Understanding Our Mind, Thich Nhat Hanh

• Store consciousness stores and preserves all the seeds of our experiences, where seeds represent everything we have ever done, experienced, or perceived. These are “subjects” of consciousness
• The seeds make up store consciousness and can be distinguished from the store, but the store is dependant on the seeds, thus the seeds are also “objects” of consciousness
• The ways in which we act plant seeds for how we behave in the future. If you plant wheat, wheat will grow. If you act in a wholesome way, you will be happy. If you act in an unwholesome way, you will water seeds of craving, anger, and violence in yourself and others
• When we perceive an object, we see its “sign” (I like signature more). As per Buddhism there are 3 pairs of signs of phenomena:
  • Universal and particular: universal signatures are generic labels (e.g., a house) and particular signatures are more specific (e.g., the brick, wood, nails, etc. that make up individual houses)
  • Unity and diversity: all houses are part of the designation “house”, but there are countless variations between the collection of individual houses
  • Formation and disintegration: a house could be in the process of being built (formation), but is also already in the process of decay, being weathered by its surroundings (disintegration)
    • Seeing these signatures are the basis of the teachings of interbeing
• It is easy to confuse our mental image, our signature of something, with its reality. The way to avoid misperceptions is through mindfulness: deliberate investigation of our perceptions, poking and prodding until we approach the true nature of a perception
• When we have a false perception and continue to maintain it, we hurt ourselves and others. In fact, people kill one another over their competing perceptions of the same reality
• Individual and collective seeds: the collective consciousness is made up of individual consciousnesses, and an individual conscious is formed by the collective conscious. This is the nature of interbeing
• Looking deeply into an atom, we bow our heads in awe. And yet with our friend/significant other sitting next to us we think we already know everything about them
• Walking at dusk, we see a long stringy object, and thinking it’s a snake we get scared. Upon shining a light on the object, we realize it was just rope. Our fear was the product of a misperception, not seeing something for what it truly was. We do this in life as well, misperceiving constructed perceptions as truth, avoiding deep deliberation of what we’re assuming
• Impermanence and nonself are essentially the same thing, both meaning the absence of a separate, fixed self. Impermanence looks at this temporally, nonself looks at this spatially. The idea of a discrete self is incompatible with a continuous world
• The true nature of consciousness is neither individual nor collective. We are simultaneously individual and collective. I am a unique biological pattern, that was formed by the collective consciousness of my family, the earth, and the cosmos. This collective consciousness is produced by many individuals. Interdependence.
• Manas provides energy for ignorance, thirst, and craving. It also serves as the “survival instinct”, providing reflexive reactions to stimuli. It operates in the realm of representations, and thus cannot touch the realm of things-in-themselves (truth). The attachment of manas in a self is based on an image it has created.