Meditation: Turning Toward Cognizing;; The Five Aggregates (5/5) Consciousness & Shifting, Co-Arising Experience

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Med'n: Turning Toward Cognizing; 5 Aggregates (5/5) Consciousness & Shifting, Co-Arising Experience. 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 29, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Meditation: Turning Toward Cognizing;

Hello friends. Hello and good morning from Mountain View, California, and seated on Ohlone^[1] land, wherever you are in the world. Lovely to join you in this moment in time for our practice today. We have been exploring together the five aggregates, the five heaps, these constituents of experience, the five khandhas^[2]. And today being Friday, we're going to explore the fifth one: viññāṇa^[3], consciousness, which is the most subtle one. And yet, fear not, we're going to practice with it and turn towards awareness. Awareness, consciousness... sometimes we can use these words interchangeably, so sometimes we make distinctions, but today I'll use them interchangeably with an asterisk. I'll say more later about this. So let's practice together. Let's begin. Let's land.

Ah, I see there is a problem with the Wi-Fi. The video is freezing, though I hope the audio is coming through. I'm going to switch to an ethernet cable. Here we go, switching to ethernet.

Okay, it seems like we are still streaming and the frozenness has gone away. I'm crossing my fingers; this is the part of practicing with conditions as they are! The joys of technology. Thank you for your feedback in real-time. Let's practice together, everyone. Let's meditate together.

Letting the flurry of activity, letting it go. It's okay. Releasing with delight. It's like this to be human. We plan for things, and they happen in a different way sometimes. Causes and conditions. They arise due to causes and conditions, not necessarily our intentions or our control. So, letting it go, and arriving in the body. Arriving in the sensations of the body.

Feeling the sensations of our feet connected to the Earth. Feeling our sit bones, the cushion, or the chair. Feeling our hands. Letting there be a sense of ease, relaxation. The mind relaxing into the body, and the body relaxing into the chair or the cushion.

Can the body be relaxed and soft? Receiving each in-breath, each out-breath. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, and to just be with this. The gift that has been given to us. This opportunity, not taking it for granted, not wasting, but being fully present in this moment with this. The sensations, the stream of experience, just as it presents itself. A training. Training our minds and hearts.

Letting in-breath and out-breath be calming, soothing, collecting. Allowing the body to be relaxed and for the mind to know the objects that come through the sphere of knowing. Let's turn towards all these objects. What I mean is whatever you are knowing in this moment, know it very clearly. And very clearly, is it the breath? The sensations of the breath? Sensations in the body? Sounds? Whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neither, whatever it is being known now, get clear on it.

Let there be more clarity, more enjoyment in your seeing, in your clear seeing. As if your mind just turned on the lights or put on its glasses, there is this sharpness, this clarity of seeing. Not effortful, but bright. Relaxed and bright. Clearly grokking, seeing, knowing sensations of the breath, for example.

What are the sensations? Where do you feel them? Where in your abdomen, the sides, in your back?

And now knowing that you are knowing sensations of the breath. Know that you know. We're shifting, turning the stance of our knowing just a little bit from the object of knowing to knowing itself. Knowing that you are knowing. The fact that you're knowing. Knowing that you know. That you are sensing the sensations of the breath.

And now turning the knowing further to the knowing itself, to awareness itself. That awareness of awareness. Feel expansive. Objects are being known, and this faculty of knowing, cognizing, is operating. Is operating non-stop. Cognizing the flow of experience. Either where you directed it, maybe with the breath sensations, or through the different doors of perception: recognition, sounds, sensations, thoughts, smells, etc. As they arise, cognizing, knowing is happening. Turning awareness towards awareness. Cognizing is happening continuously.

Relaxing this investigation. Letting the body, the mind relax. A sense of awareness, expansive. Knowing the stream of experience and noticing the changing nature. You know this flow of experience. Breath keeps shifting and changing, sensations of it. Maybe feeling tone—pleasant, unpleasant, neither—keeps flashing through, keeps popping up, shifting, changing. Volitional formations, mental formations, thoughts coming. Perceptions, recognitions, it keeps changing.

The heart, the mind, has ease in the midst of the sea of change. To see the sea of change. Relax with the sea of change. Arrival and departure every moment.

And as we turn to close this meditation period, as we sit together, let us appreciate. Know appreciation in our heart and mind for this beautiful gift. To cultivate our hearts and minds together, trusting there is co-created goodness. Letting go of any judgments if there are any. Leaning into the goodness and sharing this goodness together. Sharing it generously with all beings everywhere. Our good wealth. Our good wealth.

We don't do this practice, this heart work, just for our own sake. We cultivate our hearts for everyone's sake. May all beings everywhere, in ways they can understand and find benefit, share from the fruits of my cultivation. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free, including myself.

Thank you for your practice, everyone. I'll take a moment to switch over the recordings.

The Five Aggregates (5/5) Consciousness & Shifting, Co-Arising Experience

Saying hello, hello, hello everyone. Hello again. Delighted to be with you in this moment in time. As we've been exploring the five aggregates, today we have come to the last one, viññāṇa, or consciousness.

In the guided meditation, I invited us first to tune into this aspect of the five aggregates. First, we turned towards the body, the sensations of the body. Rūpa^[4], the first aggregate. And of course, I invited you if you wanted to open up to some other aggregates. If the mind is stable enough, it is possible to open up at the same time to this flow of experience. Not just sensations of the body, but also vedanā^[5] (feeling tone), volitional formations, thoughts, and maybe even perceptions—how things are being perceived and known.

