Gregory offered a series of Insight Dialogue-based teachings to the Metta community, Grandpa Greg’s Sutta Chats. The talks were attended by people who offer ID or support the practice through engagement on a Metta Programs team. Each teaching includes reflection on one or more discourses of the Buddha. The intention in this series to engage the text not as philosophy but as instructions for a whole life practice, including formal meditation and in-life reflection. At the same time, Gregory is modeling a variety of approaches to these early discourses, including traditional, in-depth dhamma analysis of one sutta, reflection on the relational implications woven into the texts, surveying multiple teachings to see what resonates at the time of reading, and, above all, opening into the human-to-human nature of the Buddha’s teachings.
This is the last talk in the Sutta series. In this talk on the aggregates, Gregory begins by taking the approach of a more traditional sutta talk: words of the Buddha in the Khandasamutta of the Samutta Nikaya (SN 22.59), and what these words mean. The talk begins with a guided meditation on the form aggregate. We then begin to explore how the five clinging aggregates provide a trail to the heart of not-self. The emphasis in this talk is how these teachings are not abstract philosophy but descriptions of practice. This talk was offered on January 29, 2017.