What Hardcore Dharma discussed last week:*
The 5 Skandhas.
What they are:
1. Form
2. Feeling
3. Perceptions
4. Mental Formations and
5. Consciousness.
What they mean:
Forget sugar, spice, slugs or snails.  These aggregates, boys and girls, are what we are made of.  They’re also where we can look for what we call our “self” and emerge as empty as the claw hook of those torturous stuffed animal vending machines you plugged quarter after quarter in at Jimmy’s arcade birthday party when you were ten and didn’t yet know that the manufacturers of these games weren’t necessarily advocating for your triumph.

What this does for my practice:
Meh, not so much. 
From the department of gripes made by folks with nothing to grip about:
I’m feeling the ache of a resistant, distended mind over-gorged on lists.  The five this, the eight that, the fifty-nine this  – it’s too intellectual – it feels too much like accumulating knowledge for the purpose of dropping awesome sounding dharma bombs “(snorfle) Well if you think about this in the context of the twelve nidanas …(snorfle snorfle)” in open talks to get the cute newcomer to pull his/her made-in-China-Mexican blanket closer to you the coming Monday.  The minute discussions feel like mental entertainment.  Analytical specificity seems to usurp the actual emotional practice-oriented specificity.  The study feels overly advanced – like popping blood vessels while struggling for a side crow in yoga class when what one really needs to do is gently work on synching movement to breath.
Note: Please add “to me” to every sentence of the preceding paragraph.
So what I want to know from the (Intermediate) Hardcore Dharma community and the community at large is why or if you think studying these lists matters for your personal day to day practice.  Sometimes I feel like I should spend one year contemplating each of the four reminders (human birth, impermanence, karma and samsara), remind myself fairly frequently of the eightfold path, meditate every day and call it four years spent incredibly (possibly overly) enmeshed in the study of Buddhism.  I understand this level of detail in monks and nuns but it seems crazy as laypeople to further complicate our mental energy, which is already so divided by a worldly existence, with brain gymnastics.  Prove me wrong: does it serve some other purpose?  Do you have some real-life examples of how the more philosophical abhidharma teachings have helped you out in your life as a practitioner? I mean, all I want to do is cultivate a sense of real, clear-seeing presence in this brave new world with such people in it.    Like shirts and shoes, is a gluttonous appetite for dharmic analysis required?
*As I previously mentioned, I’m reading along, listening the the podcasts, but not attenting HCD in the flesh.  This could be part of my problem, I admit.
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