controlling faculties.

So the word control of course is complicated, but in the good senses of the term it means that we have some choice and

capacity to engage in this practice that we're not living a life that's at the

whims of faith and at the whims of whims, that we have some ability to change the direction of our life and change

direction of our mind and what's happening for us.

And so one of those is to activate,

choose to activate,

to have the capacity to activate,

our attention for awareness in a useful way. Awareness or

attention is present for human beings all their waking hours, maybe even when we're sleeping

to some in certain ways, and if we don't choicefully engage in activating that capacity, using that capacity, then our

capacity for attention is used by things which are deeper subconscious

within us. They're hijacked in a sense. So if we are not taking control or taking ownership or taking engagement with our attention,

our attention might be swept away into our greed or hostility and marshaled, you know,

recruited for supporting those things or for fear.

We get hijacked into the fear and attention kind of is food in a sense,

food for these things.

So the more attention is hijacked by fear and anger and ill will and greed and envy

and doubts and things, the more it drives those things get stronger and which isn't to

our detriment and so we need to have some choice, some agency, to engage in mindfulness so it's not being taken over by other things.

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