The crux of the problem is to prevent our limited perceptional-tool of “experience” from eclipsing the Reality of the True. In order to arrive at the ultimate Truth, every experience we’ve had or will have in the future must be expunged. Our main point of contention—the skandhas are the carriers of experience. Let us then dissect their composition:
Rupa: the experience of [bodily form] and adjacent physical experiences linked with consciousness.
Vedana: sensate emotions, all the subtle feelings that we imagine constitute our “self”.
Samma: all thought-impressions that is the direct seed-bed of perceptions. This is an umbrella-term housing all concepts and purported knowledge that arise out of this conjunction.
Sankara: volitional-experiences of energy—the movement of a shadow-self whose will-power overshadows the life-force itself. This is the combustive fuel of reflexive mechanisms within the mind.
Vijnana: the mechanism of consciousness, including the unconscious alaya-receptacle. Here is the very discriminating image-maker itself.
Without the vessels of the skandhas, experience has nowhere to lay its head.
Thus, all experience is a self-empty tool housing limited and relative perceptions of the True, but never Self-realizing or Actual-Reality. If there’s to be any movement at all it needs to be movement towards a higher-estate of Mind, which after its arrival jettisons the raft of experience. Yea, the raft is all those experiential practices (meditation, silence and solitude) and even lifestyles that were a part of crossing-over from the old to the new-life centered in the Unborn. The final experience is death; if it’s not overcome then the new death-cycle will begin all over again. Deathlessness is a non-experience and thus is never skandhic-based but a permanent entrance into the Dharmadhatu. The moment we step into this new dimension, we will have already begun a miraculous life that is even beyond transformation itself—a veritable no-man’s land in a positive vein and an area in which even angels fear to tread. This is it—the point of no return!