All Indian and Tibetan Buddhist schools present an analytical scheme of the five aggregates, which is helpful for deconstructing each moment of our mental activity and allows us to see what is actually going in with our mind and which mental factors can be adjusted. While there are only minor differences in how the different schools enumerate these components of mental activity, they differ significantly in their cognition theories, especially regarding how conceptual and non-conceptual cognition work and how we cognize commonsense objects: whether they can be cognized non-conceptually or are merely conceptual constructions. This article explains the Karma Kagyu approach to the five aggregates and suggests how we can use this basic Buddhist scheme to analyze our experience in daily life.