Understanding Our Mind: 51 Verses on Buddhist Psychology

If manas is obscured and confused, they are obscured and confused. If manas is partially liberated, they will be partially liberated.

Whether bitter or sweet, all mental formations are blocks of suffering in our consciousness.

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).

The nature of manas is delusion, ignorance, and discrmination. It is imprisoned in its delusion and its craving for duration and satisfaction.

To say that manas is always discriminating means that it holds on to the object that it regards as its self, its beloved. Everything in the world is connected with us yet we think, “Those things are not myself. Only this is myself.”

The capacity of looking at formations as only conventional designations, the capacity to see them as having no separate selves, and the capacity to transform our attachment and craving will take us in the direction of liberation and healing.

The base of all these cravings and afflictions is ignorance, our inability to see things clearly. Ignorance is the first element in the cycle of Interdependent Co-Arising. Our lack of understanding leads to volitional actions, which in turn lead us in the direction of sorrow.

manas hinders the functioning of the store consciousness and gets in the way of transforming the seeds.

Manas is like an electrical conduit between the store consciousness and the mind consciousness, but because its nature is obscured, it distorts the electrical signal, the information, passing between store consciousness and mind consciousness. When mind consciousness is able to touch the seeds in store consciousness directly, without the distortion