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audiodharma:
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    - date: '2022-03-30'
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      speakers:
        - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal
          speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1
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      title: 'Guided Meditation: The River of Concepts'
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    - date: '2022-03-30'
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      speakers:
        - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal
          speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1
      talk_start_time_seconds: 1989
      title: "Dharmette: Satipa\u1E6D\u1E6Dh\u0101na (50) The Third Aggregate: Concepts"
      url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/15294
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location_city: Redwood City, CA
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  title: 'Guided Meditation: The River of Concepts; Satipatthana (50) Concepts: The
    Third Aggregate'
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  uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center
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# Guided Meditation: The River of Concepts; Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (50) The Third Aggregate: Concepts - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1)

_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._

## [Guided Meditation: The River of Concepts](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/15293)

Hello from Redwood City IMC, and wishing you all well for this day. I want to begin with a teeny teaching. If I ask you to evoke an image of a river, you might think of a river that you've seen in your life, and it would have a particular... maybe it would be very unique. Each one of us would have our own image.

If I write the word _river_ (R-I-V-E-R) on a piece of paper, that word will maybe reside in that paper as long as the paper exists. If I take watercolors and go out to a river, and paint the letters in watercolor on the surface of the river, that word will not persist very long. Even if the water is almost completely still and placid and flat, and you can hardly see any movement in the river at all because it's so still, and you write the word _river_ on it, paint it, it's not going to stay. Maybe not even long enough to see the word.

So when we come up with the word _river_ in our mind, the image you had of your river that I asked you to evoke at the beginning maybe went away for a few moments as I talked about writing on top of a river. But the idea of a river comes into consciousness. Maybe because I'm talking about it, maybe because you see a river, it comes into consciousness. We pull it out of our memory, or the particular ways the brain stores the idea of a river someplace. But the conscious awareness of _river_ is there as fleetingly in consciousness as it is on a running river.

Almost as much. The concept of a river is there, but it'll change, influx, and disappear as other things appear into consciousness, and it doesn't reside in consciousness very long, unless we're obsessed by the idea of a river and we can't stop thinking about a river. Then the idea maybe persists, and it might seem like we're always thinking about a river, but even then, it's probably not all the time. You might be making sentences about a river, like, "Oh, my river is the best river," and the word _river_ just there is part of the stream in the moment. The concept of rivers is there in the background. There might be some other kind of feeling or sense of what I'm talking about, but the concept, the idea, the word for river is fleeting and simple.

So this analogy is important to understand the Buddha's teachings on saññā[^1]. Usually translated as perception, but it refers to the simplest conceptual recognition of anything at all. So _river_, _door_, _person_, whatever it might be, there is usually one word that conceptually recognizes or identifies, "This is what the object of attention is, the object of seeing or hearing or something."

And in the practice of vipassanā[^2], as the practice settles down, we're beginning to appreciate the fleetingness of the concepts that we live our life by. The fleetingness is not in terms of how they stay in memory or persist as something that we can tap into, but the actual coming into full consciousness. There's just a moment of recognition—a door, river, person—and that is there just fleetingly. It's like the river of consciousness; it appears for a moment on it, and then consciousness keeps flowing and it dissolves. It might return frequently, so we think it's continuous, but it comes and goes.

This is important because one of the areas of clinging and of suffering is we cling to our concepts. We cling to ideas. Even the idea of suffering is something we can cling to, hold on to. And we can cling to clinging. "Oh, it's important to cling." As practice deepens, we become aware of the fluidity, the changeable nature, the dissolving nature of concepts as they appear in the mind. They have some reality to them. So, for example, if I feel an itch, the itch might persist for a few seconds, but the concept _itch_ is very fleeting. It flows in and flows out. There's a question, "Should I scratch?" and there's a question, "What should I do about it?" Or then I'm looking at something else, and then I come back to it. But the concept is fleeting.

So in this particular foundation of mindfulness, what we're looking at today is the fleeting nature of simple concepts as they appear. Not as they are relevant—they might be relevant continuously—but as they appear in the mind. So, breathing in, the concept of an inhale, the concept itself is a fleeting moment that maybe is repeated. The exhale, the body posture, attention itself.

So as we get into this meditation, perhaps this can become a little bit relevant. Assuming a meditation posture, and sitting in a way, taking a posture that expresses both alertness and relaxation. And each of those words is a concept: taking a posture, alertness, relaxation. All these concepts flow through as we speak and we hear, then we respond to them. And the saying of each word, the existence of the word being spoken, is brief. The word dissolves in the river of time.

Gently closing your eyes, and settling in. Feeling your whole body sitting here. And taking a deep breath in, and relaxing on the exhale. And breathing normally on the exhale, continue to relax in the body, settling into this body.

