A Surfer's Experience of the Ocean Is Different From a Sunbather's

Okay, Shokai, a week or so ago, if even that, you were saying that everything in the universe was composed of something you called buddha nature, which you described as the potential to awaken, or to put it another way, a probability.  Cool story, bro.  But now you're saying that everything in the universe is composed of something I can't even quite understand that you're calling "substrate consciousness," and that everything is like waves on the ocean of substrate consciousness.  Well, which one is it, huh?

Actually, that's a straw-man question - no one asked me that (or in that tone of voice, which is the internal tone I use in my frequent moments of self doubt).  But the voices in my head (not the schizophrenic kind of voices, but that interior monologue we all engage in) brought that up as something the hypothetical reader of this blog might ask (presuming I even have any readers left anymore).

So, to answer my own question, they're actually the same thing,  It's all just a matter of how one looks at it.  To use some Sanskrit terms (sorry), what I'm calling the substrate consciousness is alaya-vijnana, which is like gazinging at the ocean from some dry vantage point and studying the waves. But if one were to jump into the ocean and directly experience the motion of the currents, the rolling of the waves, and the silence and cold of the subsurface, one would quickly ignore the individual waves and instead experience the actual, undifferentiated ocean.  This is the tathagata-garbha (Sanskrit) or "womb of the buddhas," The tathagata-garbha is the mind purified, the substrate consciousness transformed, the alaya-vijnana in its undifferentiated state.  The undifferentiated womb of the buddhas is where realization arises, and is therefore another way of saying "buddha nature." 

So if I've connected the dots correctly and if you follow me, buddha nature and substrate consciousness are one and the same thing, which is the one thing that is you and I and all the rest of the universe.  But since I don't like using Sanskrit terms or religious terminology, from here on in for alaya-vijnana I'll use the term "substrate consciousness" and for tathagata-garbha and buddha-nature, I'll use the term "potential."  

Okay?