Goodwill for the Whole Committee

Ajaan Fuang once commented that all you really need to have trust in as you meditate is the principle of action: that you really do have choices, and that when you act on the choices, it really does make a difference. You can choose to act in a skillful way or an unskillful way. If you act based on skillful intentions, the results are going to tend in a good direction. If you act on unskillful intentions, they’re going to tend in a painful direction. And the word “action” here doesn’t mean just the actions of the body or your speech. All actions come out of the mind. That’s why we train the mind to get more and more sensitive to its own actions.

What’s radical about all this is what counts as an action. There are lots of things that we think of as things or identities but that the Buddha would prefer that we think of as actions, because it’s a lot more fruitful to look at them as actions. One of these is your sense of who you are. You make choices to identify with certain things, certain skills, certain activities. And as you’ve probably noticed, your choice of who to identify as is not always consistent. Sometimes you feel pulled in many directions.

The Buddha gives the image of a series of animals all tied together by leashes. There’s an alligator that wants to go down into the river, a monkey that wants to go up into the trees, a jackal that wants to go into the cemetery, a dog that wants to go into a village, a bird that wants to fly up into the sky, and a snake that wants to go into a hole in the ground. Whichever one happens to be strongest at any one time will pull all the other animals in its direction. That’s what we’ve got going on inside.

So to get some peace, he says, you’ve got to have a post that you tie the leashes to. That’s why we meditate. Get the mind to settle down with the breath. Try to be here with the body and get your awareness immersed in the body so that it’s not flowing out. As for any voices that come up in the mind, remember, they’re activities. They’re not really people. You’ll notice certain personalities. They either help or hinder you with the meditation. You can identify some of them as people you’ve known, people you’ve grown up with: parents, teachers, friends, ideas you’ve picked up from media. They’re all in there. Other identities that you’ve taken on yourself, that you’ve cobbled together from other people’s examples, are things you had to think up on the spur of the moment when you were suffering.

Each of these identities is based on a desire, on a certain idea about the happiness you want, and a certain strategy for how you’re going to go about finding that happiness. It’s good to see them as that—as strategies, as actions—because then you can recognize them and you realize you don’t have to identify with them.

But to break the identity with the unskillful ones, first you have to develop some skillful habits to replace them so that you have a larger range of choices. This is why we listen to the Dhamma. This is why we read things that inspire us to believe in the principle of action, the principle of skillful action, and give us some ideas of what skillful approaches might be. This is where it’s useful to study, to read, to listen, to enlarge the range of your imagination and the range of your skills.

The real skill, though, comes in learning how to deal directly with these different members of the committee or members of the crowd. Sometimes they’re not even organized enough to be a committee. Again, this is where you try to get the mind to settle down so you can recognize these voices without letting them sneak in and slip into you so that when they say they’re bored, you believe you’re bored; when they’re frustrated, you believe you’re frustrated. Just notice, okay, there’s frustration there. It’s an action. There’s boredom there. It’s an action. And there’s a choice you can make: Do you want to identify with that? Or would you rather identify with the meditator here? Try to stick with the meditator. Then your parent voices will come in, saying you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that, some of which are helpful and some of which are not. So watch out for those, too.

But remember, each of these is a strategy, and at some time, some place, it must have worked at least to some extent. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have hung on to it. So when you’re dealing with the voices that you really don’t like, this is where the principle of goodwill is useful—like that chant we had just now.

It’s a really interesting chant. It’s a chant spreading goodwill essentially to snakes. It starts out with the four great families of snakes and then goes on to all beings, including all the creepy crawlies you can think of. This is a chant that the Buddha taught to the monks. There was a monk out in the forest who had been bitten by a snake and died. When the monks reported this to the Buddha, he said that it was because that monk hadn’t suffused the four great families of snakes with goodwill. If he had, they wouldn’t have bitten him.

When you think about it, you can realize that if you’re living in an area where there are snakes and you just hate them, you’re setting yourself up for all kinds of problems. But if you learn to sympathize with them, it’s easier to think: “How does a snake think? What would threaten a snake? And how can I act in a way that doesn’t threaten the snakes?” Then you find it’s a lot easier to live with them. You can have goodwill for them, but notice at the very end, the message is, “May they all go away.” Goodwill doesn’t mean we have to sit around and be loving and chatting people up all the time or showing how much we care for one another. Often, goodwill is simply, “Okay, may you be well, but it’s very difficult for us to live together. Maybe it’s better for us to live apart. But may you be happy.” No ill will is borne. And when there’s no ill will, it’s a lot easier to talk to people.

Occasionally, people possessed by spirits would come to Ajaan Fuang. We in the West would probably say they had a bad case of schizophrenia. But as I noticed, he never used any of the old traditional ways of exorcism. What he would do was spread goodwill to everybody in there. The different parts of that person’s personality, some of which might very well have been spirits of somebody else, would actually start talking. He’d talk to them with goodwill, negotiating a peace so that the spirit would leave the person alone. The spirit could stay, but it would stop harassing the person.

The same principle applies to all the different voices in your mind. Some of them are people that you’ve had lots of trouble with, but now they’re inside your head. What are you going to do? Spread goodwill to them in the same way that you spread goodwill to snakes. You don’t have to be afraid that by spreading goodwill they’re going to hang around. After all, each of them has a desire for happiness, and that’s the basis for being able to negotiate.

We all want happiness in here. It’s simply that some of us have some really wrong ideas about what it is, how it’s found. So you wish them well for the sake of their basic motivation. Then it’s a lot easier to unpack where the unskillful parts are and then to send them packing. Just let them go their own way. They don’t have to hang around.

Exert some power over the mind. To spread goodwill to these voices, some of which are really difficult, is one of the reasons why we work with the breath in a way that makes it comfortable. When you’re coming from a place of well-being, it’s a lot easier to feel goodwill for the things that have been tormenting you. It’s a lot easier to see that they have their problems. Someplace in there, there was a desire for happiness, but it all got all skewed and distorted.

So think about the basic desire for happiness. Communicate on that level. Then it’s a lot easier to let go of some of the unskillful voices without a lot of aversion. In that way, you can make peace.

Remember that all those identities in your head of who you are, what you have been, are actions, are choices, based on different skills you’ve had, different desires you’ve had. Your idea of who’s going to benefit from your actions inside here and who in here has the power to bring those desires into being come down to the self as the consumer and the self as the producer of happiness. There are lots of them playing these two roles in there. We meditate so that we can have a common ground where we can start looking at them, recognizing them for what they are, and then learning how to deal with them in a more effective way, so that all of our actions in thought, word, and deed actually do conduce to happiness. That’s what this is all about.

There are lots of ephemeral pleasures out there. We’ve all had them. We know what they’re like. And there’s a lot of pain out there as well. What we’re looking for is how can we find happiness that’s really reliable, that’s really worth the effort we put into it. That’s why the Buddha offered this as his teaching. You train the mind, he says. Look at everything as an action.

There wa a woman who came the other day and asked, “What do I see when I look at other people?” The answer is you see examples of actions, skillful and unskillful. You can ask yourself, when you see someone do something unskillful, “Is that something I do? Well, this is what it looks like.” Or if they do something noble and inspiring, you remind yourself, “They’re human beings, I’m a human being. They can do it, why can’t I?”

Then learn to look at yourself in the same way as examples of actions. Begin sorting out which ones you want to encourage and which ones you want to let go. Just that simple principle right there covers a lot of the teaching and a lot of the practice.

So get the mind to settle down and look at things in this way: “These are actions and intentions and results.” Then apply that principle as skillfully as you can.