Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- 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 …
- The Second Noble Truth… The grasses here stand for the aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, mental fabrications, and consciousness at the senses. We try to grab onto these things, to pull ourselves to safety, to find some place to rest, because as the Buddha said, it’s only when there’s peace, when there’s a sense of resting, that the mind has any real happiness. And yet, this …
- Using Perceptions… Then you have to put those perceptions down, because after all, they, too, are aggregates. They’re fabrications. When the Buddha says, “sabbe dhammā anattā,” all phenomena are not-self, that phrase itself is a phenomenon, which means that it, too, should be let go when it’s done its work. This is why these three perceptions are especially useful, because they teach you …
- To Stay the Course… It gets involved with the aggregates for the sake of something. In other words, it sees them as a means. So look at your actions as a means to a goal, and be clear about the goal you want. Choose a good goal. Then do everything you can to keep yourself on the path, and shed any baggage that gets in the way. You …
- The Right Piece in the Right Puzzle… You look, say, at your concentration, and you realize that it’s made out of the aggregates. The form is the form of the breath, the form of the body as you’re aware of the whole body. The feeling is the feeling of pleasure. Perception is the mental image that holds you with the breath. Fabrication consists of your directed thought and evaluation …
- A Poker Mind… The five clinging-aggregates are activities to be comprehended. And then there are the four noble truths, which apply their duties to what you’re doing right now. For instance, your main duty right now is to develop concentration because that’s part of the path. So in the beginning, we take the first three frames of reference—body, feeling, mind—and we try …
- Using Your Many Minds… Ultimately, you reach the point where you can let go of any form of concentration, because concentration contains the most subtle levels of the aggregates that we chanted about just now: form feeling, perception, mental fabrications, consciousness. They’re all there in the concentration. When you learn how to let go of the most subtle levels, then you’re totally free. But you can …
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