Meditation: Marveling at the Flow of Sensations; Dharmette: The Five Aggregates (1/5) Intro & Body/Form (Rupa)

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meditation: Marveling at the Flow of Sensations; Five Aggregates (1/5) Intro & Body/Form (Rupa). It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Nikki Mirghafori at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 25, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Meditation: Marveling at the Flow of Sensations

Greetings, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever your time zone might be. My name is Nikki Mirghafori, and I'm delighted to be joining you this week, supporting us and Gail, who's teaching a retreat this week.

The theme that I like to invite us to explore this week is the five aggregates, and I'll say a lot more about it later, but for now, let's just begin meditating together, sitting together. So let's begin.

Let's arrive. Arrive in our bodies. Let's arrive in this moment in time.

Let us sit with a sense of integrity on this Earth. A sense of dignity. Internal dignity. Dignified, no matter what is going on, whatever the conditions of the mind and the body, we meet them with a physical form that is dignified.

If you're sitting, allow your spine to be straight with a sense of integrity and dignity. If you're lying down or standing, also let the body have a sense of dignity in its posture.

While we sit with our back straight, aligned as if an invisible string is pulling up on our head ever so gently, straightening and aligning our vertebrae one at a time, we also want the body to be relaxed. We want the sense of uplift to feel natural, not forced. The body is being uplifted—this form—and at the same time, it is being pulled down by gravity. The muscles are relaxed, offering their weight to the Earth. It is as if we have wings and have roots, suspended with ease.

Inviting the feet to feel the Earth. To feel the contact points or sit bones. To feel the contact points: hardness, softness, heaviness, the edges. The sensations of aliveness.

Inviting awareness to hold the breath, relaxing and receiving the breath in the abdomen, one breath at a time.

Offering the heart, the mind, inviting a sense of spaciousness in this moment. If thoughts are arising—preoccupations, ruminations—they come and they go. They are not like kryptonite locking up the mind, but they come and they go. They're like a river; they flow. There's so much space.

Receiving each in-breath and each out-breath provides connection to the spaciousness, to the steadiness of the heart and mind.

Letting there be more awareness of the body. The way this body is sitting. Whatever posture this body is in, bringing awareness to the posture. The sense of proprioception we have as humans, having a sense of the internal orientation of the body. In the suttas^[1], this is identified as knowing the body postures. Know that you're sitting and breathing.

Also knowing, being aware that the experience of this body internally is composed of many different sensations. Sensations of hardness, softness, flow, temperature, coolness, heat, pressure, release.

Letting ourselves become curious in a relaxed way. Let the body be relaxed, the heart be relaxed. Be curious about the experience of this body internally. Not so much as a concept of "body" and "leg," but the constituents of the experience. The flow of experience. The marvel of the flow of experience. Touch, vibration, heat, pressure. All of these sensations.

Your heart can relax. Actually, when we simplify, we go down to the constituents of the experience with a sense of awe, curiosity, and marvel.

As we turn towards the experience of being human, this experience of the body in its constituents: sensations, the flow, the vibrations, hardness, softness, and temperature throughout the body. Opening up, making this the measure of our attention.

We begin to perceive, to see differently. Our usual preoccupations soften; they release. See for yourself the transformation when you open up your awareness and relax into the awareness of the body's sensations. Knowing the body, this form, not through the interpretation of concepts, but through the elemental experience of sensations. No conception. There are so many sensations sensed through this body. See for yourself.

The heart and the mind can relax. The body can relax. It is just a different way of being and seeing.

It is as if we're gently tethering the mind to the body, to the sensations, to knowing the body. Tying the busy mind to a post so it can settle and see differently.

And as we bring this meditation period to a close, let there be appreciation for yourself, for your dear self, for having brought yourself to this meditation at this moment in time. You are planting seeds. Not judging how this period was, whether it was distracted, sleepy, or deeply concentrated. Not judging or attaching to an outcome in this moment, but trusting that you're planting seeds. Shifting and turning the flow and patterns of the heart and mind, little by little, through your intention.

Have gratitude for yourself and all the causes and conditions that have enabled you to be a part of this practice with the sangha^[2] and the community. Have appreciation for them and the teachings, and all the causes and conditions that have brought us to this point. Many of them are challenging, of course—to be human is challenging—and many of them are wonderful blessings.

Share the goodness of our practice with all things everywhere. May my practice, a single moment of awareness, of kindness, and of wisdom, be of service. Not just to myself—though definitely to myself, my loved ones, those I know, and those I don't know—but to all things everywhere. May my life be of benefit in ways I cannot understand. May it be of service to all beings everywhere.

Thank you, everyone. Thanks for your practice.

Dharmette: The Five Aggregates (1/5) Intro & Body/Form (Rupa)

Hello again, and good day.

For this week, I'd like to invite us to explore the teachings on the five aggregates. I was thinking about what might be a good topic to discuss this week. So many beautiful topics have been covered in these 7:00 A.M. Pacific Time teachings. I looked back and saw that the five aggregates haven't been discussed as a series for a long time—for years. It's such a rich teaching, and I wanted to do my best to bring heart to it. Even the name, "the five aggregates," sounds like: What is an aggregate? It just seems kind of complex and very heady. But it's not heady. Let's explore.

