Seeds of Our Happiness

Each person is a field of consciousness that holds many different kinds of seeds. We have seeds of love and hate, of greed and generosity, of anger and loving-kindness. We also have a special seed of mindfulness. Some of these seeds are weak while others are strong. Only those seeds that are watered often will sprout and grow strong. Without tending to our field of consciousness, it will become overgrown. Our life is determined by the seeds that we water.

Photo by Joshua Lanzarini on Unsplash

For people living in the same country all their life, it becomes increasingly difficult to be objective about their living conditions and life circumstances. And it also becomes difficult to see reality from different angles, to see things from new perspectives. They are exposed to a particular propaganda (e.g. capitalist consumerism), which colours their judgment in a certain way. Even younger people have this difficulty of changing perspective, because a simple fact of being brought up in a particular society will influence and define our worldview. It starts from our earliest age, with our parents, with a school system, and extends to the society at large. When we, then, try to learn something new we often compare it with our existing knowledge and beliefs. If it is in line with what we already know, we accept it easily. If it disagrees with our prior notions, we discard it. In either case, we learn nothing new.

Buddhist practice allows us to step back from the society in which we have been brought up to see a larger picture. It allows us to change perspective more easily and see the viewpoint of other people (that is different from ours), to change our ingrained habits, and, ultimately, to become more objective — particularly about ourselves.

Abhidhamma, which is a system of Buddhist psychology, contributed to the formation of modern psychology in the West, at the beginning of the twentieth century, and had a profound influence on the psychoanalysis of Carl Jung in particular. Buddhist view of the self has always been difficult to fathom for a Western society. In the West, we prize individualism and self-expression, which often degenerates into a mere self-promotion. The Buddha would have said that our concept of individuality was a dangerous delusion. Moreover, with a rise of the consumerist culture in the West, and its emphasis on individuality, the West has created a distorted and perverted view of the self which is tearing the fabric of society apart. This false view of the individual (with its inalienable liberties), aided and abated by the economic system that exploits and generates inequality, creates a widespread alienation and depression.

Buddhism provides a different and a much healthier perspective of the individuality. Society has a shared consciousness in which every member participates, often unwillingly or unknowingly. Our individuality, our intimate sense of self, is constructed at the very intersection of the individual and collective consciousnesses, and the individual part cannot be separated from the collective. We are essentially like the Borg Hive from the Star Track, each of us is sharing a consciousness with everyone else in the society. That is exactly why money has value. Why paintings, which are nothing but some oil on a canvas, are bought and sold for millions of dollars. That is why we can agree to disagree.

Store consciousness

According to the Buddhist psychology, each person has a mind consciousness and a store consciousness, where mind consciousness is an amalgamation of individual and collective parts which cannot be separated. Individual aspect exhibits different traits that we inherited from our parents and ancestors. These traits are mainly expressions of the stored genetic information which shapes our character traits. Collective aspect, at the same time, exhibits imprints of societal characteristics, molded by upbringing and social conditioning.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: we are formed and molded by our thoughts. Those whose minds are shaped by selfish thoughts cause misery when they speak or act. Sorrows roll over them as the wheels of a cart roll over the tracks of the bullock that draws it. … If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him. — Dhammapada

Our sense of self is not really ours. Consider, for example, your position on how the society should be organized, on social justice and welfare programs, on tax rates and redistribution of wealth, on crowned heads and private property. It becomes sobering to realize that many of these positions often work against you (that is if you belong to the 99%). It is a tragic absurdity that we are living in the 21st Century and we are still hearing fairy-tales about royalty?! The Queen is about to die. We won’t hear enough of it.

Store consciousness, according to the Buddhist psychology, stores our seeds (bīja). Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, invented the concept of the unconscious mind that in some ways corresponds to the Buddhist concept of the store consciousness (Freud was influenced by Buddhism). But the unconscious mind is just a tiny part of the store consciousness. The store consciousness is in the Buddhist literature often depicted as a field in which many different seeds have been planted by our ancestors, parents and society. Some of our seeds are simply expressions of our inherited genes, while others come from upbringing and interaction with a society in which we live. And we have many different kinds of seeds, where some are wholesome while others are unwholesome. We have seeds of love and hate, of greed and generosity, of anger and loving-kindness. We also have a special seed of mindfulness.

