Seeing the Dhamma
How Practice Leads to Understanding
About this Course
What does it mean to be free as we move through the world? The Buddha described freedom as the natural consequence of understanding all the experiences of embodied life in terms of how they affect our hearts. We crave reliable safety, pleasure, and connection but instead find life unsatisfying, fleeting, and even our sense of self unstable. These three “marks” can be seen in anything we bring our attention to.
This 5-week course is the third in a series of practice and study courses aimed to build a strong foundation for Theravāda Buddhist training (the first two are available as on-demand courses, but are not a required prerequisite). We will explore a set of teachings on how to understand the world, looking at the core analytical lists of the marks, defilements, aggregates, and sense bases, leading to an overview of Dependent Origination, the Buddha’s unique model for how embodied experience and the patterns of the mind give rise to continued existence and suffering. The heart of this study is the practice of applied mindfulness, where we bring persistent, loving attention to the world as we experience it, with the aim to see how it works and be free of its snares. You do not have to have taken the other courses in the series to take this one, and beginners are welcome.
We will read original texts from the Pāli Canon as the source of our meditation instructions, and weave in supporting material from contemporary neuroscience and psychology. Each week we will meditate together, read passages from the discourses, and support each other in building or deepening a daily meditation practice. You will come away with deepened skill in Buddhist mindfulness, and a framework for bringing the discernment of spiritual inquiry into every part of your life.
Created with New York Insight, spring 2025.
Take this Course
All courses are offered in the Gift Economy model. This course is available on a wide sliding scale, based on self-assessment of your income and ability to offer your resources in a way that supports others with lesser resources to attend. Please support us in using the Gift Economy model by engaging sincerely with the process and selecting the highest level you can on the sliding scale (or beyond it). Your generosity directly gifts scholarship support to those who need it, and allows us to share these teachings with everyone who might benefit from them, regardless of access to wealth. Thank you!
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Further scholarships are offered as widely as possible and based on request. Our goal is to not turn anyone away for lack of resources, both for this course and future offerings. Email us here to request a scholarship.
What’s included
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We begin our exploration of the analytical models the Buddha used to lead practitioners to insight with these twin concepts: the five aggregates and the three characteristics or marks (lakkhaṇa). The three characteristics are the core important qualities to discern in each of the five aggregates, or aspects of experience. They are emphasized not because they are the only characteristics held by things and entities, of course, but because they are the ones most useful for the awakening process.
When we open to reality, the Buddha says, one of the things we will discern if we are investigating our experience skillfully is the changing nature of everything. This is the doorway insight to wisdom and awakening. Seeing impermanence is synonymous with seeing the Dhamma, and it is the insight that turned the wheel of the Dhamma in that first discourse.
This section includes:
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 30 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
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In this class we look at the khandha—five categories of things—that are known as “aggregates” because they are the constituent parts of conscious, or “sentient” experience.
Form (rūpa)
Feeling or affect (vedanā)
Perception (saññā)
Mental or Volitional Formations (sankhārā/saṃskāra)
Consciousness (viññāṇa/vijñāna)
This section includes:
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 32 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
Further study links
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In this week’s class we’ll explore the list known as the six sense bases, fields, or spheres. Like the aggregates, our experience of the senses is commonly that we grasp at, or push away, their objects. This is the heart of why we suffer. The practice instruction, then, is to relate to sensory experience as a process through which we can observe our patterns of grasping and aversion, and understand the conditioned nature of that painful process.
This section includes:
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 32 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
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This week continues our exploration of the core structures of early Buddhist analysis, turning to the central description of causality in Early Buddhism, called Dependent Origination (paṭicca-samuppāda). Dependent Origination is a circular model that describes the process by which conditions ripen into identity, suffering, birth and death.
This section includes:
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 30 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
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We’ll close our series by reading one of the most majestic analytical texts in the Nikāyas, spoken by one of the Buddha’s senior disciples, Ven. Sariputta, who was known as the “foremost in wisdom.” Sariputta unpacks the teaching on “Right View,” and in doing so lays out a set of instructions on how to practice understanding experience.
He begins with the core distinction “skillful/unskillful” as the primary assessment we should make of any phenomena we come into contact with, particularly any state of mind.
In meditation, the important point is the reactive mind that spins out from vedanā, (feeling tone or affect) into grasping, clinging, and becoming. With mindfulness, we learn how to feel pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral sensations as they pour through us, and as we restrain our impulse to grasp, find ourselves less constricted, anxious, and angry. Without grasping, we don’t become anyone or need to do or be anything. When this is taken to its ultimate maturity in the psyche, we recover from the unconscious fear of death and desire for more life, and in that recovery, our bondage on the wheel of existence is broken. A definition of liberation is the ability and power to choose our path in the world free from ancient trauma and compulsion.
This section includes:
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 30 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
The image I get when I think of these meditations in relation to my body is that of a deep, warm, and fertile core of the earth’s soil where the seeds able to withstand storms take root.
— Class Participant
Meet your teacher, Dr. Sean Oakes
He/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English ancestry, living on unceded Pomo land in Northern California
Sean teaches Buddhism, Yoga, and somatic practice, focusing on philosophical inquiry, trauma healing, devotion, and social engagement as expressions of the Dharma. He wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance, and teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and elsewhere. Read more about…