Dharma explorations by Stephanie Noble

From over fifteen years of sharing her understanding of Buddhist concepts

  • Consciousness, The Fifth Aggregate

    As we look at each of the Five Aggregates that constitute the ways we experience being and what we hold to be ‘self’, we discover if we slow down and see each aggregate as it arises and falls away, we can hold it in a spacious way. The fifth of the Five Aggregates is consciousness.…

  • Urges, impulses and intentions, oh my!

    The fourth Aggregate is volition. Like feeling tones and cognition, this is a mental formation, made of thoughts and emotions. But unlike the others, volition is what causes action to take place. It is not the action itself, but the arising urge to act.For example, we are in a conversation, have the compelling urge to…

  • What to do when we feel helpless

    I attended a dharma talk by Rick Hanson this week about the Three Marks or Characteristics: impermanence (anicca), the universal sense of unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), and no-self (anatta). Then Thursday our traditional brief reading of an excerpt from ‘Pocket Pema (Chodron)’ also happened to talk about them. So I shared with the class a little of…

  • The Wizard of Oz — A Buddhist View

    We have been investigating the first three of the Five Aggregates, those ways we experience life that we typically mistake to be who we are. So far we have looked at material form, in particular our body; feeling tones, i.e. our likes and dislikes; and cognition — the way we process information, the body of…

  • ‘Am I what I know and how I know it?’

    We continue to explore the Buddha’s Five Aggregates in the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness. We have looked at material form and feeling tones. Now we will look at cognition.Cognition is the way we organize the information we take in as we experience the world. The brain develops a highly complex system of assessing, comparing, categorizing…