Listened to a dharma talk today about the five aggregates with Pascal Auclair. He calls them the five rivers, a good reminder that we’re a complex process made up of many other processes with nothing fixed. The five aggregates of clinging are five parts of our “selves” that can be used in practice to look closely at the processes behind our experience. Individually, they are not self, together, they are simply an aggregation.
The names commonly used for these are not well chosen, in my opinion, so each requires a few words to explain what they really mean. The five are:
- form, matter – the body
- sensation – feelings of pleasant, unpleasant or neutral
- perception – mental identification and labeling of objects
- mental formations – all the things that spring up from our mind – Wikipedia puts it well: all types of mental habits, thoughts, ideas, opinions, prejudices, compulsions, and decisions triggered by an object
- consciousness, discernment – that which knows, mind; this one is a little hard to pin down, Wikipedia has a whole article on it
Pascal also points out how arbitrary the five really are. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that these five aren’t the right choice of aggregates. Any neuroscientist will tell you that a feeling of like, dislike or neutrality is hardly an elemental process. You could just as easily look at ourselves as simply body and mind. Or you could go deep like the Abhidhamma and get into the 89 kinds of consciousness. The idea remains that I am a collection of parts and processes, none of which, taken by itself, is “me”.
