Search results for: "Aggregates"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. Meaningful Choices
     … As he analyzed the present moment, he saw that you have potentials coming in from the past, and then you fabricate them into actual present-moment experiences of aggregates. So the fact that fabrication is involved in everything, intention is involved in everything, means that we live by meaning. That’s because an intention always is, “I’m doing something for the sake of … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Fear
     … You see that the battle of clinging to the body, the battle of clinging to the aggregates is one that’s not worth fighting. When you can cut away the battles that are not worth fighting, that lightens your load considerably. That’s one of the secrets of inner strength: learning how not to waste your strength, to devote it to things that really … 
  17. Overcoming Obstacles
     … What are the results? The results are the aggregates. The results are the sense media. And that, as the Buddha keeps saying, is anatta, anatta—it’s not-self, not-self*.* So focus on that issue. What you really have is this process of fabrication that’s work, work, work—all the time. And yet the work you do doesn’t produce any results … 
  18. Using the Committee of the Mind
     … It’s when you actually fight off a defilement, it’s actually when you get the mind to settle in and see all the different fabrications that go into getting the mind to settle in—either in terms of the three fabrications or the five aggregates, you see these as activities and you master them yourself: That’s when you gain insight. That’s … 
  19. Meditator, Mediator
     … It’s the only way you’re going to take these aggregates we have and turn them into a path. So accept the fact that on the path there are going to be mistakes, that you’re going to figure things out as you go. The principles are there, but actually applying them to whenever issue comes up in the present moment requires skills … 
  20. Changing the Pleasure Equation
     … As the Buddha once said, it’s because there’s pleasure in the five aggregates that we fall for them. It’s not necessarily the case that we think that they’re permanent or that they’re substantial or that they really belong to us, but there’s pleasure there, and that’s what we go for. As in any case, there’s an … 
  21. The Heightened Mind
     … We can observe ourselves as we meditate and begin to see how we’re using form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness—all the aggregates—in this state of concentration. You can start analyzing it. Where’s the stress? In fact, one of the ways of improving your concentration is to step back a bit like this and ask yourself, “Where am I causing unnecessary … 
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