Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- Pleasure & Pain… You begin to see the differences between the different aggregates that make up your larger sense of pain, your larger sense of suffering. When you take things apart this way, they’re much less imposing. They place much less of a weight on the heart. And when pain then becomes much less of an issue, it’s very liberating for the mind. After all …
- Levels of Truth… You want to be able to look at it, and watch it so you can understand how it comes, how it goes, what are the things that you like that involve stress, what are the drawbacks of liking those things? The Buddha talks about common, everyday stress, and then he moves on to an underlying analysis that he calls the five clinging-aggregates: form …
- Study & Practice… After all, it’s made out of aggregates, which are subject to conditions. But you have to use them, so you have to learn how to recognize which part of the meditation is involving stress that’s necessarily part of the path and which part is creating unnecessary stress—the pointless burdens that you place on the mind. We have these concepts so we …
- The Graduated Discourse… Also, if people were just conglomerates, aggregates, coming together and then disappearing at death, there would be no value in being generous with one another because there’d be no lasting impact. So when the Buddha starts with giving, he’s affirming the principle of freedom of choice at the same time affirming that there’s something to us that goes beyond death. From …
- The Power of Perception… These aggregates the Buddha talks about are activities. There’s an intentional element in them. Really to accept what’s going on doesn’t mean just accepting them as a given. It means accepting the fact you’ve had a hand in shaping them. You want to see that in action. If you don’t see that in action, you’ve got a huge …
- Action & the End of Action… the suffering of aging, illness, and death; of not getting what you want, of being with what you don’t like, of being separated from what you do like; of clinging to the five aggregates. But where he really goes into detail is the training: what you do. There’s a story that after he had trained more than a thousand arahants, they came …
- Lessons from the Buddha’s Awakening… Either he’d talk about the suffering and go into the five aggregates and what clinging is, or he went into the different types of craving and the conditions leading to craving, or he went into the factors of the path—particularly the factors of the path, because those are the things that are going to get you out. So as you think about …
- Dependent Co-arising Right Now… Name and form is basically the five aggregates. And those are right here, too, simply that fabrication is divided up here into a few other categories: attention, intention, and contact. You look at how you pay attention to the breath. You can look at your intentions in staying with the breath. You look at how your perceptions and your attention and your intentions all …
- Alighting on the Dhamma… So have some confidence that when the Buddha’s talking about the five aggregates, he’s talking about things you know. When he talks about the four bases for success, these are qualities you’ve developed to at least some extent. And you can build on them now. The fourth quality is that you’re single-minded. The word for singleness, *ek’aggata, *is …
- Possessed by Emotions… This is why the Buddha gives his analysis of the present moment in terms of fabrication, in terms of the aggregates, in terms of the sense media, properties: All these things play a role in how we experience the present moment and all too often we let these activities in the present moment get possessed by greed, aversion, delusion—whatever. Then we complain about …
- What Am I Becoming?… In other words, you’ve got the sufferings that come from the aggregates, you’ve got the sufferings that come from the six sense spheres, you’ve got the sufferings from your greed, aversion, and delusion. These things are going to harass and plunder you as much as they can as long as you’re on this shore. The only safe course of action …
- Appropriate Attention… You’re clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. And why are you doing that? Because of craving. Now, that right there is pretty radical. Most of us, when we suffer, tend to focus on the causes coming from outside. This person did that, that person did this, the society’s like this, the weather’s like that …
- Like a River Full of Water… What is this sensation of pain? What’s the difference between the pains, say, of the body or the aggregates, and the pain that comes from craving and ignorance, clinging and ignorance? That’s an important distinction, because the second kind of pain—the clinging and ignorant pain, the pain that affects the mind—is what really makes you suffer. It’s what takes …
- Admirable in the Beginning, Middle, & End… In the same way, it’s not the case that the five aggregates are holding on to us, keeping us down. We’re the ones clinging to them, and that’s what’s keeping us down. So the freedom’s going to come from leaning how to let go. And then finally, excellence: Nibbāna really is amazing. It really is something totally other and …
- Think Calmly about Death… So even though this point may not be confirmed for you, keep reminding yourself, “You are not the body.” Rupam anattā: “Form is not-self.” The same with all the other aggregates. But the question is, “When you leave these things, where are you going to go?” As long as there’s craving, you don’t have to worry about having nowhere to go …
- The Breath Soufflé… If you think of the word “aggregates” as being like the gravel they use to make a road, the difference is between putting all the gravel into a big bag on your shoulders to carry it around and actually putting it down on the ground so that you can walk on it. We’re learning to do these fabrications with awareness, with knowledge. We …
- Don’t Objectify… It takes as its raw material the five aggregates, which also are activities. Even “form” the Buddha defines with a verb. He says it de-forms. In other words, once there’s a form, then there’s going to be change in it all time. Feeling feels, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, consciousness cognizes: That’s how he defines these things. So they are activities …
- Mindfulness + Discernment = Intelligence… In terms of self or not-self, in the Canon there’s a case where a monk decides that if the five aggregates are not-self, there must be nobody doing anything and nobody to be affected by what’s done by what’s not-self, so you can do anything you want. The Buddha chastises him for misappropriating the teaching. There are plenty …
- A Path Rooted in Desire… We cling to the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, consciousness—and that’s the suffering. It’s the passion and desire that wants to hold on to these things as you’re feeding on them. There’s a hunger, and the hunger is not yet satisfied—that’s where the suffering is. That’s to be comprehended. The cause is the craving …
- Strategies for Happiness… So you’ve got all five aggregates here turned into a path. There will be a sense of identification with the path, but it’s different from just plain old straight identifying with these things. There’s a more skillful use of them so that they lead to a greater and greater sense of wellbeing and security. As you get more identified with the …
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