This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: The Bundles (4 of 5) Story Making

Hello and welcome to this fourth talk on the five bundles, the five khandhas^[2] in the Pali^[3] language.

I've been pointing out that this is a very important teaching in the early tradition of Buddhism. It represents the primary activities of mind that build up the bundle of suffering we can live in. Our suffering is seldom just about a single thing; there's a gathering, a collecting, and an accumulating of clingings. The graspings, things we hold on to, are addicted to, or caught in, contribute to an overall package of emotional distress.

To understand that package—how it gets created and built—is to untie the bundle so we no longer contribute to it, so that we don't have to suffer. The alternative to that is not to build something, but rather to allow something to grow.

Next week, as a follow-up to this week's talks on the bundles, I'll talk about the Seven Factors of Awakening^[4]. They're more like the seven limbs because there's a biological association. They are part of our biology, the limbs of our being that can grow, develop, and get stronger. They're the alternative to being caught in these bundles of clinging. They show what's possible without the resistance, obstacles, and coverings of these bundles; something deep can grow and develop to a fulfillment. It's a very positive orientation to a human being.

The idea that there are bundles might seem like a depressing idea. Or the idea today that questions in a deep way the substantial reality of stories and story-making can also seem very off-putting, because some stories are very meaningful for us and inspiring in profoundly deep ways. But next week, there will be this whole other orientation of deep meaning, a deep sense of purpose and value that is also very inspiring, that comes from this almost biological nature.

The metaphors the Buddha uses for these five bundles are metaphors of things that have been constructed or engineered by human beings, that don't exist in the natural world by themselves. Whereas the metaphor for the Seven Factors of Awakening are things that do exist naturally in the world. One of the metaphors for the bundles is an animal trap that a trapper has made. The trap doesn't exist in the natural world, but a carefully constructed trap can catch an animal. We construct these careful traps, these careful stories, that some of us get caught in. That becomes the story of our life, or the story of how we understand ourselves completely.

The fourth bundle is called saṅkhāra^[5]. Kara means "to make" and sam can mean "with" or "together." We make things up. It's the part of the mind that makes things up. One teacher friend of mine calls them "concoctions." Somebody else calls them "fabrications." I call them "constructs," mental constructs. It belongs to the world that constructs thoughts, ideas, plans, and fantasies, as opposed to something which grows.

In the Theravada^[6] tradition that developed over time, these five bundles we're talking about this week came to represent the human being. All aspects of a human being are somehow shoehorned into these five areas. Mental formations or mental constructs, this fourth one, represents all the different mental activities we do: the positive ones, the negative ones, those that cause suffering, and those that bring freedom. It's a very big basket.

But in the earliest tradition, there was no need or interest in getting involved in the metaphysics of what the human being actually is. Rather, the focus was how to free the human being from their suffering. What we are is kind of a sideshow to that freedom and living that freedom. We don't have to shoehorn everything in, because the bundles were meant not to describe the whole person, but to describe the primary ways in which we create our own suffering.

Some suffering might not be our creation. Deep grief, for example, could be called suffering, but that's part of the good heart sometimes that is broken or aches because of our love. It's not necessarily suffering in the Buddhist sense of it. Suffering is what we contribute to, what we put together, and what we make up.

So, the fourth aggregate is the most important because that's the source from which we create the bundles. That's where we make up stories and ideas about appearances, so we cling to appearances. That's where we make stories, ideas, and fantasies about sensations and pleasure and pain, so we get attached to them, with positive and negative attachments. We don't just recognize something as something, but we recognize it, have stories about it, and build up ideas so that we get attached to it.

Right here next to me is the bell, IMC's bell, and I can recognize it as a bell. But I can also create a story about how it got here, who gave it to us, what it means, and how long I've been using it. I could say, "I've been using it here for so long that it's probably mine, and if I ever leave IMC, certainly I have the right to take it with me." I'm creating this story, and each of those stories adds a little bit more attachment and clinging. That's not necessary. All that's necessary for teaching here at IMC is to know it's a bell so I can strike it properly.

This mental construct, this mental mind that makes things up, is the fourth aggregate. That's the one that makes the other items into bundles. They don't make sensations, they don't make recognitions, but they gather them together into these big collections of attachments that we then live under the burden of.

Some people love that mind because it can be amazingly creative. It can provide tremendous satisfaction, joy, purpose, and meaning. It can make things up where we are the prime character of a delusion of grandeur. We can have wonderful dreams of how wonderful things will be if we win a billion-dollar lottery. We can just be so enamored and lost in what we can do with all that money, how wonderful it will be, how people will love us and be the center of attention. It feels like finally we're fulfilled, we have a place, we're loved and respected, and won't it be wonderful to win the lottery?

We can have fantasies and make up utopian ideas. Some of these things are appropriate. Part of the beauty of a human being is our capacity to be creative, and make stories, or have new visions—that's a fancy word for a story. A vision, a dream of the future, serves as a guide and support for us. The mind that has stories and ideas has a lot of benefit.

It's the bundling, the way that they come with clinging, that is the problem. It's possible to have stories without any clinging. But when the story-making mind clings to itself and clings to the stories, then it becomes a bundle. Then it becomes the bundle of mental constructs. And the thing about these stories is that they contribute to the possibility of clinging to the other bundles. They kind of create the other bundles, in a sense, but they also create their own bundle.

Some people are so caught in their story. They have a single story that they live their whole life by: a story of resentment, a story of victimhood, a dream, or a Pollyanna story where everything is just wonderful, and they don't really see through it. There are many ways things we get caught in and stuck in that limit us.

The Buddha's teaching explicitly talks about how we limit ourselves so that we can understand how we can free ourselves from the limitations of clinging and attachments. Free ourselves from these heavy bundles we carry, sometimes for a lifetime, to see fresh, to see in a new way, and to see in a way that allows something profound to begin coming alive inside of us. Our innate vitality, our innate movement of life, sometimes gets curtailed by these difficult stories that we carry.

A very important part of mindfulness, then, is to know how to be mindful of the thinking mind, the discursive mind, the storytelling mind. To be present for it with respect, love, and care, but in such a way that we learn to see and feel it for what it is. To see it as something we're creating. If it's useful to do so—if it's a wonderful, healthy form of joy and creativity and it has value—we can hold onto it. But we want to learn in mindfulness how to put it down, how to let it go, and how to become quieter. So that we have much more say in the future outside of meditation about what we pick up and what we put down, what we see the value of staying with, and what we can relax and step away from.

One of the key aspects of this in mindfulness practice is to recognize if there's any tension, any kind of pain, contraction, headaches, narrowing of attention, or limiting of attention that happens in relationship to the story-making mind. That is extra. Even appropriate, healthy, wonderful stories we can cling to and be attached to. We can be tricked into staying with them because the story itself is a good and healthy one, but what's not healthy is how we hold it and how we relate to it. We want to find how to relate to even good, healthy stories in a healthy way. Don't cling to them. Don't get tight. Don't get preoccupied, and don't have a compulsivity or obsessivity with those as well.

Mindfulness is a very powerful tool to free us from clinging. That's one of its primary values and purposes. How we do that is to really stay present and feel the sensations of clinging until we see those sensations for what they are—that they're unnecessary to live by. When we put down the clinging, a whole different source of life is possible, which is inspiring. But you have to wait for next week for that.

We have one more bundle to talk about tomorrow. This is the one that maybe will excite some of you or already confuse some of you, because usually in English the last bundle is called consciousness. That is a bit of a problem to translate it that way, and we'll look at that tomorrow. Thank you.