Search results for: committee

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  2. Equanimity & Exertion
     … This is what I want.” You’ll find that it has lots of friends in the committee of your mind who will argue for it. That kind of cause of suffering, the Buddha said, goes away only when you do what he calls “exerting a fabrication.” The word “fabrication,” sankhara, here, means that you work with intentions and try to figure the cause out … 
  3. The Gatekeeper’s Duties
     … If you really work at maintaining your concentration, trying to get it to settle in more deeply, you’re going to run into other aspects of the mind, because the mind is like a committee. When you decided to sit down and meditate just now, it wasn’t the case that the whole mind went along. Enough of the mind went along to get … 
  4. Heedfulness
     … And you do want to get the other members of the committee in your mind to listen to what it has to say. It’s like teachers in school. There are some teachers who are really friendly but they don’t really teach us all that much. They let us have a good time, and when you come away from the class you’re … 
  5. Training Your Cynical Voices
     … So there’s nothing superhuman about what you’re doing here—simply that you’ve got to learn how to train those committee members and turn the cynical or skeptical voices on your greed, aversion, and delusion. At the same time, learn how to bring in some more confidence, conviction in this path. For most of us, it’s not a path that we … 
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  6. Verbal Fabrication
     … You have a whole committee in there, so you have talk to them, to convince them that this is a good place to stay. You can do part of that by making the breath comfortable, but that’s not going to be enough. You have to keep reminding yourself of why it’s important to train the mind: We all look for happiness, and … 
  7. Feeding Off the Future
     … Don’t give in to the temptation to straighten out those members of the committee, because they’ll pull you in. Like the tar trap that the Buddha talked about: When they used to catch monkeys, they put tar on a stump. The monkey comes up and sees something soft and black, wants to figure out what it is. So he touches it with … 
  8. Book search result icon Good Heart, Good Mind Virtue
     … How do I prepare so that I don’t believe the committee member in my mind who says that I’m a bad person? A: One of the reasons why we meditate is so that we’ll be alert at the moment of death. Then remember that any voice that comes into the mind is just one member of the committee, and as a … 
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  9. It’s All in What You’re Doing
     … What was I keeping in mind? Whose voice was I remembering? This is when I began to realize that the mind was a committee. Lots of different people in there. My mother was in there. My father was in there. Teachers and school friends from my past. TV, radio, magazines, books. All sloshing around in there. They all seemed very authoritative and they were … 
  10. Time to Heal
     … You can go and sit under a tree, be by yourself with nothing but the wind and the leaves and the few bugs here and there, but you find you have a whole committee sitting there with you—all these different voices saying, “Well, now we’ve got all this free time, we can think about this, we can talk about that.” And they … 
  11. Don’t Be Afraid of Mistakes
    When we talk about the committee of the mind, or when Ajaan Lee talks about all the various consciousnesses that may be hovering around your body, or when the Buddha talks about your thoughts being not-self, the purpose is to get some distance from those thoughts. But it doesn’t mean you have to distrust them. It simply means that you want to … 
  12. Training in Happiness
     … Even though part of you may say, “Gee, I don’t like this,” remember that the mind is like a committee. There are lots of voices in there. You don’t have to trust every voice that comes up. You have to look at and see: Is this a reliable voice? Who’s speaking in here? Is it greed speaking? Is it laziness speaking … 
  13. Addictive Thinking
     … You can train your own mind.” This is where the image of the mind as a committee is useful, because different parts of the mind are more skillful than others. You take the skillful parts and you basically make them stronger. Everything the Buddha taught was out of pure compassion. So that’s the voice you want to have in your mind, along with … 
  14. Basic Intro
     … You begin to see that the mind is like a committee, with lots of different ideas, lots of different voices in here. For the time being, you’ve got to learn how to listen to one voice, the voice that reminds you to stay with the breath. The best use of your time right now is to develop these good qualities in the mind … 
  15. Refuge
     … The mind is a whole committee. And the Buddha’s teachings take advantage of that fact. If you had only one self in there, how could your self do anything to improve itself? But the fact is that you’ve got lots of different selves and they can look at issues from different angles. Some of them have better ideas about what’s skillful … 
  16. Bad Friends Inside
     … If you think of the mind as a committee, there are lots of different voices in there, lots of different persons almost. And a lot of our problem is we don’t know who to choose as our friends inside. Sometimes we take greed as our friend, sometimes lust, sometimes anger, sometimes fear. We think these things can be relied upon, these things can … 
  17. Samvega
     … All the different committee members of the mind are eventually going to come here and have their say. If you can learn to step back and look at them, that gives you your chance to comprehend them. This ability to step back and look is equanimity. Learn to develop some equanimity around the pain. Just watch it for a while and see what happens … 
  18. Patient & Inquisitive
     … If we think about the mind as a committee, we’re trying to train the members who are the investigators, the watchmen, so that they can watch what’s going on in the rest of the mind and try to figure it out. The Buddha doesn’t want us to simply accept the truth of his teachings and say, “Oh yes, it’s true … 
  19. Alone & Together
     … If you’re constantly dealing with other people’s issues, you don’t know about the committee in your own mind. Voices come up, and you don’t know where they’re coming from. Thoughts come into your mind. Who are they? Who do they represent? Where did you pick up those ideas? You want to be able to track it down. You can … 
  20. Learning Through Healing
     … At first it doesn’t feel like you’re learning too much, but over time you begin to see deeper and deeper into all the different functions that the mind performs, all the different voices, all the different committee members you have in there. And as you deal with this one and deal with that one, you begin to get a better sense of … 
  21. Genuine Happiness
     … It’s more like a committee or a whole corporation: a factory with lots of workers, lots of executives making decisions and doing things, sometimes without the people in the top office knowing what’s going on. This is where the top office has to come down and look inside. Otherwise the corporation starts churning out junk, which will bring the corporation down. You … 
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