A Meditator’s Map of the Mind

Yogic scriptures describe the mind as an inner instrument. It stockpiles our memories, manifests our hopes and desires, and manages our daily activities. Yet despite the central role it plays in our lives, we rarely think about the mind itself. Few of us could even easily define what we mean by “the mind.” For meditators, a working knowledge of our mental terrain is like a map. It allows us to see where we are going in meditation and shows us how to get there. Fortunately, yoga philosophy provides a map of the mind that complements the practice of meditation. It opens the door to a new way of seeing human affairs and helps us solve the puzzle of who we are. Let’s have a look, with a view to what this map reveals about the mind in meditation.

The Landscape of the Mind

To gather experience, the mind must be connected to a body. It is through the channels of the senses and the sense organs (the eyes, ears, hands, feet, etc.) that the mind receives impressions from outside and acts on the outer world. Mind and body are thus a subtly integrated team. 

Even though the mind’s functions are seamless, yogis nonetheless identify four distinct realms of activity. The first is the everyday conscious mind, manas. Next is the subtle and quiet witness of experience, buddhi. Third is the reservoir for storing habits and latent impressions (samskaras) deposited in the unconscious mind, chitta. Finally, the mind creates our sense of individuality or self-identity, ahamkara.

Manas: The Everyday Mind

The everyday mind, manas, is often called the lower mind or the mundane mind. Manas serves as the screen of consciousness, blending sense impressions of the outer world with experiences already stored in the mind. Through the operations of manas, we see that a feathery creature has a rust-colored belly, hear it begin singing early in the morning, and remember its name: robin.

Manas is also sometimes called the indecisive mind because it is a good collector and displayer of information but a poor decision maker. It can choose a vacation destination, select the best available dates, plan the route, and calculate the costs of the entire trip. But it will be unable to decide whether or not to go. It cannot come to a conclusion. For that, we will need to employ buddhi, the part of the mind that helps us determine the value of our actions.

Take a few moments to identify the functioning of manas within yourself. Read these brief instructions, then pause and take in your immediate environment.

• See the world presented to you on the screen of your awareness.
• Hear the sounds of your surroundings as they reach you through your ears.
• Notice how sensations of touch, taste, and smell are also completely integrated into your consciousness on this multidimensional screen of awareness.
• Notice how quickly you identify the objects around you (by naming them or simply recognizing them), thus constructing a coherent environment.

It is important to be aware that the mental screen not only registers impressions from outside, it colors them as well. Memories of past encounters with the world, and images of future ones, shape the present. You shy away from buzzing bees, but cuddle up to fluffy kittens. The image of sailing seems inviting, but “Don’t forget the sunscreen!” your manas tells you. Both desires and memories are constantly shaping the content of our thoughts.

Buddhi: The Silent Witness

Given the many activities of manas, the everyday mind, we might imagine it to be the mind’s chief operating officer. It is the scene of constant hustle and bustle, passing without interruption through periods of waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. But its activity is a mask of sorts, one that conceals a deeper dimension of life. Meditators learn to see behind this mask of frenetic activity, and discover a natural tranquility of mind that is far more compelling.

Indeed, the activities of manas are often described as a kind of sleep. They focus on sensory experience, on the fulfillment of instinctual urges, and on the pursuit of everyday pleasures. Yet they sleep to the deeper experiences of life. Thus, a voice calls to us from within, saying, “Wake up! Return to yourself!” That is the aim of meditation and the goal of the spiritual journey. But how is it accomplished?

For meditators, the first step is to give the lower mind a stable focus. Usually that focus is the breath or a mantra. This is the beginning of the process of resting your attention. As you do this, the busy senses—including the sense of imagination—follow along. They are quieted and relaxed. Thus, by giving the mind a focal point, you calm the activities of manas.

As manas quiets and calms, you begin to wake up. You develop an awareness of yourself as a silent witness—a center of consciousness from which other mental activities can be quietly observed. You become aware of your own awareness.

The function of mind capable of this kind of awakening is buddhi. The term comes from the Sanskrit verb budh, meaning “to wake up.” Interestingly, this is just what happens in meditation. A quiet shift in consciousness occurs, calming the emotional distractedness of manas and awakening a calmer, steadier mind.

The verb from which buddhi is derived has other meanings as well, each related to the nature of the mind in meditation. It means, for example, “to return to consciousness,” that is, to restore awareness of one’s deeper self, as well as “to attend,” to gather awareness rather than to let the mind be distracted.

