The Five Skandhas

[Jundo]

Re: The Five Skandhas

Dear Jundo,

I really liked the analogy of the holodeck (I am a big ol' nerd), but need some help understanding it.

So, say I'm Data playing Sherlock Holmes in one of his favorite holodeck ("regular world" with the skandhas) adventures (me, in the "regular" world, at work, playing Mari in one of her favorite/not favorite adventures of really not liking Moriarty/bad customer and really liking Geordi/co-worker or good customer who is playing my "helper" Watson).

Then I leave the holodeck/Just Sit. But what's there now? What am I doing?

Oh, sorry, Mari ... there is a little misunderstanding here.

Ya see, you are not Data or Jordi ... You are one of the characters on the holodeck! You know, one of those characters in the holodeck that is always surprised to find out that, in fact, he is just a holodeck character ... just made of photons and such. Those characters also know no world beyond the story in the holodeck. When the program is shut off ... so are you! :shock: (though something goes on ... the photons and holodeck computer ... which is, after all, what you were all along)!

And you are not stepping off the holodeck ... not as Mari at least.

But let's not stretch this analogy too far (I already have)! It is just an analogy after all. 8)

Gassho, J

[Mari]

Re: The Five Skandhas

But let's not stretch this analogy too far (I already have)! It is just an analogy after all.

I kinda got the feeling that I was getting too wrapped up in it once I realized I was totally confusing myself with my own questions! :lol:

Thank you for the clarification about being one of the characters.

[Amelia]

Re: The Five Skandhas

I also love the Trek.

All this hologram talk has got me remembering a book I read called, The Holographic Universe, by a guy named Michael Talbot. The second half of it may be a bit too New Age-y for some people here, but I really like the first half where all the science of holograms is described, showing how the way we perceive the world around us is much like a hologram. Also, our brains are holographic in the sense that our memories are not localized in the actual flesh of the brain. A study is described in the book in which a man would cut apart the brains of rats and then put the brains back in, rearranged. The rats were still able to retain their memories and were still able to make their way through mazes, though with slight problems in motor skills.

[Rich]

Re: The Five Skandhas

Oh this was an interesting conversation. Don’t have to worry about skandas anymore. Zen students are the best actors. O time to go- - beam me up scotty![liveustream][/liveustream]

[Jundo]

Re: The Five Skandhas

I am tickled that it is a conversation we started in 2007, in the first months of this place, and just picked up from there. 8)

Gassho, J

[Heisoku]

Re: The Five Skandhas

A really interesting thread...

...just to add to the 'holographic paradigm' (and other paradoxes....Ken Wilber)...at a conference on Friday concerning trauma and attachment disorders in children, the science is pointing to the brain maladapting to normalise experiences in neglect and abuse suffered even within the womb. The fact that our whole life experience is created without needing our conscious input and that our own bodies (brain as organ) can in effect such physical changes I think is a link that is now having enormous repercussions in culture and health.

..The amount of patient, compassionate re-education at a conscious level that teachers and therapists have to dedicate to healing such traumas if indeed they ever do is ten-fold to the length of the original period of neglect/abuse. The early the trauma the more hard-wired in the behaviour patterns the longer the therapeutic response required..that is if the trauma is recognised early enough.

Our Buddhist understanding of how our constructed worlds emerge is becoming so important in many fields and for so many people, particularly children who are usually written off at an early age..

[Kyonin]

Re: The Five Skandhas

May I offer some context before you try to delve into the traditional interpretation of the Skandas?

Thank you, Jundo. I really needed a little explanation like this.

[disastermouse]

Re: The Five Skandhas

Hello all,

I was recently reading an explanation of the Five Aggregates (AKA Five Skandhas). This is probably the third such explanation I have tried to comprehend with little success. There is something about this concept that is preventing me from getting my head wrapped around it. Perhaps this is a bit ironic as they have to do with our perception and understanding of reality, do they not? Anyways, does anyone have a simplified rendering of this concept they would care to share, or know where I can readily find one?

Thanks,
Kelly

You may find some benefit in exploring the Western philosophical concept, attributed to Sellars, called the 'myth of the given'.

Chet

[Wintergreen]

OK - I know it's nearly 10 years latter but (if possible) could you (Jundo) please repost the "thing you just wrote" (noted above) because the link is broken; or maybe there is a better description of the 5 skandhas (and how to forget them).
Gassho
Wintergreen
Sat today

[Jundo]

OK - I know it's nearly 10 years latter but (if possible) could you (Jundo) please repost the "thing you just wrote" (noted above) because the link is broken; or maybe there is a better description of the 5 skandhas (and how to forget them).
Gassho
Wintergreen
Sat today

Hah! I have no idea, which itself is a teaching in emptiness and impermanence.

Gassho, J

SatTodayLAH

[Byokan]

Hi Kelly,

May I offer some context before you try to delve into the traditional interpretation of the Skandas?

