A Man of Many Lists

My formal introduction to Theravada Buddhism was in 2018 at Wat Arun in Bangkok, Thailand. Laurie and I had wandered in to the Meditation Center and meditated. When we were finished we were greeted by Mr. Hartanto Gunawan, the director of the center. The meditation center also includes an LNA program for at-risk girls and a community learning center. We spoke about meditation and I shared I’d been practicing and teaching pretty consistently for about 15 years. He asked what I got from my meditation. I told him a calm, clear and tranquil mind. What about wisdom? he asked. Hmm. Haven’t really thought about that too much. I guess just working on a calm, clear and tranquil mind was a lofty enough goal for me at the time. Hartanto asked me Who are you, what are you? I gave him some stock new-age, yogic answers. He smiled. We exchanged email addresses. I contacted him the next day and set up an appointment to meet again as I was intrigued by his much different approach to meditation.

We met and meditated together. As we were finishing up our post meditation discussion he handed me a piece of paper with the Five Aggregates written on it. I had never heard about them. He told me to study them, learn them and find out who and what I really was. I took the paper and dove into them for the next eighteen months. The Five Aggregates are the first list in Theravada I was introduced to. The aggregates are:

• Form
• Feeling
• Perception
• Thoughts
• Consciousness

When I returned eighteen months later to visit Hartanto he asked Have you found out who and what you really are? Yes, I replied. Must be consciousness. Wrong he replied. You are a combination of all five! I hate being wrong, especially after eighteen months of study and meditation in this tradition.

Form is our physical body. Feelings are our evaluations of the moment to moment experiences we have. Perception is our cognition, knowing. Thoughts are our mental formations. Consciousness is being aware of what’s happening. The list can keep you busy for the rest of your days. I’ve been parsing through the aggregates, studying each of them, meditating on them. This list has been with me for seven years now and it never gets old. The aggregates help us to see things as they really are. Form, our physical body, we can see grow from youth to old age. We understand that this body is impermanent, someday it will cease to be. We can look at feeling – the evaluation that we place on experiences we have. We are constantly evaluating each experience we have throughout the day. Things are either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. We ca trace the origin of these evaluation back to “us”. It’s we who place the labels on the experiences we have. The experiences themselves always exist first as neutral. It’s not until we decide others that they change. Perception is the mental process of how we interpret and organize things. Thoughts are mental formations and activity. Consciousness is awareness or discernment arising from the other aggregates. It’s a lot to digest, but the nice thing is that the aggregates are always here ready for us to study them, to meditate on them, to understand them. I’m still at it every day, going deeper into the aggregates and “my” relationship to them. In facing disease and death we study how the aggregates are impermanent.

By this point I became aware that the Buddha was a man of lists. And I’m kind of a list guy myself. So we get along great. Another list I came to know were the five precepts. These are for us common folk. Monks have two hundred and twenty seven precepts. OK, maybe next time around 🙂

• No killing
• No stealing
• No sexual misconduct
• No lying
• No intoxicants

Kind of like half of the Ten Commandments, right? Kind of like the five Yamas from Yogic philosophy.

As I got deeper into my practice, my studies and my meditation and tried to integrate these teachings, I feel like I’ve grown quite a bit. The more time I spend with them, the more I have a deeper understanding of these concepts.

My practice led me to yet another list, the Four Noble Truths.

• Suffering
• Cause of suffering
• End of suffering
• The path to the end of suffering

Suffering is created by us internally, not by something external. If we can see the cause and find the path to the end of suffering, then perhaps we can end suffering. Of course that path, The Eightfold Path, is yet another list. The Buddha loved lists.

• Right view
• Right intention
• Right speech
• Right action
• Right livelihood
• Right effort
• Right mindfulness
• Right concentration

I jumped into the Eightfold Path. I started right at the beginning, with right view. Right view points right back to the Four Noble Truths and asks us to really understand them if we’re able to. Right view also looks forward to the next four items on the Eightfold Path which are informed by right view. I stopped and noticed how powerfully important right view is, and can be. Can we see that nothing in life is unfair? Can we let go of our obsessions with the wrong-doing of others? This was a powerful moment, a realization, an insight into right view. It stopped me in my tracks the moment I read it, or heard it, I don’t remember how I came across it. But it made perfect sense to me. Most all my life I’ve been I’ve been guilty of being obsessed with the wrong-doing of others. Most of us are. We don’t like what so and so is doing – whether that’s a politician, stranger, co-worker, friend or even a family member. Think about it for a minute. You don’t even need a minute. There is someone you can bring to mind right now who may not be living up to your expectations. They’re not doing things exactly the way you want. And you think about it over and over. And at some point, on some level, you suffer. It stresses you out. Stress is caused by our inability or unwillingness to detach our mind from the thought patterns that are causing the stress. We can begin to see that we are the ultimate cause of our own stress or suffering. The first step to end suffering is the first step on the eightfold path, right view. If we begin to cultivate right view then we’re on our way. Notice when you’re thinking about that someone who in your mind who is not living up to your view of how you would have them act, whoever that is and whatever that is. And let it go. Let them go. It can truly be liberating.

Anyway, enough about lists. I’ve been feeling good the past few weeks. Stabilized by a new course of drugs. Some of the positives of being terminally ill and sometimes home-bound is that I have plenty of time for meditation, reading and creating music. More songs coming very soon!

I hope you all are well.

Peace out for now.

David