The Five Aggregates: A Dharma Talk With John Cunningham

What are the five aggregates of Buddhism and how can we as modern people work with them for deepening our practice and freeing ourselves from attachment to suffering? This talk is by John Cunningham of Insight Meditation Cleveland. Enjoy. May all beings be free.

Transcript

So,

You know,

This evening I'd like to do a talk on the five aggregates.

Some recent discussions that I've had with people,

I've come to hear that some of these models of the Buddhas,

We read about them or hear about them in a Dharma talk or some other place and they come in and we cognitively work with them a little bit,

Maybe they make sense,

And then we move on.

And I've not really used them the way the Buddha intended for them to be used.

So what I'd like to do is try to do both a talk on the aggregates,

But then also do a guided meditation for our second meditation this evening so that we could actually work with the aggregates and get a little closer to what it was that the Buddha was trying to share with us.

You know,

He was a master at creating models.

So we have all these different lists in the Buddha's teachings that we can work with.

And the key is figuring out how do we take what the Buddha taught,

Look at it for ourselves and see what the value is for ourselves.

Does the model make sense for us?

And if so,

How do we work with it?

One of the things that the Buddha did in a lot of his models and in the aggregates,

This is certainly the case,

Is he took our experience,

Which feels so familiar and so common to us,

So every day,

That we don't normally tend to try to investigate it and see what's going on.

We just get this sense of,

I know what's going on,

I know what it is because I've experienced it so much,

And we just move on through life with it.

So we're somewhat deadened to the actual experience because we're so familiar with it.

What the Buddha does with these models is similar to what happens when we take a prism and shine white light through it.

So if you take a prism and shine a beam of white light through it and then look over on the wall,

You'll see the constituent colors that the white light is made out of.

So you'll see the reds,

The yellows,

The greens,

The blues,

The violet.

You'll see those colors.

When you look at the white light,

It's white,

But when you look at the spectrum that the prism separated for you,

You see the colors.

There's not anything really magical that's being done there.

Well,

In one sense,

It's quite magical,

But in another sense,

It's just the white light being broken into the elements that make the whiteness when they all come together.

And so that's really a way to think of this model of the aggregates is we're taking a prism and taking this experience that we call I or me or myself,

This whole experience of that,

And shining it through this prism of the aggregates and breaking it into constituent pieces that we can look at in a little bit more detail to try to have a better sense of what's going on.

And certainly when we come back and look at our life,

We'll see the whole life again.

We'll see all the parts of it,

But we'll have a little bit more understanding,

A little deeper understanding of what's going on there.

So the idea of the aggregates,

The language,

The aggregates is a poly-word,

Conda,

Which is usually translated as aggregate.

Sometimes it's been translated as a pile or a heap.

It's the idea that we can take this experience and break it into these different types of globs of experience and begin to investigate them independently of each other to some degree.

They're not really easy for us to separate.

And so we can look at parts of them,

But we really are using the aggregates to look at the aggregates to try to understand them a little bit better.

It's important to understand we're not really trying to define what it means to be a person with the aggregates.

We're not trying to uncover that kind of equality to it.

We're not looking for just a cognitive model that makes us feel like we now know something that we didn't before.

What we're really trying to do,

The way the Buddha talked about the aggregates is we're trying to understand the essence of our suffering,

What happens and how do we come to suffer in this experience that we call ourselves.

One of the things that really begins to point that to us is in one of his earliest suit,

Is one of his earliest conversations with the bhikkhus,

With the monks,

He defined dukkha.

And the way he defined dukkha is he said,

Birth is dukkha,

Aging is dukkha,

Death is dukkha,

Sorrow,

Lamentation,

Pain,

Grief and despair are dukkha,

Association with the unbeloved is dukkha,

Separation from the loved is dukkha,

Not getting what is wanted is dukkha.

In short,

The five clinging aggregates are dukkha.

So with all of that that he said,

That is dukkha,

Dukkha if you're not familiar with us,

The Pali word for what we would translate as suffering or stress,

That inherent quality of dissatisfaction that seems to visit us so often in our lives,

That he said in short,

The five clinging aggregates are dukkha.

