Diamond Cutter Discussion Groups

In The Diamond Cutter, Geshe Michael describes a method for tracking imprints and making our good imprints stronger, which he calls a six-time book:

Go out and buy yourself a little daily planner that you can keep in your pocket. Then go back through the forty-six business problems in the last chapter and find three of them that apply to you especially. These are your three biggest problems, and these are what you're going to concentrate on. As a particular problem goes away or reaches a certain state of improvement, replace it with your fourth biggest problem from the list, and so on.

Divide a few pages of the daily planner into six boxes that give you room to write about five or six sentences each. Number the boxes, then write a few words to remind yourself of the solution to the probem, one solution in each of the first three boxes. Then repeat the process for the next three boxes. The first three boxes are to use before lunch; the second three boxes are for after lunch.

In the example below, we are using the antidotes to three of the Ten Bad Deeds, which are a list of our ten worst tendencies according to Buddhist tradition. For a complete list, see the bottom of this page.

Sample page from six-time book, partially completed:

You'll notice that in each box there is a plus, a minus, and a "to do": For the plus you should write something you did in the last 24-48 hours that was a good example of this behavior. For the minus you should write down something you did that was not consistent with the good deed listed.

Geshe Michael writes:

No generalities here — they don't work. We don't want to see "I'm a pretty nice guy to people at work" as an entry. We want to see "At 3:15 on Tuesday I went over to Susan's desk and thanked her in front of everybody else for keeping the inventories so well, so quietly, for the last six months." This kind of conscious tracking of your small successes creates a very strong good imprint in your mind, and you will find, soon, that the problem of people misleading you has started to vanish, so steadily and surely that you haven't even noticed what was happening.

At the end of the day, after you have filled out all six squares, look back and decide what were the three best and worst things you did during the day. Write those items next to the three plus and minus signs at the bottom of the page. Take a moment to be happy about the good strong imprints you created, and quietly resolve to do a better job curbing your worst habits.

You may find you have to free associate a bit when you fill out your six-time book. For example, you may already be very careful about never being dishonest, never even telling a white lie, so you need to look a little farther to stamp out even the slightest tendency toward dishonesty. An example would be a fleeting thought like "I'm glad my boss doesn't know I spent a half hour on Facebook this morning." The goal of keeping a six-time book is to uproot even the slightest bad imprints from your mind, so as your behavior improves, you'll need to learn to work on a more subtle level.