Your Committee of Addicts

When the Buddha describes suffering, it’s as if he’s describing an addiction. Suffering is not a something we’re simply on the receiving end of. It’s an activity we’re actively doing. Yet we turn a blind eye to the suffering that comes with our actions. That’s an addiction, and it’s an addiction that’s hard to break.

We all know that the Buddha talks about clinging to the five aggregates. But he also talks about four ways of clinging. These are basically ways in which we put the aggregates together—our sense of our body, our feelings, our perceptions, our thought constructs, our acts of consciousness. We put them together into something that we actively hold on to.

The Buddha’s great insight was that if you’re really serious about going beyond suffering, you can take the different things that you hold on to very tightly, analyze them down into those five aggregates, and see that they’re just activities you’re doing. And none of these particular activities, when taken individually, really amount to anything. You wonder how you could try to establish anything that was really reliable based on them. That’s when you develop dispassion for the whole process.

But first it’s good to get to know how we cling.

One is clinging to sensuality, the pleasure we get out of our sensual fantasies, thinking about how we’d like to have sights like this, or sounds like that, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. Often we get more pleasure out of the fantasies than we do out of the actual things that we then try to find. That’s one thing we really cling to. A lot of people feel that without that, life wouldn’t have any meaning.

One of the monks was talking to one of the workmen the other day. The workman was saying, “In the evening, when you’re hungry, what do you do? Can’t go out and get a hot dog?” As if the prospect of getting a hot dog would make the day worthwhile. We hold on to that.

Then there are views about the world. In the old days, these revolved around views about whether the world was created or not, if it was created with any intention, whether it’s infinite, finite, eternal, not eternal—that kind of thing.

Nowadays, we think more about the political world: lots of really strongly held views about how the world should be run.

Those shade into the third kind of clinging, which is clinging to habits and practices: our ideas about how things should be done— which kind of actions are acceptable, which kinds of actions are not.

Then finally, our sense of our self—who we are, what kind of person we are, what kind of things will make us happy, what kind of things we can do in order to get happy, what our capabilities are. We latch on to these things as if they’re really, really real. And these are the different roles that the mind plays.

This is where the committee of the mind comes from, taking on these different roles. Some members of the committee can think only of sensual pleasures. Others are very attached to their views about the world. Others are very attached to ideas of what should and shouldn’t be done. This includes people who say, “Well, there are no shoulds,” or “There shouldn’t be any shoulds. People should be free to do whatever they want.” We have members like that in the mind.

Then there are all the various things you identify with. Yet what is this act of self-identification? It’s basically a strategy. There’s a sense of you who will enjoy the results of certain actions. Then there’s the you who’s the agent who can or cannot do those actions, and there’s you as the observer and you as the judge. You’ve got lots of different roles inside here.

So when you’re dealing with the committee members, you have to figure out, “Which kind of member is this? What’s the proper treatment for it?” You can’t treat them all alike.

Some of them are more reasonable than others—just like people outside. You have goodwill for everybody, but you can’t treat everybody the same way.

You have some members of your committee who are really sociopaths. They don’t care what the long-term results of your actions are going to be. They want to do what they want to do right here, right now. They have no sense of shame.

It’s important to understand that when the Buddha extols shame as a virtue, he’s talking about the shame that’s the opposite of shamelessness. He’s not talking about the shame that’s the opposite of pride, because he does teach you take a certain amount of pride in doing well in the practice. When he talks about the virtue of shame, he’s talking about the virtue of wanting to behave in a way that looks good in the eyes of the wise. That’s an idea that you find less and less and less in the world at present.

With everybody performing on the Internet, they choose the eyes that they would like to look good in. And often the choice has nothing to do with wisdom at all. Well, you’ve got members of the committee who are like that, too.

In some cases, you can train them, you can show them that it really is not in your best interest to ignore the long-term consequences of your actions. Sometimes they’ll listen; sometimes they won’t.

So, when you’re dealing with your committee members, you have to have a lot of strategies—just as you have to have a lot of strategies when dealing with addicts outside.

Some shameless people will develop a sense of shame after a while. Usually, they’re the type of people who think that the ideas of “should” and “should not” were just meant to keep people suppressed. They want to show their freedom. But what kind of freedom is that? The freedom to follow your defilements?

The defilements are false friends. They promise you all kinds of things, yet then when the bad results come, they run away—like people who get you to break the law and then, when the police come, they run away, and you’re left holding the bag. There are people like that in the world. There are people like that in your mind.

There’s another quality the Buddha talks about together with shame, and that’s a sense of compunction. That’s when you really care about the results of your actions. Developing that compunction is probably one of the best ways of developing a sense of healthy shame: when you see that your actions do have long-term consequences and you finally decide that you do care about yourself down the line in the future, that you have to reap the results of those actions. That’s one way of dealing with the shameless members of the committee.

Then you’ve got the members that have very strong views about the world. They hold on to them very tightly. A lot of them, the ones that lead people to do unskillful things, come from a lack of imagination. You see this with addicts outside. You can tell them what should be done, what’s for their true health, their true well-being—and they just can’t imagine themselves doing it. They know it would be good for them, but they just can’t imagine themselves doing it.

So, in cases like that, you’ve got to help their imagination.

The same way inside: You have to develop your imagination inside that, yes, you can do this. I know a lot of people who say, “I can’t see myself doing the advanced parts of the practice.” Well, who you will be as the practice develops keeps changing. Your talents will change. Your abilities will change as you develop them.

It’s like a scrawny person saying, “I can’t imagine myself lifting heavy weights.” Well, you don’t start out lifting the heavy weights when you’re scrawny. You lift the lighter ones, and you gradually build up. When your muscles grow, you can lift the heavier weights.

Or if you’re learning how to play the piano: You can’t imagine yourself playing Beethoven in the beginning, but you work on it bit by bit by bit, step by step, step by step, and you find that you become a different person, a different piano player. You find you can play Beethoven.

So, with some members of the committee, you have to take them by the hand and convince them that, yes, you’re not there yet, but, if you follow the steps, you can get there, and you will be a different person.

This is a lot of what the Buddha’s analysis of suffering is all about. Your sense of who you are can grow. It will have to grow as you follow the practice. Some people say, “You shouldn’t see that you’re doing the practice,” that somehow wisdom is doing the practice for you. Well, the Buddha wasn’t one of the people who said that. He has you take responsibility for the practice. And as you look carefully at what you’re doing and accept responsibility for what you’re doing, you find that you can do things you couldn’t do before, and you, too, become a different person.

Which is why the Buddha said to take your sense of identity apart in terms of those aggregates. They’re activities—things you’ve been doing. And you don’t have to keep on doing them. You can do something else. Do something better. You’re taking responsibility as a conscious agent and, in doing so, your sense of yourself becomes more fluid and opens more possibilities.

So you don’t try to drop your sense of self right away. You just allow it to change, seeing that it’s made out of actions, and so you change your actions.

It’s in this way that you can use the Buddha’s teachings on the aggregates and the four forms of clinging to learn how to deal with all the different members of the committee inside. Learn how to identify them, which type they belong to, and then you get a sense of what strategies you want to do with the different ones. You can’t follow the same strategy with everybody.

It’s part of the range of skills that you develop as you practice. And it’s in the course of developing these skills that you really do come to comprehend suffering. When you comprehend suffering, the Buddha said, you comprehend all the other factors of the path—all the other noble truths.

So, look at your addictions—the things you like to do but are actually causing you suffering. Learn how to admit the fact that they are causing suffering—and that you don’t have to do them. That’s the essence of the path.