Search results for: "Aggregates"
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- Training Your Selves… As long as there’s clinging to the aggregates, you’re still suffering. If you just resign yourself to these things, you may be equanimous, you may be accepting, but it’s like that line from Thoreau: people living their lives of quiet desperation. It’s equanimous desperation, accepting desperation. But the Buddha was not the kind of person who would leave you there …
- Staying Still… I can drop it.” It’s playing around like this that you learn a lot about the aggregates, you learn about all the things that you need to know to gain insight. But you play around with them in the stillness. When you’re tired of playing, you just rest and be right here. It’s a good place to be. It’s a …
- The Taste Is Release… There’s a passage in the Canon where a monk goes around interviewing other monks who are arahants, asking them, “What did you focus on that led you to awakening?” One monk replies that he focused on the five aggregates, another that he focused on the six senses, another that he focused on dependent co-arising, and another that he focused on the six …
- A Connoisseur of Happiness… As the Buddha once said, if there were no pleasure in the five aggregates, we wouldn’t be attached to them. They do offer pleasure. And we need to understand the different kinds of pleasure they offer, so we can use that pleasure as a means to the highest happiness or the highest pleasure: nibbana. The Pali word for pleasure and happiness is sukha …
- The Dead Snake Around Your Neck… He talked about how fabrication in the five aggregates—which he claimed was something different from the three types of fabrication—is not really karmic. It’s just the result of old kamma, but doesn’t create any new kamma. But if it’s not karmic, what are you doing? The way you look at things, the way you think about things, is going …
- Mental Stirrings… these aggregates, these little events in the mind, these choices that are made. We think that we’re being disturbed by the thought, yet we’re the one creating the thought to begin with. Maybe that initial stirring was something unintentional but as soon as you latch onto it and begin to draw out its potentials, that’s intentional. That’s the kamma, and …
- The Challenge of Faith… It’s not just knowing the definitions of the four noble truths or of the five aggregates or of any of the other terms the Buddha uses. It means knowing how to put them to use skillfully, being strategic in figuring out what’s skillful and what’s unskillful and how to talk yourself into doing the skillful thing that you might not want …
- Why We Train the Mind… As the Buddha said, when you get into a deep level of jhana and you’ve mastered it, you begin to look to see what in this state of jhana, in terms of the five aggregates, is still stressful, inconstant, empty? That way, you’ll be able to get rid of your attachments and find a happiness that doesn’t have to latch on …
- Working at Home… And even though you may not be directly applying the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to the five clinging-aggregates, you’re learning to take a problem-solving approach to issues in your life, which is precisely the Buddha’s approach. The four noble truths are a problem-solving approach, focused on the problem of stress and suffering as a whole, and …
- Alighting on the Dhamma… You begin to realize that this concentration state that you’ve got going here is composed of aggregates. As long as you’re clinging to it, there’s going to be suffering—something you have to comprehend. Up to this point, you’ve simply been developing it, but now you have to comprehend it. Which means understanding: What’s the perception here? What’s …
- Truths That Are Noble… Suffering is the clinging-aggregates—the passion and desire you have for form, feeling, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness. It’s like an addiction. We lay claim to these things. We construct our idea of who we are out of those things. We search for food using these activities. So we think they’re really good, that we can’t do without them. But the …
- Faith in the Practice… There’s a sutta where a monk goes and visits different monks and asks them, “What is the point that you have to contemplate in order to gain awakening?” One monk says you have to contemplate the five aggregates, another monk says you have to contemplate the six sense spheres, another says dependent co-arising, another says the elements. He gets very confused. “Why …
- Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising… The mind is thirsting for things, and so it latches on to the five aggregates and tries to feed off them. Form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, and sensory consciousness: These are the things we feed on. When we’re meditating we’re trying to create a good bhava, a good place for the mind to stay in the present moment. If you create a …
- Adjusting the Flame… If you want to understand the aggregates, you’ve got to watch the mind in concentration. If you want to understand intention, well, what is concentration? It’s a mind that’s firmly intent. And it’s got to deal with other intentions that are going to come in and try to pull you away someplace else. So you’re dealing with these factors …
- Negotiating with Death… He has us take things apart, like the five aggregates. It seems to be a strange way of dividing up the pie. You’ve got form, which is the body; feelings: i.e., feelings of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions: the labels you place on things. Fabrications, which are all the things you put together in the mind, to make thoughts …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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