Making Sense of Mind Only by William S. Waldron;

Author:William S. Waldron;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

These passages outline the feedback relationship between our unconscious and conscious cognitive processes. As a complexly structured strata of subliminal awareness, ālayavijñāna “grasps onto and appropriates” our embodied sense faculties, which respond to specific stimuli in specific ways. These cognitive structures influence how and what we perceive—the sights, sounds, smells, and so forth—whose imprints are “heaped up” and “accumulated” in our subliminal stream of citta. The cumulative effect of these imprints in turn help preconfigure later conscious perceptions.

In one of its significant departures from other Buddhist traditions, both ālayavijñāna and the six manifest forms of vijñāna are now said to occur not just sequentially, but simultaneously:

The six groups of cognitive awareness131 occur supported by and depending on the appropriating awareness. . . . Of these, visual awareness occurs supported by a visual form and the eye accompanied by consciousness. Simultaneously and in conformity with that visual awareness, a mental awareness conceptualizing (vikalpaka manovijñāna) that object occurs at the same time with the same object.

If two, three, four, or five groups of sensory awareness occur simultaneously, then only one mental awareness conceptualizing that same object occurs at the same time having the same object.

One can compare this to a large stream of water: if the conditions for the arising of a single wave are present, then only a single wave arises. If the conditions for the arising of two or many waves are present, then two or many waves arise, but the stream of water is neither interrupted nor exhausted in its current.132 (5.4–5)

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