Why You Are Always at War with Yourself (And How to Negotiate Peace)

Why you are always at war with yourself and how to negotiate peace. We hear so much about how the ego is a bad thing, selfish, narrow-minded, grasping, threatened, that we forget that the concept of ego in western psychology is actually quite positive. It's your negotiator inside, between the things you actually want to do and the things that you should want to do. In western psychology, there's a real conflict between those two things, a conflict that never really gets resolved. In the Buddha's teachings though, it's quite different. The shoulds are designed your genuine happiness. You should try to comprehend suffering. You should try to abandon its cause. You should try to realize the cessation of suffering. You should try to develop the path. Those are your shoulds. And where are they aimed? They're aimed at true happiness. In western culture, the shoulds are not necessarily aimed at your happiness, which is why there's always an internal conflict. The Buddha's shoulds though are friendly shoulds, which means your inner negotiation is a lot easier. Still, you have to negotiate. Your greed, aversion and delusion want to pull you off in different directions away from the path. So you need a healthy set of ego functions. In other words, internal skills for negotiating so that you can get everybody on the same page. After all, every voice in your mind wants happiness. It's just that they have very different notions of what that's going to be and how it's going to be found. Healthy ego functions are those that enable you to educate everybody inside until they realize that the Buddha was right. True happiness is found through training yourself in virtue, concentration and discernment. It's something you can do. This is probably one of the most important parts of the Buddha's teachings. His emphasis on what human beings can do for themselves. You look at the other teachings of his time. So many of them said, well, there's only so much you can do. In many cases, they even said, there's nothing you can do at all. Some said that action is unreal. Some said that action is real, but it's motivated by forces that are outside of you. So you're totally not in control. As for ideas of right and wrong, some of them said that they're pure social constructs. There are no shoulds at all in nature. That's what they would say. But as the Buddha would say, all these teachings leave you unprotected because you have to create your own protection through trusting in your power to choose what is right, to choose what is skillful, and to follow through with your skillful choices so that you aren't overpowered by your unskillful notions. So the important part of this negotiator inside, this healthy ego function inside, is that you be confident that yes, the battles are real, but they can be won. None of us are so original that we can come up with a defilement that nobody's ever had before, that nobody's ever solved before. So we should approach the whole negotiation here with good humor. In fact, humor is one of the healthy ego functions that Western psychology points out. And it's there in the Buddha's teachings. The Buddha doesn't talk about it much, but he displays it. There's the humor in the origin stories for the rules in the Vinaya. And there's humor in some of the suttas. And the tradition has been passed down. Ajaans of the forest tradition, even the really fierce, serious ones like Ajaan Mahabhuva and Ajaan Mun had very sharp senses of humor. Ajaan Mahabhuva apparently once gave a dhamma talk on people's addictions to lottery that had his preceptor laughing so hard he couldn't stop. Ajaan Mun liked to play with words, with a point. And he had a good sense of humor about his defilements, which is what humor is for. It's useful when you see your defilements to be able to laugh at them, not in a nasty way, but just in a good-humored, this-is-the-way-human-nature-is kind of way. It's always good to have that attitude at the back of your mind. When you're confident that this battle can be won, then you can approach the whole thing in good humor. But there are other functions, other skills you're going to need as well. The first one in Western psychology is called anticipation. In Buddhism, it's called heedfulness. You realize that your actions now are going to have consequences down the line. So you want to make sure that you can anticipate what the consequences of your actions will be, and aim at actions that will give good long-term results. It's based on this that you develop a quality called compunction, along with appropriate attention. As the Buddha said, heedfulness is the root of all skillfulness. Compunction means that you really do care about the consequences of your actions. You're not apathetic. You're not defeatist. You realize that you can make a choice, and you can make the choices well. You simply don't want to cause any more suffering. You realize that you've suffered enough as it is. So why add more pain onto the pile? Appropriate attention is a matter of looking at your actions, not in terms of whether you like them or not, but in terms of where they're going to lead you. You look at your thoughts. You look at your words. You look at your deeds, in terms of their long-term consequences. This is the voice of the negotiator inside, pointing out that if you really want to be happy, you need to take your actions seriously, not in a grim way, but simply seeing their importance, that you really do want to have long-term happiness. You've had enough of short-term happiness that turns into something else. So whatever you can do to induce the quality of heedfulness is one of your really important skills as a negotiator. The second skill is altruism, realizing that your happiness, if it depends on other people's misery, is not going to last. So, you have to take their happiness into consideration, not that you have to please them all the time. Again, the Buddha's idea of acting in a beneficial way for other people comes down to getting them to observe the precepts, getting them to overcome their greed, aversion, and delusion. You've to think about their happiness as well as yours. There's that scene in the