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  2. The Brahmaviharas Are Not a Complete Practice
     … 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 … 
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  3. Creating a New Self
    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 … 
  4. Page search result icon Contents
    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 … 
  5. Monologue on the Breath
     … 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 … 
  6. Friends with the Breath, Friends with the Buddha
     … 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 … 
  7. Goodwill for the Whole Committee
     … 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 … 
  8. Meditation Prep
     … 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 … 
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  9. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … 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 … 
  10. Ripples Go Far
     … 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 … 
  11. Karma Storms
     … 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 … 
  12. Off to a Good Start
     … 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 … 
  13. The Buddha’s Cure
     … 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 … 
  14. Breathing Easy
     … 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 … 
  15. The Tricks of Denial
     … 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 … 
  16. Recovery Skills
     … 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 … 
  17. Admirable Friendship
     … This way, you gain a sense that you have lots of different potential identities, so why not use the best ones? It also helps you to realize you don’t have to identify with whoever is the strongest committee member or the one who’s shouting the loudest at any particular moment. You want to ask yourself, “Which committee member is the best one … 
  18. Games the Mind Plays
     … Remember that image of the committee. And there’s not just the committee that’s operating on the surface. As we all know in any political discussion, very rarely do the real operators show their faces. They let their puppets act for them. So just because something is hidden doesn’t mean it’s reliable. There was a game that my stepmother used to … 
  19. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … So it helps to see them as committee voices. Then you can think about having rules of order for your committee. Just as they have Robert’s Rules of Order in the outside world, you can use the Buddha’s rules of order in your inner conversations. The basic rules come down to three: What you tell yourself has to be true, has to … 
  20. A Total Training
     … The difference between mind states and mental qualities is like the difference between a whole committee making a decision and the different members of the committee having different ideas. The mind state is the whole committee. Mental qualities are individual members of the committee. But if you focus directly on the mental processes right away, it’s very easy to get lost in them … 
  21. On an Even Keel
     … You’re a wise committee chairman. The wise committee chairman is very patient: firm, but patient. When you can make your mind like earth like this, when you can keep it on an even keel like this, then the meditation becomes more and more of a skill. Something you can begin to rely on. In the beginning, it will have its ups and downs … 
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