Search results for: "Aggregates"

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  2. Food for Consciousness
     … It keeps landing on things like a body, or feelings, or perceptions, or fabrications—what the Buddha calls the five aggregates. These are the five activities that the mind employs around feeding. For instance, there’s a feeling of pain: You feel a hunger, you want to find something to satisfy it to have a more pleasant feeling of fullness. Then there’s the … 
  3. A Sense of Yourself
     … but then they go to answer the question: “But what are you?” The traditional answer, which a lot of the commentators came up with, was that you’re just the five aggregates—which is precisely what the Buddha is saying are not you. This gets back to that passage where the Buddha notes that if you try to answer the question, “What am I … 
  4. Ask the Right Questions
     … Can you create a wrench out of these aggregates? And when comes the point where you don’t need any of these tools at all? When do you have to put down those tools, and let go of all fabrications entirely? These are some of the questions you hold in the back of your mind. And it’s good to have a sense of … 
  5. Mindful Judgment
     … The Buddha defines this suffering as the five clinging-aggregates, which is the technical term for the fact that we try to feed on the form of the body, on our feelings, on our perceptions, on the way the mind fabricates its thoughts, and on acts of consciousness, in our attempt to find happiness. It’s like feeding on potato chips thinking that you … 
  6. Abusing Pleasure & Pain
     … In other words, anything that’s fabricated like the body or the mind—any of the khandhas or aggregates—is going to involve some stress simply by virtue of the fact that it’s fabricated. That’s part of the natural order of things. But there’s also a deeper stress, a deeper pain that comes from craving. That’s stress and pain in … 
  7. Arising & Passing Away
     … There’s a sutta where a monk goes around to visit other monks and asks them, “What do you have to focus on in order to gain awakening?” One monk says to focus on the five aggregates, another says to focus on the six sense spheres, others say to focus on dependent co-arising, the elements. Each monk has a different answer. This upsets … 
  8. Fear of Death
     … goes well, and at the best it helps you discover something that doesn’t die, so you can have that to depend on as the body passes away and all the aggregates fall away. The same principles apply to pain. When you begin the meditation, the first step in dealing with pain is learning how not to go with it. There may be a … 
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