Tao aggregates of the Self

© Igor Morski

After the cognitivist description of the Self and the mind and its crititical discussion from a phenomenological-experiental point of view, Varela, Rosch and Thompson integrates for the first time in the cognitive sciences terms and concepts taken from the eastern traditions which - for millennia - have studied and described in a experiential way the entities of Mind, Consciousness and Self; particularly the authors introduce for the description the five aggregates of the Abhidharma canons of the Buddhist tradition:

Looking for a Self in the Aggregates

We now tum to some of the categories in the Buddhist teachings called the Abhidharma. This term refers to a collection of texts that forms one of the three divisions of the Buddhist canon (the other two are the Vinaya, which contains ethical precepts, and the Sutras, which contain the speeches of the Buddha). Based on the Abhidharma texts and their later commentaries, there emerged a tradition of analytic investigation of the nature of experience, which is still taught and used in contemplation by most Buddhist schools. The Abhidharma contains various sets of categories for examining the arising of the sense of self. These are not intended as ontological categories, such as one finds, for example, in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Rather, these categories serve on the one hand as simple descriptions of experience and on the other hand as pointers toward investigation.

The most popular set of these categories, one that is common to all Buddhist schools, is known as the five aggregates. (The Sanscrit term translated as "aggregate" is skandha, which literally means "heap." The story goes that when the Buddha first taught this framework for examining experience, he used piles of grain to stand for each aggregate.)

The five aggregates are

1. Forms

2. Feelings/sensations

3. Perceptions (discernments )/impulses

4. Dispositional formations

5. Consciousnesses

The first of the five aggregates is considered to be based on the physical or material; the remaining four are mental. All five together constitute the psychophysical complex that makes up a person and that makes up each moment of experience. We will examine the way in which we take each of these to be ourselves and will query whether we can find something in the aggregates that will answer to our basic, emotional, reactional conviction in the reality of self. In other words, we will be looking for a full-blown, really existing ego-self-some lasting self that would serve as the object of our emotional conviction that there really is a ground underneath the dependent, impermanent, everyday personality.

Forms

This category refers to the body and the physical environment. It does so, however, strictly in terms of the senses-the six sense organs and the corresponding objects of those organs. They are the eye and visible objects, the ear and sounds, the nose and smells, the tongue and tastes, the body and touchables, and the mind and thoughts. The sense organs do not refer to the gross external organ but to the actual physical mechanism of perception. The mind organ (there is debate in the tradition as to just what physical structure that is) and thoughts are treated as a sense and its object because that is how they appear in experience: we feel that we perceive our thoughts with our mind just as we perceive a visible object with our eye.

We might point out that even at this level of analysis we have already departed from the usual idea of an abstract, disembodied observer who, like a cognitive entity parachuted into a ready-made world, encounters matter as a separate and independent category.

Here, as in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, our encounter with the physical is already situated and embodied. Matter is described experientially.

Is our body our self? Think how important our body and possessions are to us, how terrified we become if the body or important possessions are threatened, how angry or depressed we become if they are damaged. Think of how much effort, money, and emotion we spend on feeding, grooming, and caring for the body. Emotionally we treat the body as though it were ourself. Intellectually we may do so also. Our circumstances and moods may change, but the body appears stable. The body is the location point of the senses; we look at the world from the vantage point of the body, and we perceive the objects of our senses to be related spatially to our body. Though the mind may wander, sleeping or daydreaming, we count on returning to the same body.

Yet do we really think of the body as the same as the self? As upset as we might be at the loss of a finger (or any other body part), we would not feel that we had thereby lost our identity. In fact, even in normal circumstances, the entire makeup of the body changes rapidly, as seen by the turnover of one's cells. Let us take a brief philosophical excursion on this point.

We might ask, "What do the cells that make up my body now have in common with the cells that will make up my body in, say, seven years?" And, of course, the question contains its own answer: what they have in common is that they both make up my body and therefore make up some kind of pattern through time that is supposedly my self. But we still don't know what that pattern qua the self is; we have simply gone round in a circle.

Philosophers will recognize this little vignette as a variation on the example of the ship of Theseus, which, every so often, has all of its planks replaced. The question is, Is it the same ship or not? And philosophers, being more sophisticated than most of the rest of us, deftly reply that there really isn't any fact of the matter one way or the other. It all depends on what you want to say. In one sense, yes, it is the same ship, and in another sense, no, it isn't the same ship. It all depends on what your criteria of identity are. For something to be the same (to have some kind of invariant pattern or form) it must suffer some change, for otherwise one would not be able to recognize that it had stayed the same. Conversely, for something to change there must also be some kind of implicit permanance that acts as a reference point in judging that a change has occurred. So the answer to the quandary is both yes and no, and the details of any specific yes or no answer will depend on one's criteria of identity in the given situation.

But surely the self-my self- can't depend on how someone chooses to look at it; it is, after all, a self in its own right . Perhaps, then, the ego-self is the owner of the body, of this form that can be seen in so many ways. Indeed, we do not say "I am a body" but "I have a body." But just what is it that I have? This body, which I seem to own , is also the home for numerous microorganisms . Do I own them? A strange idea, since often they seem to get the best of me. But who is it that they get the best of?

Perhaps the most definitive argument that we do not take our body as our self is that we can imagine a total body transplant, that is, the implantation of our mind in someone else's body (a favorite theme in science fiction), yet we would still count as ourselves. Perhaps, then, we should leave the material and look to the mental aggregates for the basis of the self.

Feelings/Sensations

All experiences have some kind of feeling tone, classifiable as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral , and as either bodily feeling or mental feeling. We are very concerned about our feelings. We strive endlessly to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Our feelings are certainly self-relevant, and at moments of strong feeling we take ourselves as our feelings. Yet are they our self? Feelings change from moment to moment. (Awareness of these changes can be made even more precise in mind fulness/awareness practice: one develops firsthand experience of the momentary arising of feelings and sensations as well as their changes.) Though feelings affect the self, no one would say that these feelingsare the self. But what /who is it , then, that feelings are affecting ?

Perceptions/Impulses

This aggregate refers to the first moment of recognition, identification, or discernment in the arising of something distinct , coupled with the activation of a basic impulse for action toward the discerned object.

Within the context of mind fulness/awareness practice, the coupling of discernment and impulse in a moment of experience is especially important . There are said to be three root impulses - passion/ desire (toward desirable objects), aggression/anger (toward undesirable objects), and delusion/ignoring (toward neutral objects). Insofar as beings are caught up in habits of ego clinging, physical or mental objects are discerned, even at the first instant, in relation to the self—either as desirable, undesirable, or irrelevant to the self-and in that very discernment is the automatic impulse to act in the relevant fashion.

These three basic impulses are also called the three poisons because they are the beginnings of actions that will lead to further ego grasping. But who is this ego who is grasping?

Dispositional Formations

This next aggregate refers to habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, perceiving, and acting-habitual patterns such as confidence, avarice, laziness, worry, etc. We are now in the domain of the kinds of phenomena that could well be called cognitive in the language of cognitive science or personality traits in personality psychology.

We are certainly heavily self-invested in our habits and traits—our personality. If someone criticizes our behavior or makes a favorable comment about our personality, we feel that she is referring to our self. As in each of the other aggregates, our emotional response indicates that we take this aggregate as our ego-self. But again when we contemplate the object of that response, our conviction falls apart. We do not normally identify our habits with our self. Our habits, motives, and emotional tendencies may change considerably over time, but we still feel a sense of continuity as if there were a self distinct from these personality changes. Where could this sense of continuity come from, if not from a self that is the basis of our present personality?