“Heart” Has Three Powers

Your subconsciousness is a combination of the first five consciousnesses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching). It is your body awareness.

The sixth consciousness is your brain consciousness, which is your thinking (mind).

The seventh is your “I Consciousness”, which is a combination of your subconsciousness and brain consciousness.

The eighth is your Hidden Consciousness.

You can think of your consciousnesses as being three parts of a single unit: brain, sub-, and hidden consciousness.

Which of These Is “You”?

Brain consciousness, subconsciousness, and Hidden Consciousness are the three parts of Heart. The three consciousnesses together are your Heart Power, but usually they are separate.

Your Hidden Consciousness comes from your past-life karma and guides your life in a mysterious way. It’s called “hidden” because you’re not able to be aware of it. You don’t know why you were born this way, with this body, with this family, doing things which cause suffering that you don’t want to experience.

Your subconscious controls your body every moment of your life. Your body is changing every second and you aren’t even aware of it: your heart beats, your lungs breathe, your stomach digests food, your eyes blink, and your kidneys clean your blood. Your subconscious also controls your movement. You can think about raising your arm, but you can’t directly tell the muscles to relax and contract in the correct order so that your arm lifts up: your subconscious does that for you.

Your brain consciousness is the one now you are living. It’s what most people think of as “I” and includes language, logic, and your inner monologue. Animals aren’t yet able to develop their brain consciousness.

As a human, you can learn to develop your thinking and join all three consciousnesses together; that’s called True Heart. When they are separate or in contradiction, it’s called Illusion Heart.

Everything you learn with your brain consciousness is a map, but it’s not the journey. To reach a higher level, you can’t just read the map, you have to get up and follow the directions. When that happens, it’s no longer just brain consciousness; it’s also subconsciousness, Hidden Consciousness, and eventually Heart.

Buddhas use Heart but brain consciousness is part of Heart, so they are also using brain consciousness.

To speak, you need language, which is part of brain consciousness. To learn philosophy, you first use brain consciousness to absorb the information, but to advance you have to wake your subconsciousness and hidden consciousness to create Heart.

If you don’t have Heart, you don’t have self. If your mind is influenced by polluted ideas, your subconsciousness develops without any awareness, and your Hidden Consciousness holds a lot of terrible karma that makes you experience a lot of suffering. You continue to create more bad karma, making your next lifetime have even more suffering.

Finding your True Self

When your consciousnesses are in contradiction, you don’t have a True Heart, so how are you going to find your True Self? If there’s no True Self, then Self-Being isn’t even possible.

The process of awakening and understanding life is actually the process of seeing through everything and making it possible for your True Self to exist. Through observing your life, thinking ability, lifestyle, how you pass through your karma, and what karma you create, you start to clear your mind and clean out your blindness, making them clear, united, and sure with Will.

Then your Heart has natural purity, natural sincerity, natural discipline, and natural concentration. That nature united as one is your True Self. Before that, there is no True Self. You are simply learning to wake up and create the possibility of letting your True Heart be free, and to live the perfect way life should be.

This post is taken from a talk by Forever Wisdom Forest on 8 December 2013 at the Sydney dojo.