Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- The Six Properties… The forest ajaans make the point that you don’t have try to understand all five aggregates, all at once. You find one that really seems to be the key to everything else, and you focus there. And often the key aggregate, as they explain it, is perception. So as we’re working with the breath, we’re going to perceive the breath in …
- Admirable Friendship… When the Buddha talks about suffering, he starts out with things we’re all familiar with and then he goes into the five clinging-aggregates, which are not so familiar. He says that they’re the actual problem there. So we have to look, “Okay, what is the clinging? What are these aggregates?” It’s not something that would immediately occur to us, that …
- Discernment Performs… You have to notice that sometimes certain insights—insight into the elements, insight into the aggregates—if you use them in the wrong way, you start thinking, “Well, there’s nobody there. It’s just aggregates, just elements.” If there’s nobody here, nobody there, then you start wondering about what use it is to be good to people if there’s no real …
- No Extra Arrows… When the Buddha talks about suffering in the four noble truths, it’s the clinging to the aggregates. Clinging, he says, is desire and passion. It’s focused on form — the form of the body — feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, acts of consciousness. And it comes from craving. Craving, too, is desire and passion. The relationship between the two is like this: The word for …
- Respect Opens Possibilities… The Buddha identifies it as clinging to the aggregates. The aggregates are activities we indulge in. We chanted about them just now. Form—your body is constantly in action. Feeling—feelings of pleasure, pain, feelings of neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions—the labels you apply to things, the meanings you give to them, how you identify them. Thought fabrications—the way you put ideas …
- The Noble Truths of the Breath… It’s the five clinging aggregates. And what are those aggregates? One of them is perception. And a good way to see how you cling to perceptions is to experiment with new perceptions, to see where they are useful. This is why we listen to the Dhamma to begin with. The Buddha gives us new ways of perceiving our lives to try on. And …
- Always Willing to Learn… The Buddha defines suffering as clinging to the aggregates. The clinging there is desire and passion. When you comprehend that, you comprehend suffering. Then the cause of suffering is craving, which is also desire and passion. So what’s the difference between suffering and its cause? Well, the word for “craving” also means “thirst.” The word for “clinging” also means “feeding.” You see the …
- The Kamma of Self & Not-self… What is this “me,” what is this “I” made up of? Five types of things, the five aggregates. The Buddha never says that the aggregates are what you are. He says they’re the raw materials that you use to create your sense of self. You take the potential for form, the potential for feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness, all of which come from …
- The Karma of Pleasure… As the Buddha says, it’s a pleasure that doesn’t come under the five aggregates. It’s known by a consciousness that doesn’t come out of the five aggregates, and isn’t known by means of the sense media. That’s something really special. But the only way to find that is, first, to develop this ability to create a sense of …
- What’s Relative, What’s Constant… He says you experience the aggregates because of this intentional activity. The process of fabrication here and now takes the potential for form, the potential for feeling, perceptions, thought-constructs, even consciousness, and turns it into actual aggregates. I was listening to a Dhamma talk the other day in which someone was saying, “Consciousness has to be unconditioned. After all, how could one conditioned …
- A Concentration Diet… It starts with: “What is one?” “What is two?” “What is three?” and it goes all the way up to, “What is ten?” For example, “What is four?” The four noble truths. “What is five?” The five aggregates. “Eight?” The noble eightfold path. The most interesting answer, though, is the answer to, “What is one?” And that is, “All beings subsist on food.” And …
- Question Your Perceptions… The forest ajaans talk often about how, with all the five aggregates, you don’t have to analyze all five at once. Choose one. As you really get to know that one, that knowledge spreads to the others. I think it was Ajaan Chah who said that his own efforts at gaining discernment really got going when he started looking into this issue of …
- A Post by the Ocean… After all, you’re building your path here out of what are called aggregates. And as the Buddha said, all these aggregates are inconstant, stressful, and not-self. When we’re resisting that to some extent, we know that we can’t ultimately make our state of concentration permanent. But what we are doing is giving the mind the strength it needs to let …
- Only Natural… As the Buddha said, when we’re suffering, it’s the five clinging-aggregates. And how do we identify ourselves? We identify ourselves with the five clinging-aggregates. We’re identifying ourselves with suffering. But there’s an alternative. Our problem is that we identify with suffering and we don’t imagine any other way. The Buddha’s allowing us to imagine something else …
- No One Size Fits All… from the five aggregates, the six sense media, the six properties, dependent co-arising. A monk once went to see a several different arrahants, one at a time, and asked them, “What were you focused on when you gained insight and gained awakening?” One monk said the five aggregates, another one said the six properties, another said the six sense media, and another said …
- Skillful Selfing… The path that did work was to focus his desires on taking these aggregates, these raw materials from which we create our sense of self—the form of your body, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness: taking these things that we normally grab onto to create a sense of self in a particular becoming, and turning them into a path. Even though there may …
- Tranquility & Insight… Here the questions are: “How do you regard fabrications? How do you investigate them? And how do you see them with insight?” You can regard fabrications as the five aggregates: There’s form, feeling, perception, fabrication itself, and consciousness. Or there’s another list called the three fabrications: bodily fabrication—which is the breath; verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation; and mental fabrication—perceptions …
- Perplexity… clinging to the five aggregates. If you go out to ask the average person on the street, “What’s suffering?”—it’s very rare that you’d would find someone who would answer, “the five clinging-aggregates.” They’d have all kinds of other ideas. To comprehend suffering, you have to really look carefully at it to see that this is what lies at …
- Mastering Causality… That’s what the first noble truth is all about, clinging to the five aggregates: clinging to the form of the body, clinging to your feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, or consciousness. When you stop clinging to these aggregates, then even though they’re still impermanent and there still may be some stress in them, it doesn’t weigh on the mind. The bridge has …
- Eyes in the Back of Your Head… You can apply this principle either in the concentration itself or when you’ve come out of concentration and are looking at things in terms of the five aggregates. In the concentration, the Buddha recommends developing the ability to step back from your concentration a bit. The image he gives is of a person sitting who’s watching a person lying down, or a …
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