canon. King Pasenadi is one-on-one with his queen Malika, and in a tender moment, he turns to her and asks her, is there anyone you love more than yourself? You know what he's thinking. He wants her to say, yes your majesty, I love you more than myself. If this were a Hollywood movie, that's what she would say. But it's not. This is the Pali canon, where there's no room for foolishness. She says, no, there's nobody I love more than myself. And how about you? Anybody you love more than yourself? More than… The king has to admit that no, there's nobody he loves more than himself. That's the end of that scene. So, the king leaves the palace, goes down to see Buddha, tells him of the conversation, and the Buddha says, you know, she's right. You can search the whole world over and not find anybody you love more than yourself. And in the same way, everybody else loves themselves just as fiercely. The conclusion he draws is not that it's a dog-eat-dog world. He says that when you realize this, you should never harm anyone or get them to do any harm. In other words, think about their well-being, take their well-being into consideration as you look for your own. So again, we have a skillful quality, compassion, that's rooted in heedfulness. This too is one of your skills as a negotiator, reminding the voices in the mind, the short-sighted ones, that if you just do what you want without thought for other people, it's going to lead to suffering down the line. The third skill is suppression, your ability to say no to yourself and make it stick. In Buddha's vocabulary, this is restraint as you hold yourself back from doing things you know are going to be harmful. It's paired with what's called sublimation in Western psychology. The Buddha doesn't have a term for it, but he does provide you with alternative forms of happiness. Think of his image of the six animals. Say, you're trying to practice sense restraint. You need to have a sense of well-being in the body to maintain that restraint, so you develop mindfulness of the body based on the breath. In the image of six animals, you've got a bird, a monkey, a dog, a hyena, a crocodile, and a snake. You tie them to leashes and you tie the leashes together. If you don't have a post to tie the leashes to, they're going to pull and pull and pull in different directions. The monkey will want to go up a tree. The bird will want to fly up in the sky. The crocodile will want to go down into the river. That's probably where they're all going to go. The crocodile will just drag them down into the river where they'll all drown. That's sense restraint without any solid foundation. In other words, it's no restraint at all in the end. But if you have a post, which he identifies with mindfulness of the body, you tie all the leashes to the post and pull and pull and pull as they might. They're not going to go anywhere. They're going to end up lying down next to the post. So you have a sense of well-being in the body as you go through the day to provide you with an alternative pleasure to sneaking little pleasures from sights, sounds, etc. This is one of the reasons why we work so much with the breath. Make the breath comfortable. Make the breath interesting. Here it is. One of the primary properties of your body. And it can be used for all kinds of good things. To create a sense of lightness when you feel heavy. A sense of heaviness when you feel lightheaded. It can improve the circulation in the different parts of your body. It can provide you with a sense of well-being that spreads through all the nerves out to the pores. It's not only pleasant, but it's also just fascinating. This element you have that we, as a society, are not very good at explaining or talking about. So open your imagination. See what you can do with this breath element. Ajaan Phuong tells the story of a nun who was studying Ajaan Lee's method of breath meditation. She'd gone off on her own and found that she could breathe in a certain rhythm that would get her body to hop up in the air about a foot. She told this to Ajaan Phuong. He tried it out. And he found that he could do it too. He had a group of people studying meditation with him. So one night, he had them hop, hop, hop, hop across the room. They turned around, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop back. After a while, he realized this was going nowhere. But it's interesting that you can get the breath to do that. So there are all kinds of ins and outs to the breath. It's not just in and out breathing. There are lots of things you can do with this breath element. The more you take an interest in it, the more grounded you're going to be, and the more you're going to enjoy being here. It's not just being comfortable and at ease with the breath. You're learning something about how the mind relates to the body, how your awareness relates to the body, how simply moving the spot of your awareness in the body can change things in the body, how changing your perceptions of the breath will change the way you breathe. There's a lot to learn right here. Even though you're saying no to a lot of the ways you would look for pleasure in the senses, you've got an alternative that's a lot more interesting because it allows you to look at the way your senses process things, the way your mind processes sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, creates narratives out of them, creates worldviews out of them, creates all kinds of attachments out of them. In some cases, these narratives are actually useful, but in a lot of cases, they can cause harm. So, you've got the opportunity to learn a lot right here as you try to direct your desires for pleasure outside into a different kind of pleasure, a different kind of happiness inside. If you do this with good humor, you find that you have an infinite capacity to learn. It's our impatience. We want everything to be just the way we want it to be right now. Right now, that gets in the way of a lot of learning. Sometimes, you have to sit with something for quite a while, poking here, poking there before it's going to reveal its nature. But if you can do this with good humor and that's the necessary element in this negotiator inside, you can learn a lot. The negotiations