So it tells us it's worth understanding what these aggregates are and what it means to be a clinging aggregate so that we can begin to understand the essence of dukkha and how it comes about for us.

So this model of the aggregates really there's two components to it.

One is the aggregates themselves.

And then the second part is what he referred to as the clinging aggregates.

So what is this model?

What are these five aggregates?

Well,

The first of these aggregates is form,

Material form.

So it's basically all physical phenomena.

And in particular,

It's our body,

The inside,

The outside of our body.

It's our physical senses,

The five physical senses,

Which is our way of connecting with our world around us.

So this all the materiality that we know is this first aggregate of material form.

The second aggregate is feeling tone.

It's referred to just as feeling often,

But it is things that are pleasant or the feeling tone is the pleasantness,

The unpleasantness or the neutral feeling,

Neither pleasant or unpleasant.

So just that experience of something being pleasant is the feeling tone.

Something being unpleasant is the feeling tone.

And for most of the things that go on for us is a kind of a neutral,

Neither pleasant or unpleasant,

We tend to ignore those things,

But that's also part of a feeling tone.

So there's material form,

There's feeling,

There's perception is the third one.

Perception,

It's much the common way we think of perception.

It's the making sense of our experience.

So when we have a sense experience,

Our system,

Our mental systems come to bear on that and make sense of it for us.

So there's memory,

There's recognition,

There's past experience,

All of these things that come together that let us know what is happening now is in context to our experience of being who we are.

So it turns the indefinitely of an experience into something more concrete for us.

And it often induces the feeling tone as part of that.

And again,

That could be based upon our perception.

So we have material form,

We have feeling tone,

We have perception.

The fourth of these aggregates is mental formation,

Or sometimes it's referred to as fabrication,

Mental fabrication.

And this is essentially everything else that the mind does besides feel and perceive.

It's pretty much everything else.

So it's our thoughts,

It's our emotions,

It's the processing that we do in our mind,

Just these ways that our mind works on the experiences that we have,

Taking the perceptions,

The feeling tone,

Creating stories,

Creating dialogues and dramas in our mind,

Creating emotions of joy,

Emotions of fear or anger.

So both sides of that,

All of that is a mental formation.

And then the fifth is consciousness.

So this is really sense consciousness is what we're talking about.

It's the capacity that we have to be aware of things,

The capacity that we have to know the five physical senses and the experiences that come with those senses,

As well as what in Buddhism,

The sixth sense is the mind,

The ability to be aware of the mind,

To be conscious of what the mind is doing.

So again,

It's material form,

Feeling tone,

Perception,

Mental formation,

And sense consciousness.

So the way the Buddha talked about this,

He said,

This is the sum of our experience,

These pieces.

This is a model for how we live this life,

Who we are in this life.

The quality of these aggregates that the Buddha talked about when he discussed dukkha,

This idea of a clinging aggregate as opposed to an aggregate.

When we define those five aggregates,

There's nothing in them,

Inherently in them that would lead to a sense of stress or suffering.

They're just experience.

They just define our experience.

But what seems to happen as these aggregates come together,

There is an identification process that seems to arise with these aggregates.

And the identification is that we begin to take an interest in what's happening in these material experiences,

In the perceptual overlays that define what they are for us,

In the thoughts and the emotions and the processing.

There seems to be this identification.

And with that,

There is a sense of an I or a me,

A self,

Someone who is the subject of these experiences.

So no longer are they just an experience,

Just an aggregate.

But now there's something that we take an interest in.

And that kind of interest that we take is what the Buddha's talking about here is clinging.

So we're trying to hold on to those things that are pleasant and push away those things that are unpleasant.

So that quality of identifying with these aggregates as they arise,

Taking a vested interest in them,

Being the subject of them and having them happen to me,

I now have this interest in making those things that are pleasant stay and making those things that are unpleasant go away.

This sense of an I or me expects these things to be operating in my timeframe.

So to hold onto them as long as I want to hold onto them,

To push them away when I don't want them to be here.

