This talk continues an extensive review of the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness, focusing on a Buddhist theory of personality, the Five Aggregates of Clinging.  This concept provides a way to investigate the impersonal nature of one’s subjective experience, leading to insight regarding anatta, the absence of an enduring and autonomous self.  The concept does not suggest that one’s personality is blank, rather that the self-experience is a process that coordinates the interactions between external stimuli and internal interpretive processes.  This psychological discipline provides opportunities to investigate how the sense of self forms and can therefore be modified to provide a “better fit” for changing environmental circumstances, a useful skill in these trying times.

The complementary “Guided Five Aggregates Contemplation”, recorded the same night as this talk, is found in the Audio Archive of this site.

Here are the notes prepared for this talk:  Five Aggregates of Clinging Review

The topic for next week’s review is the core Buddhist concept “Dependent Origination”.  During the talk, a more contemporary rendering of the concept will be provided, “Contingent Provisional Emergence”.