A simple experiment will help you sense this. Close your eyes and feel the flow of your breathing, following these basic instructions:

• Stay with the breath for a few minutes until you find you can relax the effort you are making, resting your mind on the pleasant sensations of exhaling and inhaling.
• Begin to notice in a very simple way that you are not the breather. You are awareness, witnessing the sensations of the breath.
• You will not sense buddhi by anything it does, but by its quiet presence. You, as buddhi, are silent, restful awareness.
• Continue resting your mind by watching the breath. When manas is calmed, and attention rested in this way, it is possible to go beyond the lower mind, to see its activities, and yet to know yourself as the inner witness of these activities.

The journey does not end here. During meditation, distractions arise that alert us to the many layers of experience stored in chitta, the unconscious mind. Buddhi examines these impressions—in the form of both thoughts and feelings, and later as the habits and behaviors of everyday life. In this process, buddhi observes and registers a thought (“Vacation!”), forms an understanding of its significance (“It’s been years!”), and makes a decision. That decision will either be foolish if it is based on attachment (“I’m going no matter what!”) or wise if it is based on an assessment of real needs (“It will provide a much-needed rest”). Buddhi is the decision maker, and as it awakens, it learns to make decisions wisely.

But while an awakening of buddhi can help us in daily life, the goal of meditation is not simply to make us better decision makers or to enable us to gather more life experience. The awakening of buddhi helps us turn back into ourselves. It shows us how to recapture awareness of the inner Self, the source of our conscious awareness.

This is a process that unfolds slowly and gradually, but it is not uncharted territory. Start by quieting yourself, learn to observe the passing activities of your lower mind, and awaken your buddhi, the inner witness. Begin to recognize the terrain of your mind when you sit to meditate. There is no landscape on earth more beautiful or more compelling.

Chitta: Storehouse of Memory

Chitta is the mind’s capacity to retain experience in memory. It is a vast reservoir of stored impressions, habit patterns, and desires. In this unconscious repository, seeds of the future are planted by our experience in the present.

We might envision chitta as a lake, a body of water into which various streams of experience are constantly flowing. Some of these streams arise from our encounters with the world around us. We see it, hear it, taste it, smell it, and rub against it. But chitta also records encounters with processes occurring within the mind itself. Each time we remember the words to a favorite song, we anchor them more deeply in chitta.

The information we gather from all these encounters remains dormant in the unconscious. And at times memories surface from this lake to contribute to fresh experience. Thus, that favorite song might pop into your head while you’re in the shower.

But if we define the contents stored in the unconscious too narrowly, we’ll misunderstand the real significance of chitta. The mind does not simply store facts as sterile information. Experience is more complex than this. It is emotional.

The peach I eat pleases me. The pear, for some reason, does not. The shirt I see at the store entices me, but its price is dismaying. I attach emotions to experience, and then deposit the combination of fact and emotion in the mind.

Pleasure and pain are the sources of emotion. They lead to likes, dislikes, wants, wishes, hatreds, cravings, aversions, and aspirations. Each of us pursues happiness and avoids pain. Thus the seeds of experience stored in chitta are not placed there randomly, but carry with them, appropriately or not, our desires for the future.

A Working Mind

During meditation the mind’s conscious activities, largely the province of manas and buddhi, are brought to awareness and gradually mastered. This is the central purpose of meditation. But as we have seen, the mind also stores impressions in the unconscious. These impressions, called samskaras, remain latent until triggered into activity. Meditation must also address these latent impressions in some manner. Only then can meditation perform its deep-seated work of healing and integrating the disparate elements of the mind.

Swami Rama portrayed the beginnings of meditation in a memorable way. “Suppose,” he would say, “someone were to grasp your big toe. You might be amused at first and pretend that it had little effect on you. As time passed, however, you would wiggle your toe a bit to see if the person’s grasping could be easily dislodged. If this failed, you would shake your foot with even more energy, until, if nothing else was successful, you might kick the annoying toe-holder and rid yourself of the aggravation once and for all.

“The struggle we put up in meditation,” he said, “is quite similar. The act of giving the mind a focus is like grasping your mind by its toe. At first the mind plays along, only occasionally wiggling to see if you are serious. But over time, forces within the mind demand the freedom to play themselves out. The mind becomes more and more agitated until it finally kicks at the process of meditation and shakes free from the effort to concentrate.”

