Perhaps it’s best to ix-nay on the CD reviews for a while and talk about something considerably more important.
The Buddha stated repeatedly that in all his long teaching career he taught one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering. (I suppose the nit-pickers could say that’s two things, but it’s one idea.) He also said that just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so his teachings had but one taste, the taste of liberation.
Both of these statements are tremendously important for most Western practitioners, who have a tendency sometimes to forget such simplicities and begin spinning (delightfully) into the philosophical threads of the Dhamma. Many teachings which are really meant as practices are turned into philosophical inquiries or psychological theories. As such they are often rather incomplete, to say the least, or can be easily argued out of relevance. But they were never meant to be psychological theories, at least not in the sense that we modern Western Buddhists might tend to think of such theories.
I remember being dismayed during one teacher’s presentation on the Five Khandhas, or “aggregates”, when a particularly bothersome student began taking issue with what he saw as an unduly simplistic model of human psycho-physiology. There’s no question but that the khandhas do sound rather naïve if considered a model for the workings of the psycho-physiological organism: the five ‘heaps’ or ‘aggregates’ are: form, feeling, perception, mental volition, and consciousness. It’s worth noting that all of these five are also links of dependent origination — the Buddha’s practices for understanding the arising of suffering.
And that’s the key to them: they are practices, and not a theory of the workings of the mind. Consider the five ‘aggregates’ as objects of inquiry, which is how they are typically used when presented by the Buddha to his students. Each of the objects in turn becomes the object of three specific inquiries: I am not form, form is not mine, form is not myself. That is repeated with: I am not feeling, feeling is not mine, feeling is not myself. And so forth down the list.
It seems clear enough to me that these five objects of inquiry were chosen, not because they form a complete picture, but because they represent five levels of increasing subtlety, which is to say that as we progress from ‘form’ to ‘consciousness’, with each level it becomes more challenging to understand the lack of a permanent abiding self in the khandha in question.
Considering ‘form’, the first of the khandhas, it is a fairly straightforward process to consider that physical form (with all of its nuances — energy, gravity, shape, etc.,) does not amount to a permanent, abiding ‘self’ that somehow exists apart from, and permanent to, any other notions. (One might consider this a ‘soul’ in fact and be in the general proper ballpark.) Certainly my physical self isn’t the all-abiding, all-permanent ME. I can lose any amount of it and still remain ME. And it changes constantly, is rebuilt every seven years or so, grows and shrinks and waxes and wanes and in short does all the things that a physical organism does. No: there is no permanent abiding self in form.
Provided that I might have moved a bit in my practice to disentangling myself — be it ever so little — from any notion of my physical self being ME (or perhaps getting nowhere in the process but wanting to move on a bit anyway) I can progress to another slightly more subtle stage in the process: am ‘I’ to be found in that ever-brewing foam of feeling? Pleasant, unpleasant, neutral…a constant state of reaction to everything that impinges anywhere in my perceptive range. This is a bit more subtle, but on the other hand, after some time I think we have some chance of perceiving, as it really is, this constant flux and changing kaleidoscope of reactions, and understand that there is nothing permanent or abiding about it. No, that isn’t ME either.
So onwards: how about to the very act of perception itself? This involves the coming together of the sense door, the target, and the sensory consciousness, which together form that split-second of ‘contact’ — the moment when it all comes together into a ‘perception’. The eye sees the object, the eye-consciousness registers and informs it: contact is born. From contact comes quickly the spin of feeling, from that craving, which hardens into clinging, even further into becoming and is finally born as a full-fledged THING which in my delusion I consider to be real, even possibly to be some manifestation of ME — or worse yet, to be ME. So perception is a bit of a tougher nut to crack, nor are we expected to achieve perfect lasting success in our inquiry. The act of inquiry itself is the process. So: I am not perception, perception is not mine, perception is not myself.
From this we arrive at mental volition — the wonderful blur of mental process, all those jillions of little thought bubbles that stew about. As most of us who practice mediation intensively are well aware, those little bubbles come and go regardless of my opinion on the matter. It doesn’t matter whether I welcome or reject them. Like the ultimate uninvited guests crashing my mental party, they swarm, arise, last, depart, in a never-ending stream. Given half a chance in the matter I wouldn’t have anything to do with 99% of them. But there they are.
It’s easy to consider my thought processes as ME. Didn’t Descartes tell me that “I think, therefore I am.” But that really isn’t it: there’s no permanent abiding ME there, either. I’m not expected to take this on somebody’s say-so (even the Buddha’s say-so), so I am instructed to use inquiry: I am not mental volition, mental volition is not mine, mental volition is not myself. Just keep dropping the pebbles of inquiry on the object and see what happens.
Finally we arrive at consciousness itself. This really is the most subtle of them: how many of us would think of that carrier-wave of mental energy as being somehow the ultimate governor back there, the playing field upon which the rest of the fireflies of thought, perception, feeling, and form do their thing. The Buddha, however, made sure that we wouldn’t necessarily turn consciousness into a THING by dividing it into each of the sense groups — that is, we have an eye consciousness, ear consciousness, tongue (taste) consciousness, body (physical feelings) consciousness, nose (smell) consciousness, and mind consciousness. That alone is a great teaching to help us work on avoiding the tendency to think of consciousness as I described above — i.e., as a carrier-wave of mental energy that is a constant abiding something-or-other that provides the base for everything else. But it isn’t really like that, and so in our inquiry we can take a crack at dissolving our dependence on that particular delusion
And then, when we’ve finished with a practice, we can take a breath and perhaps begin again, always remembering that the practice of the Buddhadharma isn’t a set of things to believe, or even a bunch of stuff to be studied and learned, but a bunch of stuff to *do* — practices to be followed. It’s all about liberation, not fancy-pants philosophical ideas.