Five functions of the mind
Vritti Sarupyam Itaratra
Vrittayah Panchatayyah Klishtaklishtaha
Pramana Viparyaya Vikalpa Nidra Smritayaha
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When the mind is tranquil, it can grasp the truth. But when the mind is distracted, there is a misunderstanding of the truth in terms of quality and depth. Just as the pure white light of the sun gets refracted into many colours, giving rise to illusionary patterns, a mind that is tossing about does not allow a clear perception of the truth.
There are five activities of the mind. They can be either of help in creating a feel-good factor, or can create a lot of misunderstanding and disturbance.
The five activities of the mind are Pramana - Cognition of, understanding and grasping an object or an idea. Viparyaya - Misapprehension or confusion. Interpreting what one sees in ways it is not actually, misunderstanding. Vikalpa - Imagination. One can imagine a positive situation, for instance - when caught in difficult circumstances, the mind can provide temporary relief by imagining a situation where there are no problems.
Vikalpa can be negative too. For instance, when a person approaches with a good intention, the mind can imagine the person approaching with an ulterior motive behind.
The fourth activity that the mind is capable of is called sleep. When all its faculties go to rest and does not work, the mind is at sleep. The mind is not on its office seat, minding its business of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching - but takes a holiday and shuts shop.
The last capability of the mind as described by Patanjali is memory. Whatever it has experienced through the five senses, is stored as memory in the unconscious and sub-conscious layers of the mind. When the situation requires, the conscious mind can remember and recall the object or situation. This quality of the mind helps us to identify objects and people and helps in calling a computer as a computer and a car as a car. If this faculty was absent, we would be calling the tree a tubelight or a chair as daddy!
(Photograph: Geese wading in a rainwater percolation pond off a Naperville road in Chicago.)
(On Bamboo Wisdom find a verse-by-verse explanation of the Bhagavad Gita and on the Vignana Bhairava Tantra in Cosmic Consciousness - Swahilya Shambhavi. (swahilya.soulmate@gmail.com)
12 comments:
Wonderful post Swahilya!
I appreciate the way you had explained the different activities.
Thought i will share with you an imagery that goes with light and colours concept seen at
The Uneasy Supplicant -www.joderebe.wordpress.com
nice post nice picture and nice presentation.
Thank you merging point. Yes that was a beautiful picture. I saw it.
Welcome fruitu.
Great photo and post!!! I'm learning much from you and appreciate this blog. I feel at home here. Jeff and I have started to do Yoga together. :D I love meditation.
Hugs, JJ
Welcome home Loch! To practice Yoga by oneself is quite one thing. But to do it along with another is a blessing. The Universe unfolds when the self unites with self - which is the essence of Yoga.
Informative--Made one think.
Thanks for stopping by.
Welcome Ps!
What a great post, with so much said in a little bit of space. I am forever trying to convince my husband to give yoga a try with me. My next attempt is to make the link between flexibility and bike racing (he's a cyclist).
I'm so glad you stopped by my site.
peace is every step: There is so much of the essence of Yoga in your very blog name! Whether it is walking or cycling, Yoga is possible. A step taken in total awareness or connecting to the seat of the bike and placing the foot on the pedal makes the rider one with the cycle - hence in Yoga!
Most welcome.
Dear swahilya, thank you for this educational post. I learn from it. Besides these 5 activities are there any other known in Yoga.
To get in touch with the unperceptible or to communicate with eternity or to wander in the time frame where would you put these activities?
Dear Ray, thank you. These five activities have been described by the Sage Patanjali who codified Yoga in a nutshell. The cracking of each shell may unfold eternal truths. The mind performs a million activities. It goes places. But wherever it goes, it understands by cognition, misunderstands, imagines, sleeps and remembers.
With the cognitive faculty a child's mind can see a tree and say it is a tree while a scientist can understand its species or ecological properties with the same but developed faculty of cognition.
In sleep for instance, it dreams, in imagination sometimes, it hallucinates but this is like a formula to describe the mind like a formula E=MC2 for instance.
*****
To get in touch with the unperceptible or to communicate with eternity or to wander in the time frame where would you put these activities?: These also fall under cognition (Pramana) in a spiritual framework where the objects of cognition are not material objects, but abstract truths.
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