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The Wonderful Functioning of Mind
Each person is a treasure house (store consciousness) containing both suffering and the jewels of happiness, solidity, and freedom. When pain or craving clings tightly, we feel as if we are being gripped by a crab with many claws, forgetting that within us there are also other seeds—like a television receiver with hundreds of buttons: press “hell” and hell appears, press “the Kingdom of God” and the Kingdom of God appears.
Deep within the store consciousness are fifty-one kinds of mental formations, and when they encounter “sunshine and rain” from the outside, they give rise to five universal mental formations:
- Contact (sparśa)
- Attention (manaskāra)
- Feeling (vedanā)
- Perception (saṃjñā)
-
Volition (cetanā)
Among these, perception—awareness, cognition—plays a key role: wrong perception distorts all signals and brings about suffering. The practice is to allow the “signals” of the Dharma time to penetrate deeply into the soil of our mind, to let go of hurried labeling, so that the spring rain (mindfulness) can soak into the seeds, allowing them to crack open and sprout into insight.
Our consciousness is organic, like a garden: suffering, craving, anger, and ignorance can become “compost” for the flowers of compassion and wisdom. Within each of us is hidden both the Tathāgata-garbha (the treasure of liberation) and the store of birth and death (the cycle of samsāra). Continually ask yourself, “Are you sure?” with every belief, every perception, and when you are caught in suffering and cannot let go, seek out the Sangha so that together you can transform.