Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- 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 …
- Seriously Happy… He says that the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness—the things out of which we create our sense of self—have their pleasures and their pains. He says that it’s because of their pleasures that we get stuck on them. It’s because of their pains that we look for a way out. So when you find yourself missing a particular …
- Training the Whole Mind… Get so that it really does know how to deal with the aggregates as they arise, how to deal with pain so it doesn’t turn it into suffering, how to deal with pleasure so it doesn’t turn it into suffering. Get so that the mind develops a basic intelligence in sorting itself out, managing itself, so that all your mental powers suddenly …
- Everything Comes Together Right Here… oh, there are aggregates there; there are different fabrications. They’re all there: all the things you’re going to need for insight. They’re right there. You don’t need to go anyplace else. So you’ve got mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, all in one convenient location. And just that thought should help get you even more focused. You don’t have to …
- Passion for Nostalgia… You’re clinging to these different aggregates. And what are you getting out of them? You’re placing ruts in the mind, or as the Buddha would say, you’re bending the mind. We would say they’re ruts. You get into the rut and it’s hard to get out. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha said that lack of …
- Surveying the World… events in the body, in terms of the four properties; events in the mind, in terms of the four mental aggregates. And what can be done with these things?” Try to use good perceptions of the breath. They give you an anchor. Then you apply acts of attention and intention. As they stick here, they pay careful attention to what’s going on, and …
- Peace vs. Clinging… All this, he says, boils down to clinging to the aggregates. We’re trying to feed off of things that can’t give us really good food. So when you’re looking for peace, you also have to look for what’s disturbing your peace. And the disturbance lies in the act of having to feed. What kind of feelings are you feeding on …
- Noble & True… Seeing the act of clinging to the aggregates not as a source of happiness or a source of who you really want to be, but as suffering, something to be comprehended so that you can abandon its cause: That’s a noble act as well. When the mind has a good sense of the present moment and how to stay with the present moment …
- Disenchantment & Dispassion… All the teachings—the teachings on the five aggregates, the six sense media, the properties of earth, water, wind, fire, space, and consciousness; and his more poetic teachings, the images in the poetry, the images in the suttas: They’re all aimed at this direction—to induce that sense of dispassion, disenchantment. And through the dispassion, release. Not that you’re hoping to be …
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