Excerpt from “Touching Peace” by Thich Nhat Hanh
According to Buddhist psychology, our consciousness is divided into two parts, like a house with two floors.
On the ground floor is the living room, and we call this “mind consciousness.” Below the ground level, there is a basement, and we call this “store Consciousness.”
In store consciousness, everything we have ever done, experienced, or perceived is stored in the form of a seed, or a film.
Our basement is an archive of every imaginable kind of film store on a video cassette. Upstairs in the living room, we sit in a chair and watch thee films as they are brought up from the basement.
Certain movies, such as Anger, Fear, or Despair, seem to have the ability to come up from the basement all by themselves. They open the door to the living room and pop themselves into our video cassette recorder whether we choose them or not. When that happens, we feel stuck, and we have no choice but to watch them.
Fortunately, each film has a limited length, and when it is over, it returns to the basement. But each time it is viewed by us, it establishes a better position on the archive shelf, and we know it will return soon. Sometimes a stimulus from outside, like someone saying something that hurts our feelings, triggers the showing of a film on our TV screen. We spend so much of our time watching these films, and many of them are destroying us. Learning how to stop them is important for our well-being.