Search results for: "Aggregates"

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2. Play AudioDistinctions That Make a Difference
    … When he talks about the five aggregates, you start out by learning them as concepts. But you really get to know them as you practice concentration. This is one of the reasons why concentration is necessary for discernment, because when you’re concentrated, you’ve got all the aggregates right here. You’re doing them as part of the concentration. Say you’re focused … 
3. Play AudioA Clean Break at Death
    … This is why you cut off what they call self-identity views, views that would define your self with reference to those five aggregates in any way, either as identical with the aggregates, or as owning the aggregates, or as being in the aggregates, or as having the aggregates in you. All those forms of self-identity just get cast aside. You see for … 
4. Play AudioAppropriate Attention
    … There’s another passage where the Buddha talks about using appropriate attention to look at the five aggregates. Where are you going to see them? In your concentration. Or you can see them as you leave concentration, or as you go from one level of concentration to another—these activities in the mind. You can’t determine ahead of time which aggregate is going … 
5. Play AudioDeconstruction
    … clinging to the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness. The clinging is in the desire and passion you have for those things. The suffering is the clinging-aggregates altogether. Think of this in terms of the image of feeding. You’re hungry: That’s the craving; that’s the desire and passion. You find something you want to eat, so you … 
6. Play AudioPerceptions of Self & Not-Self
    … We have to note that it’s there in the Buddha’s teachings as well, as in the passage we chanted just now, where the Buddha talked about the aggregates being not-self . But then there are other passages where also talks about taking the self as your mainstay, as your refuge. Take the self as your governing principle. Remind yourself, if you’re … 
7. Play AudioControl
    … This is how you take the aggregates and make a path out of them. The path may be makeshift: Remember the Buddha’s image of the raft. You don’t wait for a professional carpenter to come and make the raft for you. You put it together out of the twigs and branches and leaves you can find: i.e., these aggregates. Then you … 
8. Play AudioPerception
    … This is the Buddha’s approach to all of the aggregates. You’re not trying to do away with form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness — at least not right away. The first thing you’ve got to do is learn how to convert them into the path. They use the word “aggregates,” “heaps,” for the word “khandha.” You might think of them as … 
9. Play AudioTo Know the Buddha
    … He defines suffering—dukkha, stress, pain—as the five clinging-aggregates. Now, the act of clinging is an action, and the aggregates themselves are actions, even the body. As they say in Pali, rūpa ruppati, which means form deforms; feelings feel; perceptions perceive; fabrications fabricate; consciousness cognizes. They’re not things. When we talk about them as aggregates, it sounds as if they’re … 
10. Play AudioAppropriate Attention Always
     … As for the clinging-aggregates, those are to be comprehended. That’s the duty with regard to the first noble truth. What does comprehension mean? It doesn’t mean you’re simply notice, “Oh yes, there is suffering,” or “This is what suffering is like.” You understand that suffering lies in the clinging to the aggregates. And why do you cling to the aggregates … 
11. Play AudioParsing Out Suffering
     … First he talks about the five aggregates, how we cling to them. Then he talks about the four kinds of clinging. You look at the various ways people look for happiness in the world, and you can see that they can be analyzed in those terms if you really want to understand them, and especially if you want to understand how you’re looking … 
12. Play AudioHappiness is a Skill
     … We try to look for the aggregates and see how we cling to them, how we create an identity around them. To know the aggregates, the Buddha has us take them and turn them into concentration. This is where a lot of the skill comes in. Look at Ajaan Lee’s teachings on breath meditation. Many of his analogies have to do with people … 
13. Play AudioRecollection of Hell
     … You’re trying to turn these aggregates into factors of the path—right mindfulness and right concentration—a way out of all the potential heavens and hells to which the aggregates, these processes of fabrication, can lead you. Even the development of discernment in right view is a kind of perception. You apply the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to the aggregates … 
14. Play AudioRespect for Concentration
     … These activities are called aggregates, and ordinarily we suffer a lot because of the aggregates. But it was the Buddha’s insight as a strategist to see that we can take these aggregates and learn how to engage in them skillfully, because aggregates are actions. The English translation aggregate is kind of unfortunate. It sounds like gravel, but these are actually activities of the … 
15. Play AudioNot-self as a Raft
     … The Buddha simply says it’s outside of the aggregates. It’s an awareness outside of the aggregates. And as for who’s there, the Buddha wouldn’t answer. He said when the arahant dies, you can’t say that he or she exists or doesn’t exist or both or neither. Ajaan Suwat had a nice way of putting it. He said that … 
16. Play AudioThoughts About Thinking
     … There’s clinging to the five aggregates—that’s suffering. But then the five aggregates are involved in the path. Concentration takes all five of the aggregates. Your discernment is going to require perceptions and thought-fabrications. So if you come across a perception, how do you know whether it’s part of the problem or part of the solution? You ask some questions … 
17. Play AudioYour Actions Are Yours
     … Stream-enterers have abandoned the idea that “I am this” with regard to the aggregates—either identifying with the aggregates, or identifying yourself as the owner of the aggregates, or believing that you’re in the aggregate—that is, for example, you might have a sense of infinite consciousness and you’re there inside the infinite consciousness, or you’re in there in the … 
18. Play AudioA Good Independent Self
     … As the Buddha points out, right concentration is made out of the five aggregates. You can control them to that extent, to give rise to concentration and stay there. It is possible. They have that potential. And it’s not just the Buddha’s aggregates, or Ajaan Mun’s aggregates, or Ajaan Lee’s aggregates: Your aggregates can be shaped as well—they have … 
19. Play AudioThe Raft of Jhana
     … It’s important to realize that as we practice we’re building on habits we already have, using things that we’ve already been using, like the aggregates. As the Buddha says, when the mind gets settled in and you get really good at this, you start analyzing the state of concentration in terms of the five aggregates. Now, we all know that the … 
20. Play AudioThe Brightness of Life
     … We feed off of these aggregates. And keep in mind that the aggregates are not things, they’re activities. We find delight in doing these activities. After all, how do we define ourselves? We define ourselves usually around what we feed off of, both physically and emotionally. And we need these aggregates to engage in the feeding. There’s form: the form of the … 
21. Play AudioClinging & Feeding
    When the Buddha defined suffering or stress in the four noble truths, he gave lots of examples and then summarized them all as the five clinging-aggregates. Notice he didn’t say five aggregates. It’s the clinging-aggregates that are suffering. It’s because we cling to them that the mind suffers. The aggregates may have stress simply in the fact they arise … 
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