What Lies Beneath Our Consciousness?

Below our conscious mind is a stream of subconscious, emotional activity. Buddhists call this stream the Life Continuum Consciousness, or the Bhavanga. Sometimes we call it just karma. It is what remains with us from lifetime to lifetime and impels us to do what we do, whether they are good things, neutral things, or bad things. From this Bhavanga arise thoughts and drives that are imbedded in our personalities and consciousness from time long past, and it is here that we can discover why we feel good, why we feel bad, or why we feel indifferent.

As this emotional subconscious bubbles up to the surface, we become ensnared in its power to pull us in certain directions. We might be extraordinarily attracted to something or someone for no apparent reason, and can no more disregard the attraction than we can go against our very nature. Our subconscious is what we are.

If we are not what we want to be; for example if we are greedy or hateful and want to change, then we must make that change at the subconscious level. Doing it on the surface would only be pretending that we are something that we are not, and we cannot sustain that kind of deception for long. Even when we are good enough actors to pull off pretending that we are someone other than who we really are, it is only a matter of time before the old underlying consciousness raises its ugly head. Unless we change our karma, our karma will keep us going down the same old roads.

And this is where it gets dicey . . . trying to change our imbedded karma. Since karma is a result of our habit patterns going back many lifetimes, changing it is not easy. Changing our karma means going against what we perceive is the natural road for us; our comfort zone. If we are comfortable just looking out for ourselves and disregarding the needs of others, then to change that attitude is almost impossible. We will probably remain self-centered our entire lifetime.

The reason we do not change our ways is because our mind justifies what we are, whatever that may be. Even a criminal believes that he or she is right in their actions against a society that they may believe is unjust in some way toward them. Whatever we do, the mind will follow that action with thoughts, or precede that action with thoughts that support and justify our karmic patterns . . . a circular trap that is difficult to find one's way out of, because we never believe in our heart that we should find our way out. As far as the mind is conce
ed, we are doing the right thing at all times, even if it is the wrong thing.

Only occasionally is this stream of consciousness, called the Bhavanga or our karma, interrupted. It can happen during an almost fatal accident, a near death experience, or maybe over time during a long illness or life-changing trauma of some kind. It is when the mind loses control, for a moment, or for a long time, that the Bhavanga changes.

After such a change takes place, a person's outlook and behavior can change dramatically, almost as if they have taken on a different personality. Self-centered people many times become very caring about others, while people previously full of hatred may discover compassion. And it is all is because of a disruption in the constant flow of the Bhavanga, of our normal karmic patterns; a disruption that at the time may have seemed very painful compared to our natural activities. It is as if we were forced to change.

Only when we experience this kind of change can we look back and see what we have been, and what we see usually dismays us. How could we have been so callous, is the usual reflection, and this is why changing ourselves is never easy, because we begin to see exactly what we are, and when we begin to see what we are, we escape the pain of that by justifying what we are in our minds, when we can. It's only when we cannot escape and must face ourselves that our karma may change permanently.

Beginning meditators, with imaginations of entering and maintaining some kind of supe
atural bliss, are surprised when, instead, they face themselves for the first time. And what they see is never very pretty. They end up facing themselves because meditation changes the Bhavanga, changes our embedded karma as surely as a traumatic event can change us, although meditation does it gradually and compassionately.

And this is the main function of meditation; changing our karma so that we don't continue down roads of confusion and destruction. We can finally step back from our old mind and its dictates that have caused us so much pain in the past, and begin to see through the imprisonment that destructive thought and emotion involves, and how these two illusions have led us into situation after situation providing no peace or love whatsoever.

It all can begin with the simple act of watching our own breath, which is a form of meditation. This in itself is enough to begin to alter the Bhavanga, so that we can begin to get out of the enclosed, fearful world of "self." n