Yes: you can carry mental and behavioral patterns unconsciously, though ultimate awareness of all phenomena is Buddhism's goal.
In Buddhist thought, "carrying something" typically refers to bearing mental habits, karma, and patterns of behavior rather than physical objects. The question asks whether you can maintain these patterns without conscious awareness of doing so. The answer is unequivocally yes, and this insight forms a central part of Buddhist psychology and practice.
Buddhism distinguishes between what you consciously know and what operates beneath conscious awareness. Much of what we carry—resentments, compulsions, reactive patterns, karmic tendencies—operates automatically, often invisible to the bearer until examined through meditation or mindful observation.
The Buddhist concept of "anusaya" (latent tendencies or underlying inclinations) directly addresses this. These are deep-rooted mental dispositions that persist without your explicit awareness. You may carry anger, greed, or delusion in the form of anusaya—as tendencies rather than conscious thoughts—until conditions trigger them into active consciousness.
The Pali Canon frequently describes practice as making the unconscious conscious. In the Samyutta Nikaya, the Buddha discusses how defilements operate at different levels of subtlety, some accessible to ordinary awareness and others requiring refined meditation to recognize. This presupposes that most practitioners carry mental burdens unknowingly.
Karma (literally "action") includes volitional patterns that operate habitually. You can perform the same action repeatedly—speaking harshly, avoiding difficulty, seeking distraction—without consciously intending it each time. These become grooves in your behavior, self-perpetuating and largely invisible to you until someone points them out or meditation reveals them.
The Buddha taught that karma ripens through habit. Volitional patterns establish momentum, and you become the carrier of this momentum without needing to "know" about it moment by moment. This is why traditional Buddhism emphasizes continuous mindfulness practice: what is unconscious cannot be transformed.
Mindfulness ("sati" in Pali, literally "remembering") is the practice of bringing awareness to what is otherwise automatic. The Buddha taught that the path requires making the implicit explicit. In the Mahasatipatthana Sutta (The Great Discourse on Mindfulness), he prescribes systematic observation of body, feeling, mind, and mental phenomena—essentially a methodical search for what you carry without knowing.
This teaching reveals Buddhism's position: unconscious carrying is the default condition, but it is also the primary problem. Liberation requires turning the light of awareness onto patterns you currently move through blindly.
Theravada Buddhism emphasizes personal discovery of unconscious patterns through meditation and mindfulness. Mahayana traditions, particularly Zen, often use sudden insight practices ("satori" or "kensho") to break through habitual patterns, treating unconscious carrying as fundamental delusion to be shattered rather than gradually illuminated.
Tibetan Buddhism's Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions explicitly teach that ordinary consciousness itself is largely unaware of its own nature and habitual patterns. These traditions suggest that not only do you carry burdens unconsciously, but you are unconscious of consciousness itself until advanced realization occurs.
From a practical standpoint, acknowledging that you carry much unconsciously is liberating. It explains why willpower alone fails: you cannot change what you do not see. This understanding motivates meditation practice, therapy-like introspection, and community feedback as means of surfacing hidden patterns.
Buddhism teaches that this capacity to become aware is itself your means of liberation. You are not trapped by unconscious patterns because awareness itself—the ability to recognize what you carry—is your birthright. The entire spiritual path involves progressively illuminating what was hidden, until nothing is carried unknowingly.