Feeling is one of the seven universal mental factors. The other six are contact, perception, mental formations, concentration, life force, and awareness. These are the five universal mental factors: contact, attention, feeling, perception, and intention. They are the mental activities that arise during any cognitive process.
These five mental factors are the most common, so they are called the “five universal mental factors.” They take place in any cognitive process. At another time, we may have a certain emotion such as resentment, fear, or lust. Then we should watch the emotion exactly as it is without trying to confuse it with anything else. Can you do this? These emotions are habits that you have cultivated over time, so you can certainly watch them in this way; they are simply karmic habits. When we bundle our form, feeling, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness up into one and try to watch all of them as feeling, we get confused, as we will not be able to see the source of feeling. If we simply dwell upon the feeling alone, ignoring other mental factors, our realization of truth becomes very difficult. Therefore, we need to clearly distinguish and thoroughly understand these five aggregates, as well as the functions of each mental factor. If you bind them together, ego-grasping will arise, and you won’t be able to discern them clearly. Without wisdom, we humans are just like animals. When you mix and bind the five aggregates together, you believe in the existence of a “self.” Before learning the path to liberation, weren’t you like this? Ask yourselves. Only after you have learned this can you gradually separate the five aggregates one by one. The aggregate of mental formations has various mental factors and many functions; the aggregate of consciousness is further divided into six categories. If you don’t separate them in this way and don’t clearly distinguish these mental factors, you cannot realize the true nature. As long as we are sitting in one place, we may gain some degree of mindfulness. Going on a retreat and spending several days or several months watching our feelings, perceptions, countless thoughts, and various states of consciousness may eventually make us calm and peaceful. Normally we do not have that much time to spend in one place meditating. Therefore, we should find a way to apply our mindfulness to daily life in order to handle unforeseen events each day. This means we should learn to meditate in our daily life, maintaining mindfulness in short sessions and gradually merging them into longer ones. In other words, we should first learn and cultivate mindfulness.