Grounding The Five Aggregates

This dialogue is a continuation of the previous week’s discussion.  During the discussion, Peter led a guided meditation on how to use the four elements contemplations to provide a consistent focus for interrupting the elaboration the mind creates in the “selfing story.”  This exercise was followed by a sharing from the attending Sangha members regarding their experience during the  exercise and discussion of how this practice can benefit the process of awakening.  Next week’s exploration will include the contemplation of vedana (feeling) and sanna (perception), with the hope that this information will further the process of understanding the Five Aggregates of Clinging.

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How Feeling Drives The Self

This is the second of two talks about the importance of the practice of mindfulness of feelings.  During this talk, Peter reviewed paticca samuppada, usually translated as dependent origination.  A new rendering of the term was explained, that is, contingent provisional emergence, with clarification of the non-linear, mutually influential functions that affect how the mind overlays a provisional interpretation of raw sense data input, thereby creating a “selfing moment”.  In this creative process, attention becomes fixated on a particular feeling and perception, creating the craving and clinging dynamic that is the driving force of our distresses about life.  Mindfulness of feelings as feelings allows the skilled meditator to avoid “personalizing” the emerging self-organization, providing relief from craving and clinging.

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