All these different seeds, while they are in the store consciousness, lay dormant until activated. Activation comes from our thinking or interaction with other people and society at large. Once activated, the seed rises from the store consciousness to the plane of the mind consciousness and becomes a mental formation (saṅkhāra). When a seed manifests in our mind consciousness, it becomes strengthened in the process as well. A seed, once manifested, can then produce other seeds of the same nature in our store consciousness. For example, if we often indulge in venting our anger (by punching pillows or in other ways), the seed of anger will just produce more of the same seeds, and it will become stronger. Anger cannot be vented. If we allow any seed to have frequent occasion to manifest as a formation, that seed grows bigger and stronger in our store consciousness. It becomes more important, it dominates other seeds, and, ultimately, shapes our personality.

If we know how to touch the seeds of compassion, forgiveness, and joy in us and have them manifest several times a day, those seeds will become more and more important in our store consciousness. If we touch the seeds of fear, anger, and pain in ourselves and allow people around us to touch them also, we are helping those seeds grow stronger all the time. — Thich Nhat Hanh

If the seed of anger grows strong in our store consciousness it will become easy for it to manifest in our mind consciousness and we will, eventually, become an angry person. It is as simple as that. Nobody is born as an angry person. We all can become one, by touching our seed of anger or allowing other people or society to bring it up. The main problem is that our society is (almost deliberately) shaping our circumstances so that the seed of anger is touched often.

The society is often watering our unwholesome seeds of greed, hatred and delusion.

We are often hearing how greed is good, how we have the right to be angry, how everybody else is wrong but us, how we are better than others, the America first and all that. We are immersed in a culture that is promoting selfish, greedy and deluded individuals, which are often fulled by prejudices and governed by wrong impulses and misaligned incentives. If we hang around these people, that will shape our views. Even the simple fact that we partake in a society is already colouring our consciousness in a certain way.

If we touch red ink, our fingers become red. If we are in constant contact with people who are filled with greed, hatred, delusion, and prejudice, some of those characteristics will rub off on us as well and our consciousness will become “stained” by them. — Thich Nhat Hanh

We need to cultivate only the wholesome seeds in our store consciousness. We need to water only the positive seeds and let the negative ones lay dormant. This is called “selective watering” by the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and that is how happiness is grown, organically, like the vegetables in a garden. However, in order to be able to tend to our garden, we need to cultivate mindfulness.

Without mindful awareness in our daily life, our field will become overgrown, because the main-stream society is watering our negative seeds. Capitalism thrives on greed. Society promotes money-makers, first and foremost, where they often go through life without a moral compass. Facebook and other social media outlets are toxic. Instagram is driving young girls to suicide. Google and other Ad Tech companies are fueling our unhealthy cravings and create addictions. Spammers and scammers are exploiting our sense desire every time the “Attractive Young Singles In Your Area” initiate chat conversations (using provocative profile photos) in an attempt to lure you into scam traps. Globalization is enslaving whole nations and creating an inequality gap that appears insurmountable.

What has seriously gone wrong with globalization is the illusion about a global village. The reality is of a global supermarket — run on a Walmart model. Walmart is excellent in maximizing its profit margins, gets cheapest production from wherever it can get, cheapest sales in its retail systems, highest level of monopolizing through economies of scale, and is able to then rip off the workers and the original producers. — Vandana Shiva

We need to be aware that globalized consumerist society is poisonous and detrimental to our mental health. And, with each new technology, it is further developing in the opposite direction from that of the Buddha’s teachings. We need to pull back just a little bit from the society, we need to abide mindfully in the present moment, and we need to block Ads and other distractions. We need to develop mindfulness. This skill is becoming increasingly important for navigating the modern life and will become essential as the society progresses towards the technological utopia.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness (sati) is also a seed in our store consciousness. If we haven’t watered it, this seed will be very weak and feeble, and we may not even notice it. But it is still there. Although our seed of mindfulness may be weak, it can grow quickly if we practice doing things mindfully. In order to grow, mindfulness needs nourishment. However, it will be difficult for it to grow if it has been surrounded for a long time by the strong and thorny bushes of greed, hatred and delusion. We need to water it often — both through the formal meditation practice and by doing things with awareness — in order for it to grow into a strong plant. Then, after some time, if we have been diligent with our watering practice, our seed of mindfulness will become strong and it will become easy for it to manifest on the plain of our mind consciousness. Once there, our mindfulness can take care of our other mental formations. This is crucial for our well-being.

