Tomorrow night Rosemary plans to talk about the Satipattana Sutta, or the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. If you remember, there is one section where the Buddha teaches that we are all made up of five aggregates. I have five, you have five, everyone has five. There is the body, which is one aggregate, and there is the mind, which is divided into four aggregates. So in this way, we all have five aggregates.
In general, when people get together, for instance, one person gets together with a partner, one brings five aggregates, the other one brings five, so then we would say five plus five equals ten, right? Wrong! This person brings their five. That person brings their five. Then there are the five aggregates which the first person wishes they were, and there are the five aggregates which their partner wishes they were. There are the five more that this person wishes they were to please their partner, and there are five more that their partner wishes they were to please them. We are already up to thirty, right? One person figured out that they had 50 aggregates in their relationship.
This is what happens, "I want them to be different." "They want me to be different." "I wish I was different." So we've got all these different aggregates going on, and it can become quite a mess. And often the relationship breaks up if there are too many aggregates. Now when I came together with Rosemary we never had a single argument in the first three months, when we had our first romance, nothing! I liked her aggregates. She liked mine. It was nice. It has worked for 37 years. The less aggregates you have, the less you want to change the other person, and the nicer your relationship will develop.
In Buddhist terms, we have five aggregates, the mind with four parts and the body with one.
Let's take the body. How many different smaller aggregates are there in the body? When we say smaller aggregates, we now mean how many different parts are there that I want to change? The body divides into two: there is the face, and there is the body. We often judge our partner on their face and on their body. Now, with the face, in how many different ways do we judge them? The eyes? We often fall in love with a person's eyes. Or the nose?
Every magazine that you see tells you that you're not beautiful enough. There they are, the movie stars, they seem to be better looking than us. We are being constantly bombarded with these thoughts, but what is it that we're really worried about? Is the face good enough? Is the chin too small or too big? Or are the teeth stuck out, or tucked in, or whatever? These are different body aggregates. The height of the body, the size, the weight, parts push out, push in. These are different aggregates of the body that we often compare when we look at our partner. There are many, many different body aggregates that we may like or dislike.
Now the mind. How big is their compassion? How big is that aggregate in their mind? How big is the aggregate of anger? How do they compare? What about their patience? Let's go through the Ten Paramis. That's a very good way to judge your partner's aggregates on a mental level. Maybe face-wise or body-wise they are not perfect, they are not like movie stars, whatever. But what about their mental aggregates and the Ten Paramis? Now, what if they are not so strong in one Parami? Maybe their patience isn't so good, even though the other nine are great. Can we learn to have patience with their level of patience? Can we say, "Hey, these nine aggregates of the Paramis, they're wonderful, I really like these! Okay, this one isn't so great. But that's all right." Can we see that most of our grass is wonderful compared to the weeds? So when we look at the mental side it goes deeper than just the four basic mind aggregates of Buddhism. We look at the qualities of the mind, what the person is really like, especially based on the Ten Paramis.
Also, we plan to be talking later in the retreat about the eight worldly dhammas, the eight worldly conditions. This is where we create a lot of our Dukkha: attachment to praise and blame, fame and obscurity, pleasure and pain, gain and loss. That is another way to judge your partner, how well they can mentally handle having loss, having blame, having pain, having obscurity, and so on. And how well do they avoid getting attached to fame and praise and everything else. So mentally, we can see more types of aggregates in our partner, and then to see how much of that is actually very nice, that we can work together with.
And if you don't like the other person's aggregates in the very beginning, don't try the relationship.