Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- Heightened Skillfulness… This is why the Buddha says you start by looking at the concentration itself as aggregates, and perceiving them as inconstant, stressful, not-self, alien, an arrow, a disease, an emptiness: whatever perception allows you to realize that even this refined pleasure, too, has its drawbacks. You want something better. When you develop a sense of disenchantment with the concentration and look for something …
- Duties… When the Buddha taught the five clinging-aggregates, this is why: to help you take your suffering and stress apart, to understand what it’s made of. Exactly what are you clinging to right now, how are you clinging, so that you feel that stress, you feel that burden on your mind. It might be form or feeling or perception—i.e., the labels …
- Mental Movements… And when the Buddha talks in terms of the four noble truths, that’s the suffering he’s focusing on, where there’s clinging to the five aggregates: clinging to your body or forms of any kind; clinging to feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness. There’s clinging only when there’s craving. So, these are the issues we have to watch out for. He …
- The Right Time at the Right Place… That’s all five aggregates right here. You’re getting hands-on experience with them as you shape them into a state of concentration. Instead of carrying them around on your shoulders, you’re making them your path. It’s like a sack full of bricks: If you carry it around, it’s going to be heavy; if you take the bricks out of …
- Hold onto the Breath… We cling to the five aggregates, and the clinging itself is the suffering. Then, later on in the talk, I mentioned that there’s got to be some clinging in the path. Someone in the audience said, “Aha.” They’d caught me in a weak point. “That means you’re saying that there’s going to be suffering on the path.” And I said …
- Your Secret Foundation… And the same goes for the other aggregates. The potential for perception, your potential for fabrication, your potential for consciousness: These are all things coming from past actions and shaped by present intentions into what you actually experience. You can begin to see this in the breath. The breath is as close as you can get to focusing on the mind without actually focusing …
- Secluded from Sensuality… Why is that? What’s the appeal? Where is it located? The Buddha talks about how the appeal can be located in any of the aggregates. In other words, your perceptions around lust, your perceptions around your relationship to the other person, your role in getting involved. Sometimes it’s your thought constructs, the stories you’re telling yourself, or the feelings that come …
- Respect for What’s Noble… They’re called “aggregates,” but they’re more activities: form—this body of ours, which is constantly changing—feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. These are all activities that are involved in feeding: The form is the form of the body, the form of the food we eat. Feeling, in the feeling of hunger that drives us to eat, and in our desire for …
- Thinking About Your Fears… The body will die, the different aggregates will go, but there is this deathless element that doesn’t die. Because it’s outside of space, outside of time, it can’t be touched by things within space or time.” When you’ve seen that, that puts away all your fear of death. If you haven’t seen it, well, work on it and meanwhile …
- A Trained Observer… First into the different aggregates: When you’re sitting here, you’ve got form, which is the breath. Feeling, which is the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to develop. Perception, the image you hold in mind of how the breath moves through the body, where it starts, where it finishes. Fabrication, how you talk to yourself about the breath, evaluate it, make adjustments …
- Let Go Like a Millionaire… You comprehend the clinging-aggregates. Well, to comprehend them means that you overcome passion for them. You try to abandon craving by feeling dispassion for it. And then the cessation of suffering is the actual dispassion for craving. But when you get to the path, you have to generate some passion because you’ve got to build these things: You’ve got to build …
- The Meaning of Insight… As the Buddha says, we fabricate the aggregates for the sake of using them. So that gives us two things right there: goals—what the Buddha calls attha—and means toward the goals. This is the way the mind functions. This is the way it gropes through the world, learning about things, learning what works, what doesn’t work, which kinds of goals are …
- The Path of Action… Sometimes they talk about the aggregates, sometimes he talks about sense-media; sometimes they stress equanimity, other times they stress effort. Attempts to map out the whole teaching and make it into a consistent system have always been problematic. There’s no final word on what Buddhist philosophy should be. People keep coming up with new ideas, new interpretations, new frameworks. But the Buddha …
- Disenchantment… This is why we have the contemplation of the 32 parts of the body, the analysis of things in terms of the aggregates, in terms of the sense media, in terms of the properties: so we can realize that the food of lust or possessiveness we’ve been feeding on with regard to the body is really not based on much. It doesn’t …
- A Passion for the Path… We don’t usually think that we’re passionate about suffering, but as he pointed out, we suffer because of five clinging aggregates, and there’s passion right there in the clinging. We cling to our body, our form, our sense of the body felt from the inside and other forms we see outside. We cling to our feelings, our perceptions, our thought fabrications …
- Exploring Fabrication… Basically, you take the potential for, say, a form or a feeling or a perception, fabrications, or consciousness—these potentials come from your past kamma—and then you fabricate them into an actual experience of the aggregates. There’s an intentional element in all of these things. As the Buddha said, the essence of insight is learning how to investigate the process of fabrication …
- Delusion… A lot of the Buddha’s teachings on, say, the aggregates, the establishings of mindfulness, or his various lists of the qualities that are important to develop: These alert you to things going on in your mind that you might not have noticed before. This is one of the reasons why it’s useful to study, to read up on what the Buddha has …
- Boring… All the aggregates are going on right here, and you’re relating to them in your old ways. And as we all know, the old ways are the ones that cause you to suffer. There’s ignorance there. There’s something you’re not looking into, some question you’re not asking. So try to cast around and see what that question might be …
- The Flamethrowing Mind… different angles, all of which are useful for dividing things up, until you find that angle that works for you, the angle from which you can see that none of the aggregates are worthy of passion: the passion that wants to make something out of them. You can learn to do that with your own mind. When the mind is freed, then, as Ajaan …
- Duties… The Buddha said it’s five clinging-aggregates. That doesn’t sound like anything familiar. But he said that these are activities of the mind, things we’re doing all the time. We cling to them, we feed on them, and that’s why we suffer. You want to learn how to comprehend that. If there’s physical pain, you want to see that …
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