Mindfulness, as a mental formation, can coexist side-by-side with any other mental formation. If we simply become aware of our mental state or our emotions as soon as they arise — that is mindfulness. This fact becomes especially important with our unwholesome mental formations, such as anger. The arising of anger leads to an increase in the release of adrenaline, and such an increase in adrenaline will in turn further stimulate the anger. This creates a vicious self-reinforcing cycle, where physiological reaction feeds mental state, and vice-versa. By simply remaining receptively aware of a state of anger, neither the physical reaction nor the mental proliferation is given scope for development.

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh describes this practice of mindfully attending to anger as follows: “We just breathe and hold our anger in our arms with utmost tenderness … Then the anger is no longer alone, it is with your mindfulness. Anger is like a closed flower in the morning. As the sun shines on the flower, the flower will bloom, because the sunlight penetrated deep into the flower. Mindfulness is like that. If you keep breathing …, mindfulness particles will infiltrate the anger. When sunshine penetrates a flower, the flower cannot resist. It is bound to open itself and reveal its heart to the sun. If you keep breathing on your anger, shining your compassion and understanding on it, your anger will soon crack and you will be able to look into its depths and see its roots.“

It is important to note that studies have shown that even advanced meditators are not without the experience of conflict, but are remarkably non-defensive in experiencing such conflicts. This observation points to their ability to maintain non-reactive and equanimous awareness.

Diligence

The Buddhist practice of diligence is very important for tending to our field and watering our wholesome seeds. It consists of four related aspects.

Buddhist practice of diligence (Right Effort).

(1) The first aspect of diligence is not to invite negative seeds to manifest, and not allow the environment or other people to bring them forward. (2) The second aspect is to replace the negative mental formations as soon as they manifest with the positive ones. The Buddha teaches five different ways this can be done. (2a) Replacing unwholesome mental formation with their opposite as an antidote. (2b) Removing unwholesome mental formations through the factors of hiri (self-respect) and ottappa (respect for the wise), which stand for a heightened sense of conscience and responsibility to ourselves and others. Hiri and Ottappa are reffered to in Buddhism as “guardians of the world”. (2c) Replacing unwholesome mental formations by a deliberate diversion of attention on something else. (2d) Removing unwholesome mental formations by mindfully investigating their source and their hold on the mind. (2e) When all else fails, as a last resort, the Buddha suggests forcibly suppressing the unwholesome mental formation. (3) The third aspect of diligence is to always invite positive seeds to arise on the plain of the mind consciousness. This is watering of wholesome seeds. (4) The fourth, and last, aspect of diligence is to try to keep the positive mental formations, after they have already manifested from the wholesome seeds in our store consciousness, for as long as possible.

This fourfold practice is called the Right Effort and forms a part of the Noble Eightfold Path. It strengthens the wholesome seeds in our store consciousness and creates more of the same kind. These slowly become the dominant seeds in our field that manifest easily as positive mental formations, and our well-being improves as a result of that. This is how happiness is grown, from cultivating our wholesome seeds.

Habit energies

Habit energy is an important term in Buddhist psychology. When a person is brought up in a certain environment, a habit energy is formed. We are influenced by the actions and beliefs of the society in which we have been brought up, but our reactions to things also have their own patterns. And we are caught in these patterns. Our habit energies are the fruit of our behavior, formed by our reactions to things and also by our environment. Some of our habit energies have been transmitted to us by our parents. We may find ourselves repeating through life the same errors that our parents have made, simply because we have the same habit energies that push us in certain directions.

Without mindfulness, we are often slaves to our addictions and desires, we mindlessly pursue gratifications, and we are trying in vain to satisfy our sense pleasures. We are without awareness and control over our life. We are driven in a certain direction by our compulsion, but we are not behind the wheel. The autopilot is turned on. The river of feelings is carrying us forward.

Habit energies are in the Buddhist texts often depicted as ruts that are created in the field by carts pulled by oxen over the same paths. They become deeper by the passing of time. And it becomes more difficult to pull the cart of our life from these well-beaten ruts and steer them in a different direction.

