Mental Factors

Discerning Meditation In general, meditation has two stages: discerning meditation and stabilizing meditation. In discerning meditation, we work through either progressive steps or a line of reasoning, as we did in the thinking process, to build up to a state of mind that...

 Mental Factors There are primary consciousnesses and mental factors. In any cognition there are always these two kinds of conscious phenomena, which share five congruent features (mtshungs-ldan lnga). They share a common (1) object (yul), (2) reliance (rten), (3) mental...

The Components of the Aggregate of Other Affecting Variables The fourth aggregate, the aggregate of other affecting variables, is the largest collection of items. “Variable” means that it changes, and “affecting” means that it affects our experience. This grouping contains all...

Balanced sensitivity requires deconstructing the deceptive, dualistic appearances our mind creates and harnessing our underlying deep awareness and natural talents. We also need to work with other mental factors that structure our mental activity, but do not form part of our...

This eighteenth century text concerns the mind and the ways in which it knows things, and is written from the point of view of the Gelug interpretation of the True Aspectarian branch of the Sautrantika tenet system of Indian Buddhism.

Mental activity is made up of six types of consciousness that are aware of an object as being a sight, a sound, and so on, and 51 types of mental factors that qualify or help with the cognition of that object.

An introduction to the system of ways of knowing (lorig), a major component of the Buddhist map of the mind. The text covers the various ways in which we cognize objects – valid, non-valid, conceptual, non-conceptual and so on.

A presentation of the Karma Kagyu explanation of how the mind works according to sutra.

It is useful to not look at the mind as a “thing” but as mental activity, occurring moment to moment and which ​​can be non-conceptual or conceptual.

An analysis of static phenomena, which are validly knowable and unaffected by causes and circumstances, and nonstatic phenomena, which are impermanent, changing from moment to moment.