By Susie O’Reilly
The notion of Citta in yoga, as depicted in the ancient texts, corresponds roughly to our modern concept of mind. But unlike in the West, where mind is opposed to the body and senses, there is no such separation in yoga. Citta relates to an inner sense, considered to be a material entity which is diffused throughout our entire physical being. The idea of citta as a sixth sense allows us to move beyond a mind-body dualism, destabilises the notion that consciousness is centred in the brain and fundamentally shifts our idea of identity. This reconfiguration of the senses reframes percipience and cognition to a mind located within a substratum that penetrates our entire being thus promoting an increased sensitivity to the integration of our physical and psychic layers of being which can be mobilised as meditative tools to transcend the material world. Mind, understood as enmeshed within the entire body becomes the subtlest form of the body. The understanding of mind within a yoga framework opens us to a more holistic approach to our integrated being and helps disabuse us of fragmented understandings of ourselves and our wellbeing. With the global spread of yoga, Westerners are increasingly being confronted with this alternative perspective of the mind and are being challenged to incorporate it into previously held views that conceive the faculty of thinking and the abstract mind as separate from the body and related to subjective consciousness. Thinking across these boundaries may entail a certain level of cognitive dissonance and yet many westerners have found a way to simultaneously hold both perspectives and are increasingly turning to yoga as opposed to western medicine, psychology or religion to resolve their problems of physical, psychological and spiritual wellbeing.
The yogic perspective based on an ancient philosophical system gives rise to an alternative sensorium that incorporates the mind differently and disrupts our Western mind-body dualistic model which tends to oppose a physical body with an immaterial mind and conceives the senses as bridging an outer objective physical world with an inner subjective consciousness. Yoga metaphysics divides reality into prakti which incorporates everything in the material world including our notion of the mind and purusa which connotes an abstract essence of divine consciousness often referred to as Self that relates to our true identity. According to American Indologist, Edwin Bryant, this concept of reality derives from the ancient Sankhya system considered to be the source philosophy from which the yoga system is derived. From this perspective, reality emerges as the product of “prakti, or the primordial material matrix of the physical universe, and purusa, pure awareness, the innermost conscious self or soul”. (Bryant:11).
According to this philosophy, the material body consists of a system of layers that become progressively subtler as the layers move inwards. In order from the most gross to the subtlest they are the: skeletal, physiological, mental, intellectual or discriminative sheaths. The first and most subtle evolutes from the material matrix, the three psychic layers of: buddhi, intelligence; ahamkara, ego; and manas, the organising mind lies in close proximity to and are diffused by the unchanging sacred essence of our true identity. Together these three psychic functions form citta which can be conceived of as an energy field that acts as a bedrock for all psychic activity and the senses (Bryant). The innermost layer, Buddhi relates to judgement or discernment and it molds itself into the forms of the data that gets passed to it from manas. Ahamkara relates to our sense of “I-ness” and is the component of citta “that binds the consciousness and the body through the inner sense, the mind” (Iyengar:33) but it does not in itself constitute the self. Manas relates to sensory perception, feelings, emotions, desires and aversions. (Bryant, Iyengar) The divine purusa is “neither the physical body in which it is encased nor the mind that exhibits psychic functions. It is pure autonomous consciousness.” (Bryant:16). In contrast with common Western conceptions that our subjective identity relates to our mind, from the yoga perspective citta is an extension of the senses that links the objective world with the unchanging subjective self which lies close to but beyond citta. Within this layered model, the sensorial input including perception, feeling, emotion, and desiring would be found in the middle layer referred to as manas. (Bryant:13)
The Yoga Sutras of Patanajali, commonly considered as the authoritative text on yoga, outlines the practice and spiritual path which eventually leads to Self-Realisation, when the physical mind merges with the divine essence. The Yoga Sutras establish the aim of yoga as, yoga-citta-vritti-nirodhah which translates as “yoga is the stilling of the changing states of the mind” (Bryant). While citta relates to the mind as a repository for all our thoughts, sensations, feelings, emotions, habitual thought patterns and latent impressions etc. the vrittis relate to the psychic activity of the mind. Since the mind is always reacting in some way to its previous psychic activity as well as external stimuli via the senses it is said the the vrttis are usually in constant flux. Frequently the relationship between citta and the vrttis is likened to that of the sea and the waves – the vrttis are the never-ending temporary waves created by the tides and undercurrents of the citta (Bryant: 14, Iyengar: 29). It is said, a process occurs whereby “sense objects” provide images received by the senses, that are sorted by manas (the thinking and organising part of citta), the citta molds itself into the vrttis (thoughts, ideas sensations and desires) which are pervaded by a spiritual pure consciousness leading citta to misidentify itself as consciousness. It is this ignorance or mis-identification whereby the animated citta considers consciousness to be inherent within itself rather than an entity separate from itself that the interpreters of yoga texts consider to be the cause of our bondage to the physical world which the path of yoga must liberate us from. (Iyengar, Bryant) In other words, we misidentify ourselves with our sensations, desires, thoughts and emotions which stand in the way of our reaching our true unchanging Self and source of enduring contentment. Therefore, “yoga involves preventing the mind from being molded into these permutations, the vrttis, the impressions and thoughts of the objects of the world”. (Bryant: 16) The aim of yoga being to extricate oneself from misidentification with our material self in order to move towards the realisation of our spiritual Self. “What is said to be given up in this process …is not participation in or performance of goal-directed actions in the world per se, but rather one’s ego- attachment to goals, thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and the outcomes of actions” (Roeser: 26). To do this citta must deconstruct itself through the integration of physical and mental processes and the fine tuning of perception.