By following these habit energies, without conscious awareness, we will become shadows of our parents. An we will repeat their mistakes. Moreover, we will pass these habits onto our children, and the wheel of Saṃsāra will continue to turn. The only escape from the habit energies that often run our lives is through the practice of mindfulness. With mindful awareness we can slowly de-condition our deeply ingrained behavioral patterns, we can de-emphasize our inherited traits, we can change instinctive reactions and create new ruts — we can break the cycle of bondage.

Internal knots

Habit energies are also the basis of internal knots (samyojana), which is an another important Buddhist concept. Internal knots are, among other things, the blocks of sadness and pain that are tied up in our consciousness. Their nature is unwholesome. For example, if we have been abused in the past or had traumas, these will be manifested as very strong internal knots. Even when someone simply says something or we see something that makes us angry or sad, this can begin to create an internal knot. If we are not mindful at that time, a new knot will be tied and we will carry another block of pain.

Each interaction with other people and society at large has a potential to create yet another internal knot. That is why it is important to recognise, with mindful awareness, these potential knots before they form. Even after the internal knot is tied we can untie it with a mindful investigation of the causes and conditions that have brought it about. But time is of essence here. If we let time pass after the knot is tied it will grow stronger, and it will become more difficult to untie it later on. That is why past traumas are very difficult to deal with.

In order to demonstrate a wise approach to dealing with internal knots (and difficulties in life), Buddha uses a simile of a glass of water in which we have put a large spoon of salt. That water is very salty and undrinkable. This is our present condition. In order to make the water drinkable again (or the life agreeable) we shouldn’t try to take out the salt. Instead, we should add more water, then transfer it into a bigger container and pour in still more water, until that water becomes drinkable again. The salt is still there, it hasn’t gone anywhere, but we can’t notice it anymore. The same is true with our life. We shouldn’t strive to remove the negative mental states and blocks of pain; instead, we need to use the practice of diligence and water our wholesome seeds.

Sense doors

The Buddha recognized that the consciousness is born from the contact of the object with a sense base. For example, when the eye (as a sense base) contacts a shape or a color (object), the eye consciousness is born. We constantly contact and consume food and information through our six sense doors (eye/seeing, ear/hearing, nose/smelling, tongue/tasting, body/touching and mind/cognising). The seeds of perception are brought into our store consciousness through these six sense doors, each time there is a contact of the objects with the sense bases.

We need to sow only the wholesome seeds. We need to be very careful with what we consume, because many of the things we consume are toxic and can damage our physical and mental health. There are toxins concealed in Ads, Games, Music videos, Tweets, Memes, News, that we consume on a daily basis. There are toxins in our food as well (fast food, GMO food, etc.). Coca Cola is a poisoned water and people still pay money for drinking it. Long exposure to these toxins will slowly poison us. We may not even be aware of it.

Without mindful awareness in our everyday lives the modern society will distract us with toys and poison us with Ads. And we will become angry or depressed. We’ll carry blocks of pain tide up as internal knots, and our habit energy will be that of an endless pursuit of fleeting pleasures.

We need mindfulness as a guardian of our sense doors. Every time the interaction with other people is about to tie another knot in our consciousness we should be aware of it, and we should start working on loosening that knot immediately. Otherwise, it will grow strong and we’ll suffer because of that. We can’t get rid of our negative, unwholesome seeds, and we should not even be trying. Instead, we should just water our positive, wholesome seeds instead. That is how we’ll grow our happiness, by carefully nurturing our wholesome seeds, with diligence and patience of a gardener.

Buddha’s teaching is not a philosophy. It is not concerned with a creation of the universe. It contains, as far as lay followers are concerned, practical instructions for getting along with other people and, in the process, living a meaningful, fulfilled and happy life.

I am offering these thoughts as a humble gift of Dharma, hoping they may be useful, and may incite the reader to start a Buddhist meditation practice. Any merit that it may generate along the way I wish to transfer to readers.

References

1. Thich Nhat Hanh: Understanding Our Mind: 50 Verses on Buddhist Psychology, Parallax Press, 2002.
2. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Eric Swanson: The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness, Harmony, 2008.
3. Bhikkhu Cintita (John Dinsmore, PhD): Buddhist Life, Buddhist Path, Lulu Press, 2019.
4. Thich Nhat Hanh: Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, Parallax Press, 2002.
5. Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, Sounds True, Boulder, Colorado, 2016.
6. Robert Wright: Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, Simon & Schuster, 2018.
7. Karen Armstrong, Buddha, Penguin Books Ltd., New York, 2001.