..续本文上一页t plague the mind

　　 First, one needs to be truly honest with oneself and accept the fact of their presence together with the knowledge on how they are activated. Then one is ready to undergo the cleansing process, the purification of mind in Vipassana meditation, which eventually leads to the healing and transformation that ultimately frees one from mental suffering.

　　The anusaya”s are inbuilt tendencies - it is known that babies have them at birth - so everybody has them to some degree or other. Perhaps we can say that they are our karmic inheritance, somewhat like our genes. But don”t suppose that the latent or underlying tendencies need be there forever – that they are everlasting, or that we are fated to their effects. As it is a universal truth that everything changes, so we need not get stuck in conditioned patterns of the mind, as we have the potential to decondition the mind and be free!

　　There was an American politician who won an election with the slogan, “it”s the economy, stupid!” We say “it”s the mind, stupid”, as it is the mind that is the source of self-inflicted suffering, or you might say stupid suffering. So we identify the mind as the source of suffering and the root latency in the mind is the latency to ignorance. This tendency to ignorance forms the foundation for the latency to craving, which is the tendency to get attached to - to identify with - things. We are very much inclined to identify with one belief system or another, seeking certainty and relentlessly pursuing the myth of security, while not being savvy to the Wisdom of Insecurity.

　　One of the deeply conditioned latent tendencies is the attachment to concepts while taking them for realities. It is the tendency to get attached to concepts, per se, without understanding them for what they are in themselves: as just something that someone has thought up, or has been able to imagine. There is an ingrained tendency to grab hold of the concepts in worldly usage, to cling to them tenaciously and identify with them. We assume that the words that we use have a reality of their own, that they are true in their own right, even going to the extreme of a war of words over ideas – over some ideology.

　　As the latent tendencies lie dormant in the mind below the conscious level, the question is what triggers them, or what causes them to surface

　　 As far as I know there are two ways that this happens: during the play of emotions, when the mind state is coloured by the unwholesome latent tendencies, which tends to reinforce them; or during the process of perception, when there is thought and then conceptual proliferation.

　　In whatever way they find expression, the latent tendencies are activated unconsciously in the mind and that is why they are so difficult to control, even when they are continually cut down (without uprooting them) by concentration-based meditation (samatha).

　　There is a verse by the Buddha in the Dhammapada that illustrates this:

　　If its root remains undamaged and strong,

　　A tree, even if cut will grow back.

　　So too if latent craving is not rooted out,

　　This suffering returns again and again.

　　- Dhp 338

　　A model of the mind used to explain Buddhist practice has the mind in three layers. The top is the expressed level, where restraint is used to inhibit expressions of unwholesome emotions; the middle is the manifest level, where unwholesome thoughts are swirling about and are pacified or temporarily inhibited through concentration based meditations, such as loving-kindness; while the bottom level is where the latent tendencies lie, which are only accessed and eliminated through insighting into the processes of the mind itself, in various forms of awareness based meditations.

　　A simile used to illustrate this is that of a sleeping snake, i.e. the dormant …

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