Autumn starts to come in fast, almost relentlessly, leaving me to wonder where the summer just went. The changing colors in the trees are reminders of the winter to come, as well as the growing season that just passed. Things are constantly in process of change, renewal, integration and eventual dissolution. Just reflecting on change can be a form of strange release. I often wonder why, besides being the season of my birthday, the autumn has so much symbolic weight to me. I believe that it is the one season which reminds me the most of impermanence, It portrays the beautiful and colorful disintegration of life ,back into the crisp elements of the soil and cold wind.
Today's study session is hosted by Venerable Chang Zhai, a very gentle and amiable nun who lectures very deeply and honestly on the Chan principle. Venerable Chang Zhai describes the Five Aggregates, Twelve Contacts, and Eighteen Realms. I found it quite fascinating how the Venerable started our session by having us explore what life means to us. After describing the Five Aggregates and how they compose the world we perceive (Form, Sensation, Perception, Volition, Consciousness), Venerable Chang Zhai then asked us to look again at our first question of the day. Did anything change between the question of life before and after learning the Five Aggregates?
Venerable Chang Zhai compared the Five Aggregates to the pieces of a puzzle. While they inter-mesh and compose each part of one's experience, they somehow never quite become whole. When I see something in front of me, say, a cup or this computer, I already have gone through a complicated process to get to that point of 'seeing/framing' the object. There is a condition of an appearance, such as a form, followed by sensations hitting the eye or other organs (sensations), followed by a framing of the sensations into shapes or appearances (perception), then followed by my responding to that perception (volition), and my labeling the object in terms of set qualities or labels from memory (consciousness). Venerable emphasized the last as the part that drives the whole business. Without an ability to describe something as a 'thing' using discursive thoughts, there would not be this process of forming objects based on the aggregates. This leads me to feel that consciousness is the 'glue' that keeps the aggregates together, though it too is only a constituent in a never-ending cycle. What I mean is that consciousness must play a big part in sustaining my belief that a 'thing' is a 'thing' and sustains that same thing-ness over time. Yet, if I were to look at still shots of each part of an object's trajectory on a film, what makes me think that the ball in one shot is the same as the ball in the next shot? The act of unifying these two images is also an act of consciousness.
This teaching is valuable in itself, because it describes a way of approaching how the world is created by mind. Most of my energy and efforts are devoted to the 'practice' of responding to what I believe are self-contained, permanent objects that are 'out there', impinging upon 'me'. Because I believe that the images in mind have a separate, individual self, or a kind of independent substantial existence, I spend my time either seeking those objects that I like, or warding off what seems threatening to my happiness....or, ignoring what is neither desirable nor detrimental. How the sense of self is formed in all this is a mystery, perhaps worth some study with developmental psychologists, But the point is that, I literally attach a 'weight' to subject and object that is not real. I once read a book by Walker Percy, called Lost in the Cosmos where he refers to the self as a kind of thing that 'sucks' the life out of objects around it, eventually draining the things of their qualities. For example, when we first buy a clothing that is attractive to us, our impression is to identify closely with that clothing ('I look good in this"),until eventually, the clothing loses its allure. Soon enough, it's not the thing we thought it to be, but is rather a piece of cloth sitting in the closet somewhere.
Now, how did that happen? How did the self get to be what it is, appropriating what it likes and discarding what it stops liking or dislikes? Maybe my question is not an interesting one. A better question might be, 'what happens when that happens? What is that experience like?' I think it's the experience of constantly using up experiences and growing disenchanted as they no longer feed the weighted sense of 'me' or 'mine'. And that weight is so addictive that it must be frightening when a person first meditates and sees that the self does not have such a heavy weight to it. It is like, 'what's going on?' "Why don't I feel the grave matter of 'me' coming up, with all these wandering thoughts coming and going and disappearing?" A kind of ontological panic starts to set in. And I see that similar ontological panic when Descartes starts to question who he could be without thinking...or when Roquentin, the character from Sartre's Nausea, starts to deconstruct a tree into its thusness, no longer labeling what arises as 'a tree'.
I think this can also happen in one's relationships as well. How often have I experienced times when others went against what I expect to be 'considerate' or 'sensitive' behavior, leaving me feeling demoralized? This sense of 'I am wronged' is such a pervasive source of suffering. It's based on a misunderstanding that there are actually these permanent selves that are connected in mutual 'obligation' to each other. In fact, my perceptions of another's behavior are entirely subjective ones, which are often based on false and hasty over-generalizations of what I think should happen in a given moment. But does even this sense of 'I' endure over time? Unless I am aware that this situation is a threat to a specific sense of 'weighted, substantial self',then I will spend all my time trying to defend the illusory sense of self,without being able to let go of my grip on it. It's a pity and a waste of time as well, to be driven by this habitual sense of 'this is what existence must be'. But on the other hand, those 'threats to self' are opportunities to peel away the layers of that sense of weight, to see that it's simply a heap of impressions "bundled together" by a false consciousness of a 'me' as opposed to 'you' or 'the world''..
I think it's important to explore, at least phenomenologically, what happens when the sense of self is compromised or exposed. Otherwise, I think that subconsciously, it is easy to put up smoke screens and start to zone out when our experiences are seen as aggregates. But over time, we might start to experience the liberating potential of seeing our experiences as pieces in a puzzle
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