Following on from our conversation last Wednesday about the different types of meditation - basically fabricated and unfabricated - I have continued to be interested in these differentiations. One of the ways this manifests is revisiting ideas about different types of consciousness that I don’t really feel I properly understand.
An example of this - which I’ve mentioned before - is the idea of a level of deeply unconscious ‘consciousness’ that is the repository of all our past karmic imprints. It is called the ‘storehouse consciousness’, the alaya-vijnana. In my mind I think of this as deep habitual patterns that are intertwined with memory. It is these that entirely condition every aspect of our thoughts, emotions and behaviours - essentially distorting and obscuring how things really are.
However, I have previously thought that this concept doesn’t really make sense. Descriptions of it on the one hand describe it as patterns of unconscious reactivity - we might call these all pervasive auto-pilots - and at the same time, a deep level of consciousness that when experienced is bright and calm. I don’t know about you, but these two description just don’t seem to go together.
So today I revisited it - as I sat I asked myself is there a level of my experience I don’t normally notice that is my karma and also that is conscious? And then I saw it. Yes, of course there is. It is right under my nose - it is everything I am experiencing right now, and how I am experiencing it, in this very moment. Every bit of it is karmically conditioned. And further more this experience is known - it knows itself - and so here is the consciousness aspect. A conscious aspect that remains evenly clear irrespective of the changing states of mind that come and go within it.
So yet again, another seemingly opaque Buddhist term that turns out to simply be an observation of the bloody obvious.
NW. 2 October 2023
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