500 of You

When you meditate, you’ve got the mind training the mind. This is where the image of the committee comes in useful, because there are some parts of the mind that don’t want to be trained. They want to do things their old ways. But you have to remember, the Buddha’s basic message is that your old ways are causing you to suffer. If you really want happiness, you have to change your ways. The part of the mind that realizes that that’s true becomes the trainer inside and it has to deal with all the other members of the committee. The weird thing about this committee is that everybody looks like you. Everybody sounds like you. So you have to be very careful to figure out who’s the genuine you, who’s not.

It’s like that story that they tell about Ven. Culapanthaka. His older brother, Ven. Mahapanthaka, was ashamed of him because Culapanthaka was pretty stupid. He couldn’t even memorize a meditation topic properly.

One day the monks were invited out for a meal. Mahapanthaka didn’t include his brother in the invitation. So Culapanthaka was upset. He went and meditated. His mind entered the jhanas and he developed psychic powers. When the Buddha found out that Culapanthaka was ready to come, he told the sponsor of the meal that there was one more monk who had to come.

The sponsor sent one of his servants to invite Culapanthaka. Culapanthaka made himself into many different versions of himself, 500 Culapanthakas all over the monastery. So the servant went up to one of them and asked him, “Where’s Culapanthaka?” The first one pointed to somebody else. The servant went to the second one, who pointed to somebody else. This kept up for quite a while. So the servant went back and told the Buddha. The Buddha said, “The next time you go, as soon as the first monk is about to open his mouth, grab hold of his arm.” So the servant did, and all 500 Culapanthakas got concentrated back into that one.

You’ve got a committee that’s like that: versions of you all over the place, with all of them pointing to somebody else as being responsible for the problems in the mind. You’ve got to say, “Okay, whoever I’m speaking to right now, that’s the first problem I’ve got to deal with.”

There’s a story they tell. The King of Thailand came to see Luang Pu Dune once and asked him what order the defilements should be dealt with. Luang Pu Dune said, “Whichever one comes up first, deal with that one first.” So whatever is coming up in your mind that’s obstreperous and not going along with the training, you’ve got to deal with that. As you deal more skillfully, convincing everyone in the mind that this is for your own good, then the training gets a lot easier. Things go more smoothly inside.

So no matter how much you may pick up from an outside teacher, you’ve got to have an internal teacher looking after you all the time. Identify with that internal teacher as much as you can. Train that internal teacher so that it’s really good, really skillful, and all the other versions of you will begin to fall in line. When everybody falls in line, that’s when the mind really can be unified. It’s when the mind is unified that it can find a lasting sense of genuine well-being.