Spacing Out Is the Manas Engaged in Deliberation

Spacing out, staring blankly, losing focus, being in a daze—“leng” means being dull and motionless, while “shen” refers to the mind consciousness. “Lengshen” (spacing out) means the mind consciousness ceases to function in thinking and analysis. Because the mind consciousness has already understood the superficial, surface-level meaning of the dharma, but cannot solve questions that go one step deeper, it has no choice but to hand the problem over to the manas to solve; the mind consciousness is only responsible for keeping its eye on the problem. Many major and profound problems cannot be solved by the mind consciousness, so it has to rely on the manas' inherent experience and wisdom accumulated over past lives. In the earlier stage, the mind consciousness works out the shallow questions and transmits them to the manas; once the manas understands the general outline, it will deliberate further on the deeper questions on its own. For example, upon seeing an old classmate or old colleague, the mind consciousness recognizes the person and knows who it is, yet simply cannot come up with the name, and thus cannot address the person or greet them. At this point the mind consciousness can no longer take any action, so the manas has to search for the person's name, deliberating and pondering continuously, while making the six consciousnesses stand there with mouths agape, eyes fixed on the other person, doing nothing at all. While spacing out, sometimes the mind consciousness still has some faint mental activity to assist the manas' deliberation, but the mind consciousness's thinking will not be strong; otherwise, if the mind consciousness's thoughts become active, it would emerge from the state of spacing out.