Search results for: committee

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  2. A Taste of Freedom
     … You can think of the mind as being like a committee. Your old habits are the members of the committee who have held power for a long time over you. Whereas the members who want to meditate may not be quite so strong, but you can strengthen them. You can side with them. The more you develop your mindfulness, your alertness, your concentration, and … 
  3. The Skill of Happiness
     … Because the mind is like a committee. There are lots of views, lots of opinions, lots of strategies we’ve used in the past for finding happiness. When they see that the field is open, there’s no other activity going on right now, they’ll come to the fore and pull your thoughts off in different directions. Either that or the committee members … 
  4. Obsessive Thinking
     … That’s what you’ve got to look into.” This is where it’s good to think of the mind as a committee. There are some committee members who like this. It’s only when you ferret out those members that you can do something about them. Then, the fourth step is to really look carefully at the drawbacks of that kind of thinking … 
  5. Defilements
     … all the different committee members. This is where it’s good to have some practice with the phrases for goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, because if you then suddenly find yourself talking to yourself about somebody else in an envious or a spiteful way, you’ll notice that it doesn’t really go together with “May all beings be happy. May all beings … 
  6. Determination
     … If you think of the mind as a committee, when you make a determination like that, you’re basically putting out a warning to any members of the committee that might want to be traitorous that they would be recognized as traitors and shot. That gives the mind a strong impetus to carrying through. When the Buddha talked about determination, there were four qualities … 
  7. Responsible Happiness
     … The mind is like a committee, as I’ve said many times. We have all kinds of members in there. The members you’re proud of. The members you’re ashamed of. The members that are thoughtful. The members that are thoughtless. You might think of them as all the different desires you’ve had in the past, and they’ve gotten lodged in … 
  8. Study & Practice
     … If you think of the mind as a committee, mind-states are like the whole committee agreeing on something. Mental qualities are the different members, which sometimes are with you and sometimes are against you if you want to meditate. Again, you look at these things in and of themselves, as events happening: That’s your frame of reference. The “in and of themselves … 
  9. Developing Mental Seclusion
     … to give you that better place to stay, so that the mind can be protected from all of its other conversations and companions and committee members that would pull you off in other directions. We need this ability to make these distinctions to decide, “Yes, I’ll go with this,” or “No, I won’t go with that.” Because there are lots of times … 
  10. For What It’s Worth
     … Think of the mind as a committee. Some of the committee members have decided they want to slip away as soon as your mindfulness lapses. They’re all ready to go. There’s a lapse, and they’re gone. You want to see that point where they made up their decision to be ready to go. Scientists have done psychological experiments where they can … 
  11. Concentration as Wilderness
     … You find that if you settle down with the breath, large parts of the committee of the mind are not really here yet. They’re still carrying on their conversations about home or work or whatever, assuming that you will give in after a while and forget about the breath. And you will – to begin with. But then you remember that you’re not … 
  12. Take the Buddha Seriously
     … That’s why we use the image of the committee. As the different committee members get up to have their say, you find yourself playing the role of that member. This is what becoming is all about: You take on an identity. But you can take on many different identities in very quick succession, so you have to figure out which identity in the … 
  13. Things that Arise & Pass Away
     … This is where that image of the mind of as a committee is really useful. We all tend to identify with every voice in the committee. But if you can step back and listen to the different voices, you realize, “Okay, that voice that’s speaking there: I can pretty much figure out who I picked up that idea or that attitude from. I … 
  14. Discernment & Determination
     … So you have to be very careful about who gets admitted into the committee inside and who has a voice in the committee. These are all different factors of discernment that can help you with the remaining factors—like truth. Truth means you make up your mind to do something and you really do it. This is one of the qualities of the great … 
  15. Goodness Comes from Heedfulness
     … It’s as if you’ve got to committee in there—or it’s more like the Chicago City Council. Some of the people will go along for a little while and then do what they can to subvert your decisions. So you’ve got to watch out for this. And be watchful. The Pali word for this is appamada, heedfulness, realizing that there … 
  16. The Kamma of Self & Not-Self
     … So what are some skillful uses of self? A while back there was a book, called The Wisdom of the Ego, in which a psychologist talked about healthy ego functions—the ego being the part of your self-committee in the mind that negotiates among your desires, and between your sense of what you should do and what you want to do. And although … 
  17. If at First You Don’t Succeed
     … He’s already scouted out the territory and said, “This is the best thing you can aim at.” It’s up to you to decide, in your committee of the mind, whether the members all on board with going to this goal. Some of them will be, but a lot of them won’t. They have other agendas. So that’s the next aspect … 
  18. How to Save the World
     … As we were saying this morning, it’s as if there’s a committee in there and they have all kinds of agendas. But if you approach the committee as a person centered, well-nourished, energized through the meditation, it’s a lot easier to sort through the issues to see which voices you want to identify with or at least take up with … 
  19. Negotiating with the Committee
    The Buddha made an important distinction between physical seclusion and mental seclusion. You might be sitting alone under a tree, alone in the sense that there’s nobody else around you, but there can be a lot of people in your mind. He said, all your cravings, all your thoughts of past and future, all that conversation going on in the mind: It’s … 
  20. Developing Discernment
     … You’ll find that the committee of the mind has some members who are happy to be here, and other members who are not. This is why the Buddha says there are two duties that you *do *as you get the mind to settle down with right mindfulness and into right concentration: One is to keep track of the object you’re determined to … 
  21. Unsubscribe from the World
     … It’s as if you have a whole committee of voices inside, with all different kinds of ideas, and you have to sort them out. Who are the ones you can trust? Some of the ones that come from outside you can trust, some you can’t. Some of the ones that come from inside you can trust and some you can’t, but … 
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