A Producer Mentality

There’s an old New Yorker cartoon: Two upper middle-aged couples are sitting in a very upper middle-class living room, and the husband of one of them is saying, “Of course it’s had its ups and downs, but by and large, Margaret and I have found the consumer experience to be a rewarding one.”

That’s a lot of the problem with our society right now. We’re here for the consumer experience. We’ve been trained in a consumer mentality.

The problem with the consumer mentality is that it wants a maximum amount of pleasure with a minimum amount of effort, a minimum amount of sacrifice. We need a more producer mentality, realizing that there are goals we want, it’s going to take a lot of work to get there, and we’re willing to put forth the effort.

That, of course, is a skill, because you can’t just work, work, work, work, work, without enjoying the work and the prospect of making progress. Even when progress is slow, you have to be able to talk yourself into enjoying the fact that you’re on a good path.

So even though we’d like to have all the comforts of the path—we read about the bliss, we read about the rapture, we say, “I’d like that, but I’m not going to give up my sensual pleasures until I get that. Then I’ll give up my sensual pleasures”—it doesn’t work that way.

Think of the Buddha on his way to awakening: As he said, there was a point where he realized that he was going to have to give up thinking about sensuality, and his mind didn’t leap up at the prospect. That’s understandable. But then he made another step. He said he realized that if he didn’t give up those thoughts, he’d never get to where he wanted to go. So even though he wasn’t there yet, he was willing and able to make sacrifices.

You see this principle in all the lists of the wings to awakening.

The bliss of concentration, the bliss that comes with discernment, comes at the end of the five faculties, the end of the five strengths. In both cases, the list starts with conviction.

The four bases of success start with desire.

The noble eightfold path starts with right view and right resolve: right view about what’s going to cause suffering, what’s not going to cause suffering, what’s going to take you away from suffering, and then the resolve to do what needs to be done to get into right concentration.

But then there are steps between right resolve and the actual concentration. One of the steps is in right resolve itself: being resolved on giving up sensuality, in other words, giving up your fascination with thoughts of sensual pleasures; giving up ill-will; giving up harmfulness. These are precisely the things you need to give up in order to get the mind to where it’s secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful thoughts, unskillful mental states, so that you can get into the first jhana.

But there are steps in between. One of the big steps is effort, just as desire is followed by persistence in the four bases for success, and conviction is followed by persistence in the five faculties and the five strengths.

So the trick, as the Buddha said, is learning to make yourself want to do the things that you may not like doing but you know will give long-term results; and to make yourself want to avoid doing the things that you like to do but you know will give long-term harm. It’s a matter of psyching yourself up, knowing how to persuade yourself.

This is where you can use all kinds of ways of dealing with your mind. You should know, better than anybody else, what kind of approach works with you to get yourself off your rear end to something when you’d much rather just lie around and rest. How do you talk to yourself? What gets you up to work? In some cases, it’s being stern. In other cases, you can use humor.

We read a lot in Ajaan MahaBoowa about his techniques for dealing with himself. He tended to be the kind of person who responded really well to harsh treatment. Some of us read that and we feel a little put off—if that’s what’s required, then we’re not up to it. Well, that’s what worked for his mind. And remember, at some points in the practice, you *will *have to be harsh with yourself, but it doesn’t work all the time.

Think of Ajaan Lee. He was more strategic. He used humor a lot in getting himself to stick with the practice.

Think of the Buddha and his way of teaching. He would instruct, urge, arouse, and encourage: one part information, three parts pep talks.

In some cases, the pep talks were phrased as, “You can do this. Other people have done it.” Or: “They can do it. They’re human beings. I’m a human being. If they can do it, why can’t I?”

Or think of the case of the Buddha’s cousin who comes to see him and is really discouraged in his meditation practice: He’s getting nowhere. He’s thinking of disrobing. The Buddha says, “Look, I’m here to help you. Take my help.” So learn how to provide yourself with help. Learn what works in your case.

Remember that being secluded from sensuality doesn’t mean that you have to give up sensual thoughts forever before you can get into concentration. Just put them aside for the time being. It’s not going to kill you.

And learn some skills. This is what it means to be a producer. Like someone who’s mastering a musical instrument: You have to go off and play for yourself. You can’t yet have the enjoyment of playing for other people. And you have to do your scales and work at mastering whatever technique is involved in your instrument. In some ways it’s pretty boring, but you can learn how to make it interesting.

So even when the progress is slow, you console yourself with stories of people whose progress was slow but they stuck with it and got out.

Think of the Dene back in that story of the 1820s, 1830s. There was an Englishman, I’ve forgotten his name now, who wanted to check out the copper deposits up in the Northwest Territories. He was on the coast of Hudson Bay. And there were some Dene who were going to go past that spot, so they offered to take him along—one of the first cases where an Englishman entrusted his life to a band of natives. He noticed, as they were going through the wilderness, that on the days when the hunting was really bad and everybody was hungry, those were the days when they joked with one another the most, laughed the most, to keep their spirits up.

So learn whatever is needed to keep your spirits up, because there’ll be fallow periods when you’re putting in the work and the results just don’t seem to be coming. But you can’t let that stop you. If you want instant pleasures, you’re reverting to that consumer mentality. And that’s the mentality of an addict, which just goes spiraling, down, down, down. It’s the producers of the world who find genuine happiness and gratification.

There’s a difference between pleasure and gratification: Pleasure is simply when you enjoy the sights and sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations that the world has to offer. Gratification is when you realize you’ve mastered a skill. So think of whatever skills you’ve mastered. Try to apply the same principles here.

We had a person visiting us way back, in the beginning years of the monastery. His mind would swing back and forth between extremes. Some days he wanted nothing but arahantship; other days he didn’t want to practice at all. So I told him, “Think of some skills you mastered in the past, how you were able to apply yourself, modulate your desire, so that it was just right for your persistence.” In other words, it doesn’t get in the way of your persistence, but you’re able to keep it going, keep it going. So he went back to think. The next day he returned to me and said, “You know, I have no skills.” That was the problem.

Learning a skill requires that you learn how to balance your persistence with your desire and keep on going even when the results seem to be small, confident that the results will have to get big at some point.

This is a path that many people have followed in the past—people of all kinds: people who were inclined to it, talented; people who were not inclined to it, not talented, but realized they had to do it, because if you don’t learn how to put an end to your suffering, you’re just going to keep on suffering more and more and more. without end because you haven’t tried enough.

So learn the skill of learning to be good at what you’re not talented at yet.

Learning a skill, in that situation, is a skill in and of itself. It comes down to these qualities—conviction, desire, right resolve, learning how to talk to yourself, to lift your spirits, so that you can provide yourself with your own nourishment when the nourishment of the factors of jhana isn’t there yet.

There should be some nourishment from being generous, some nourishment from being virtuous, some nourishment from the simple fact that you’re here meditating, training your mind.

The mind may be resistant, but it’s got to be trained. So develop the talents you need to do what needs to be done.

Because if you don’t do it, no one else can do it for you, and it’s not going to get done.