Then the discrimination between self and nonself, mine and not mine, will vanish.

Practicing meditation, looking deeply, we can identify and touch the blocks of ignorance, craving, and other afflictions in our store consciousness, and make the right effort to stop going in that direction.

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.

ourselves. In the flower we can see the sun, the compost, and the earth. One thing brings with it all other things. One thing is all things. When we practice looking like this, we will not complain about manas and how it is always causing us to suffer.

In order to transform manas, we need to look deeply at the elements of ignorance and craving that cause it to act in this way.

Another way to describe nirvana is interbeing.

Our habit energies, delusions, and craving come together and create a tremendous source of energy that conditions our actions, speech, and thinking. This energy is called manas. The function of manas is grasping.

And because one of the functions of manas is the instinct to survive, to protect the self, it grasps firmly to its belief that our mind/body is a permanent, never-changing self (atman).

This capacity of manas is akin to what biologists call the “primitive” brain, which functions solely in the interest of survival, of self-preservation.