Search results for: "Aggregates"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. Consciousness, Awakened & Not
     … He points out how you start taking apart your practice of concentration in terms of the aggregates, discerning how they all are fabricated — including the aggregate of consciousness — and then you incline the mind to the deathless. But then you have to watch out. The perceptions that incline you in that direction, such as the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self: Those … 
  16. The Buddha’s Wisdom
     … Desire and passion also created those five aggregates that you were clinging to. When there’s no more passion, there’s no more drive to fix those aggregates. You can think of fixing food: As long as you think you’re going to eat, and it’s good food, you fix it. But when you see that it’s bad food and not worth … 
  17. Stick to Your Duties
     … As you try to comprehend the suffering that comes from these things—and there is suffering—you begin to see that it’s focused on perceptions, thought constructs—all of the five aggregates. The aggregates themselves are not the problem. The problem is, as the Buddha says, the desire and passion you feel for them. So you want to figure out: Why is there … 
  18. Worldly Narratives
     … When the Buddha analyzed suffering in his first sermon, he said that it comes down to clinging to the aggregates. In the second sermon, he brought in the aggregates back again, but now as topics of reflection. The process of reflection itself is a mental fabrication. In this case, the reflection was to take these things apart: Exactly what in there is you or … 
  19. Look at Yourself
     … At the same time, in getting the mind to settle down, you’re dealing with what? You’re dealing with the aggregates. You’re going to have to be using the aggregates or the sense media or the properties as the terms you use to analyze things with your discernment. You get to know these things really well—what’s a perception, what’s … 
  20. The Buddha’s Encouragement
     … All the aggregates are right here. They’re all doing their thing. And of course, we want to learn about the aggregates, so this is a good place to learn about them—to see them on their subtle level. There are a couple of passages in the Canon where the Buddha talks about his own problems in getting the mind into concentration. We read … 
  21. Fear & Insecurity
     … So you’re looking at these aggregates not so much as “me” but as something you can do to create good results. Of course, even discernment will involve the aggregates. You use your perceptions and thought-fabrications to probe and ask questions, to figure things out: Why is it that there in the mind you’re creating suffering when you don’t have to … 
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