will go a lot better until you finally do arrive at that happiness that everybody wants, everybody inside your mind wants, whether they know it or not. This is what we all want, a happiness that doesn't change, a happiness that doesn't let us down. It can be found through our own efforts, following a path that, as the Buddha said, is admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end. It's good all around. Skills to take with you. When we come out to the monastery like this, we come to a place cut off from human society. Not totally cut off because there are other human beings here, but it's a different kind of society, a society where the bottom line is the practice, the growth of the mind, the growth of the heart, the development of mindfulness, concentration and discernment. That's not the bottom line in the world at large, but it is the bottom line here because the mind needs this kind of environment to develop its best qualities. When we live in the world, we tend to pick up the values of the world. And what do those values say? They say it doesn't matter what you do as long as you succeed, as long as you get ahead, as long as you get money. That's the important thing. People try to dress these values up to sound a little better than that, but that's basically what they come down to. And when you live with people who hold to these values and you don't have a good solid basis within yourself to withstand that kind of thinking, you've got to give in. You tend to follow along with them whether you like it or not. But the Buddha teaches us that true happiness isn't found that way. He says that true happiness comes from developing good qualities in the mind. It has nothing to do with money, nothing to do with status, nothing to do with the opinions of other people. It's something totally inner and it has to come from inner goodness. This is revolutionary because the world tells you if you want to get ahead, you have to develop all sorts of qualities you can't really be proud of. The qualities you need to stab people in the back, make a quick buck, take advantage of other people's weaknesses. But the Buddha says that true happiness requires you to develop things like persistence, perseverance, endurance, integrity, mindfulness, kindness, reliability. These are things you can be proud to develop. There's a dignity to the practice that you don't find in the world outside. But if you're living in a worldly environment, what the Buddha says sounds like a dream. Lots of nice ideas but not all that realistic. That's why you need places like this where the values that the Buddha teaches are realistic. It's what life here at monastery is all about. So being here gives the mind a chance to develop these qualities and to see that they really do lead to happiness. They really are important, much more so than the things the world holds to be important. This is why physical seclusion is so essential. You get in touch with yourself out here. You get in touch with what's really important in your life. The issues of birth, aging, illness and death become very large out here. In the world, the ordinary world, these issues get shunted aside. People don't have time for them. And so when aging, illness and death do hit, it's like a big surprise. The mind isn't prepared. People get blown away even though everyone knows deep down inside that these things have to happen. Yet when you live in a society that doesn't give you time to look at these things, to reflect on them and to prepare for them, you really get knocked to pieces when they come. So you need a chance to get out and look at what's really important in your life. And how you're going to prepare for these things. That's what the meditation is all about. Developing a good solid basis in the mind that can withstand these things when they come. The image the Buddha gives for this basis is of a stone column, eight cubits long. Four cubits are buried down in the ground in a good solid mountain. Four cubits are above ground. When the wind comes, the column doesn't shake at all. It doesn't even shiver. No matter how strong the wind, no matter which direction it's coming from, the stone column stays put. That's the kind of mental state you need in order to withstand these things. And that's what you develop in the course of the meditation. Then as we all know, it's important that you don't cultivate this skill only while you're here, this place of physical solitude, but that you also take this skill back with you. Many times people come to the monastery and say that it's such a relief for the mind to be out here and they'd like to take that state of mind with them when they go back. Well, you can't take a state of mind like that with you. It's a result. What you can take back is the skill, the cause of that state of mind. It's not just the environment that allows it to develop. People can come out here and still have their minds a total mess. What makes the difference is that you learn how to make use of the environment to develop the skills you need to straighten out things inside. The skills are the things you can take back with you when you go home. The skillful attitudes, the skillful approaches to bringing the mind under control, giving it a sense of stability inside. These are the important parts of the practice that train the mind to stand on its own two feet. When you ask yourself, where is the best place to meditate? Your answer should be right here, wherever you are. That's the best place. That's the ideal. But as you're getting started, you're like a child learning to ride a bicycle. You need training wheels. You need help. You can't just jump on the bicycle and ride off with a perfect sense of balance. You use the training wheels. You use the community. You use the peaceful environment to help get the mind in the proper attitude. Then you try to develop your own skills so that when the training wheels are taken away, you can ride with ease and won't fall over. What are some of these skills? The most basic one is just learning to focus the mind on one thing and to withstand any temptation to let it go. This is an important skill you need whatever your work is. If you can concentrate on your work and don't let the