Inner Negotiating Skills

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 for 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 Maha Boowa and Ajaan Mun—had very sharp senses of humor. Ajaan Maha Boowa 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, Mallika, 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?”

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 alterative 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 kind of good things: to create a sense of lightness when you feel heavy, a sense of heaviness when you feel light-headed. 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 Fuang 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 Fuang, 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.