The Five Aggregates: A Guided Meditation

A guided meditation which offers ways to work with the five aggregates in your meditation practice. Appropriate for all levels of meditators and offered to all who wish to add an understanding of this aspect of Buddhism to their practice. May we be free from attachment to suffering.

Transcript

So if you'd like to find a position that'll be comfortable for you for the next 20 to 30 minutes here.

And allow your eyes to softly close.

Noticing your attention to your breath.

Just noticing the breath flow into and out of the body.

And wherever you're noticing the breath,

Maybe in the nostrils,

The tip of the nose,

The breath as it flows through the throat,

Or even the rise and fall of the belly.

Notice that you are not actually aware of the breath.

What you're aware of is sensation that's come about by the breath.

So when the air passes through the nostrils,

There is a sensation in the nostrils.

It's that sensation that you're experiencing,

Not the breath itself.

So even here we can begin to see the aggregates and can begin to tease them apart.

That sensation that you're experiencing is form.

Just to take a moment to reflect on and allow yourself to experience the sensation.

And now to bring back the idea of the breath,

That this is the breath that you're experiencing.

And we know now it's not the breath,

It's the sensation,

Just the sensation that you're experiencing.

But the mind comes in and with a perception of what's happening,

Perception of your body,

The process of breathing,

The things you know well,

Builds a new story for you,

A story of a breath.

The mind comes in and paints it with a word,

Breath,

A mental formation,

That word breath.

And foundationally to this experience,

To the arising of a perception,

Of a thought behind that with the sensation itself,

There's a kind of an awareness of that sensation.

That out of all the things that you could be experiencing in that moment,

It's the breath that's in front of you,

That you're most aware of.

This is the sense consciousness.

The consciousness is almost like a light that shines on something in our experience.

And just as a light illumines something different and we don't really notice the light,

So the consciousness is not as easy to see what it is,

Or rather to see what it is illuminating.

It's easiest to see the consciousness if we shift it around.

So let us now move from the breath to sound,

To the hearing sensation,

Whether it be my voice or other sounds in your room.

Just direct your awareness to the sounds that are coming in.

I'm going to ring the bowl now,

Not to end the meditation,

But to give you a sound to just hear.

While you were listening to the sound,

Where was the breath?

It was certainly still going on,

But the quality of awareness shifted from the breath to the sound.

This is sense consciousness,

And it moves freely whenever you're called to some other aspect of your experience.

So let's return to the form aggregate by moving our awareness now to one of your hands.

Can pick either hand.

Just as you paid attention to your breath or to sound,

Now pay attention to that hand.

And with your eyes closed,

Just aware of what's going on in your hand,

What is actually going on there?

What is your experience?

There's just sensation.

It may be vibration,

Warmth,

Or coolness.

Just sensation.

With your eyes closed,

Is there any boundary to the hand,

To the sensation?

Is there any limit to it?

Popping the word hand so that we're just feeling the experience itself,

The sensations.

Going deeply into the sensation.

As you go into the sensation,

You may find there's not even a fixed physical location for that sensation.

No boundaries,

No location,

Just sensation.

No hand,

Just sensation.

Allowing the mind to come in now and recognizing that this is your hand again.

If you need to,

To make that connection again,

To open your eyes and look at your hand and close them again.

And see what happened as you did that second part of recalling that this is your hand.

When you think of it as your hand,

Is there not a slightly different experience than there was with just the sensation?

Are there not boundaries,

Fingers,

A palm,

A back of the hand,

Knuckles,

Nails,

Connection to a wrist?

Are these qualities not back again?

Blend it in with the sensation to be sure,

But to some degree also masking the sensation itself.

The perception of hand.

What is,

What's the feeling tone of the hand?

Is there any sense of pleasantness?

Any discomfort or unpleasantness?

And with the hand,

When the hand comes,

Is there not a subtle feeling that this is my hand?

When it was just the sensation,

That quality of my sensation is less than when it's a hand.

When it's connected to an arm,

When it has fingers.

Where is that my of my hand coming from?

What is that quality?

Who is it?

Whose hand this is,

Who is that?

And once more dropping the story of hand,

Dropping the word,

Moving back as fully as we can into just the sensation,

Just the mental form.

I'm sorry,

Just the physical form.

Just the experience.

No boundaries,

No edges.

No spatial location,

Just sensation.

Is it my sensation or is it rather just sensation happening in awareness?

And allowing the mind once again to come in and reclaim the hand,

To reclaim the experience as hand.

The physical form through the experience happening in consciousness or awareness,

Our perception that this is a hand.

And that special quality that it's my hand.

With any feeling tone that comes from the experience of the hand.

Anything that thought thinks about the hand or about being aware of the hand or about the condition of the hand,

Noticing any flow of thoughts that come through,

Any emotional tone that might be there,

Happiness or sadness,

Boredom,

Anger,

Fear,

Anything that might arise all coming together to make up this experience of ourself through these aggregates.

And with the building of the story as we allowed the perceptual overlays and the feeling tone and the mental formations to come back in,

That behind the scenes subtle sense that this is happening to me,

This is my hand,

This is happening to me.

And I have an interest in and a concern for the pleasant feelings,

The unpleasant feelings.

I have a vested interest in this.

If there is any pleasantness or unpleasantness associated with what your mind is working with right now,

To just notice that.

And if it's pleasant to notice the pull,

The wanting,

However subtle it may be.

If there's any unpleasantness,

Any discomfort in the hand or in the mind from doing this work,

Noticing how the mind and the self wanted to stop,

To not be.

Friends,

This is the origination of Dukkha.

However soft and subtle it might be for something simple as your hands and the feelings in your hands,

This is how Dukkha arises.

We do this process over and over again,

Moment after moment,

With all our mental form,

Every sensation we have.

The words you're hearing right now,

You're doing this for those.

Whatever you're experiencing for sensations in your body right now,

You're doing it there.

Wherever your mind is wanting this to be over,

Wanting it to continue,

Feeling bored or happy,

It's going on there.

And yet when we went right to the sensation itself of the hands or the breath,

We could begin to see that without the other aggregates,

Those sensations have a kind of purity to them,

A purity of self,

A purity of not belonging.

And with that purity,

A kind of freedom to let them be just as they are.

This is the invitation of the Buddha's teachings of this kind of work.

By investigating our experience this way,

We can begin to see a little at a time that there's no need for us to hold these aggregates,

To try to hold them or push them away.

But just like the experience of the sensation in the hand or the breath,

To allow them to be,

And in that allowing to be free from the dukkha that's induced when we cling to them,

When we hold to them.

Reviews

Interesting investigation of sensation and our thoughts about sensation. 🙏What are the five aggregates, though?

Such a useful exploration of the aggregates and how the experience of them becomes “me”. Thank you so much for separating out the process so clearly.

What a strong meditation!

Beautiful and clear experiential demonstration of the root of our suffering

Sorting through the aggregates, hearing words saying sense the air blown from the belly, through the airway, out the nose, striking the hand. An awareness that these directions represent a mental formation leads to a neutral feeling that life goes on whether or not any one considers home a place of doing or being no place at all.

Brilliant! Thanks! Applying the concepts

I am grateful for the talk about the Five Aggregates and the guided meditation. It is illuminating and will be helpful in my practice.

Good to know how to practice what the Buddha taught. More of this is needed.

Excellent

Phenomenal - thank you!

v. effective. Thank you

Truly insightful and wonderful! I definitely will be returning to this meditation again and again so I can see the Illusion of Anatta and dukka for what it really is. 🙏🏼