And in fact,

We're not in control of that.

We don't have the capacity to hold most of the things that go through our experience.

We don't have the capacity to push away the things that are unpleasant.

If we had that capacity,

We probably wouldn't be here tonight.

We would just take hold of those things that are pleasant,

Push away those things that are unpleasant and move on.

So one of the other qualities here besides this sense of an I or a me that seems to arise out of this model of these aggregates is a sense of permanency that we get because we're sort of dulled to these aggregates when we look at them as a holistic experience.

So those things like our material form,

Like our body,

For example,

Underneath it all,

We kind of expect it to be permanent,

To be here and available to us in the form we want all the time.

And the body will do that for a while,

But then there are times where you won't do that.

Either we get sick,

We get old,

Other things happen that cause our material form to begin to change.

We talked just a minute ago about the feeling tones,

How we really work to hold on to the pleasant feeling and to push away the unpleasant feeling.

How does that work for you?

If you've got a pleasant feeling,

How often do we,

As we're trying to hold it,

That trying to hold it itself is unpleasant because it's the fear it's going to go away.

And it seems that the more we try to push away something that's unpleasant to get rid of that unpleasant feeling,

That itself is unpleasant.

So we're inducing more unpleasantness just by the pushing away of the unpleasant.

The perceptual overlays,

They create a story for us out of the material experience that we've had.

They pull from our memory,

From our perceptions,

From our comfort with what's in our world around us,

What's what,

And build a story for us.

And that story feels very real and very substantial and like it will be here for at least for a long time,

Even if it doesn't feel like it will be there forever.

Our mental formations are much more challenging,

I think,

Because while we can see if we begin to look at them,

We can see how fleeting they are.

They also paint a picture that we believe.

The thoughts that arise in our heads and the emotions that flow through us,

They feel so solid and substantial,

So believable that no matter how many times we've had them,

We fall for them over and over and over again.

Even when we know this thought is not real,

It could be something that's coming up for you or maybe you're awake at night and thinking about something.

You're safe in your bed,

But you're thinking about something that's coming up tomorrow or the next week.

Even though you can tell yourself,

I don't have to worry about this now,

I'm safe in my bed,

The mind's insistent nature says,

No,

No,

This is real.

You have to believe it.

And we do.

So the qualities here as we begin to look at these aggregates,

We begin to see,

First of all,

That they themselves are ever-changing,

That they don't hold still for even a moment.

And you can try this for yourself by taking anything from a physical sensation you're experiencing to a thought or an emotion that's coming up for you,

A feeling tone,

And see how elusive it actually is,

How much it's constantly changing in your experience.

And so our work that the Buddha has offered and invited us to do with the aggregates is to investigate what is this that's going on here?

What is the nature of these aggregates?

To see how we're sucked in by the belief of these things to be a reality and how easily we're confused when we try to process life as if it has those qualities of being permanent and there being a self or an I that's in charge of everything.

So we can use this model to slowly deconstruct the self that we have made as a heap or as a pile of these aggregates and see some of the qualities that are there and investigating those qualities to begin to find,

For example,

That nothing is static,

That nothing is really fixed,

That there's ever changing nature to our experience,

To see that there is no real subject no matter how much it feels like that or we sense that there's one when we go to look for it,

It's not there.

The Buddha had a simile that he used to talk about this and it was the idea of a chariot.

He said if you've got a chariot and you take the wheels off the chariot,

To look for the chariot,

Begin to dismantle,

Take it apart,

Where is the chariot?

You take the wheels,

You look there,

There's no chariot in there.

You take the seat,

There's no chariot in there.

You begin to pull the chariot into its pieces and you see there was nothing,

There is nothing that is inherently a chariot.

That the chariot is just the aggregation of the different components of it that's made into something that would be called a chariot.

And that's really what the experience of a sense of self is.

Each one of these aggregates as they arise for us begins to contribute to this sense of an I or a me and as they come together,

There's this illusion of a permanent self,

A permanent subject to everything.

It feels,

There's some sense that it's here,

That it's real,

But when we go to look for it,

We can't find it.

