Search results for: "Aggregates"

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  2. Feeding on Ardency
     … As the Buddha said, all our experience of the aggregates is based on intention. It’s because of intention that you take the raw material for an experience of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, or consciousness, and turn it into an actual experience of those things. So there are many layers of feeding that go on in our experience, and because we can’t simply … 
  3. Why Mindfulness
     … They’re going to ask you, ‘What does your teacher teach?’ How are you going to answer them?” So the monks ask Sariputta, well, what would be a good answer? Sariputta’s answer is interesting: “Our teacher teaches the abandoning of passion and desire.” And the follow-up question is: “Passion and desire for what?” For the five aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and … 
  4. Antidotes to Craving
     … You often hear about clinging to the five aggregates. But here he said you’re clinging to craving—the craving that led to the clinging to begin with. You turn around and hold on to that. That’s what pulls you along. So you look at the kind of cravings you might have at that point, and three big ones stand out—the ones … 
  5. Inner Authorities
     … And how did he finally know who was right and who was wrong? He found a path that led to something that was deathless, a knowledge that didn’t involve the aggregates at all. We sometimes think that as you listen to Buddhist teachings, you finally get to a point where they make sense, it really hits home that what he says is true … 
  6. Tapping into the Breath
     … all the five aggregates. And if you want to know what’s not-self, what’s beyond your control, you try to exert as much control as you can in this area. You’ll find there will be limits. It’s when you want to run into the limits that you say, “Oh, this is really not-self.” But you don’t give up … 
  7. Make the Most of Right Now
     … Even though the path is made out of intentions, thoughts, words, deeds, still it’s a set of intentions, a set of aggregates, that provides the way out. You have to depend on this body, with all its illnesses and its aging, as a tool for practice. Either you take it as an object of contemplation, or you focus on the breath: contemplating the … 
  8. Name & Form
     … In some cases, the word “name” covers just the other four aggregates: feeling, perception, mental fabrication, and consciousness. In other cases, mental fabrication gets divided up into attention, intention, and mental contact. This gets us into dependent co-arising. All this is dependent on consciousness, consciousness is dependent on this, and the two of them together are dependent on fabrication, which is another word … 
  9. Samvega
     … You need to have your skills ready so that you’re not taken in by pain, you’re not taken in by any of the aggregates. When you have that sense of urgency, that’s when your practice really takes off.
  10. Visakha Puja – Shaking the Earth
     … the ending of passion for what? The ending of passion for the five aggregates. Why? What advantage is there in dispassion for these things? Because if you cling to these things, then when they change, there’s going to be sorrow. But if you have no passion for them, then no matter how much they change, there will be no sorrow. Then he went … 
  11. How to Read the Dhamma
     … Or there’s Sister Sona, who said that when she went to see another nun and asked for the Dhamma, the nun taught her aggregates, sense doors, elements or properties. So there are some Dhamma teachings there. Still, there’s not much in detail. The same with Ajaan Mun’s life. At the very end of his life, he mentioned that his main teachings … 
  12. Calming the Breath
     … Even our basic experience of the five aggregates—our experience of the form (the body), feelings of pleasure and pain, our perceptions, our thought constructs, even our sensory consciousness: As the Buddha says, we *fabricate *these things for certain purposes. The best way to test this is by watching the breath. This is why this process of (1) being sensitive to the whole body … 
  13. Standing Where the Buddha Stood
     … As the Buddha said, sometimes looking at things in terms of the five aggregates is what provides the important insights; sometimes you have to look in terms of the six sense spheres, sometimes in terms of dependent co-arising, sometimes in terms of the six elements. You never know beforehand which kind of analysis is going to be right for you. You have to … 
  14. Bringing Right resolve
     … It’s not mediated by the senses or the aggregates or any of those activities. At that point, you can let go of the path. You don’t need right view or the other factors anymore, because you’ve got the happiness that more than satisfies the desire for happiness that you’ve nurtured all along.
  15. Solidly Here
     … Ajaan Suwat used to make the point that the Buddha would often talk about how, say, the aggregates are not-self or the senses are not-self. But he never says that about karma. There’s the passage we chant regularly: “We’re the owners of our actions.” This is something we really are responsible for. Our actions right now are to get the … 
  16. Just Events
     … In the Buddha’s terms, with any of the aggregates: form, feelings, perceptions, or thought-fabrications, if you can see the act of consciousness as something separate from these things, and see the consciousness itself as something you can step back from—not that you go unconscious, just that the consciousness of things is something you can step back from—then as these things … 
  17. Asalha Puja
     … You’re clinging to the five aggregates: That’s the suffering. The cause is not something outside. You can’t blame it on the weather or other people. You can’t blame it on the economy or politics. It’s your own craving—specifically, three kinds of craving: craving for sensuality; craving for becoming, which means the desire to take on an identity in … 
  18. Pain & Patience
     … And you’re clinging to five different activities—any one of the aggregates: form—the way you create the sense of your body, inhabit the sense of your body; feeling—feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain; perceptions, the labels you put on things, either words or images; fabrications—the thoughts you create around things; and then finally, consciousness, which is aware … 
  19. Appropriate Attention
     … Engaging with the senses, having to construct aggregates around your sensory experience, involves a lot of stress. Even in pleasant experiences, a lot of construction has to go on. The more you get sensitive to this—the work the mind has to do in order to fabricate its experience—the more your understanding of what dukkha is, is going to develop, to the point … 
  20. Stubborn Clinging
     … its ways of clinging to the five aggregates. The recognition of this suffering—the stress, the pain you’re causing yourself—and the recognition that it’s not necessary: Those are the only things that are going to get you out of those really stubborn mind states. That and respect for the teaching. There are times when these mind states are so stubborn that … 
  21. Where the Mind & Body Meet
     … That’s the origination of the aggregates, the origination of the sense spheres. They come from the fact that we relish them, we welcome them. In other words, they’re out there, but the fact that we relish them and go out looking for them, want them—that’s the origination of our experience of them. So it all comes from within the mind … 
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