Understanding Our Mind: 51 Verses on Buddhist Psychology

The nature of manas is delusion, ignorance, and discrmination. It is imprisoned in its delusion and its craving for duration and satisfaction.

because manas is blind, because its nature is obscured by delusion, it can often take us in the wrong direction.

With good practice, the delusion of manas can be transformed into the wisdom of equanimity.

With the energy of mindfulness generated by our mind consciousness, we can avoid watering seeds of anger, craving, and delusion in our store consciousness and we can water seeds of joy, peace, and wisdom.

Manas is like an electrical conduit between the store consciousness and the mind consciousness, but because its nature is obscured, it distorts the electrical signal, the information, passing between store consciousness and mind consciousness. When mind consciousness is able to touch the seeds in store consciousness directly, without the distortion

Our practice is to transform the nature of manas a little bit each day and release our store consciousness more and more from its grip.

Because the nature of manas is obscured, our mind consciousness is often also covered over by delusion. Unlike manas, however, our mind consciousness is capable of other modes of perception as well—direct or inferred. When our mind consciousness is able to perceive things directly, it is capable of touching the realm of suchness.

For awakening to flower, we have to sow the seed of awakening in our store consciousness. If we only use our mind consciousness for mental gymnastics, we won’t go very far. Many people keep the teachings they learn up in their mind consciousness, using their intellect to poke and prod at them. Even though they think about them and talk about them a

Store consciousness has the power to maintain, nourish, and bring forth what we expect to have. In the practice of meditation, we trust our store consciousness. We plant seeds in the soil of our store consciousness, and we water those seeds. We trust that one day the seeds will sprout and bring forth plants, flowers, and fruit.