It's not like a hand that you can just go and see with one of your physical senses.

It's not even like a thought where if you're watching a thought,

You can kind of see this thought arising,

It's coming,

It's falling away.

You can see some activity of the mind,

But where is this self?

The more we look for the self,

The more elusive the self becomes.

The metaphor that I think of it as is it's like looking for a shadow with a flashlight.

So there's a shadow over in the corner and you want to get a better look at the shadow.

So you take your flashlight to shine it on the shadow.

There's no shadow anymore.

The very act of looking,

Trying to find the shadow makes the shadow disappear.

So our self,

That sense of an I or me is like that.

The more we look for it and ask where is this self,

The less it's available to be seen.

So it's very elusive that way.

So as we begin to investigate the aggregates this way and see the temporal nature of them,

That the sense of an I or me that feels like it's the subject of all of it,

As that begins to soften,

It can begin to feel untethered.

Like what is there?

What's underneath all this?

And so the investigation of seeing what's underneath these things is a good experience to see what is there?

If I don't have a self at the core of these things,

What's left?

People are afraid when they hear that sense of an I or a me is part of the experience of these aggregates arising from them.

Well,

What will happen if I don't have a self?

What's that going to do?

And it's not going to do anything except give you freedom because the one that's afraid of disappearing is part of the story.

You just see that by investigating these aggregates for yourself.

The Buddha said the aggregates and the clinging to them are the root of our dukkha.

They're the root of our suffering.

As we begin to investigate and see how that happens,

How would the arising of an aggregate,

The formation of an aggregate,

There's a sense of self that comes in and takes ownership of that.

How does that lead to dukkha?

How does that invest,

Investing in that aggregate,

How does that cause this wanting things to be other than they are?

So what I'd like to do for the meditation tonight is guide an experience around these aggregates to give you a little bit more direct experience with how you might be able to see them for yourself.

So I ask you for this next period of time to just have an open mind,

To let yourself look at these things that I invite you to look at and see for yourself what's going on here.

See if you can begin to see these aggregates as they arise for you.

And I'll be reminding you as we go through it what the aggregates are,

But just again,

Just to name them for you so you can,

As we get into it,

You can begin to see is the first one is the physical form.

So we'll start with that,

Looking at that.

The second is the feeling tone,

Which is just the pleasant,

Unpleasant or neutral.

The third is the perceptions.

It's our mind making sense of what it is that we're experiencing.

The fourth is mental formations.

So we'll have a lot of those.

We'll have thoughts.

We'll have perhaps emotions.

We'll have mental processing.

That's all the mental formations.

And we'll have consciousness,

Which is a little harder,

I think,

To begin to see more clearly,

But that's basically the awareness that your mind is holding these things in.

So we'll investigate that as well.

As we do this practice,

We'll be doing two things.

The first one is meditation.

So from this perspective,

Meditation is the direct experience,

The direct looking and just looking without any comments,

Without any decisions,

Without any planning,

Just looking at the experience of what's going on.

So use that meditative mind to just notice,

Just to see what's going on.

And then I will invite you with some questions to move from meditation to contemplation.

With contemplation,

What we're doing is we're using our cognitive mind.

We're using the aggregates to investigate the aggregates.

So we'll begin to look at something that we experienced and see what is that experience like?

What is the nature of that experience?

So that's the contemplation piece is to sort of reflect on what it was that we were experiencing in the meditation.

Reviews

Great summary of the 5 aggregates - useful to listen to as I study and meditate on this subject. The teacher is knowledgeable and has a calming tone to his voice. Highly recommended! I will listen to this again as I continue my learning.

Good integral perspective, Worth re-listening to.

Very helpful in describing the Five Aggregates.
Thank you.

Thank you, this teaching was very helpful for me, and I have a much better understanding of the aggregates now.

Excellent

That was a very clear and interesting talk. Thank you. 🙏

The guided meditation evaporated as if there were no self in charge of sorting through the piles of gravel.

Great!!! Thank you

Really amazing talk!!! I return to this one again and again!

would have loved to have done the meditation but this was wonderful