Here one question arises ; If the flow of consciousness never stops, what happens to consciousness when man is in deep dreamless sleep ? According to the Buddha, the consciousness of someone in dreamless sleep continues to flow in the state of bhavanga.
Bhavanga is meant " the cause, reason, indispensable condition, of our being regarded subjectively as consciousness, the sine qua non of our existence, that without which one can not subsist or exist. " It may say that bhavanga is a function of our being. It makes the passive side of our existence possible. It donotes a function state of sub - consciousness. As such it is the subconscious state of mind - below the threshold of consciousness by which we conceive continuous subjective existence possible. In this sense, bhavanga is nothing but consciousness, which has possibility of knowing itself. As mentioned earlier, consciousness is not self conscious, but consciousness can know itself as an object through the mind door or the inner sense, that is it can be known by reflection or introspection only. Consciousness can be reflected upon only when it is active in the sense of coming into contact with external or internal objects through any one of six doors or channels, namely, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. The active consciousness is called " processed - consciousness [ vithicitta ] " as it functions through the process, which we will consider later on. It is this processed consciousness that can be the object of reflection. But the passive processed - free consciousness can never be reflected upon because it is can not be know door or the threshold of consciousness. Since it can not be known by reflection, the processed free consciousness is called bhavanga or sub - consciousness, The dividing line between sub - consciousness and processed consciousness [ vithi - citta ] is the threshold of consciousness [ manodvara ].
Thus sub - consciousness does not stop during the period of dreamless sleep. The subconscious state of consciousness flows on without interruption. This subconscious stream is arrested when the processed - freed consciousness makes contact [ phassa ] with an object through the sense doors. When a material object is presented to consciousness through one of the five sense - doors a processed - consciousness [ vithi - citta ] arises, consisting of a series of separate conscious moments succeeding one another in a particular uniform order, called citta - niyama. In order to have a complete perception of material object, consciousness must have passed through seventeen consecutive moments. If the series for some reason is incomplete, the perception does not attain clearness. For this reason, a moment of material object is said to correspond to these seventeen conscious moments. These seventeen moments may be simplified into four sections.
The initial moment represent the initial entry of the perceptual object into the receptive medium of consciousness, and the disturbance as well as the arrest of subconscious stream caused by the entry.
The second moment represents a gradually increasing attention to the object, in which its particular nature and qualities are received , examined and determined.
The third moment represent the full cognition of the object. This last moment represents a registering of the perception as a whole. They may be viewed as the transition from a perception to a primary memory. After the last two moments perish, there is the subsidence into the subconscious state.
" Like any other consciousness, it [ bhavanga ] also consists of three aspects, genesis [ uppada ], static [ thiti ], and cessation [ bhanga ]. Arising and perishing every moment, it flows on like a stream not remaining the same for two consecutive moments. "
THE BUDHHA'S Core Teaching
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