Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- Merit: Goodness of the Heart… We’re engaging in what the Buddha calls five aggregates: the form of your body as you feel it from within; your feelings; your perceptions; your fabrications, the way you put thoughts together; and your consciousness. All of these things are activities. Even the way you keep reaffirming to yourself where your body is right now: That’s an activity, your sense of form …
- The Path is Fabricated… With right mindfulness and right concentration, we’re developing what’s called the concentration aggregate of the path as we abandon the hindrances. All of these activities are a kind of fabrication. The Buddha once made a distinction, saying that the highest Dhamma in terms of fabricated or unfabricated, taking both sides into consideration, is dispassion. The mind finally has a sense of disenchantment …
- Universal Truths… It’s good to keep in mind, though, that there comes a point where you have to let go of even concepts of things like the five aggregates and the duties of the four truths. There’s just stress arising and passing away, something you just comprehend and develop dispassion for. And because there are these different stages in the path, you have to …
- Disenchantment… After all, what else are you going to work with? How would you create a path unless you took those aggregates that you were using for one purpose and use them for another? Meditation is a different way of dressing up the present moment using form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, consciousness as tools. You dress them in a different way. But in the process …
- Pulling Out of the Narratives… This is why the Buddha has you analyze things in terms of the aggregates, sense media, and properties. Break things down into small units and see what other things can be created out of those units. A lot of the discernment lies right there—in particular, the kind of discernment that leads to release. Release is going to be something unexpected. It’s outside …
- Mindworms… This is where Ajaan Suwat’s distinction between the not-self teaching with regard to the aggregates and the self teaching with regard to karma is useful. The mindworm is the result of old actions. Once an action has been done, the results are beyond your control. You can’t go into the world and undo your past actions. So, you have to tell …
- Is the Buddha’s Wisdom Selfish?… The Buddha’s analysis of suffering itself is that we cling to the aggregates, and the word for “clinging” there can also mean that we feed on them. And the reason we feed on them is because they themselves are activities that are involved with feeding, too. Take physical feeding, for instance. You have form in the form of the body you’re trying …
- The Buddha’s Letter… It comes because there’s a bridge—the bridge of craving and clinging, clinging to the five aggregates, which are activities of the mind. We cling out of our desire for sensual pleasure. We cling out of our views of what the world is all about. We cling out of our old habits and practices. And we cling to our sense of who we …
- Awakening Is in the Details… Right now, we’re trying to develop concentration, and sometimes concentration gets advanced by trying to figure out how it’s composed of aggregates. Other times, it gets destroyed if you try to analyze it too much. So learn just the right amount of analysis to keep yourself interested, with a sense of clarity, a sense of all-around protection. Remember that once you …
- The Steadiness of Your Gaze… The craving causes the clinging, and the clinging to the five aggregates is his basic definition of stress and suffering. That’s what we’ve go to work on, because that’s the part of stress and suffering that’s not necessary. Once it’s taken care of, then the other stresses in the world are not an issue at all. So what is …
- The Gift of Discernment… What does it mean to comprehend suffering? Try to take it apart in terms of the five clinging-aggregates. What are you holding onto in terms of the form, whatever forms there may be in your experience right now? What are you holding onto in terms of feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness? How are you holding on? Why do you hold on? What’s the …
- The Mind’s Ostinato… When he talks about the aggregates he doesn’t define them as things—they’re activities. In fact, there’s so much of the Dhamma that you can understand by seeing things as activities—and that’s how we find release. As long as we’re living in the world of solid things—this is this, and that’s that—then those ideas take …
- Great Expectations… Whereas the Buddha said you’re not your feelings. “Feelings” here, in terms of emotions, come under sankharas, fabrications, in the five aggregates. He very clearly saw that there’s a greater happiness to be found by letting go of these fabrications. It’s possible to get beyond your feelings. So when he says to kill your anger, he’s not telling you to …
- The Knife of Discernment… To ferret out the difference between the physical pain — the pains of the khandhas, the pains of the aggregates — as opposed to the pain of attachment, craving, and clinging: That’s a distinction you see in the doing. You catch yourself in the doing; you see how the doing affects things. This is something you can’t figure out in advance. But when the …
- The Anatomy of the Present… He also says that we shape our experience of the rest of the aggregates through fabrication, and that fabrication does it for a purpose. We take the raw material coming in from the past and we shape it into a feeling or into a perception because we have purposes in using these things. So our purposes are what determine how we’re going to …
- Action & Result… But after all, how is suffering defined? It’s the clinging-aggregates. You cling to things because you have passion for them, yet suffering comes out at the other end. As Ajaan Chah says, we’re like the person who doesn’t think that the tail of the snake is connected to the mouth of the snake. The tail seems safe, doesn’t have …
- The Three Perceptions & Their Opposites… There’s another case where a monk tries to argue that if all the aggregates are not-self, then what self is there to do the actions? And what self would there be to receive the results of actions? That line of thinking is a license for irresponsible behavior. There’s nobody there to be responsible, nobody to be affected by the actions, so …
- What Is One… In other places, he identifies the food for consciousness with the other aggregates: form, feeling, perception, and fabrications. It’s only arahants who don’t need to feed on these kinds of food. They feed physically, but their minds no longer need to feed, because they don’t identify themselves as beings. To be a being, you have to be clinging to something, attached …
- Taking Apart Suffering… This is what the teachings on the aggregates are all about, as well as the teachings on the establishing of mindfulness. The Buddha wants you to take things apart, to see that this big mass of suffering you’ve got here is actually composed of little tiny things, little tiny actions, little tiny decisions in the mind or little tiny physical sensations that you …
- Things as They Function… You hold on to the raft that you’ve made out of what? Out of the twigs and branches on this side of the river, the side that’s dangerous—in other words, the linging-aggregates. You hold on to the raft as you go across the river, then you let it go. Then you’re free to go as you like. The Buddha …
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