Part of the solution to this kind of mental reactivity is to train manas to rest in its focus—a process that evolves naturally when we strengthen our concentration. Buddhi’s natural function as inner witness also calms mental agitation.

But the mind’s agitation is largely the result of forces in the unconscious mind—samskaras that press upward toward awareness. Every meditator knows the experience of being distracted by such thoughts. In a moment, I can be transported from “here” to some far away “there,” from a one-pointed focus to “I-shouldn’t-have-said-that-to-my-friend.” Distracting impressions are a part of the very nature of chitta. They seize their opportunity to arise during the relative quiet of meditation.

Some of these impressions are duties and current affairs needing attention; some are hopes and designs for the future; others are reflections of the news, weather, and entertainment mill; and still others are fancies long abandoned. For better or worse, the emotion naturally fused with these impressions brings them to awareness, like a bubble seeking the surface of a body of water.

The effect of these impressions on meditation depends upon how much attention is given to them. Some thoughts are important and require contemplation. Other thoughts are driven by worry or desire and have little place in the meditative process. As meditation deepens, even constructive thinking is set aside in order to clear the way for restful concentration.

Transforming the Unconscious

We cannot go directly into the unconscious mind to alter or wipe away the collection of impressions there. But meditation influences the unconscious nonetheless. The question is how?

Recall the function of chitta. It is a storehouse of experience, a reservoir of latent impressions. We deposit both joyful and unpleasant experiences there, and later we are influenced by these same impressions. Thus the mind is colored by countless experiences of greatly varying qualities and intensities.

Meditation itself is an experience—one that is deposited in chitta. Meditative experience, like all other experiences, transforms the color of chitta. In the same way other experiences are deposited in memory, meditation reaches deeply into the mind and leaves its subtle impression. But meditation is not simply a new color added to the mix. Meditation is a transformation of color. It transforms the unconscious mind, like a smile transforms a somber face.

Focus and Let Go

Two methods are used in meditation to transform chitta, each complementing the other. The first is restful concentration. The second is a cultivated detachment from distracting and disturbing thoughts. These are the classical meditative techniques, given in both the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali (1:12) and in the Bhagavad Gita (6:35).

During meditation, we learn to gradually shift attention toward a meditative focus. We concentrate on the work of centering the mind. The outcome of this patient inner work is profound. While it may seem that meditation is unproductive and even boring, quite the opposite is true. With each passing moment, impressions of relaxed concentration are deposited in chitta. These impressions incline the mind toward clarity and tranquility; they calm the mind and give it a meditative quality.

But what about efforts at cultivating detachment? Non-attachment in meditation calls for a paradoxical approach. We must initially learn to accept the distracting thoughts appearing in us rather than pushing them away. It doesn’t help to fight with ourselves. The very thoughts arising in meditation—our wants, wishes, fantasies, and fears—are part of who we are, at least in the present moment. So even when such thoughts are distracting or painful, accepting them remains a necessity. Only then can we see them as they are, with all their subtlety and motivating power.

But these distractions must not become the primary focus of our attention. We can watch these passing thoughts and observe their hungry nature without feeding them new energy. By fully accepting what appears on the surface of the mind, yet seeing it with detachment, we purify chitta, lessen the momentum of distracting thoughts, and strengthen the mind’s ability to focus.

Focus and let go. This is the way of deep meditation. It plants seeds of patience and self-acceptance. It reveals underlying motivations and reinforces unselfish intentions. It creates a dialogue between the conscious and unconscious elements of ourselves, and in transforming chitta, it opens the way to a more lasting happiness within.

Ahamkara: Who Is the Self?

When we refer to ourselves we use words such as “I,” “me,” and “mine.” These words play a number of roles. They register a sense of self-identity, mark the separateness of one person from another, and signify our possession of things—the effort to extend ourselves into the surrounding world (this is “my car”). 

The familiar sense of self supplied by the mind at each moment—the fourth function of the mind—is labeled ahamkara in Sanskrit. It’s a term constructed from two words: aham (“I”) and kara (“maker” or “doer”). The mind, as ahamkara, is the maker of an “I.” With every action, it proclaims: “I am the doer” and “These actions are mine.” Thus, when we use the word “I,” we imply an identity constructed within the mind itself. Your “I” is the identity of a particular body, a particular personality, particular patterns of thinking, and a particular life.

