Search results for: "Aggregates"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. Seclusion Through Mindfulness
     … After all, what is “the knowing” in the present moment? It’s the aggregate of consciousness. It’s one of the khandhas. It’s a useful tool in the path, but ideally you don’t want to be the knowing—you want to keep track of the knowing. This is how you get secluded: putting aside thoughts of the past, not laying claim to … 
  10. Fix Your Views
     … There’s never any place where the Buddha defines suffering, say, in other terms aside from the five clinging-aggregates. He never says that they’re the end of suffering. There’s no place where he defines right resolve, say, as being resolved on sensuality. Certain things are right and certain things are wrong, period, across the board. And even though we’re coming … 
  11. Developing Absorption
     … not just registering the fact that there is suffering, but realizing that clinging to the aggregates is the suffering. That’s not a point that’s easy to comprehend, because it’s all too easy to think that we’re suffering because of things outside. But to see that the actual suffering is the act of clinging: That requires that we be very careful … 
  12. A Concentration Checklist
     … What is the perception it holds with regard to the breath? What is the conversation it’s having with itself about the breath? In other words, think about the different aggregates that are playing a role right now. What’s form, what’s feeling doing right now? What’s perception doing? What’s fabrication doing? What’s consciousness doing? How do these things work … 
  13. Right Action & Right Livelihood
     … After all, we are beings—we’ve chosen to become beings by latching onto the different aggregates—and that requires feeding. We feel that our very identity depends on feeding. This is something that all beings have in common. This is the answer to that question, “What is one?” in the Buddhist catechism: All beings subsist on nutriment. Everywhere, all around, they’re feeding … 
  14. To Comprehend Craving
     … At the moment of death, when the mind can’t stay here in the body, when this being that you’ve created out of your attachment to the aggregates has to move on, if it hasn’t uprooted craving for sensuality, it’s going to go for sensual pleasures of almost any kind. People can be reborn as dogs—or even worse—through sensual … 
  15. Doing
     … You’ve taken these five aggregates and you’re turning them into something good; something skillful. You’re getting more control over them. So it’s inevitable that there will be a certain sense of self that develops around this. But it’s a healthy one. It’s a self that’s willing to learn, a self that’s devoted to looking for a … 
  16. Questioning Your Way to Certainty
     … When you can question your way to that first experience of the deathless—where you let go of the activity of creating a self around these the aggregates for the first time—then the deathless opens up. As the Buddha says, that’s when your conviction becomes verified, when you see that this process really does work. Up to that point, of course there … 
  17. Immersed in the Body
    Immersed in the Body September 19, 2004 Some people think that when the Buddha describes the five aggregates he’s describing what we are, but that’s precisely what he’s not saying. He’s saying that we’re not that. But the mind does identify with these things — sometimes with the body, sometimes with feelings, perceptions, thought-formations, sometimes with sensory consciousness, sometimes … 
  18. Skills Needed at Death
     … One of the points that the forest ajaans make again and again is that if you want to understand all five aggregates, get so that you know one really well. The one they all seem to focus on is perception. Seeing how arbitrary your perceptions are can help loosen up a lot of the firm assumptions you have about things that are making you … 
  19. A Promise to Yourself
     … The way the mind maintains that state of stillness contains all kinds of aggregates and mental events, acts of attention, acts of intention. There are many levels of conversation going on inside. You get one level still, and then in the stillness you begin to realize there’s another conversation going on, more subtly. “I’ve got to look into that”: That’s the … 
  20. Shame & Acceptance
     … The way you label things, the way you think about things, all of the aggregates that go into your sense of the present moment have an element of present intention in them. And that element can be trained, can be changed. So when we’re mindful and alert, we’re not simply noticing what’s already there as a total given. We also have … 
  21. First Principles
     … If you want to know the aggregates, focus on one of them. Really get to know it. That knowledge will then spread to the others. The same with the elements: Really get to know the breath element—how it responds to your mind, how it responds to your perceptions, how it responds to your directed thought and evaluation. You learn some important lessons in … 
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