Non-Reactive Judgment
I received a letter today from someone who’s having a problem with his inner critic, basically asking, “How do you get the inner critic to shut up?”
That’s not the solution. We all need an inner critic to pass judgment on what we’re doing as we practice, to get an idea of what’s going to be helpful and what’s not. The problem is, our inner critic was trained by somebody else, not by the Buddha. It was trained by the mass media, by our parents, by our friends, by our teachers, by the internet, internet, internet—all of whom have lots of conflicting standards of value. No matter what you do, you can be criticized from somebody’s point of view. When you do something, one set of values will say it’s good, but another will say it’s wrong. Then you try to please the second, and the first set of values will say, “No, that’s wrong.”
What you need is to let the Buddha train your inner critic, the inner voice who passes judgment on what you’re doing, to let you know what’s really skillful and what’s not. This is a theme that runs all the way through the practice from the very beginning, up to the highest levels.
In the beginning, we work with generosity and virtue, and we want to be clear about what we’re doing, when we’re in line with our precepts and when we’re not. I got another phone call this morning from someone who, in a fit of real anger, had intentionally killed a mosquito. Even though it was a very small animal, the fact that she had intentionally killed it scared her. She had talked to some of her Dhamma friends afterwards and they had said, “Oh, don’t think so much about it. You probably didn’t mean to.” She told me, “Well, I did mean to.” The friends who were trying to make her feel good were actually trying to anesthetize her inner critic. But when that happens, your precepts start getting sloppy. When your precepts are sloppy, then your concentration gets sloppy and your discernment gets dishonest. So you have to start training the critic.
The training in meditation begins with some very basic instructions: the passage where the Buddha tells Rahula, “Try to make your mind like earth. Bad things are dumped on the earth, but the earth doesn’t react.” You can extend that to say that perfumes can be poured on the earth, but the earth isn’t pleased.
We’re often told that we try to make the mind non-reactive and non-judging, but it’s more an issue of making it non-reactive for the purpose of judging more clearly. In other words, you learn to see negative things inside you without getting upset, without getting roiled up about them. Accept the fact that they’re there and then ask yourself, in a matter-of-fact way, “What can I do to change them?” You recognize that they’re unskillful, but you’re not knocked over by that fact. If you get knocked over, that means that your sense of self—or more precisely, your prideful sense of self—has gotten in the way. You don’t like to see unskillful things in yourself, so you try to hide them, which is not going to get rid of them. You need to have the mental solidity and stability to say, “Yeah, there are unskillful things in my mind, so now what do I do about them?” You have to have confidence in the Buddha’s teachings, that the tools he gives you can deal with those negative voices and with the negative things going on in your mind in a skillful way.
Then we further train in mindfulness in this way. The Buddha said one of the functions of mindfulness on the path is to remember what right view tells you about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s skillful and what’s not. Then you use your ability to keep that in mind to direct your efforts, to get rid of what’s unskillful and to encourage what’s skillful.
Think of the image of the gatekeeper at the gate to a fortress. The gatekeeper doesn’t just sit there watching people coming in and going out through the gate. He’s not a people-watcher. He’s not like the mannequin policeman that one scholar once said mindfulness functions as—in other words, the simple fact that there’s mindfulness sitting at the gate means that your unskillful mind states are afraid to go in the fortress. If the gatekeeper just sits there and watches whoever comes in and goes out, he’s not going to intimidate anybody. It’s like driving past a mannequin policeman. The first time you see him, you might slow down, but then you notice that it’s not a person, it’s a mannequin. From that point on, you can ignore it with impunity.
It’s the same with your defilements. If you don’t do something about your defilements, they’re going to come in through the gate with impunity whenever they want and take over the place. Remember, the fortress is on a frontier where there are enemies: things that are actually bad for your mind. You’ve got to learn how to recognize them and make sure they don’t come in. After all, mindfulness is coupled with alertness, and then it informs ardency, which again is right effort. So you’re ardent to block the unskillful things as best you can. As the Buddha said, this is what right mindfulness does: It blocks them. Then discernment is what uproots them, gets rid of them totally.
But to develop the ability to judge things clearly as to what they are and what they’re not, you’ve got to get the mind in a non-reactive state. There are times when people coming into the fortress may look like friends but they’re not. They can dress themselves up and disguise themselves in all kinds of Buddhist ways. Laziness in particular can dress itself up like the Dhamma and say, “Well, the Buddha said for you to follow the middle way. It leads to the highest ease, so the path itself should be easeful, too.” But then you think of all the paths you’ve encountered in the world, and there are a lot of paths that go to really beautiful spots, spots where you can rest, gaze peacefully out across a beautiful landscape, but getting there is not easy.
There’s a famous spot in the French Alps where photographers like to go to get spectacular pictures of Mont Blanc, but getting there requires hours and hours of climbing ladders built into cliff faces, and you have to be really fit to get there. It’s just not the case that a path to an easeful goal has to be easeful, too.
