… Why are you doing this? How do you deal with the different committee members in the mind that are pulling you away?
As you experiment with these different approaches, you’ll find the ones that work, so that your single-mindedness really stays single. It really does develop power. Without the strength of the concentration, your discernment won’t be strong enough to deal …
… 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 …
… 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 …
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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… Are all the members of the committee on board with the desire to stay with the breath? Which ones aren’t? When they’re not on board, where do they want to wander? What are they looking for? Why?
The Buddha said to try to get the mind to settle down in right concentration, you have to seclude it from unskillful qualities. You have …
… 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 …
… Or if you think in terms of the committee of the mind, what happens when you follow certain voices? When you follow other voices, what happens? Look into the voices themselves, because you’ll learn a lot by doing so.
The voice that says, “The path is impossible”: That’s a destructive voice. The voice that says, “You don’t have any choices; you …
… If any members of the committee are out of order, let them know. Because this business of verbal fabrication inside the mind, as Ajaan Lee pointed out, is the most important issue on the path. It can do the most damage, but it can also be the most helpful. It can be helpful in the sense that it reminds you of what right view …
… 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 …
… You’ll find, of course, that some members of the committee of the mind have lots of other desires as well, most of which are based on very strange ideas of what’s possible in the world. Now, you can’t simply make up your mind about the way things are going to be. You can’t make up your mind, say, that you …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… Different members of the committee
haven’t agreed on what you’re going to do for the hour. Some of them
say, “Hey, now that there’s free time, we can plan for tomorrow or
hash over what happened today.” And you have to develop the insight
that enables you to say No to those things and to stick with the No.
Once the …
… The first has to do with the image of the committee of the mind. If you see the mind as having lots of voices, with lots of different opinions, you might think of “mind” as a frame of reference concerned with the mind as a whole—the times when the committee has come to an agreement—whereas “mental qualities” refer to the individual members …
… This is where you start seeing the committee of the mind in action.
Some of the members have decided they’re going to leave. As soon as
you’re not fully alert, fully aware, they’re going to take off. Then
they pretend that they didn’t make that decision. But it has been
made. It’s simply waiting for the chance. Then another …
Mindfulness of Breathing
… The first has to do with the image of the committee of the mind. If you see the mind as having lots of voices, with lots of different opinions, you might think of “mind” as a frame of reference concerned with the mind as a whole—the times when the committee has come to an agreement—whereas “mental qualities” refer to the individual members …
