“The best discipline is taming your mind stream.”

To tame our mind stream we must reduce our afflictions. That is one of the main things. To reduce them we have to know what causes them. To eliminate them, we need to know what causes them.

The lamrim talks about six factors that cause the arising of afflictions. Here, what we are talking about is the manifest afflictions. What causes afflictions to manifest in our mind so that they take control of our mind and pull us here and there, and make us create karma. We are talking about the gross afflictions that we succumb to all the time.

One of the factors that causes them is that we have the predisposition, or the seed, of the affliction. The “seed of the affliction” is a potency for the affliction to arise. Right now, you are not angry, but that does not mean that anger is gone from your mind stream altogether. There is just no manifest anger right now. You can have manifest anger, then a period of no anger, and then something triggers it and you have manifest anger again. What is it that connects the first anger with the second anger? You have the seed of the anger. When it is not manifested, it goes into the form of potency, and when it is triggered later, it comes up as manifest.

That seed is part of the afflictive obscurations that we want to get rid of. What this means is as long as we have the seeds of the different afflictions in our mind stream, we need to be very careful because any kind of cooperative condition can provoke them, and they become manifest.

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