Renowned yoga practioner and interpreter of the Yoga Sutras, BKS Iyengar claims “The practice of yoga integrates a person through the journey of intelligence and consciousness from the external to the internal. It unifies him from intelligence of the skin to the intelligence of the self, so the self merges with the cosmic Self” (102). For Iyengar, intelligence is not necessarily located in the brain. It is not unusual to hear yoga teachers, especially those coming from India where yoga cosmology is more integrated, refer to the “intelligence of the skin” or another part of the anatomical body. This disrupts the mind-body dichotomy and relates the idea that perception is located directly within our body rather than our brain. It helps explain why those who regularly practice a physical activity, such as a professional golfer, can rely on muscle memory or a latent skilled proprioception that builds up with experience and enables them to excel at the activity without needing to rationally think through all the lessons that went into fine tuning the ability. For the yoga practitioner, the physical body integrated with the mind is harnessed as a meditation tool to draw the senses away from the attraction or repulsion of external “sense objects” and instead turn inwards towards an unchanging pure consciousness which is considered to be our true identity. In this way, the path towards durable wellbeing and self-realisation (as opposed to fleeting pleasure and misidentification) takes place in the material body and involves disciplining our physical and cognitive senses to withdraw from “sense objects” through practice and detachment. Through continued effort and discipline the senses are oriented less and less towards the external world for gratification and eventually becoming oriented towards the divine within. In the words of Iyengar, “all the layers or sheaths from the skin to consciousness are penetrated, subjugated and sublimated to enable the soul to diffuse evenly throughout” (Iyengar:74). Iyengar understands the brain as “the mind’s instrument of action” and claims that through techniques involving the physical body (including the mind) and breath control the cognitive faculty can be trained to apprehend the mind to lift the “veil of obscurity and encourage quiet receptivity in the ego as well as in the consciousness, diffusing their energies evenly throughout the physical, physiological, mental, intellectual and spiritual sheaths of the soul”(Iyengar:38). Obviously, the path to everlasting wellbeing and liberation is rife with obstacles and impasses and it is debatable as to whether enlightenment as evoked in the texts is even humanly possible. Nonetheless, an increasing number of people are turning to versions of this model of techniques which is being repackaged in a variety of brands of yoga, mindfulness and meditation as a means to alleviate a range of physical, psychological or spiritual issues such as: stress, depression, concentration, high blood pressure, chronic back pain or just general wellbeing. This holistic model which combines the physical and mental to reach the divine is often believed to be more effective than a Western compartmentalised approach which increasingly relies on a number of highly specialised medical professionals to attend to physical ailments, a mental health system that pathologizes and offers pharmaceutical therapies as coping mechanisms and religious organisations that can appear political and morally corrupt.
The ubiquity of the conventional Western model of “the five senses” which is contingent on scientific frameworks for perceiving the human body constrains our idea of the mind as being above the senses as opposed to being on a par with the other senses and part of a holistic and integrated system of interconnecting psychic and physical manifestations. The idea of citta as a sixth sense is proposed as a way of destabilising the idea of the mind as the seat of our personhood and to suggest instead a more holistic approach to our integrated beings. It is also a way to reinforce the constructiveness of sensory models which are contingent on the historical period, the culture or even a given perspective within a culture. (Howes) This model of the human being as interpenetrating layers of a physical, mental and spiritual nature, which is still represented to-day in the Hindu perspective would have resonated with Western Christian conceptions before the science of psychology developed a “profane view” of the human body in the Post-Enlightenment period (Roeser:16 ). There are countless configurations for apprehending the senses which produce various affects. As David Howes reminds us, human perception is not entirely innate but to some extent depends on how we categorise, perceive, control and exercise our “sensory powers” (Introduction, ABCDERIUM). When Westerners integrate the teachings of yoga they not only experience the fluidity of our sensory categories but also the fluidity of perception itself. When we perceive the intelligence in our spine or the cells of our skin, much as dancers do, we not only hold ourselves differently physically we relate to the world and ourselves differently. When we conceive of the mind and the body as a single system that can be used as a vehicle for transcending the fragmented material world, we gain an embodied understanding of the unity of the world as opposed to the dispersed one our languages, categorisations, theories and cultures present to us.
Bibliography
Bryant, Edwin F. The yoga sutras of Patanjali: A new edition, translation, and commentary. North Point Press, 2015.
Howes, David, ed. The sixth sense reader. Berg Publishers, 2009.
Iyengar, Bellur Krishnamukar Sundara. Light on the yoga sutras of Patanjali. South Asia Books, 2004.
Roeser, Robert W. An introduction to Hindu India’s contemplative psychological perspective on motivation, self, and development. na, 2005.