Observations placeholder
Asvaghosha - The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana - The Personality
Identifier
016335
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
This extract describes the role the Personality or ego has in both separating us from the Higher spirit but also in the way we process the input from the 5 senses - the perceptions. In effect, how we see things in life and build up a non erasable record of them [karma = perceptions] is totally dependent on our personality - the personality we have been given to achieve our destiny.
A description of the experience
Asvaghosha - The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana translated by D T Suzuki
Five different names are given to the ego.
The first name is activity-consciousness in the sense that through the agency of ignorance an unenlightened mind begins to be disturbed.
The second name is evolving-consciousness, in the sense that when the mind is disturbed, there evolves that which sees an external world.
The third name is representation-consciousness, in the sense that the ego (manas) represents an external world. As a clean mirror reflects the images of all description, it is even so with the representation-consciousness. When it is confronted, for instance, with the five objects of sense, it represents them at once, instantaneously, and without any effort.
The fourth name is particularisation-consciousness, in the sense that it discriminates between different things defiled as well as pure.
The fifth name is succession-consciousness [perceptions], in the sense that continuously directed by the awakening consciousness it retains and never loses or suffers the destruction of any karma, good as well as evil, which had been sown in the past, and whose retribution, painful as well as agreeable, it never fails to mature, be it in the present or in the future; and also in the sense that it unconsciously recollects things gone by, and in imagination anticipates things to come.
Therefore the three domains (triloka) are nothing but the self-manifestation of the mind. Separated from the mind, there would be no such things as the six objects of sense.
The source of the experience
AcvaghoshaConcepts, symbols and science items
Concepts
CharacterDesire and personality
Destiny
Five senses system
Perception
Perceptions
Perceptions - what happens to perceptions
Perceptions - what has perceptions
Perceptions and memory
Personality
Will