CHANGING TIDES AND TIMES
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the mind. Basic attachment, aversion, and the quality of stupidity are the three primary emotional responses of sentient beings; they are the source of all suffering. From these primary delusions spring secondary developments, causing things to become much more complex. Mere attachment can develop into avarice (or greed) and grasping. Stupidity develops into pride and self-aggrandizement. Aversion develops into envy, jealousy, etc. But it does not stop there. With these basic emotions, further developments and ramifications take place until there are literally thousands of emotional responses and emotional situations. To indicate the complexity of this level of confusion and distortion of the mind and emotions, the sutras speak of eighty-four thousand emotional and mental discursive situations. The resolution of these emotions is a topic we will address more at length further on; for now, let us continue to attempt to see the source that affects our emotional response. Because one has mental and emotional conflicts, one naturally acts in certain physical, verbal, and mental ways. Through such actions, which are again based upon dualistic confusion, one reinforces karmic tendencies, either positive or negative. Generally, however, one tends toward the negative because it is out of this confusion that further confusion reinforces itself. Any overtly negative actions, such as killing and stealing, reinforce this confusion, and these negative karmic patterns will produce even further suffering. This is the fourth level of obscuration which I mentioned when I began this discourse. Actually, the situations we are now experiencing can be described in whole by referring only to those four veils of mind's confusion: fundamental ignorance, dualistic clinging, emotionality, and karmic tendencies. In the Buddhist tradition, the empty, clear, and dynamic state of awareness (which is the fundamental nature of mind itself), is technically termed the alaya, meaning the origin (or source) of all experience and of all transcending or intrinsically pristine awareness. To use a metaphor, take the example of transparently clear, pure water, without any sediment or pollutants, into which a handful of earth or mud is thrown and stirred round until dark clouds of earth particles obscure the water's transparency. The water is still there but there is something that is hiding or mask-