… It’s like a committee. Sometimes the committee’s like the Chicago City Council. It’s got lots of politics; lots of deals are being made in the back rooms. But the fact that an idea has appeared to the committee doesn’t mean that you have to go along with it.
If the committee’s putting things together in a bad way, you …
… This is where perceiving the mind as a committee is useful. Some committee members may have their opinions, but you don’t have to listen to everybody on the committee; you don’t have to identify with everyone on the committee. If they’re going to chatter about what they want, that’s their business. You’re going to stay focused on the breath …
… They’re like a huge committee, with lots of different agendas. What we’re trying to do as we meditate is to find which members of the committee are most skillful, who actually do have the ability to bring about some happiness, a happiness that doesn’t have any bad side effects. If your happiness involves the suffering of other people, there are going …
… These members of the committee tend to be deluded. Some of your strategies involved doing things you liked to do but actually led to suffering—as when you hit your sister and got your toy truck back. These members of the committee tend to be dishonest and deceitful: They deny the suffering they caused. This is why your committee of selves is not an …
As I’ve said many times before, the mind is like a committee. It’s got
lots of different members. Each member lives in its own world, has its
own ideas about what’s going to lead to happiness. Sometimes they
actually have meetings, and other times they just move in and move
out. But their worlds are pretty impervious to each other. Because …
… All the different members in the committee of your mind have their ideas about what would be good dinner tonight, what the food should be, how it should be fixed. And a lot of the discussion in your mind is about how you’re going to feed.
So when you learn how to meditate and get the mind into a state of well-being …
… For the time being you want some space here inside so that you really can settle down and the members of the committee that do want to settle down will have a chance to get a sense of ease and well-being with the breath. Which means you can’t just grab on to the breath and force it. You want to simply allow …
Contents
Cover
Titlepage
Copyright
Introduction
The Pursuit of Excellence
Joy in Getting It Right
Because the Mind Is Purposeful
Wearing the Breath
The Committee of the Mind
Whole-Hearted Concentration
All Eye
Ironclad Technique vs. No Technique
A Divine Seat
The Flamethrowing Mind
The Radiant Mind
The Dhamma Is in the Method
Think
To Be Debt Free
Honest & Observant
Wise About Mistakes
Non-Reactive …
… But by focusing on
the breath, you begin to call the committee to order, cleanup the
discussion, learn how to keep it all on one topic. As for any comments
that come from the committee, you want to listen only to the helpful
ones. As for the discouraging words in the mind, well, here you are
home on the breath, where you’re not …
… You need it as a friend because you’ve got all these other people in
your head as well, all the committee members, and you don’t know where
you picked them all up. Some of them are thoughts you’ve come up with
on your own. Others are things you picked up from people around you:
some well-meaning but ignorant, others even …
… 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 …
… Another way to loosen that sense of identity is to think of the mind as a committee. The committee contains all kinds of members who propose all kinds of things. Just because somebody in the committee has proposed a bad idea doesn’t mean the committee is bad. The duty of the committee is to listen to the ideas brought to the floor figure …
… all the voices of the committee; all the various members of the
committee that get in on the conversation. You bring a topic to the
committee, and everybody talks about it, passes judgment on it, gives
recommendations, asks questions. That inner conversation can prime you
to suffer a lot if you’re not careful. Then there are mental
fabrications, which are feelings of pleasure …
… It’s like all those different committee members in the mind, the ones
that want to meditate, the ones that don’t want to meditate. Where did
they come from? They came from strategies you had in the past for
finding happiness. Some of those strategies are things that you cooked
up way, way back when your powers of observation were pretty poor and …
… Think about your mind as being like a committee. There are lots of
members in there. Some of the members may be totally out of control,
the whole meeting of the committee may be in chaos, but try to find
one member of the committee that you can identify with, that you feel
safe identifying with, and see what you can do with that …
… As we
were saying this afternoon, your mind is like a committee—and it’s a
pretty raucous one: lots of different opinions, good and bad, and the
discussion can get pretty unruly. Some of the committee members simply
use force, and one of their ways of using force with you is to alter
the way you breathe.
Anger comes along, lust comes along …
… Think of the mind as a committee. There are lots of different voices
in the committee: Some members are invited; other members are not
invited. But just because someone is loud doesn’t mean they have to
take over the committee—or that whoever’s speaking at the moment
expresses the will of the committee. It’s just one voice.
What you’re trying …
… So it’s useful to think
of these desires as a committee, and a very disorganized committee at
that. No interest in Robert’s rules of order, no interest in fair
discussion. It’s like politics.
When you’re meditating, you try to impose some order on the
discussion, so that your intention to do what’s skillful, your
intention to stay, say, with …
… It’s like you’re training a whole committee of people
in here. Sometimes you train one person and he performs in a stellar
way, but the whole rest of the committee is just sitting there
watching. They’re not playing along yet; they learn how to pull things
back. So when you find yourself with what
seems to be a lot of advancing …
… In some cases, you can reason with the
other members of the committee and they’ll be willing to join in. But
then there are some others that don’t seem to want to listen to reason
at all. They have their own reasons that they’ll sometimes present to
you as to why there are other things you could be doing with this …
Strategies of Self & Not-self | Selves & Not-self
… These members of the committee tend to be deluded. Some of your strategies involved doing things you liked to do but actually led to suffering—as when you hit your sister and got your toy truck back. These members of the committee tend to be dishonest and deceitful: They deny the suffering they caused. This is why your committee of selves is not an …
