The Six Entanglements

This Sunday Payton led a discussion on the Six Sense Bases (the usual five plus the mind), which Gil Fronsdal calls the “Six Entanglements” based on a different interpretation of the word usually translated as “fetter” into English. The discussion was centered around a talk by Gil linked here:

http://www.audiodharma.org/talks/audio_player/6452.html

The talk invited us to explore the way in which we perceieve objects that contact our senses. When we see a book, we are usually clear that our seeing (the experience of our eye sense) is separate from the thing seen (the book). That separation is less clear when we talk about our thinking (the experience of our mind sense) being separate from our thoughts. Either way, it’s usually not the sensing itself that causes problems, either with the book or the thought, but our “entanglement” with the sense object.