The Eight Consciousnesses: A Buddhist Map of the Mind
Has all the buzz about mindfulness captured your attention?
I wouldn’t be surprised given its enormous popularity and seemingly uncountable number of benefits.
According to the American Psychological Association, studies show the regular practice of mindfulness can:
Reduce stress and anxiety
Lessen obsessive thinking
Boost working memory and focus
And those are just a few of its many researched benefits.
But when you sit down and actually look at your mind for the first time you might feel more overwhelmed by a fantastic number of thoughts than inspired by the potential benefits of mindfulness.
Understanding how the mind works can alleviate this initial anxiety, confusion, or doubt in mindfulness meditation. It has for me and the many students I’ve guided as a mindfulness teacher.
Of all the various Buddhist maps of the mind, the Eight Consciousnesses (more accurately, the eight collections of consciousnesses) is simple and easy to understand.
What are the Eight Consciousnesses? Let’s take a look.
A Breakdown of the Eight Consciousnesses
The Mahayana Buddhist model of the Eight Consciousnesses provides an explanation of how the mind works by mapping out its components. This schema includes five sensory consciousnesses and three mental consciousnesses as follows:
Eye consciousness
Ear consciousness
Nose consciousness
Tongue consciousness
Body consciousness
Mind consciousness
Conflicting or defiled consciousness
All-ground consciousness
The first five sense consciousnesses are easy to understand, right? They constitute you’re ability to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, and to feel bodily sensations—presuming those capacities are functioning.
It might be a little more tricky to grasp the three mental consciousnesses since we tend to see mind as a single thing in the West.
Let’s use the experience of a tree to explain each one.
The Sixth Consciousness — Mind Consciousness
As soon as you see a tree, the experience registers in the sixth consciousness. Mind consciousness simply notices and knows a tree is a tree. It differentiates between the variety of sense information presented to it. And it organizes the data you receive from the five sense consciousnesses into a coherent picture.
The Seventh Consciousness—Conflicting or Defiled Mind
The Seventh Consciousness represents the mind that conceptualizes, judges, and ruminates. All input is typically considered in terms of “I” or “mine.” So it produces feelings of like, dislike, or indifference.
“I hate that tree! I love that tree! I wish I had that tree in my yard. If I owned that tree, other people would admire me.”
Grasping occurs—the desire to maintain objects and experiences you like and avoid those you dislike.
Due to this constant grasping, the Seventh Consciousness is considered the source of human suffering. Ironically, that’s where we humans spend most of our time, isn’t it? We constantly feed a stream of inner discursiveness centered around what we like and dislike.
The Eighth Consciousness—All Ground Consciousness
Inactive, the Eighth Consciousness is the storehouse of your mind. It contains all the seeds of your karma. This includes good, bad, and neutral karma.
“The root of suffering is attachment.” — the Buddha in the Sunakkhatta Sutta: To Sunakkhatta
Take a moment to let that all sink in. Have you gotten a sense of it? You can experience most of this model directly, for yourself.
For example, you know what it’s like:
To have sensory experiences.
To simply be aware of what occurs on the screen of your mind without judging it.
You know what it’s like to be lost in thought, consumed by judgements, and distressed when you lose something you love—even just your favorite cup.
The storehouse of karma may be a new idea for you. If so, consider how people are conditioned to operate or respond in a certain way. Conditioning is a big part of who we are, isn’t it?
Conditioning is similar to the idea of karma. The storehouse of karma isn’t a specific place nor are its seeds specific things that you can locate and touch. But neither is conditioning. Yet we know it exists and often we want to break out of our conditioning.
So how does this all relate to mindfulness? That’s next.
Mindfulness and the Eight Consciousnesses
The goal of mindfulness is to remain, more and more, in the Sixth Consciousness. In the Sixth Consciousness, you’re simply aware of what occurs within and without. You’re not engaged in an inner commentary about everything you experience.
Our minds and hearts however have been conditioned to think, think, think or feel, feel, feel. As soon as we have a sensory or internal experience, we bypass the Sixth Consciousness and jump right into the Seventh Consciousness. We generate thoughts and judgements about what has occurred and decide whether we like or dislike it.
The key to mindfulness practice is to watch out for that juncture between the Sixth and Seventh Consciousness. As soon as you find your mind wandering in the realm of thoughts, the Seventh Consciousness, you bring it back to the simple awareness of the Sixth Consciousness.
At first, the gap between the Sixth and Seventh Consciousness seems to last but a nano-second. Your mind drifts into thoughts about your to-do list, your next vacation, or whether its time to end the meditation.
But the more you practice mindfulness, the more you’re able to remain in the Sixth Consciousness, free from the oppression of your own mind.
That doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to use the conceptual mind again. It can be a useful tool when you’re not mindlessly stuck in it. But you’ll come to see for yourself it’s not as essential as you once thought.And, it’s far more enjoyable to experience the world directly than to be lost in thoughts about it.
There’s another benefit to resting in the Sixth Consciousness.
The less and less you react as you rest in mindful awareness, the more the seeds of your karma diminish too. How magical is that? Mindfulness isn’t the only way to change your karma. But all advanced forms of meditation depend upon it.
As you learn to rest in awareness in mindfulness practice, you’ll slowly be able to transfer this ability to everyday life as well.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”—Viktor E. Frankl
Concluding Thoughts
Have you ever wished you had a map of the mind that could show you the best places to go and the spots to avoid? The Buddhist model of the Eight Consciousness is just that kind of map. And mindfulness helps you avoid the pitfalls.
This schema identifies our different sense experiences as five aspects of consciousness. Then it shows a fork in the road, where you can remain in simple awareness or move into the conceptual mind of judgment, rumination, and grasping.
One fork leads to suffering. The other leads to peace. Which will you take?
[Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels]
Thank you for your presence, I know your time is precious! Don’t forget to sign up for Wild Arisings, my twice monthly letters from the heart filled with insights, inspiration, and ideas to help you connect with and live from your truest self.
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