Subjective feel

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Rick
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Subjective feel

Post by Rick »

Which skandha (or skandhas) is responsible for the subjective feel/vibe/qualia of an experience?
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Johnny Dangerous
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Re: Subjective feel

Post by Johnny Dangerous »

Rick wrote: Sat Jul 17, 2021 12:19 am Which skandha (or skandhas) is responsible for the subjective feel/vibe/qualia of an experience?
All of them?If we are talking "feeling" tone I think it's vedana and samskara mostly. If you break it down though, I think that many mental events involve all or most them, almost by definition.

I am sure there is an official answer to this somewhere, that is just my assumption.
Meditate upon Bodhicitta when afflicted by disease

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when sad

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when suffering occurs

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when you are scared

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Rick
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Re: Subjective feel

Post by Rick »

Thanks, JD. :-)

I was thinking about Nagel's take on consciousness, that to be conscious is not merely to sense/perceive/process rather 'to be/feel like something', and I wondered if this had an analogy in Buddhism.
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SilenceMonkey
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Re: Subjective feel

Post by SilenceMonkey »

Interesting question... I think JD is right about vedana and samskara. There is vedana for all things we perceive through the six senses, and it is always present with the experience of things that arise in the mind (mental factors/mental states/mental events, aka samskaras) as it is one of the "omnipresent mental factors." Vedana would be feelings of the body or feelings of the mind, and could be anywhere from course to subtle. Samskaras are any of the mental factors, which could sometimes loosely translate as emotions. Generally, Mind is talked about in terms of Mind (the container, which is consciousness -- the fifth skandha) and Mental States (the contents, which is everything that arises in the mind -- including the second and third skandhas). So whatever Mind experiences would be samskara.

We might also recognize that there are actually more than the standard 51 mental states, which Mipham mentions in the Gateway to Knowledge:
[11.102] With these mental states are mainly stated the distinctions of the general mind bases and the virtuous and negative mental states. It should be understood, however, that there are a tremendous number of different kinds, such as sadness and elation, difficulty and ease, patience and impatience, and so forth, which result from the different kinds of grasping patterns of apprehension, perception and so on.
The second skandha of "perception" is just the function of our mind that distinguishes this from that. It would be the thought or recognition that "I am experiencing sadness" or "this is sadness." It could even be a nonverbal and subtle recognition of "this is this" and "that is that."
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Rick
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Re: Subjective feel

Post by Rick »

Thanks! :-)

Do you (does anyone) know of a good teaching (text, audio, video) on the skandhas? They're a big part of how I view reality/consciousness, but I never really explored them in depth.
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Malcolm
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Re: Subjective feel

Post by Malcolm »

Rick wrote: Sat Jul 17, 2021 9:19 pm Thanks! :-)

Do you (does anyone) know of a good teaching (text, audio, video) on the skandhas? They're a big part of how I view reality/consciousness, but I never really explored them in depth.
Chapter 1, Abhidharmakośa.

There is also an entire text on them alone, by Vasybandhu, translated by Artemus Engle.
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Rick
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Re: Subjective feel

Post by Rick »

Thanks! :-)
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