Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- Swept Downstream… The Buddha lists five kinds of grass corresponding to the five aggregates. They all get pulled out as you try to grab on to them, as the flood washes you downstream. So where is your island? The Buddha says you try to establish your mindfulness—ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world—so that you can get …
- Discernment in Concentration… For example, the five aggregates: You’ve got the breath, which is form. You’ve got the pleasure that comes with being with the breath: That’s feeling. There’s the perception that holds you with the breath, the image of the breath that you have in mind that helps you stay with the breath: That’s perception. You’re thinking about the breath …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… As the Buddha said, suffering comes from clinging to the five aggregates. And what is our identity made out of? Out of the clinging to those same five aggregates. We identify with our suffering. So of course it’s going to be hard to let go as long as we say, “This is me” and “This is mine.” This is why you have to …
- The Brightness of Life… He doesn’t deny that there’s pleasure to the aggregates, pleasure to the senses. But he points out that if you focus on the pleasures, you’re going to also be subject to the pains, because they keep coming back, coming back. But if you can learn to focus on the drawbacks of these things, learn how to let go of them, the …
- Respect for Concentration… We’re taking the khandhas — these aggregates of body, feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness — and instead of identifying with them, we use them as tools. And as part of the process of mastering them as tools, there will have to be a sense of identification. You identify with the state of concentration, whatever sense of the body is present in the concentration, whatever …
- On the Path of the Breath… Here you’re using one of the aggregates, the aggregate of perception, to help calm the breath down. And you notice that it does also induce a sense of piti, which is usually translated as “rapture,” although in some cases it’s not quite as strong as what we would ordinarily call “rapture.” It’s more a sense of refreshment. The body feels full …
- Thinking About Rebirth… And the teaching on not-selfing doesn’t wait until the very end, when all you see are things in terms of the five aggregates, you see they’re inconstant, stressful, not-self, and you let them go. Actually, the perception of not-self is the shadow side of any perception of self. When you have a definition of who you are, there’s …
- Learning & Respect… One is when you get really still, and you get really good at staying still, you can start observing the still mind to see that it, too, is made out of aggregates. It, too, is subject to inconstancy, stress, not-self. So even in the still mind, you can observe. Or you can observe it as it goes from one state of concentration to …
- Nimble with Your Questions… Ajaan Lee talks of five layers of aggregates—layers of subtlety. Sometimes you deal with one layer, and you think you’ve taken care of everything. Well, there’s another layer and another layer. Kee Nanayon talks of many layers of film in the mind, and each layer of film is going to require a different question to get past it. This is why …
- In Touch with Your Fabrications… When the Buddha defines fabrication, he defines it as taking the potentials for a sense of form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, or consciousness, and then putting them together into actual experiences of those aggregates for the sake of something. Many of our problems come from the fact that we, in the past, did these things for the sake of what we thought was going …
- Doing, Maintaining, Using… Well, these are all different aggregates: feeling, perception, thought constructs. And as you learn how to use them in different ways to deal with different situations, they begin to stand out more clearly because you see them in action, you’ve used them in action. This is when you’re going to gain real insight into them, how you can relate to them in …
- Calm & Insight… There are what are called the five aggregates, the five khandhas: the form of the body as you feel it from within. Feelings, which are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions—the labels you put on things, either as individual words or as images. Thought fabrications, where you put things together and think in full sentences. Then, consciousness which is …
- Dispassion & Delight… As he noted, the Buddha talks about the aggregates being not-self, the sense-spheres being not-self—but then there’s that passage we chant again and again: “I am the owner of my actions.” I’m responsible for these things. As the Buddha himself put it, if we say simply that all action leads to stress—because all actions lead to feelings …
- The Bright Tunnel… Where is it? How is it happening? The Buddha says, basically, that it comes down to what he calls the five clinging aggregates. There’s form affected by clinging, feeling affected by clinging, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness, all of which are affected by clinging. The clinging is what turns them into suffering. The clinging is what tries to wring a happiness out of them …
- Endurance Through Discernment… What makes them suffering that weighs down the mind is clinging—clinging to the aggregates. The point being that if you could stop the clinging, then aging, illness, and death would not be suffering, or you wouldn’t have to suffer from them. They would be painful, but the mind wouldn’t have to suffer from them. It’s somewhat ironic that you hear …
- Appropriate Attention, Appropriate Intention… He boils it down to the five clinging-aggregates, which is not an immediately clear or obvious way of explaining it. To see it in those terms, you have to look at it carefully and take it apart. That way, when you see what suffering is, you can watch it carefully enough to see what the cause is, to develop dispassion for the cause …
- The Buddha’s Tools… But the Buddha has you analyze your mind in different ways—aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. That kind of analysis has a lot less friction to it, again, a lot less drama and blame. If we have a bad ego or a poor struggling ego, that frames the issues in one way. But if we say, well, there’s a feeling, there …
- What’s Getting in the Way… What would that be like? What would it be like to really see, as the Buddha says, that the best way to think about suffering is to see it as the act of clinging to the five aggregates. By defining suffering in this way, he’s giving you a handle on how to understand it, how to take it apart. Yet even just these …
- Potentials… After all, even though the aggregates are not fully under your control, still as the Buddha said, if people couldn’t develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful qualities, there would have been no point to his teaching. So we can do something with our body. We can do something with our feelings, with our perceptions, with thought fabrications, and with consciousness. That’s how …
- Let Pleasure & Pain Fall Off the Plow… If you hold on to those places—in other words, what the Buddha called the five aggregates: the form of your body as you feel it within; feelings; perceptions; mental fabrications, where you put thoughts together; and consciousness, your awareness at the senses, including the sense of the mind: If you hold on to these places, you’ll find that they can give pleasure …
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