Oh my, the video is freezing again. I'm on ethernet, so there is nothing more I can do about it, dear ones; it's probably my internet provider. As long as the audio is okay and my voice is clear, I will continue, hoping that it will adjust. We're just going to go with this now. Exactly, more opportunities for practice!

So where were we? Yes, I was recounting one way that we can practice with tuning more into awareness, viññāṇa, consciousness. As we start, we can start by looking at an object that we're aware of, so the mind can become stable knowing an object. In this case, I invited you today to tune into the breath and maybe sounds. And then, after the mind is stable, turning on the light. Remember this analogy of turning on the light, really grokking, really brightening this sense of knowing. Knowing an object, connecting with an object, connecting with the sensations of the breath, really brightened.

So, if my right hand is knowing, turning the light makes the object brighter, so that the object and the knowing of the object are kind of happening together. Getting this brighter, and then we turn towards, "Oh, knowing that we know." Knowing that we know. We kind of turn awareness onto itself. Knowing that we know. And then, if the mind is stable enough, you can rest in the sense of awareness, knowing that this stream of experience is being known. In the guided meditation, we turned towards seeing impermanence—the impermanence of all these aggregates arising and passing.

The five aggregates are so rich and have so many aspects. This week, we have primarily spent time tuning into them. We want to tune into them, recognize them as these constituents of our experience, and say that that's usually the first step. Then we want to see that they are impermanent.

I just got a note that my internet connection is unstable. I see the video stopping, but I hope the audio is okay. I will just continue to teach, trusting that at least this will be recorded and available on Audio Dharma. So, here we go.

It's a very important part of this teaching. After we have tuned to these constituents of our experience, we see their arising and passing, their impermanence, and also how they dependently arise. How, for example, a volitional formation, a thought, arises from a perception, which has given rise to, say, a pleasant or unpleasant feeling tone. And that brings a whole bunch of thoughts and volitional formations. Seeing the dependent arising in our experience—these are all conditioned. It's all conditioned. None of this is fixed.

And to see the empty nature of phenomena. Now this word, suññatā^[6], emptiness. I prefer "relational" as a better translation of emptiness. "Empty" seems hollow and kind of dangerous and scary, but with suññatā, we get to see everything is relative. Everything is relational. Everything arises related to everything else. So we see the relationality and the relativity in the sphere of our experience, in the way we experience the whole world through the five aggregates. This is such an important teaching.

A couple of other things I want to say. One is that these five aggregates are not things unto themselves. They are processes. So it's not just viññāṇa as a cognition or as consciousness, but it's cognizing. It's perceiving. It's this process of perceiving that keeps happening. It's a flow of experience, so appreciating and tuning into that sense of flow is important.

Regarding this consciousness, or cognizing and knowing, it tends to show up in what's called in Buddhism the six sense doors. Seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, all the other aspects, and cognizing—the sixth door being the mind door. So viññāṇa, or cognizing, can show up in all of these. There's one consciousness that keeps moving and shifting to these different aspects of perceiving our world.

And again, as we practice, as I invited you to tune into both first an object and then this knowing, this cognizing itself, it can be quite interesting not to be so fixed on a particular object. For example, not to be fixed on our thoughts, but to feel the sense of openness of, "Oh yes, knowing. Just knowing is happening." It can bring a sense of freedom.

Before I give a couple of references, the last thing I want to say is that these five aggregates are not separate. They all happen together. They're dependently arisen. So, for example, cognizing and mental formations and perception and feeling tone, they all happen together. It feels like a cluster, and yet you can see them as they arise. They're in a process of flow together, but you can tune into them to see them differently, and to see their impermanence and their impersonal nature.

A couple of references I wanted to share with you. For those of you who are psychologists, there is an interesting paper called "The Five-Aggregate Model of the Mind." Let me see if I can type this in real time in the chat. Here is the paper for you. It's an interesting paper that talks about the five-aggregate model of the mind and relating it to psychology, and it might be of benefit to the non-psychologists as well.

Another reference I want to share is Majjhima Nikāya 28^[7]. It's a beautiful sutta where the Buddha talks about the five aggregates, and how practicing with them, really seeing the conditionality of all of them arising, and their impermanence, leads to freedom.

One last important thing I just remembered! Someone sent a question to me about the "clinging aggregates." These five aggregates are often also referred to as the clinging aggregates, and it's because we cling to them. We take them to be "me" and "mine." So all these five aggregates can be clinging aggregates, but we don't have to cling to them. When there is freedom, for the awakened mind, and in moments of awakening and freedom, there is no clinging to these aggregates. So you might have heard of the clinging aggregates; that's what it is. We can be clinging to them or not clinging to them.

Someone asks in the chat, how do you spell that? Majjhima Nikāya. It's the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha. It's that book in the corner, that brown one. If you do a Google search for MN 28, it will pull it up. It's also known as the Greater Discourse on the Simile of the Elephant's Footprint.

So, it's been rich, and there's so much more. I hope your interest in the five aggregates, and practicing with them, has been kindled or rekindled this week. It's been such a delight to be able to share and explore this with you.

For those of you who are local, tomorrow, Saturday, I'm teaching a day-long at IMC^[8]. A mettā^[9] day-long, a loving-kindness day-long. Come drop by and say hello if you can. Even if you can just come for part of the day, that's perfectly fine. No registration needed, just come to IMC. It would be lovely to meet you in person, dear online sangha.

Thank you so much for joining me and the community this week, and exploring the five aggregates. May the fruit of our practice together be of benefit to all beings everywhere. Thank you so much, be well, take care.