One student asked: if a person has accumulated little wholesomeness, they still lack much self-mastery and often lose to the power of defilements. How should such a person train and develop in order to gradually increase merit and wholesomeness, strengthen their spiritual faculties, and gain enough self-command to recognize and avoid falling under the power of unwholesomeness?

The teacher answered that one must accumulate the five spiritual faculties (bala): mindfulness, wisdom, faith, concentration, and effort. Watch, in each moment, what will help these five keep growing. For example, when feeling lazy — wanting to sit for just a while and then quit — mindfulness must step in to remind us to keep sitting.

Wisdom is especially important, because wisdom helps make everything better. Whether cultivating mindfulness, building faith, practicing concentration, or sustaining effort — everything becomes easier with wisdom, because it requires information, a kind of shortcut, and wisdom is exactly what reveals these shortcuts, making everything easier. This is why mindfulness must always be paired with wisdom. Without wisdom paired alongside it, everything becomes difficult, because unwholesomeness steps in to guide us instead — and guides us wrongly, making things harder still. Wholesomeness, by contrast, guides us toward what is correct, making everything easy and comfortable. Unwholesomeness makes everything difficult, keeping us in a state that must constantly be endured and is hard to bear.