Then settling into your breathing. And as you breathe, there are ever so simple concepts that recognize what's happening as we're breathing. Those concepts might be verbal, with a thought. They might be quieter and seemingly without words, but still a recognition that the inhale is an inhale, exhale an exhale. Or the recognition of beginning to inhale, ending the exhale. Movement, pressure, release.

Mindfulness builds on the simple recognition of what's happening as it's happening. And any thought, mental idea, or concept of breathing, as useful as it might be, is fleeting. It appears and it disappears.

And if you're involved in thinking, you're probably involved in a different river, being swept away and thinking about things that are not here and now. If you're in commentary about here and now, you're probably removed from your experience. To enter into the direct experience, and very relaxedly, openly, know the experience, experience the experience, is to practice mindfulness.

And to know the fleeting nature of the individual concepts as they appear in the mind is a means to begin to relax the grip we have on our thoughts and ideas, leaving them alone.

Even distracted thoughts are made up of individual concepts that are fleeting, that appear and disappear. What happens if you tune into the fleeting nature of concepts, ideas, thoughts?

Each word in a thought disappears almost as soon as it's spoken.

And as we come to the end of the sitting, if we can appreciate the fleeting nature of individual concepts and ideas, then we can appreciate the concepts which are useful, but at the same time not let them be a barrier for perceiving and seeing what's here. In particular, when we're not stuck in ideas of how people are, we can maybe take in and register, or see and feel and sense people in a deeper way, in a fresh way. Freedom from being stuck in concepts allows for more clear seeing of others, clear feeling of them with our hearts.

We don't then come with our preconceived ideas when we meet other people. Well, we might come with preconceived ideas, but we don't linger in them. We see them pass. We can see with fresh eyes. May it be that our ability to see others freshly, with fresh eyes, fresh heart, fresh mind, lets us be a clean channel for care and goodwill, for basic friendship and friendliness. Maybe this practice clears the channels of communication, of perception, of connection. So we see people anew and fresh, and fully in their humanity, in a way that maybe we respect and revere others just for being human and being alive.

And in this clear, clean channel of connection, may it carry out into the world. Our well-wishing for the world: May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we live in a way that contributes to that possibility for others. May we be an agent for peace and happiness.

I'll be back in a moment.

## [Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (50) The Third Aggregate: Concepts](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/15294)

So yeah, the recorder that we have, I can turn it on and off up here, but once I turn it off, in order to be able to turn it on again, I have to go over to the recording station we have and push a button there. So hopefully that will be fixed soon.

We're in the fourth foundation of mindfulness, looking at the mindfulness of the five—usually called five aggregates of clinging, or the five groups of clinging. The five divisions of how we take our whole experience as human beings and cling. And so the Buddha divides clinging. When we cling to almost anything, we're actually clinging to these five areas. And it's not quite just who we are, but it also has to do with anything at all that can kind of fit into these categories.

The refrain of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta[^3] that we talked about many weeks ago, which is the direction in which the mindfulness practice is going, comes to a place where we see the inconstant nature of our experience, the flow of experience, the appearing and disappearing of experience. And in this repetition of emphasis, over and over again, the rising and passing of experience is an alternative to being stuck. Alternative to being caught up in some thought, or idea, or concept, or feeling, or anything. It's an alternative to clinging.

And so, you know, if you're in a river, if the river is flowing and you want to stop the river, you grab it or you put up your hand to block it. It doesn't work; the river just keeps flowing. But the stress of trying to hold the river back remains in our hands as we try to block it. But if we can appreciate that what the river does is it flows, then we might allow ourselves to be carried, if it's a nice, safe river, to be floated along in the current of the river. And we can go far, and we can make it eventually maybe to the great peaceful ocean.

And so the same thing with our experience. It is much more fluid and changeable than our concepts tell us. Concepts, ideas, when we cling to them, hold on to them, or we are obsessed by them, it gives a kind of sense of continuity, a kind of constancy to what we think is there, what we think is going on, so that we think we can cling. It works to cling. But we see that these concepts, these ideas, are part of the river of change. Then we can learn to float on them, which means we don't reject the concepts, but we see their fluid, inconstant nature.

So in the five aggregates, the five heaps, five groupings, the third one is saññā (S-A-N-N-A), and it's usually translated into English as perception. But I don't think that's an appropriate translation. I think perception seems to imply too much non-conceptual perception: seeing, hearing, tasting that we perceive at these different sense doors. The word saññā has a meaning of 'to mark something', to label it. And so it's the simple concept we have of things. There are things that we might see that we don't have any concept for. We might not even have a word for it, we say it's just _something_. And some of these concepts are very fluid and changeable.

I have here this wonderful bowl for the bell. We call it a bell, but if I didn't have any bowls to eat my breakfast with, this would make a perfect bowl. Rather than using it as a bell, it becomes a bowl. It becomes my breakfast bowl, or my soup bowl, or something. Or it might be that I don't need the bell anymore, but I have a lot of pens, and it becomes a pen holder, and they stick in there. Or it becomes some other holder. What this object is is changeable. It can be a flower pot. And we can label it by its function often. And so the concept we have for some things is functional, and the function can change, and so the label changes. This points to the idea that concepts are fluid and changeable. They're not absolute; they are relative, provisional, and situational.

