The term Skandhas is often interpreted as “aggregates” or “heaps” but neither of those words are very helpful to Westerners. According to Red Pine, in his book, The Heart Sutra, the term skandha really refers to the trunk of a tree, or a pillar made of wood. In this context, the skandhas are aspects of experience that form the pillars of a “self” one believes in.

The skandhas then are points of view that are intimately connected to each other, and not in any way self subsistent or standalone aspects of reality. It is their interconnection that gives rise to the persistent notion of a self. The skandhas are:

• Form
• Sensation
• Perception
• Memory
• Consciousness

The Fourth Noble Truth is that the Eightfold Path is the means of removing this cause of suffering. In summary outline form, the Eightfold Path is:

Cultivation of Wisdom

• right view
• right thought

Moral Action

• right speech
• right action
• right livelihood

Meditation Practice

• right effort
• right mindfulness
• right contemplation

The Second Noble Truth is a statement that this suffering identified in the First Noble Truth has a cause, that it is not a necessarily inevitable condition. And that cause is NOT DESIRE, but the the attachment to desires: the desire for sensual pleasure, the desire to become – to be somebody, and the desire to get rid of things that we don’t like. The attachment makes the desire personal and is very much a part of the notion of a me, and of mine.

The Third Noble Truth is that the cause of suffering, this attachment to desire, can be overcome by rejecting, relinquishing, leaving and renouncing attachment to desire.

I’ve added a section called The Monastery to hold the writing I want to do for the next several weeks. It’s mostly oriented toward Buddhist teaching, as I understand it, with commentary on how I’ve experienced it so far. I’m not enlightened, so there are sometimes discrepancies between my experience and what I think I’ve been taught. But the views are honest layman views. Sometimes I see things clearly, and many times I can sort of see the outline of how things might work.

I’ve organized it around the Buddhist teaching, because I’ve come back to the fundamentals after of few years of thinking I understood them. These articles share my experience. For some enamored with meditation, they may seem like heavy stuff. My own personal experience is that the basics are exceptionally useful in focusing and understanding what I have experienced.

Thank you for your comments.

As you live within your awareness, so I must live within mine. Your mind has some comforts that my mine does not afford me. While you exist effortlessly within each moment, my mind reaches to a speculative future and a remembered past in its attempt to aid survival. You live mostly unencumbered by these spans of attention I cannot ordinarily avoid.

Just as you believe your senses implicitly, I’ve learned to believe in the normal reach of my mind; it has seemed so advantageous in reducing the insecurity of ordinary daily life. I cannot ignore this insecurity or return to a state of ignorance. The only avenue open for me as a human is what I would call transcendence – i.e., deliberate development of a different perspective that will free me from somewhat destructive preoccupation with these normal realms of imagination.

I read your blog on my morning flight above the valley.

Twit! Twit! What an imagination!

You make up a sermon in your own mind and attribute it to me. Please don’t humiliate me with credit for this.

I do not mind you coming to my valley. You are too big to eat, but otherwise you’re just a curiosity. You’re in poor condition. You’ve lost all your feathers, and your skinny wing bones are pretty comical. You have two legs, but you also seem to need to carry a wooden leg to help you walk about. I don’t see how you manage to eat, but since you obviously can’t fly to spot food, and are way too slow to catch it, you aren’t any threat to my territory.

I watched the hawk circle in the valley below Fishers Peak. It seemed majestic, soaring effortlessly, patching the green below with a dark shadow as it neared earth before circling and gliding again. In my imagination, I wandered to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and thought of independence and freedom – the image of rugged individualism we prize in our American culture. We have a special day to worship it each year – July 4 – just a few days away.

As I mused about this freedom, this magical mirage dissipated in the inrushing tide of scientific knowledge. There really was not much freedom there at all. Only in my mind did this fanciful notion have much reality at all.

As I spent a few days in the village below the mountain, I noticed that chimney swallows were nesting in my chimney again. At first it was just the noisy squawking of chicks waiting to be fed.Then it happened. Thum—pinggggg. Something had fallen and hit the draft plate of the stove connected to the chimney. Over the next few days, I let the mother birds out of the stove periodically (a couple times a day) to fly out an open window to return to search for food as they continued to try to feed the chicks in the nest that rested inaccessibly in the stove hardware. Going that deep into the stove to feed the chicks left them unable to find their way out the open chimney.

Jack: Hey Deacon, what brings you up into these remote parts? I’ve just got the fire started for some morning coffee. Take a load off those weary old bones of yours, and you can have some. And I’m going to have a few pancakes before I set off today. We can share those too if you want some. I’ve got a dab of honey left, and some blackberries to go with it.

Deacon: I was camping over at Curry’s Grove and thought I’d make a quick trip across Hook’s Pass this morning to see you. I’d like to invite you to come to town weekend after next to go to church with me. We’re having a special Religious Toleration Sunday, and we’re all out collecting people of different faiths to tolerate that Sunday.

Yowie: Shhh! Please! Just sit down and be quiet for a bit.

(10 minutes pass.)

Yowie: Hey Jack, glad to see you. What makes you come this way this morning?

Jack: I didn’t mean to interrupt your meditation. I just saw a patch of bright blue among the trees and decided to take a detour off Thistle Trail and look at it. I’m on my way up to Brokeneck Cliff for a day or two.

Yowie: Meditation. Schmeditation. I wasn’t meditating at all. I was just sitting here being an animated part of the scenery this morning along Cold Creek. There’s an incredible lightness of being when I’m not Yowie, or Grandma, and nothing takes notice of me except to see if I’m going to eat them or they can eat me.