The five khandhas^[3] can also be translated as "heaps." These five things are the constituents of experience. They are the way that, as human beings, we experience the world. All the ways that we experience the world are through the combination of these five aspects. Of course, experience could be cut up in so many different ways, and this is just one way to slice the pie.

What are the five heaps? I'll name them and unpack them a little bit.

The first one is form, or rūpa^[4]—internal and external stuff. Notice that these go from coarse to subtle, with rūpa being the coarsest level of how we experience our reality as humans.

Then there is vedanā^[5], or feeling tone. The feeling tone can be pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant (neutral). This is the sense of impression, the valence on the mind.

Next is saññā^[6], perception, which is how we perceive objects internally and externally. I'm just going to name them now, because we will go through each of them day by day.

Then come saṅkhāras^[7], which are often translated as mental formations or mental activity. The lead among these is volition or intention—relational activity, volitional activities of the mind, speech, and body.

The last one is consciousness, or viññāṇa^[8], which is the most subtle of them all.

Today, I'd like to spend more time with form, or rūpa. But first, to talk a little bit about what a heap or a khandha is. In a way, you can think of our experience as an amalgamation. It's a heap, a combination, a gestalt. It's a combination of these five aspects that form our experience.

For example, we can think of water. When we talk about water, water is water. And yet, there are different aspects: whether the water is turbid or clear, what color it has, and what the temperature is. There are dimensions of saltiness or whether there's sugar in it. All of these different aspects and constituents come together. Yet, we can lean into one or the other. We can really become tuned into the color of the water. We can lean into knowing these different constituents of experience, instead of just seeing it as one compact whole.

Why do we want to engage with this practice of seeing the different constituents of experience and separating them out?

Very briefly, we often take our experience as this compact aggregate. Perhaps we're lost in our thoughts, overwhelmed by them, and ruminating until it all becomes a mess. Maybe there's body pain, and the body pain turns into, "Why me?" Actually, a better example is this: the sensations of body pain give rise to a latent feeling tone, which gives rise to particular mental formations, and our consciousness is perceiving it in a particular way. These five aggregates come together, and then the mind's rumination—these mental formations—can just kind of go off the rails.

But if we pause, we can start to see the constituents of our experience for what they are. Then it doesn't become so overwhelming and messy all of a sudden. We take it a little less personally. We have a foothold in the middle of this experience of being human. It becomes a little more manageable. It's the same way that if you wake up in the morning and feel overwhelmed by everything you have to do, but then you create your to-do list: "Okay, I need to go grocery shopping. I need to buy this and that. I need to make an appointment. I need to call this person." Then there's a sense of relief. It becomes less entangled.

When we lean into each and every one of these aggregates, we can get to see the flow of experience as it arises and passes. We see its impermanence, its impersonality, and its unsatisfactoriness. In a heartful way, we realize, "Oh yes, there is more freedom available. There's so much more freedom than what the mind is clinging to or fixated on."

Given the time I've spent setting the stage for why this is important—and there are many other reasons; this could be an hour-long Dharma talk entirely on why the aggregates are important—I want to spend a little bit of time with the first one so that we can spend time with the others this week.

Form, or rūpa. Form internally and externally. Our experience of the world is through our perception (saññā) of form. In the teachings, form is talked about in terms of the four elements^[9].

To the modern mind, the four elements might seem like an archaic teaching. "Are you really saying that the body, and externally everything in the world, is made up of the earth element, water element, fire element, and air element? That seems so basic." I have to say, that was my perception too when I started to practice. But through years and years of practice, and also exploring scientific understanding, I see many interesting corollaries. I actually gave an hour-long talk at IMS about the four elements practice and modern science.

Ever so briefly, consider that the point of this teaching in Buddhism is for us to get an understanding of these elements inside and outside. That is the exact same thing that modern science tells us. The well-known astrophysicist Alan Lightman famously said that if you take every atom of your body, put a tag on it, and go back billions of years, you could see that it is stardust. We are stardust. Stardust inside, stardust outside. Internal, external. It's just these elements; there's no difference. That, to me, blows my mind. There is a kinship of form, internal and external.

Another way to relate to the four elements is through how science understands solids, liquids, gases, and energy. With $E=mc^2$, there is energy and there is matter. Fire can be seen as this energy element, and matter can be transformed into energy or vice versa. We can think of matter in the three ways it shows up: as solids, liquids, or gases. As modern folks, we can relate to this concept of the four elements inside and outside through gases, solids, liquids, and energy or movement.

I'm going to pause here because we're out of time. I'll say more about that tomorrow, because there are two ways we can relate to the four elements teachings: as matter inside and outside, and as the sensations through which we perceive them. I'll say more about that later. There's so much here to explore. This is fun.

Thank you so much for your practice. The invitation I have for you today, as we explored in the meditation, is to lean into a constituent of your experience with the body. As you move around the world, as you feel your body, as you sense the body internally and externally: matter and form inside, matter and form outside. Stardust inside, stardust outside. The four elements in and out. Relate to the constituents of your experience. Lean into that and see how that might shift and change the way we experience the world.

Thank you so much, everyone. Be well, and see you tomorrow. Bye.