Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- A Refuge Inside… But then there’s also the suffering of the four noble truths, what he calls the five clinging-aggregates. The first kind of suffering is just the way things are, in and of themselves. The question is: Why does that create suffering for us? Because of our clinging. So you’ve got to watch the mind to see why it clings, because the suffering …
- Ingenuity… We hear all about stress, inconstancy, not-self—not-self here basically coming down to a lack of control over what happens to the aggregates. But notice what happens in concentration practice. You take all these things that are said to be inconstant, and you try to make them as constant as possible. Your perception of the breath, the feelings that come from the …
- Right View… The aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness come in a potential form and then—based on which things we’re interested in, which things we want to create, which things we want to destroy—we actually create our experience of the present out of these different potentials. So we need to do a lot of digging down into our experience of the …
- Dharma Medicine… for example, the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. This is the Buddha’s analysis of suffering. When you suffer, there is going to be clinging to one of these five things. So it’s useful to look at whatever the suffering is in these terms, whether it’s an uncomfortable experience in the body, or an uncomfortable state of mind …
- The Power of Truth… You start with strong concentration and you develop insight by looking into the concentrated state, analyzing it in terms of the five aggregates, or simply the fact that it’s constructed, fabricated. Even to get into that concentrated state, he also said that you need not only some tranquility but also some insight. If you don’t understand the workings of your mind, it …
- Beyond Nature… As the Buddha points out, all of the aggregates — form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness — have an element of intention in them. There are lots of different potentials from your past kamma that you can focus on in any given moment. Your choice of what to focus on is going to determine what you experience. For instance, there are potentials for different kinds of …
- Relationships… Clinging to the five aggregates: That’s suffering. So where is the clinging in your relationship? Where is your clinging in your thoughts about the relationship? That’s what you’ve got to look into. Now, we’ve got a problem here that in English we talk about feeling attachment for someone, and we tend to equate the attachment with the clinging. But that …
- The Buddha’s Last Word… Some of the details in his explanation of how things work, especially among the aggregates, go one way. You listen to Ajaan Lee, it goes another way. But they’re both very useful. Ajaan Lee talks about how you start out with the perception, a sañña, and then you fabricate something out of it. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about there being a little stirring …
- The Dhamma Wheel Shakes Up the World… He said that there is suffering and he identifies it as the five clinging-aggregates, so that you know what suffering is. The next thing to know is what to do with it. It’s supposed to be comprehended. You want to comprehend what the clinging is. You want to get to the point where you finally have comprehended it to the point of …
- The Dhamma Wheel… But remember, the Buddha’s definition of suffering is clinging to the five aggregates. We’re pretty passionate about that clinging. We cling to these things—form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—because we think they’re going to provide happiness for us. Now, they do provide some pleasures. If they didn’t provide any pleasures at all, we wouldn’t have any passion …
- Ironies… Some of the things we all know—there is stress in birth, there is stress in aging, illness, and death, getting what you don’t want, not getting what you do want—but the summary is something subtler, the clinging-aggregates: clinging to form, to feeling, perception, thought constructs, consciousness. This is what it all comes down to. Again, it’s stuff that’s …
- Inconstant, Stressful, Not-self… Once the path has been brought to its culmination, that’s when you apply the same analysis even to the aggregates that form the path: the form of the body sitting here meditating, the feelings of pleasure you’ve created through concentration, the perception that holds you in concentration, the mental fabrications that maintain the intention to stay in concentration, and the awareness of …
- Proving the Teachings… He said, there is suffering in life—in the way we cling to the aggregates—and it comes from craving. We tend to blame our suffering on people outside, situations outside, but actually, whatever the situation is, the reason it makes the mind suffer is because of the way the mind relates to it. Think of all the effort we put into trying to …
- Do, Maintain, Use… We talk about the aggregates being stressful, unpleasant, suffering, but they have their pleasant side as well. As the Buddha said, if it weren’t for that pleasant side, we wouldn’t fall for them. So it depends on what your purposes are, how you sketch them. You begin to realize that the allure is just a sketch—and sometimes not even an accurate …
- Virtue Contains the Practice… As Sariputta explains it, if the person asks, “Passion and delight for what?” you say, “For the five aggregates.” What’s the danger of having that passion and delight for those things? It’s that you suffer as they change. And the advantage of abandoning that passion and delight is that you put an end to that suffering. So it’s all about doing …
- Insight Is Seeing What’s Worth Doing… So as the Buddha said, when you master concentration, the next step is to see that it, too, is composed of aggregates. And it, too, doesn’t pass the test of these three perceptions. When it really hits home that you want something better than even concentration can provide in terms of a steady, satisfying happiness, that’s when the mind turns to something …
- Hope… Then you begin to notice that in all the aggregates, the five classes of things that we use to make up our sense of self: There’s a lot of doing in each of them. The sensations in your body come in but you create them into a form. The potentials for feeling come and you turn them into feelings. The same with perceptions …
- Hold on for All You’re Worth… You can read about the five aggregates. You can read about the different types of actions that the mind engages in, but the best way to really know about them is to try to master them through getting the mind to settle down. Once you’ve done that, you’ve learned everything you need to know about how the mind fabricates and shapes its …
- Mastery… As long as you find that you can control things like form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness—the five aggregates—you do exert control over them. You do develop a sense of self around them on the path: the self as its own mainstay, the self as its governing principle. But you try to develop it, not in the sense of trying to …
- Accepting the Way Out… In other words, the first arrow is the pain of the aggregates, simply the pain of change, physical pain, whatever kind of pain that just happens to you. But then the mind turns around and just shoots another arrow. The sutta talks about one arrow. But if you look at yourself, you find yourself with a whole quiver of arrows, you just keep shooting …
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