Early Buddhist teachings that many of us have received on Vipassana retreats have been focused on Abhidharma ideas around elements. Elements can be just elements like the five aggregates, the six sense doors, six sense realms, the factors of enlightenment, and the hindrances and so on. The various lists can all be considered as types of elements. They might not necessarily all be primary elements; each of these things is traditionally taught as what you look at if you are going to accurately know your experience. They are the building blocks from which our experiences are constructed.

What this notion does, however, is that it makes people believe that these elements actually do exist—that there are such things as craving or lust or ill-will or delusion, or any of the other elements. That any of these things, in and of themselves, exist as real things, as much as something concrete or material exists.

What happens with that point of view is that when people look at their experience they can just say, “I was sitting with a few minutes of anger and then that shifted and I had some sloth and torpor and then I started to notice I was getting a little restless and then I started to find that what I was really experiencing was a state of ill-will.” And the person could feel, or you could feel—I’ve done this myself, so I’ve felt this way—that you’re really getting at it. That the true experience you’re having is ill-will. But when you recall the experience and recount it in detail it may look more like you’re thinking about person who really irritated you and that your mind is going through a variety of scenarios of how you’re going to encounter that person again and what you would like to say. Instead it’s nicely packaged into three minutes of ill-will.

The problem with any system that deals with elements like that, especially in terms of mental phenomena, is that the elements are actually no more than conceptual signs. They’re something that we use to be able to mark an experience and say, “Ah, this was ill-will or this was laziness or this was sadness.” They have none of the flavor of the experience that you’re going through. The label of ill-will has none of the flavor and passion and heat and different kinds of personalities that your actual thoughts and feelings have.

I was thinking that it was very similar to any object, like fruit. You have five oranges and you could basically say that on one level you have five of something and on another level, they’re all similar, they’re oranges. But does that say anything about the actual sweetness or sour flavor of the orange? Does that say anything about how that orange might be enjoyed? And saying, “I have eaten an orange,” does that say anything about the actual experience one had eating that orange? It just says it is an orange and puts it in a group of other oranges.

That’s what the Abhidharma essentially did regarding the wide range of human experiences, and that’s what many people who use that system fall into at some time or another. They are led to believe that the richness of an experience, the content of experience, is not what you’re supposed to be looking at. You’re only supposed to be looking at the process. But looking at elements is actually not looking at process. It’s looking at a type of abstraction of experience. It’s actually asking you to abstract what it is you’re going through and come up with another name for it, a name that usually fits within a particular system, which for Vipassana meditators is the Abhidharma.