- Joined
- Apr 26, 2011
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All religions tell you that you have a permanent, never-changing soul or self or identity that will spend eternity in hell or heaven...........
The Buddha taught that an ''individual'' is a combination of five aggregates of existence, also called the Five Skandhas which are:
1st) Form >> physical forms
2nd) Sensation >> feelings, emotional and physical, and our senses -- seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling.
3rd) Perception >> thinking, conceptualization, cognition, reasoning or when coming into contact with a physical object or an idea.
4th) Mental formations >> habits, prejudices and predispositions. Our volition, or willfulness, as are attention, faith, conscientiousness, pride, desire, vindictiveness, and other mental states. The causes and effects of karma are especially important to the fourth skandha.
5th) Consciousness >> awareness of an object, the third skandha might recognize the object and assign a concept-value to it, and the fourth skandha might react with desire or revulsion or other mental formation. The fifth skandha ties the experience of life together.
### Understand that skandhas are empty. Buddha taught that "you" are not an integral, autonomous entity. The individual self, or what we might call the ego, is a by-product of the skandhas.
Trying to find your ''soul or self'' is just like trying to find the ''car''............there's no ''car'' since a car is made of different parts...............just like the ''identity'' is made up of the skandhas..............
The Buddha taught that an ''individual'' is a combination of five aggregates of existence, also called the Five Skandhas which are:
1st) Form >> physical forms
2nd) Sensation >> feelings, emotional and physical, and our senses -- seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling.
3rd) Perception >> thinking, conceptualization, cognition, reasoning or when coming into contact with a physical object or an idea.
4th) Mental formations >> habits, prejudices and predispositions. Our volition, or willfulness, as are attention, faith, conscientiousness, pride, desire, vindictiveness, and other mental states. The causes and effects of karma are especially important to the fourth skandha.
5th) Consciousness >> awareness of an object, the third skandha might recognize the object and assign a concept-value to it, and the fourth skandha might react with desire or revulsion or other mental formation. The fifth skandha ties the experience of life together.
### Understand that skandhas are empty. Buddha taught that "you" are not an integral, autonomous entity. The individual self, or what we might call the ego, is a by-product of the skandhas.
Trying to find your ''soul or self'' is just like trying to find the ''car''............there's no ''car'' since a car is made of different parts...............just like the ''identity'' is made up of the skandhas..............