Meditating on the Five Aggregates

The five aggregates of form, feeling, conception, mental formations, and consciousness make up the entirety of our samsaric experience. They are described and emphasized in the teachings of the Buddha, as they form the basis for how we experience life. 

Samsara is a process of being bound to circle from one projection of mind to the next without ever really tasting the raw and direct qualities of our underlying nature. Because of this circling, we fight, we struggle, we fear, we expect; in short, we suffer.

Samsara is based on a constant misperception, and so if we can accurately see what and how we are misperceiving, we have a fighting chance to loosen and eventually eradicate the habitual patterns that are binding us to suffer. Buddhism describes the eradication of our misperceptions as an ultimate form of freedom or awakening. 

Here, freedom is a tricky thing to describe because ultimate freedom/awakening is beyond language and concept. Therefore, many traditions of Buddhism usually start by explaining what freedom is not. Here, a lack of awakening or freedom stems from one's unconscious habits of mind that cling to an I, me, or mine. For when we cling to a solid sense of I, me, or mine, we project other, and judgment and afflictive emotions ensue. Since our sense of I, me, or mine is always concerning one or more of the five aggregates, developing insight and experience into the nature of the aggregates and how they function is critical.

We get to know the nature of the aggregates experientially through awareness or mindfulness meditation. Here, we can practice watchfulness of one or more of the aggregates. We work with the objects of form, feeling, thought, and the way our perception interprets all of what we perceive.

So understanding the nature of these aggregates experientially through a clear, direct seeing or raw perception into their nature via insight meditation is our way out of suffering from a Buddhist perspective. Here we come to experience their changing nature. We see the mechanisms of how we suffer through them. And most importantly, we loosen and cut through the clinging to the aggregates as I, me, and mine. 

So understanding these five aggregates in our experience as impermanent, as being in essence, dukkha or dissatisfaction, and then ultimately empty of independent existence, is how we start to free ourselves.

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We need to interrupt our habitual way of relating to the aggregates if we want to experience genuine happiness. Ordinarily, we forget that the aggregates are composed of parts and that these parts are always changing. Moreover, we habitually confuse the aggregates with the self, or what we experience as I, me, or mine. 

If we experience the body as mine, we cling to it and proceed to experience the same with our feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness. From here, afflictive emotions connected to aversion or craving arise. When we act from them with our body, speech, or mind, we produce the causes for future reification and suffering (i.e., Karma). 

So knowing what keeps us on the hamster wheel and how to get off of it can be really liberating news! And when we practice insight meditation, being watchful of the aggregates, we can start to taste genuine unconditioned happiness and liberation in our sitting practice.

We can also contemplate this in our daily life. When we experience anger, we can turn towards our aggression and watch our aggregates of feeling and conception arise and fall. We can witness the waves of frustration in relationship with our body, mind, and consciousness. We can see that this is based on a habit of mind arising from our mental formations and consciousness. And then we can ask, who is the experiencer of all of this? We can begin to witness all of these parts and aggregates in dependence upon one another.

We are typically used to experiencing self as one big heap, with everything jumbled together. Through meditation, we can experience that there's just a feeling or sensation arising in dependence upon many impermanent parts. And so we start to experience a little bit of space, a little bit of hope within that. Maybe another way to say it is how we begin to experience ourselves is not necessarily so personal or impersonal, but just arising and falling. 

I love that, as when we take something personally, we are immediately stuck in a reaction. So if we cease to experience our own internal responses as personal, we find more space and freedom. It's the same with our thoughts. It's the same with our judgments. It's the same with how we are relating to our aggregates where we can easily take it personally when actually in awareness, it's not personal at all. 

What happens over time is a process where you see the clinging happen in real-time. So it's not like it happens all at once. In the beginning or until we have a little bit more practice experience, the clinging feels very automatic and immediate. It's hard to distinguish the difference between the clinging and the open spaciousness of our underlying nature. 

But the more we practice, setting up the citadel of watchfulness, emptiness will naturally dawn. For sure, it will happen. But again, why is this important? Because this whole notion of there being an independent self, some sense of a permanent I, me, or mine that we can find, is the root of suffering from a Buddhist perspective. 

Though we need some kind of way to access this. And so we can practice awareness of body, feeling, thoughts, and phenomena. The four that are commonly referred to as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. 

Here we just set up and gently maintain an aware watchfulness of one of the four objects or foundations of mindfulness (body, feeling, thoughts, and phenomena). Though this is not an intellectual process. It is more like sitting with a giant question mark. And sitting with an open question can be painful as we have to be willing to sit with no ground. Though this can be used in our favor. As when we are seeking to answer something or land somewhere, we ultimately land in a duality. We fall into a sense of dualistic clinging again and again.

So we have to explore this enough to where we start to see our dualistic clinging loosen. We can even experience this a bit in mundane situations, like the moment we fall in love. When we really fall in love with someone, it can feel as if we are melding or blending with the other person. But unfortunately, we usually cling, and it doesn't last. And so in those moments, we could also feel the dwindling of self and other. It's naturally part of us. So just imagine if we train or familiarize ourselves more with it through meditation!

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So why do we consider the body to be the self? Why do we believe anger or craving to be self? Why is that? Because we've habituated to it and we've formed our own movie more or less, and we believe that movie again and again. We have the movie of our life. But the person we were ten years ago is not the person sitting here now. There are remnants of that person, but really, how much of that person is left?  

When we watch form, we can see the changes happening on subtler and subtler levels. That's how we start to embody impermanence. Sometimes impermanence is used as a teaching to remind us of change and inevitably death. But actually, impermanence is neither good or bad. It's just sort of this sense of ever-evolving change that nothing is static. So sometimes as a human being, that works in our favor. Sometimes it works against our plans and expectations. 

So part of what's embodied in relating to the five aggregates is connected to our essential humanness. It's a potent, vital practice. We suffer when we cling to permanence. When we stay craving to what or how we think our body, our life, our loved ones should be. But actually, a lot of this practice is the practice of letting go. Again and again and again. And it's all these mini letting-gos that lead up to the big letting go of awakening.

I want to encourage you to work on the mini letting-gos in your meditation practice, as meditation is a practice of many letting-gos. We sit on the cushion, we relate to our mind, we relate to our body, our emotions, we struggle, we resist. And then in small moments, we come into connection with an open heart. Almost as if the heart is breaking open a bit. 

Here we might cry, or we might open. And this is part of insight and compassion developing. These moments reveal our false beliefs about ourselves and others. They let us know that it's okay to let those beliefs go. It's okay to open. 

So the practice is looking, watching, being mindful, and finding those mini moments of letting go where we start to see clearly into how things are. Those small moments of letting go lead up to the big letting go. Of course, this also has to do with death. But really, this has to do with trusting emptiness, being the rawness of the nature of reality without the overlay of our concepts about it. When that happens, our clinging loosens, and when our clinging relaxes, emotions are allowed to rise and fall, life is allowed to rise and fall. Compassion and love are allowed to arise and be embodied entirely in our actions in the world. 

Now, this might sound really far fetched. It's really not from a Buddhist perspective. This is your nature. But we do have to train in it. There is training that we're doing here. We do have to habituate to the awareness which sees through the solidity of how we are relating to ourselves and others. We have to directly know that duality is a farce. So to me, Buddhist inquiry and meditation end up leading to these letting-gos, which, as I said, could lead us to the big letting go where we go beyond clinging.

So at their root, the aggregates aren't really the problem. It's our perception and relationship to them that needs to shift. Their nature is also raw spaciousness, the spaciousness that's full of an ability to know, perceive, and be awake for others.