Who Do You Think You Are? The Five Skandhas with Noah Levine

June 15, 2020 Who do you think you are? Contemplate on these questions:

Who do think I am? Who am I? Who are you? What’s your true identity? Is it your gender, your race, your age?Are you a young person, an old person? Is it your personality? “I’m young. I’m cool.” Who do you think you are?How do you identify in your own head?The Buddha had this deep quest for freedom, this curiosity. This interest. And was able to identify the core issue: we’re suffering. We’re all suffering.

It’s a universal law of existence. With existence comes dukkha; suffering, a lack of satisfactions, difficulty, stress. Why do we suffer? Why isn’t happiness our natural birthright? A lot of the answer is because we are misidentified. We identify with a lot of stuff, because we think we are a bunch of things that are not really who we are, so it’s impossible to get satisfaction out of these things.

So, there is a list of the 5 parts to our human experience that the Buddha breaks down, and if you’re identified with any of these parts, you’ll suffer. Part of the process of mindfulness, the awakening we are seeking is, an unraveling. The Buddha says there are 5 main things we need to untangle to get free. They are the 5 Skandhas in Buddhism. Skandha means a heap, a bundle, a “pile” of our human existence.

1. Body; gender, race, age 2. Feeling tones; sensations 3. Mind; Perceptions 4. Mind; Mental activity or formations 5. Mind; Consciousness.

Instead of clinging to these things as who we are, mindfulness loosens our identity. It is a process of unraveling our identity, rather than this tight rope of self, “I Am”, mindfulness starts to say, “OK, there’s a body, there’s memories, pleasant, unpleasant memories, It’s a loosening of the rope of self.

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