distractions get in your way, work gets done and it gets done properly. It's a solid piece of work and not just little bits and pieces that happen to be thrown together because there's a continuity. And when you learn how to focus on one thing like this, when you focus in on the breath, it changes your attitude toward the other thoughts that come into the mind. If the mind doesn't have a particular focus, it can wander around from thought to thought, not really noticing what it's doing and not having a sense of direction. It gets lost going in the wrong direction because every direction is just the direction where it's flowing. But when you give it something to hold on to, you have a sense of direction. Then you can see how some things pull you away and some things pull you back. It's like the difference of being on the earth and being out in outer space. When you're on the earth, there's a definite sense of orientation. There's north, south, east and west. You've got the earth as a reference point. But if you're out in outer space, you don't know which way is up, which way is down, north, south, east, west. They have no meaning out there. And the mind is just adrift in the stellar currents. But when you're on the earth, when you've got a good basis, then you have a sense that this way is north, this way is south. You have a sense of the direction you want to go and you know when you're heading in that direction and when you're not. That's why it's crucial to have a center for the mind. But to maintain that center, you have to enjoy it. If you don't, it simply becomes one more burden to carry in addition to your other burdens. And the mind will keep dropping it when your other burdens get heavy. This is why we spend so much time working on the skill of playing with the breath, making it comfortable, making it gratifying, making it fill your body with a sense of ease. When you have that kind of inner nourishment to feed on, you're less hungry for things outside. You don't need to feed on the words and actions of other people. You don't have to look for your happiness there. When you can develop a sense of inner fullness simply by the way you breathe, the mind can stay nourished no matter what the situation. You can sit in a boring meeting and yet be blissing out. And nobody else has to know. You can watch all the good and bad events around you with a sense of detachment because you have no need to feed on them. It's not that you're indifferent or apathetic, simply that your happiness doesn't have to go up and down with the ups and downs of your life. You're not in a position where people can manipulate you for you're not trying to feed on what they have to offer you. You've got your own source of food inside. At the same time, when you have an inner center like this to hold on to, you develop a sense of dissociation from the thoughts that arise within the mind. You realize when you're focused on the breath and a thought comes into the mind. It's not necessarily you thinking or your thought. And you're not necessarily responsible for it. You don't have to follow it and check it out or straighten it out. If it comes in half formed, just let it go away. Half formed. You don't have to be responsible for it. This is another important skill. Because if you can learn to step back from the thoughts and emotions that come into the mind and not say that this is my thought or this is my emotion, then you can really choose which ones are worth holding on to, which ones should be explored, and which ones should be let go, that you don't have to deal with at all. Some people may say that that's irresponsible, that you've got to check everything out. Well, that's just what they say. What do they know? That's the kind of attitude you have to develop. As the Buddha said, his own practice really got started in the right direction when he divided his thoughts into two types. Skillful and unskillful. What this means is having the ability to step back from your thoughts and look at them, not in terms of their content, but in terms of where they take you. If you have thoughts motivated by greed, anger, delusion, passion, aversion, confusion, boredom, where do they take you? Well, they don't take you to Nibbana, that's for sure. They don't take you where you want to go, so you decide to dissociate from them. You don't deny that they exist, for that would just drive them underground. You admit their existence, but you realize that you don't have to follow them. You can let them go and they pass away from the mind. Meanwhile, you latch onto more skillful thinking, either that, or you learn how to let go of thoughts and just keep the mind still where it doesn't have to think. This is where you gain a sense that you're more in control of your mind, that you're not subject to everything that comes passing through. Most people's minds are like bus stations. Everyone who wants to go through the bus station has the right to do so, and they can do all kinds of weird things while they're there in the bus station. Mugging people, having sex in the restroom stalls, shooting up heroin back in the dark corners. That's what most people's minds are like. You've got to make up your mind to turn your mind into a home, a place where you have the right to let thoughts in or not let them in as you like, or let them just go passing on. You can close the windows and doors and let in only your friends. You're more in control, and when you have a home like that, you can settle down and be at ease and at peace at home, at ease and at peace with your own mind. So this is an important skill to take with you wherever you go. It's not a skill that you use only while you're sitting here with your eyes closed. One of the essential techniques you need in this skill is the ability to breathe through your thoughts, because when thoughts come heavy, when they come really strong, they don't just affect the mind, they affect the body as well. That's why when anger comes, you have a strong sense that you have to get it out of your system, because it's gotten into the body, into the way you breathe, into the patterns of tension in the body. It builds up and gets hard to bear, so you feel you've got to get it out. Most people think that