The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Hello and good day.

So today we continue exploring the five condoms, the five heaps translated as heaps.

Often these five constituents of our experience also aggregates, which is this funky word five aggregates.

The constituents of our experience.

And today we come to the fourth one, which is the Sankaras translated as formations, as volitional formations, or as mental formations.

Or sometimes as as volition, because volition is the leading one, volition is the leading one in this formations in this bunch of them.

And sometimes in this category, we perhaps simplified and think of it as as with mental formations, we just think of thoughts, just this.

Tangle of thinking that often we experience in our experience of being human.

So more generally, it's helpful to think of the the Sankaras as both, as I mentioned, both as not just reactive, but also the purposeful, the purpose of aspects of the mind that both include

intention as well as behavior. So both of those aspects and intention is an important aspect of it.

Even though I'll put an asterisk here, sometimes I might say, well, I'm not intending to have all these thoughts are just coming.

So there's no volition or intention here. So is this still quote unquote volitional formations. Yes, it is.

It also has to do with with the patterns that have been in place, the volitions, the way we've been thinking or doing it, it also has to do with karma.

So I'll talk about that's a big asterisk I'll get to in a moment.

But in terms of definitions, as we said, set it up.

So so also so examples of this both reactive and purposeive aspects of the mind that both include intention as well as behavior.

It includes both physical behavior, any activity, any intention to move, for example, and it includes intention for verbal behavior for any speech,

gentle or not gentle, wise or unwise, as well as this third category, which is our our thoughts are the psychological behavior, the psychological behavior.

And includes the poor proliferation of thoughts, for example, or again, cultivation of thoughts of mental behaviors of kindness, goodwill, compassion, clarity, stability, release, calm, all of that.

So so with with sankaras, it both includes again, this is really important and we can get to see this in our own practice and experience.

...