The Buddha used the description of human experience in terms of the five aggregates–form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness– To develop the understanding that there is no ongoing essence or self within them.

This talk explores the Buddha's teaching on not-self through the schema of the five aggregates. A sense of self is created by grasping at form, feeling, perception, formations or consciousness. What is the experience like when no grasping is taking place?

Vedana, or the feeling tone of pleasant, unpleasant or neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant that arises with each contact, was considered important enough by the Buddha to be a foundation of mindfulness, one of the five aggregates, and central to the teaching on dependent origination. It is also at the heart of the Dart Sutta in the Samyutta Nikaya, where the Buddha talks about the two common responses to suffering: to bemoan and lament the fact that suffering is happening, but often to try to avoid the unpleasant by chasing after the pleasant. This talk looks at all of these different teachings to help us understand the importance of bringing mindfulness to vedana in our practice and in our lives.

When we understand our experience in terms of the five aggregates, we see without the unnecessary overlay of self. This way of understanding is liberating.

The teaching of anattā (“not-self”) points to one of the three fundamental areas of liberating insight taught by the Buddha (along with the teachings on impermanence and on suffering or dukkha). Yet anattā can very challenging and confusing for contemporary practitioners. Is there “no self” (as anattā is sometimes translated)? How do we make sense of our feelings of individuality, identity, ancestry, and vocation? How do we address our own personal experiences of woundedness, trauma, and oppression? Are these all simply to be “transcended”? How is a sense of self actually in many ways important for contemporary spiritual development, and how is working with our own individual conditioning, whether psychological or social in origin, central to our liberation? How do we integrate attending to such conditioning with opening as well to the power and energy of experiences beyond the habitual sense of self? In this daylong, we will explore these vital questions primarily in a practical way. Using the metaphors of “thinning the self” and working with a “thick” sense of self, we will cover three aspects of practice: (1) cultivating, in several ways, the “thinning” of the self, both in meditation and in everyday life, including working with the Five Skandhas or “aggregates” of experience; (2) tracking and working with different manifestations of a “thick” sense of self, both as appearing in experience and as hidden to awareness; and (3) opening to experiencing beyond a fixed sense of self, as awareness, compassion, and responsiveness deepen.

Right view as both the beginning and ending of the path - Includes discussion of the four noble truths and the five aggregates from the perspective of non-self.

Here we look at fourth satipatthana and its specific instructions on what to see and how to see it—the five hindrances, the five aggregates, the six sense bases, the seven factors of awakening, and the four noble truths—with an eye to realizing how this practice helps us overcome self-view.