Day 16 - Seeds of Joy
Living Christ Sangha - Advent Ango Practice Period
Readings
(click the header to view the readings)
Isaiah 8:16-9:1
2 Peter 1:1-11
Luke 22:39-53
Reflection
The holidays are hard for many of us. The messages the culture sends about how the holidays are supposed to look and feel are at odds with our day-to-day lives. Religious themes like joy can also feel out of reach. I want to use this week to explore how we can cultivate a mental state like joy and share it with others, not to conform with the demands of a particular holiday season, but to explore how we can collectively realized peace and well-being. Today, we will look at how mental states arise.
The Buddhist Psychology of Consciousness
Many people are surprised to hear that we have a significant measure of control over our mental states. Many (most?) of us experience our different states of mind as “moods” that simply overtake us. Our Buddhist friends encourage us to look more deeply at how our mind works. Buddhism offer practices that provide insight into how to nurture positive mental states and transform unpleasant ones.1 Today, we look at the basic Buddhist psychology that informs these practices.
Buddhist psychology sees our consciousness as consisting of four layers.2 Figure 1 illustrates these layers.
There is an element associated with each of the five senses we experience (smell, sight, hearing, touch, taste) and these make up the sense consciousness layer.
There is an element associated with our mind itself, where all mental activity associated with our conscious awareness occurs (including sense awareness.) This is the mind consciousness layer.
There is a layer called the store consciousness, which is not part of our awareness. In it lie all sorts of dormant “seeds” that represent feelings and other mental formations in their unconscious state.
There is a fourth layer called manas, which arises from the store consciousness and turns and clings to it, identifying it as “me.” I won’t discuss this layer in detail here, but it is the source of a significant amount of suffering resulting from the misunderstandings it engenders about the self.
The Birth of a Mental State
In our model of consciousness, a given mental formation (feeling, state, memory, etc) can be caused to arise when the dormant seed for that formation is “touched” or “watered” in our store consciousness. This causes the formation that the seed holds to energetically arise into our mind consciousness.
Let’s consider the arising of joy as an example. Suppose you are having coffee with a friend, and they tell you about something wonderful that has happened to them. You hear this wonderful news, and the seed of sympathetic joy in your store consciousness is watered by what you hear, and a state of joy arises in your mind consciousness. Figure 2 illustrates this process.
This understanding that our mental formations (feelings, states of mind, thoughts, etc.) arise in response to “watering” from other layers of consciousness is good news, because it offers a way to think about how we nourish and nurture healthy states of mind, and how to diminish or transform unhealthy states of mind. Tomorrow, we will look at the role of nutriments in this process.
Prayer
Ground of our thoughts, beyond all thinking, stir up in us the desire to create peaceful and loving states in our minds, for our own benefit and the benefit of all whom we encounter. Amen.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Understanding Our Mind (Parallax Press, 2006.)
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Four Layers of Consciousness.