Traditional Buddhist psychology was way ahead of its time in attempting to describe how the mind creates, in the brain, a 'virtual' experience of the world and of your 'self'. Modern science, though still so incomplete, understands this process better every day: Your experience of your self and of the world is ultimately a fiction created when brain, sense organs and the 'outside world' (everything that is "out there" in the world really, whether you experience it or not) come together ... much like a movie you call "me and the world" created when the world is 'virtually' recreated inside the brain via data that is collected by the senses, passed by chemical-electrical signals to neurons, then (in processes we still barely understand) mixed with all the inner emotions, instincts and everything else the brain has learned about interpreting, organizing and responding to the world since you were a baby. The result is the inner movie you call your "experience of life". In fact, Kelly, you have never actually seen "the world" at all, only a virtual recreation inside your head of light that entered your eyes, somehow recreated and interpreted within the lobes of the brain as objects that, for example, you stick names on and find pleasing, displeasing or neutral.

Got the picture? The computer screen you are looking at right now may or may not be "out there" in some form (philosophers have debated that for centuries too), but no matter, what you ultimately are experiencing right now is some kind of a recreated picture of a computer somewhere in your visual cortex.

Modern science now better understands how the brain and senses recreate the movie you experience as your life, which is just the brain interpreting whatever is "out there". Traditional Buddhist psychology, however, lacked our modern understanding of how the brain, sense organs, neurons, inner emotions, etc. actually work. But, despite that, early Buddhist philosophers did an amazingly good job in cooking up a semi-fanciful system that basically came to the same result. It may be mostly the philosophers' imagination (because they lacked our modern understanding of the brain, senses, etc), but it basically was correct in its conclusions and understanding of the overall process.

Thus, the Skandas are a rather imaginative system by which philosophers created a description of how the mind works that is not exactly (but pretty close) to how the mind works (Freud's psychoanalysis is rather similar in being now understood as an early attempt to explain human psychology by inventing such concepts as the Id., Super-Ego and the like that were just figments of Freud's imagination, but were not too bad in trying to describe how the human mind actually functions)

Even though the Skandas did not quite describe the workings of the mind correctly according to our modern understanding, the conclusion is absolutely correct: If I take the pieces of Kelly's brain and mind away, piece by piece, Kelly disappears (as her experience of a separate self). If you have ever been with somebody with Alzheimers disease or the like, you may witness something close to what I am describing occur involuntarily and radically.

So, what are the traditional Skandas? Like all things in traditional Buddhist Philosophy, it depends which philosopher you ask. Philosophers disagree on the details. But, basically, you have:

1-Matter: The "stuff" (we might say atoms and molecules) that are the world (and your body) and exist without regard to whether your sentient mind is perceiving them or not.

2-Sensations- The sensing of the matter by the sense organs. These sensations are soon interpreted as pleasant, painful or neutral (we now know that, much as primitive Buddhist psychology described, much of that judging goes on even before you perceive the sensation. For example, the brain knows pain and danger even before you more deeply or consciously perceive that you are touching a hot stove).

3-Perceptions- Your mind perceiving, inside the brain, data from the senses. You become aware of the raw, incoming data inside your brain.

4-Mental Formations- Now your brain does all the complex processing, interpreting, organizing, reacting and responding to the data. You give it names, think about it, form opinions, likes and dislikes, moral judgments, have emotional reactions, formulate responses, and actions. etc. You do all the stuff that your brain (and any animal brain, though humans do more of it) does in interpreting, thinking about and acting in the world.

5-Consciousness is that extra thing that makes you alive. You are not merely a computer processing data (or a simple insect brain), but are self-aware, alive. The closest example I can give you, perhaps, is a new born baby that at first, cannot interpret the sense data beyond basic sensations like "pain" "pleasure" "hungry". Only gradually does it develop a more complex interpretation of the world, for example," this is my hand, this is my foot" (baby's actually have to discover this), "they are part of "me", the crib is not "me"" etc. A complex world view starts to develop and, only then, does the baby become "self-aware" and conscious of itself as itself (it probably was not self aware until that time, and was just raw experiencing. Now, the baby is aware that it is "me").

The above is just a rough description. Why is this important?

Well, simple answer is that if life is just a "virtual reality" movie in your brain, we can change the content of the movie. So many of the things you take as real (your "problems" "likes' dislikes" for one example) are just the story line in your movie. In Buddhism, we learn to look beyond the surface reality and perceive how we create that reality like a dream. You are living on a kind of Holodeck (for you Star Trek fans) inside your brain, and you have a great degree of power to choose the story you want.

One of the things we remove is the separation that your brain creates between your self and the world (the baby only discovers this after banging its hand a few painful times on the crib, discovering that its hand and the crib are not one). Buddhism reverses the process. All is one again. Traditional Buddhist psychology, including the Skandas, were an attempt to explain the mechanism for this process of reversal.

Did that help?

Gassho, Jundo (Just a virtual name you brain has come to pin upon some raw light data flowing off the screen into your eyes right now)

Thanks Wintergreen for the question, and thanks Jundo for such a clear explanation (10 years ago)!