the way to get it out is to say something or do something under the power of the anger, but that doesn't solve anything at all. When we're with our breathing practice, we learn how breathe through that pattern of tension in the chest or the belly and let it disperse throughout the body. Once it's dispersed, it loses its power. You feel less oppressed by it. Then you can look at the situation from a calm vantage point and decide what should be done. Do you have to say something? Is this the best time to say it? Or is it best left unsaid? How will people react if you talk now? Should you wait till a later time? You can gauge these things clearly, which you can't do when you've got a sense of weightiness or oppression from the anger inside the body. So you breathe through the patterns of tension in the body. It's an important skill you use not only while you're here, but also while you're out working, while you're dealing with your family, whatever you're doing in the world at large. It's important to realize that the skills of meditation are for use not only while you're on the cushion or sitting with your legs crossed, and your eyes closed. They are basic skills for governing your own mind, looking after your own mind, administering the ways your mind works, whether you're sitting with your eyes closed or open, whether you're alone or dealing with people, because it's the same mind. The defilements that arise in the course of your practice and the defilements that arise in the course of daily life are basically the same defilements. Sometimes in society, the defilements appear more unexpectedly, with more force and a greater sense of urgency. But they come down to the same thing. If an unskillful state arises in the mind and you treat it unskillfully, then you just go wherever it leads you. But if you learn how to deal skillfully, even with the unskillful things that come, to deal skillfully with feelings of passion, feelings of anger, your own misunderstandings, you can take the raw material of life and turn it into something fine. As Ajaan Lee once said, a person with intelligence takes whatever gets sent his or her way and makes something good out of it. This is the attitude you've got to adopt because we live a life full of the power of kamma, old kamma and new. You can't do anything about old kamma. You have to accept it like a good sport. That's why you practice equanimity. But as for the new kamma you're creating right now, you can't practice equanimity with that. You have to be very concerned about what you're putting into the system because you realize that this is the only chance you get to make the choice. Once the choice is made and it gets put into the system, then whatever the energy, positive or negative, that's the sort of energy you're going to have to experience. So pay attention. What are you putting into the system right now? This is the important thing to focus on. Whatever other people do to you, whatever arises in your body in terms of pains, illnesses, aging, death or whatever, that's old kamma that you simply have to learn to take with good humor, with a sense of equanimity. As for what you're putting into the system right now, that's serious business. That's where your attention and efforts should be focused. So the skills you pick up from the Buddha's teachings are not just techniques for silent meditation. They're skillful attitudes, skillful approaches you develop to what's important in life. You want to approach life as a skill to realize that there's always the possibility of doing things skillfully. You may not have perfected it, but you don't beat yourself for not having the perfect response to every situation. You realize that there's always the opportunity to learn. You make mistakes, you learn from them. This is a normal part of life and a wise way of living is to learn from your mistakes and resolve not to repeat them. Learn from what you've done. Notice when you do things correctly. Notice when you make mistakes. And take that information to adjust your patterns of behavior. Some people come to the practice and say, well, this is the kind of person I am. I've just got to be this way. That attitude closes the door on the practice entirely. You start from where you are, but you have to be willing to change. If people couldn't change, if they had to stay the way they are, the Buddha's teaching would be in vain. There would be no reason to have the teachings because they're all about transformation. They're all about learning, developing, changing the way you approach life. From the Buddhist point of view, accepting yourself means not only admitting where you are, but also accepting that you have the potential to change. As your approach becomes more and more skillful, you're doing less and less harm to yourself, less harm to others, less harm to both. You find that you live in a way that brings more benefits for yourself, more benefits for others, more benefits for both. It may take more energy, more attention, but it's a much more worthwhile way of living. It's like being an expert carpenter. You've got various ways of approaching the problems that arise in the mind. You realize that there are all kinds of problems and there are many ways of dealing with them. If you try just one approach, it's like having a toolbox full of nothing but saws. You can't build anything with that. You can't be called a decent carpenter at all. But when you realize that there are ways of dealing with different situations that arise and through your own powers of observation, you discover which ways work for you, which ways get the right results for you. That's called having a full toolbox with a wide range of tools. And when you have those tools at hand, you can stay anywhere. You can stay in a monastery, you can stay in a hospital, you can stay at work, at home, in this country, in another country, this world, the next world, this life, the next. The tools stay with you once you've developed them. So focus on the practice as a way of collecting tools, developing skills, both in terms of techniques in the meditation and whole attitudes toward your life. That's the most worthwhile use of your time. Those are the best things to take with you when you go.