And the same thing with our ideas of safety, the ideas of well-being, and happiness, and suffering. These ideas, as they appear as concepts, are simple concepts that then we get caught in, and we get involved in associations and complicated stories and ideas about them. To be mindful of saññā, of these simple concepts—I prefer to translate saññā as 'concepts'—gives us the vantage point to be wise about how we get swept away in the more complicated ideas we have.

And so as practice deepens, we start seeing that all the concepts we have, as concepts, as ideas, as the recognizing function of the mind, are there very, very briefly, and then they appear again and again. So, like even if I make up the sentence "I am speaking words", then those words, each of those is a concept: _I_, _am_, _speaking_, _words_. Just like we can speed read and it all kind of blurs together into one large concept, or we understand the meaning overall. But if we step back and see, or feel, or recognize the individuality of each of those words before we string them together and make it into a larger meaning: "I am speaking words".

And we can't go around in ordinary life paying attention to this kind of detail of concepts all the time; it's just not efficient. It's efficient to kind of string words together in a sentence and just get the meaning right away. But as meditation quiets, and we can still learn, then there are times when we see the exquisite appearance of a concept. Like sometimes at the end of meditation when I open my eyes, before I have a concept, there's a seeing, but there isn't quite the recognition. There's a shape, a color, there's something briefly. And then I can feel, or see, or recognize that my mind then makes a concept. Not that, like right now I'm looking at my laptop, a laptop. And that little gap between what I would call perception—just kind of taking in the sense data, the sight objects, without the concept—and then recognizing the overlay of the concept on top of it.

So I might see a bell like this, and as I pointed out, this doesn't have to be a bell. It can be a bowl, it could be a pen holder, it could be all kinds of things—a flower pot. And because all those things are not inherent in the object, it's possible to see the object without the label, and then see the label arise. And in the mind, the thought arises: _bell_. And it can be exquisite to see that, rather than just having it on automatic pilot, and see the brilliance of the mind that makes these concepts, and see it arise without any clinging, or holding on, or grasping, or any kind of extra baggage. Just a bell, bowl.

And so in deep, quiet, still meditation, this is where the exquisiteness gets more and more special, where we're down at the primal level of experience. We kind of see the arising, the beginning of this complicated world we live in. But we're not seduced by the complicated world; we're able to kind of see it as just the arising of a concept that gives birth to other concepts and ideas. And we can just stay there, watching it appear and dissolve, and come and go. It can be a little bit like, as delightful as sitting on the riverbank, watching the river go by, maybe spending long periods of time just watching the flow of the current, little waves, the flow. It's just something very relaxing and nice to see. So the same thing is possible, to see that current, the river of concepts as they appear.

And in mindfulness practice, we're using a little bit these concepts to help us stay present. The idea of a mental label, where we add a little... we repeat the concept. Maybe the original concept is almost subconscious as it appears, but then we use a mental note to recognize: _river_ for looking at the river, _in_ as we're breathing in, _out_ towards breathing out, _warmth_ if we feel warm, _restless_ if you feel restless. It's a way of using that a little bit more emphatic note, a little bit more intentional note. It's a way of staying in the flow of the present moment, being right there, being right there with it, letting it just flow and move through as it does.

And as we do so, we begin letting go of clinging. And as we let go of clinging in a deeper and deeper way, then at some point this flow of experience doesn't get limited by the particular groupings of the five aggregates, but rather it becomes... because that itself is a concept. Each of these five aggregates are concepts that the mind has produced, which is what the Buddha says. And those concepts begin to dissolve, because there are secondary concepts, there are more abstract concepts, and they dissolve. And then at some point, the awareness doesn't become so selective to one aspect of our experience, but it becomes more panoramic, where awareness is just here and present in a panoramic way, and we're just in the flow of experience without grouping them into these five groups.

So you might today, as you go about your day, see if you can notice the arising of concepts and the provisional nature of them, the fluid nature of them, and what we would sometimes say the empty nature of them. Or notice the opposite: notice how it seems the concepts are so solid, and real, and important, and it has to be this way. And what we add to it, to this simplicity of just these simple concepts that appear in the mind.

So thank you very much, and continue tomorrow.

---

[^1]: **Saññā:** A Pali word typically translated as "perception" or "cognition," referring to the mental process of recognizing and labeling objects. It is the third of the five aggregates.

[^2]: **Vipassanā:** A Pali word often translated as "insight," referring to meditation practices that cultivate clear seeing into the true nature of reality.

[^3]: **Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta:** A fundamental discourse in the Pali Canon in which the Buddha provides instructions on the four foundations of mindfulness.