We don't talk much about the skandhas and it's funny because we do love our Heart Sutra around here. I haven't even thought about skandhas for a long time. Now after living with the Heart Sutra for a while, the skandhas make a lot more sense to me than when I first read about them. I guess when I first read about them it seemed like something I had to work with, or work on letting go of, or purifying, or something. Now it just seems very descriptive of what is, and awareness and understanding of that might be enough? Maybe I don't have to fool around with the skandhas much or do anything with them? I don't know. Time on the cushion maybe has helped with the understanding.

I googled around and the Wikipedia page is pretty good:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandha

And this one too:

http://www.buddhistdoor.com/OldWeb/bdoor/archive/nutshell/teach11.htm

but I much prefer Jundo's down-to-earth and grounded explanation, it just makes sense. I guess a good understanding of this would help when doing Sutra study, at which I am a beginner. Interested to hear others' experience with or thoughts about the skandhas.

Gassho
Byōkan
sat + lah

[Jakuden]

Maybe I don't have to fool around with the skandhas much or do anything with them?

Ya that’s pretty much where I’m at now too... that is, the Skandhas are just another ancient Buddhist classification of things in a numbered list (they seemed to love to do that!) In this case, they classify the entire world inside our head into five groups. But they are only listed to point out that they don’t really exist [emoji1]
Gassho
Jakuden
SatToday/LAH


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[Jundo]

Hi,

Actually, I do believe that we talk about the "Skandhas" all the time around here, perhaps each day, although I tend to employ expressions like the "mind theatre" or the "holo-deck" of the mind in which signals of electro-chemical data for the material stuff which is (probably) "out there" come into the sense organs, get turned into electro-chemical signals, reimaged in some way in the brain, with all manner of names, categories and "like/neutral/dislike" and countless other judgments placed on them (not to mention the whole self/other subject/object divide) to which we react in many ways emotionally and otherwise in our words/thought/and acts. This is almost a daily topic around here in some way, although I don't always resort to the traditional model. My description is a bit more in keeping with our modern neurological understanding. Here is one of many many examples ...

https://www.treeleaf.org/forums/showthread.php?15207-New-Buddhist-Path-Implications-to-New-Evolutionary-Myth-PP-62-85&p=197493&viewfull=1#post197493

Wintergreen asked "maybe there is a better description of the 5 skandhas (and how to forget them). " In fact, all of our Shikantaza Practice is precisely that (plus our other Practices such as "Nurturing Seeds" LINK and the like. Chanting, Samu, Oryoki all extensions of that too.). How?

Well, precisely because in Shikantaza we Just Sit, in the wholeness and completeness of that action, dropping all the judgments, not tied up in aversions and attractions, letting the analysis and categories drop away, until even the hard border of self/other softens or sometimes fully drops away. Of course, one aspect of Zen Practice is not to get away from all that division and analysis and stay there, but rather to find that the liberation and lack of friction and conflict in the wholeness beyond categories/judgments and self/other is found, simultaneously, right in and as this crazy world of categories/judgments and self/other, knowing both at once as if seeing the world one way out of one eye, the other way from the other eye, and both eyes together as Clarity.

More or less, that is kind of all we do around here!

Gassho, J

SatTodayLAH

PS - Wintergreen, is that your human name? Would you mind to sign a human name (or a Dharma Name if you ever received on)? It helps keep things a little more personal and friendly around here. Thank you.

[Troy]

Great thread. Thank you


Sat2day

[Shinshi]

If you all will indulge me for a moment, this touches on one of my favorite topics so I am going to babble a bit.

First - I love Godzilla. I love all the movies (except that one with Matthew Broderick which starred some Velociraptor like thing). I have loved him since I was a kid.

I used to be a professor and I taught Research Methods to undergrads. And one topic was creating models. Since undergrads don't really like to focus on math that much I would use Godzilla.

I would say we are tasked with creating a model of Godzilla, to understand him better - and save the world. So we had to evaluate our models as we tried to create a representation of Godzilla. I would first present a little lizard and ask if this was a good model of Godzilla.

Most would say no. But then we would talk about aspects that were actually "correct' and what we would need to change. And then I would bring out another model that looked a bit more like Godzilla - we would talk about what made the model better and what needed to be improved. And so on.

And then we would talk about how, even if we cloned Godzilla it still wouldn't be a perfect model of Godzilla as it wouldn't have had the same life experiences. It would be close but not exact. So there are no perfect models in the world.

But we still need to identify the quality of our model. And there are two ways. One is the extent to which the model represents reality - and we know that all models fall short.

The other way to evaluate the model is the model's utility. Does the model work to explain our perception of reality. Does it do a good job of explaining and predicting. And in the end this is the more important criterion: How well the model works.

And to me the Skandhas are a model with great utility. They are amazing really given when they were developed. They don't correspond perfectly to our current understanding of physics, biology and psychology - to the physical world as we know it. And some might dismiss them because of that. But, for me, they still have great utility in understanding the world and how we perceive it. It is important not to get caught up in the particulars, but to focus on the bigger picture of how they can contribute to our practice.

I haven't really said anything that others haven't said better already but, what the heck, I got to talk about Godzilla.

Gassho, Allan

SaT-LaH