Embracing Strong Emotions
“Buddhist psychology offers a model of the mind that divides our consciousness into two layers: the upper layer is ‘mind consciousness,’ our waking mind, and the lower layer is ‘store consciousness,’ similar to the concept of the unconscious in Western psychology. It is called ‘store consciousness’ because it stores the potentialities of our mental states, which are described as seeds, sleeping in the depths of our mind. There are many kinds of seeds in our store consciousness, some wholesome, like mindfulness, generosity, and forgiveness, and some unwholesome, like greed, ignorance, and hatred. All of us have all of these many types of seeds.”