Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- Meaningful Freedom… It, too, is made out of aggregates. These aggregates give you some resistance, but they also open some opportunities. Think of the principle of causality that the Buddha taught. In some cases, the effects arise together with the causes, and they disappear when the causes disappear. In other cases, if the cause comes, the effect can come later. The cause disappears, and the effect …
- Signs Along the Road… The aggregates are all right here, and this is a really good place to watch the aggregates. This is one of the best things you can do with them: to create a state of concentration. You get to see subtleties in the aggregates that you wouldn’t have seen before if you just approached them through your ordinary awareness. Here you’re still, in …
- Neither Here nor There… the five aggregates, each of which you’ve been clinging to, and the clinging is suffering. Think of the questionnaire that the Buddha would give about the five aggregates. Are they constant or inconstant? They’re inconstant. And it’s important that you understand that term as inconstant. It’s not just impermanent, because some impermanent things could be good. An impermanent illness would …
- Skills to Make a Difference… If you shoot great distances, you see that what you’re experiencing now in terms of the aggregates is going to apply to whatever aggregates you experienced in the past and will experience in the future. You take that to heart. **When you fire shots in rapid succession, you see where the mind is suffering and where it’s causing itself suffering. In other …
- The Dhamma Wheel… In the case of the first truth, suffering is basically boiled down to clinging to the five aggregates. The Buddha never said that life is suffering. That’s one of those fake Buddha quotes. He said something a lot more useful, to pinpoint exactly where the suffering is. It’s not because of unpleasant sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations that we suffer …
- Encouragement… But to summarize, what do they have in common? The five clinging-aggregates. This is where the analysis gets impersonal and unfamiliar. And part of the problem is that translation, “aggregates.” There’s got to be a better translation. It’s basically groups of different actions. We’re clinging to certain ways of acting, clinging itself is a kind of action, and that’s …
- Constructing & Deconstructing… Where there’s the pain, which part of the experience is the body? Which part is the actual pain, and which part is the perception? If you look at this in terms of the establishings of mindfulness, you’ve got body, feeling, mind, and then mental qualities, in which case the mental qualities here might be the categories of the five aggregates. How are …
- The Path Is in the Details… When the Buddha talks about experience being composed of the five aggregates, each aggregate is a potential coming in from the past that then gets actualized through your fabrication of the present moment out of those raw materials. There’s a potential for form, for feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness, but with your present intention you choose how to put those things together and turn …
- Right Inner Speech… This is how you learn how to become skillful with your thinking, skillful with your aggregates. We’re born with these aggregates and we’ve been making a mess out of them. Now’s the time to sort them out and try some new ways of approaching them so that you can handle them in line with their truth, in a way that’s …
- The Fangs of Conceit… Where is the suffering? He lists different things that we suffer from and then he points out that they all basically come down to clinging to the aggregates. How do you catch yourself clinging? What are these aggregates? You have to ferret that out. They’re basically the movements of the mind and things coming up in the body as you sense the body …
- The Middle Way… specifically, the suffering that comes from craving, the suffering in clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. All the different kinds of suffering in world that really weigh on the mind come down to clinging to any one of these five aggregates or any combination of them. So when you see the suffering simply as that—an example of …
- Four Noble Questions… When you ask yourself what’s the suffering right now, where’s the stress, he tells you to look right there, at the five clinging-aggregates, so that you’re not just casting around and having to reinvent the Dhamma wheel every time you ask the question. How are you going to see these aggregates? When you develop the path. That’s why we …
- Concentration… You learn about the five aggregates in a hands-on way by maintaining your concentration. So as you learn how to maintain it in lots of different situations, you learn lots of useful things about the mind. You learn about the aggregates, you learn about which ones are skillful and which ones are not. You learn how to develop skillful fabrications and abandon unskillful …
- Refuge in the Dhamma… the five clinging aggregates. Now, those are not personal things. When you think about your thoughts, or your mind states in terms of aggregates, that way of thinking helps to pull you out of your narratives. You see the mind state as an activity. There’s a feeling going into it, a way of breathing that goes into it, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Seeing things …
- A Larger Perspective… The same goes with all the aggregates. As you feel them from the inside, it’s your particular sensation, with your particular perceptions. We each have our little own inner worlds like this that we have to sort out. And if we don’t sort them out, what happens? We just keep coming back again and rubbing up against one another again and bumping …
- Tuning-in to the Breath… In one of the suttas, the Buddha says that all the different khandhas, all the different aggregates that make up experience as a whole, have to get shaped into aggregates by the process of fabrication. In other words, there’s a potential for a form, a potential for a feeling, potential for perception, fabrication, consciousness; and the act of fabricating is what turns these …
- Samsara… There’s an element of intention in all of these aggregates. We create them and then latch onto them. We set ourselves on fire with them. You might make an analogy of building a big bonfire to burn ourselves. It keeps burning us and yet we keep adding more fuel. We complain about how hot it is and how much it hurts when we …
- The Skill of Letting Go… earth, water, wind, fire, space, consciousness; the five aggregates, the four formless states, consciousness itself—anything imaginable that your consciousness could lbe dependent on, that you could be clinging to—he tells him to let go. Anathapindika starts to cry, and Ananda basically says, “Get a grip! Are you sinking?” Anathapindika says, “No! I’m not sinking. It’s just that in all these …
- Time & Place… There’s a similar incident where the Buddha is talking about how the five aggregates are not-self, and a monk in the assembly says to himself, “Well, if the five aggregates are not-self, then what self is going to be affected by what’s done by not-self?” In other words, it’s the old question: “If there’s no self then …
- One Person… The Buddha talks about how the five aggregates are not-self, the six sense-media are not-self, yet when it comes to karma: We are the owners of our actions. He said, “Contemplate that for a while.” In many ways, the aggregates are the results of our actions, the results of choices we’ve made, but we have to be responsible for the …
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