With the advent of the Manas, the evolution of the Citta is complete. Practically, it is the consummation of mentality, for self-consciousness is ripe now. The will can affirm its ego-centric, dualistic activities, and the intellect can exercise its discriminating, reasoning, and image-retaining faculties. The Manas now becomes the center of psychic coördination. It receives messages from the six senses and pronounces over the impressions whatever judgments, intellectual or volitional, which are needed at the time for its own conservation. It also reflects on its own sanctum, and, perceiving there the presence of the Âlaya, wrongfully jumps to the conclusion that herein lies the real, ultimate ego-soul, from which it derives the notions of authority, unity, and permanency. As is evident, the Manas is a double-edged sword. It may destroy itself by clinging to the error of ego-conception, or it may, by a judicious exercise of its reasoning faculty, destroy all the misconceptions that arise from a wrong interpretation of the principle of Ignorance. The Manas destroys itself by being overwhelmed by the dualism of _ego_ and _alter_, by taking them for final, irreducible realities, and by thus fostering absolute ego-centric thoughts and desires, and by making itself a willing prey of an indomitable egoism, religiously and morally. On the other hand, when it {135} sees an error in the conception of the absolute reality of individuals, when it perceives a play of Ignorance in the dualism of me and not-me, when it recognises the _raison d’être_ of existence in the essence of Tathâgatahood, i.e., in Suchness, when it realises that the Âlaya which is mistaken for the ego is no more than an innocent and irreproachable reflection of the cosmic Garbha, it at once transcends the sphere of particularity and becomes the very harbinger of eternal enlightenment. Buddhists, therefore, do not see any error or evil in the evolution of the Mind (_âlaya_). There is nothing faulty in the awakening of consciousness, in the dualism of subject and object, in the individualising operation of birth-and-death (_samsâra_), only so long as our Manas keeps aloof from the contamination of false egoism. The gravest error, however, permeates every fiber of our mind with all its wickedness and irrationality, as soon as the nature of the evolution of the Âlaya is wrongfully interpreted by the abuse of the functions of the Manas.[62] {136}