Rarely do we inspect our own identities very closely. We simply are the player of roles (parent, teacher, tennis player) and the owner of qualities (attractive, articulate). Thus, when we ask ourselves the question “Who am I?” with sincerity, it can arouse curiosity and further inquiry: “Is there some aspect of myself that I have not considered? Am I other than who I seem to be?”

The perception that one’s identity is both something less and something more than it seems is a paradox that’s at the core of yoga philosophy. On the lesser side, we cling to a limited, small self (lowercase “s”)—we grasp onto our ego and the things with which it identifies. Yet each of us is also a manifestation of a greater Self (uppercase “S”), something more enduring than we appear to be. Just as a wave on the surface of the ocean remains part of a vast underlying expanse of water, each of us is part of a vast field of pure consciousness, or Self.

The Nature of Identity 

According to the Sankhya tradition, a dualist school of classical Indian philosophy, each person’s identity is an assemblage. You are the construct of two things: a conscious Self, purusha (the subject or knower of experience), and a body/mind, prakriti (which, while lacking the Self’s consciousness, seems to be conscious due to its proximity to consciousness). Prakriti serves both as an instrument of awareness and an object of experience. You have a body, but your body is not the entirety of you. You think, but your thoughts are also not the whole of you. Within each of us lies a pure inner witness—the knower, or consciousness. 

The mind, acting like a highly polished mirror, receives the light of consciousness, reflects it in its innermost surface, and takes on a likeness of consciousness itself. According to the sage Vyasa, we thus perceive our thoughts to be “the same as consciousness” because of their proximity to it.

This process is designated by the unique Sanskrit term asmita, literally “I am-ness,” a semblance of true awareness. The term implies a false sense of identity, one that is mistaken. It is mistaken because, once reflected in the mind, consciousness no longer knows itself in its pure nature. What is otherwise unlimited, blissful, and eternal, through the confusion of asmita, gives the mind the appearance of consciousness. Then, through the agency of ahamkara, the mind supplies us with a limited sense of “I.” Until we know ourselves deeply, we cling to the finite identities created within the mind by ahamkara.

Unfortunately, there is a great deal of pain in this. Over the course of time, we must learn to address the unpleasant realities of life that result from identifying with a body: health is unreliable, the aging process creeps steadily along, and death is a certainty.

Does life offer an alternative to the suffering that comes with false identification? The answer to this question lies at the heart of yoga. Despite our deeply ingrained patterns of misidentification, something in life calls to us, whispering that there is more to be known. This is the call of meditation.

The Self in Meditation

Meditation, say the sages, gradually dispels the falseness of self-identity and reveals a deep and true Self. This requires a process of purifying the ego.

Scriptures recommend two complementary strategies for refining ahamkara during meditation: First, soften your grip on the limited self by contemplating such statements as “I am not merely a body” or “I am not governed only by mundane desires.” Second, rest your mind in the presence of the Infinite by focusing the mind on a mantra.

The Bhagavad Gita (6:25) says:

Slowly, slowly, one should turn away (from desire), quieted by a steady discernment. Actively establishing the mind in the Self, one should think of nothing else.

The Yoga Vasishtha (5:59) similarly affirms:

Abandon that which is knowable—the object. What now remains is the pure consciousness which is free from doubt. I am the infinite Self, for there is no limit to this Self. It is the beauty in all, it is the light of all.

Through the implementation of these two strategies, meditation can lead you to an expanded self. Gradually, it diminishes the notion that your “I” will find permanent happiness in any of the limited identities you have assumed, and it allows you to trustfully abide in the presence of pure consciousness.

But despite the encouragement of the scriptures, a fear may persist. You might wonder, “What will happen to me if I truly relax in meditation? Will ‘I’ vanish? Lose the self that I seem to be?”

In fact, meditation helps us realize that our true identity simply cannot be lost. Consciousness is the unperturbed subject of awareness, not its fleeting object. In meditation, the self senses the fullness of Self. Disturbances and false identities are gradually dissolved, so that there can be a restoration of wholeness—not a loss, but a filling in of your identity.

The essence of meditation, then, is the expansion of self. It is a process in which the narrow confines of limited identity are gradually transcended in favor of what the Bhagavad Gita calls “the boundless happiness” of Self. To meditate is to dwell in that deep and joyful nature. Then, manas, the lower mind, rests in its focus; buddhi awakens to its role as the inner observer; impressions in chitta from previous meditations come forward for inner support; and the identities created by ahamkara increasingly relax into a higher sense of Self. This is the nature of meditation—a mind coordinated in the effort to rest in one’s own being.