Alana’s 3s and 4s or, More Technically, the 5 Aggregates and the Buddhist Concept of Self
So, I am going to warn in advance that this is sure to be a mighty technical entry. This is about to get REALZ so, if you are having trouble, assume you’re in good company (even with this blogger) and do your best to follow along. Also note, the stuff in this post is not a starting place for practice, this is not meant to fuel anyone else’s contemplations, though none of this is a great secret (there are no secrets thanks to Wikipedia), it can be a bit confusing. This was however information and a Homework assignment (in the next blog) that Mae Yo gave me to act as a scaffolding for my contemplations. With this blog, I am trying to tell a linear(ish) story of how my practice progressed and if I don’t explain this we will have a big gaping hole in the plot line. This blog then starts a period of more technical analysis of myself and myself belongings (from around Sept. 2013). So without further ado..
A little Buddhism 101: 5 Aggregates and the Buddhist Concept of Self:
So, spoiler alert — Buddhism believes there is no self. This is probably one of the single most important tidbits of the Buddha’s teachings; our concept of self is an illusion, our biggest, dirtiest, most troublesome wrong view! Now that we got that out there, let’s back-up a bit and try to understand what all this actually means, what exactly is ’no self’ or Anatta . I really Like Phra Anan’s explanation of this so, I’m going to borrow it here…
If I asked you to go find for me baby Alana could you do it? The answer of course, is no. If I asked you to go find middle school alana or prom night alana or day dad died alana could you find those alanas either? Though each of those alanas really did exist at one point, now they are gone. Things, their form, are constantly changing. This is the principle of No Self in Buddhism — there is no enduring, inherent, unchanging thingness, no self in anything…there is just a continual flow of arising and ceasing. This is actually happening in every instant, but we have developed tools in our minds to ignore it. If we look over a long period it gets easier to detect that our little snapshots of moments aren’t enduring at all. In other words, baby alana and middle school alana and today alana aren’t really the same alana at all. Alana has no permanent enduring self.
So now the million dollar question — if we are just a continual sequence of arising and ceasing (little momentary self particles for simplicity), how did we come to the delusion that we are actually some kind of solid, enduring, permanent self? What are the tools we use to ignore reality?
Enter the 5 aggregates, which are essentially the mechanism that creates and sustains the illusion of self. I like to think of them like a watch — we call the watch a watch, a single solid thing. But in reality, if you open the back you can see it’s a bunch of gears, ‘aggregate’ parts, each performing their functions, contributing to the whole, making it seem like the watch is some constant singular entity even though its parts are always moving and changing. So here we are going to have the briefest review of what those parts are, with a special focus on the two Mae Yo explained are super key to my practice… #3 and #4 (memory and imagination).
The Aggregates: I will use the Pali once for the sake of precision and after that English for the sake of practicality…
- Rupa/Form — This is just the physical, tangible, forms in the world. We talked about it a bit in the blog Stop Being Such a Mooch. For ‘self’ this is our body and our sense organs like eyes and ears, etc.
- Vedanā/Feeling — this is just our response to something as yah yuk or neutral. In general we like yahs, but it is actually the next 2 aggregates that really control what we view as a yah/yuk/neutral and what scheme we are going to employ to get more yahs and less yuks.
- Saññā/ Memory — I like to think of this as a memory bank. It is a place we we have stored memories of past experiences, things we have learned, been taught and which we remember.It’s the fuel we use for #4 to start moving.
- Saṅkhāra/Imagination — I like to think of this as my own personal storyteller. This is the ‘gear’ that takes what we sense, and whatever memories that it triggers and starts imagining. Imagining how you can use this object, avoid this pain, it fantasizes about the future, it innovates, it retaliates, it selects, it interprets, frankly it causes a commotion
- Viññāṇa/ Consciousness — This sort of goes on in the background and is not something I have contemplated. The best explanation I have heard for this .. if you had a room full of corpses and cranked-up the party tunes, they wouldn’t hear a thing. Even though they have ears, they don’t seem to have the ear consciousness to register sound. This is the job of Viññāṇa.
Why are Memory and Imagination so critical to consider? Its because they sell the lie. Memory selectively stores moments from the past, pictures of infant alana, details of prom night alana or dad’s death alana. Imagination colors in the lines, tells stories that take these separate moments, which are merely connected, and makes them seem solid, like an identity. Though our ignorance has been in charge of the storage and imagination up till now, with some wisdom, we can take back control of the story telling and begin to write new memories to the bank –ones that are in alignment with the truths of this world, namely impermanence, our propensity to suffer and no self. This part gets a little ahead of the game though. With way less info than I have given ya’ll…my homework assignment from Mae Yo was — Go and figure out how Memory and Imagination work. What is their process?
You can see how I fared in the next blog….
