… This gives
the mind something good to do, and you begin to see the other
activities of the mind, because of course as you make up your mind to
stay with one thing, there will be other members of the committee that
say, “No, I’d rather think about this” or “What about that thing that
happened today?” or “What about tomorrow?” or whatever …
… It’s like sorting through the committee of your mind and
figuring out who should actually have the right to vote and who should
not.
To do this, you have to be mindful to keep that perspective in mind,
that you want to look at your thoughts not simply in terms of what you
like or don’t like but where they come from …
… But I said, “Well, how has your practice been?
Doesn’t it require suffering to some extent? Doesn’t it require
stress?”
You’ve got members of your mental committee who don’t want to
practice. You’ve got to fight them. That requires exerting bodily
fabrication—in other words, looking at the way you’re breathing—as
well as verbal fabrication, the way …
… This is not in our best interest here”—using the word “our” in the
sense of the whole committee in the mind.
Just because there’s a particular emotion coming up, a particular
feeling coming up in the mind, that doesn’t mean that that’s the one
you have to take on right now. Remember that there’s a whole field of
potentials …
… So, yes, we are creating new selves as we practice concentration, but they’re good selves to add to your inner committee, and they change the balance of power, tipping it in the right direction. Then, as the skill gets more and more mastered, those senses of self can fade into the background as you get focused on the skill in and of itself …
… All too often we blindly take on whatever comes in, but as you stay
with the breath, you get a greater and greater sense of the mind as
being a committee, with lots of different voices in there. There’s
really no reason that you have to identify with any of them. If you
want to, you can, but again, you’ve got more …
… That’s when you see all these other intentions coming in—other members
of the committee who seemed to be with the program but they were just
biding their time. When they see that they’ve got their chance, they
move in. If you hadn’t had a firmly placed intention to begin with,
you wouldn’t have noticed it.
There are trains of …
… This is where you have to think about the committee of the mind: There
will be some members who just keep talking, and they’re not going to
stop, but the reason why they don’t stop is because you’re paying
attention to them. So, let them chatter, let them speak as much as
they want. You just don’t focus there. You …
… This is why we have so many committee members in the mind. Each has
his or her own idea, which has or hasn’t been tested, and is all too
happy to recommend it, whether or not it’s been tested—and with very
little discussion about what the standards would be to judge as to
whether something’s truly happy or truly good …
… A good way to approach it is to
assume that the mind is like a committee. There’s not just one person
in there talking or observing, or just one mood in there simmering
away. There are lots of different potential moods, lots of different
observers. Even though the mind may tend to go in a certain direction
to identify with a particular mood …
… And you’ve
got other members of your committee that really do wish for your true
well-being.
This is one of the ironies of the divided mind or the divided self.
There’s a part of the mind that doesn’t really care about long-term
happiness or well-being. All it wants is instant gratification. And
it’s also developed a lack …
… She passed away quietly in 1978 after entrusting the center to a committee she appointed from among its members. Her younger sister, Upāsikā Wan, who up to that point had played a major role as supporter and facilitator for the center, joined the community within a few months of Upāsikā Kee’s death and soon became its leader, a position she held until her …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… It’s good to think of this in terms of the image of the committee inside the mind. There are lots of different desires that haven’t yet gotten in line with the meditation, or they may be just old habits of the mind churning out thoughts. This is when it’s good to think of that technique of just ignoring the thoughts. Think …
Introduction | An Unentangled Knowing: The Teachings of a Thai Buddhist Lay Woman
… She passed away quietly in 1978 after entrusting the center to a committee she appointed from among its members. Her younger sister, Upāsikā Wan, who up to that point had played a major role as supporter and facilitator for the center, joined the community within a few months of Upāsikā Kee’s death and soon became its leader, a position she held until her …