Or sometimes we’re told, “Don’t think that you’re doing the path. The path is doing itself. After all, if you think you’re doing the path, then you believe that there’s a self, and that’s wrong view.” Well, the path doesn’t get done that way. Whatever happens to get done would have to depend entirely on your past good kamma. Your present kamma wouldn’t be contributing anything at all—and that wouldn’t get you very far. You need to have a provisional sense of “you” as being responsible for the path, along with the confidence that you are competent to do it and that you will benefit.
That’s why the Buddha talks about the self as its own mainstay, the self as a governing principle. Even when he has Rahula talk to himself about looking at his actions, it’s always: “This action that I want to do…This action I’m doing… This action I have done.” “I,” “I,” “I.” You’re responsible. You’re an agent. Now, you get to a point at the end where you can put the agent down, because it is a strategy, but in the meantime you’ve got to use that strategy all along the way.
So watch out for these voices that tell you that the path is one of ease, and if you push yourself too hard, it’s not the path. Of course, pushing yourself too hard is not the path, but what does “too hard” mean? You’re not going to know until you push yourself.
Think of the image of getting milk out of the cow. You twist the horn and you don’t get any milk. Then you stop twisting the horn and you say, “That’s much more easeful.” But you still don’t get any milk. Yet you need the milk. Remember, the Buddha’s definition of beings is that we’re feeding on things. This is what defines us all the way to arahantship, which means that we’re not going to stop feeding when we first get on the path. We have to continue feeding to nourish the path. We can’t tell ourselves, “I’ll just tell myself not to eat anymore and I’ll be okay.” You’re going to starve and it’s going to be painful. Then you’ll go back and feed some more.
So you want to learn how to feed well. Skillfully. Train your inner critic to be a connoisseur of what kind of feeding is skillful and what kind of feeding is not, what sense of self is skillful and what sense of self is not, keeping in mind that you do have these choices.
You need to train your inner critic because, after all, a lot of the path is about value judgments. Think of what Ven. Sariputta said about the main message of the Buddha’s teachings being the ending of passion and desire. Dispassion is a value judgment: that the processes of fabrication we engage in are not worth it. Before we get there, though, we have to learn how to fabricate the path and to judge what’s on the path and what’s off the path. There’s a right path and there’s a wrong path. There are causes of suffering that respond to simply looking at them with equanimity, but there are others that respond only when you fabricate a fabrication. And to master both of those approaches, you’ve got to develop good powers of concentration.
Think about the Buddha’s teachings on equanimity. There’s ordinary equanimity, which is what we start out with. That’s the equanimity of training the mind to be like earth, but you can’t stop there. To make the mind solid enough so that when it looks at something, it’s not tempted to go for it, it has to have an inner sense of well-being. This is the type of equanimity the Buddha recommends. It requires either the well-being that comes from concentration or the well-being that comes when you see with genuine insight that letting go of something really does lift a burden off the mind. But you’ve got to work on the concentration first to get the equanimity based on a sense of well-being that can look at things and see right through them and not be tempted to go for them.
As for fabrication, the Buddha talks about three kinds: bodily, verbal, and mental. Bodily is your in-and-out breath. Verbal is how you talk to yourself. Mental covers the perceptions you hold in mind—the labels you put on things—and the feelings you focus on. These are the elements that go into how you shape your present experience.
And where are you going to learn about these things? Through the practice of concentration. You focus on the breath: bodily fabrication. You talk to yourself about the breath to make it comfortable: verbal fabrication. You hold perceptions in mind that allow the breath to give rise to a feeling of ease: mental fabrication. It’s by getting hands-on experience with these processes that you can do them well, and only when you do them well can you understand them well enough to let them go.
So both ways of approaching the causes of suffering to arrive at a skillful judgment about them—looking with equanimity and fabricating a fabrication—require that you work on developing concentration.
This is how you train your inner critic to be helpful in these activities—to pass judgment in a way that doesn’t debilitate you. That’s the main problem with most people’s inner critic. It passes judgment and leaves no room for improvement, passes judgment and leaves no room for believing that you can actually do something right. Your inner critic has to be trained to understand that it is possible to put an end to suffering and you can do it. You have to be responsible, but you are capable and you really will benefit.
That’s the other part of the bad inner critic, the part that says, “No matter how hard you try, it’s going to be a waste, so don’t even bother.” That inner critic has to be banished and replaced, not with an uncritical mind, but with a more skillfully critical mind—starting with teaching yourself to be non-reactive. You can see unskillful things in you and you don’t get worked up about them. You recognize them as unskillful and then you try to be very matter-of-fact in overcoming them.
So that’s how non-reactivity functions. It’s a support, not for a non-judging mind, but for a skillfully judging mind, one that knows how to pass judgment in a way that leads to the end of suffering. When its work is done, then you can put it down, but you let it go not because you hate it, but because it’s done all it can for you and you can part ways on good terms.
