Composition
of States of the Mind
Let us pass now to the
"states of the mind" as they are called. The word which
is used for the states of the mind by Patanjali is Vritti. This
admirably constructed language Sanskrit gives you in that very word
its own meaning. Vrittis means the "being" of the mind;
the ways in which mind can exist; the modes of the mind;
the modes of mental existence; the ways of existing. That is the
literal meaning of this word. A subsidiary meaning is a "turning
around," a "moving in a circle". You have to stop,
in Yoga, every mode of existing in which the mind manifests itself.
In order to guide you towards the power of stopping them--for you
cannot stop them till you understand them--you are told that these
modes of mind are fivefold in their nature. They are pentads. The
Sutra, as usually translated, says " the Vrittis are fivefold
(panchatayyah)," but pentad is a more accurate rendering of
the word pancha-tayyah, in the original, than fivefold. The word
pentad at once recalls to you the way in which the chemist speaks
of a monad, triad, heptad, when he deals with elements. The elements
with which the chemist is dealing are related to the unit-element
in different ways. Some elements are related to it in one way only,
and are called monads; others are related in two ways, and are called
duads, and so on.
Is this applicable to
the states of mind also? Recall the shloka of the Bhagavad-Gita
in which it is said that the Jiva goes out into the world, drawing
round him the five senses and mind as sixth. That may throw a little
light on the subject. You have five senses, the five ways of knowing,
the five jnanendriyas or organs of knowing. Only by these five senses
can you know the outer world. Western psychology says that nothing
exists in thought that does not exist in sensation. That is not
true universally; it is not true of the abstract mind, nor wholly
of the concrete. But there is a great deal of truth in it. Every
idea is a pentad. It is made up of five elements. Each element making
up the idea comes from one of the senses, and of these there are
at present five. Later on every idea will be a heptad, made up of
seven elements. For the present, each has five qualities, which
build up the idea. The mind unites the whole together into a single
thought, synthesises the five sensations.
If you think of an orange
and analyse your thought of an orange, you will find in it: colour,
which comes through the eye; fragrance, which comes through the
nose; taste, which comes through the tongue; roughness or smoothness,
which comes through the sense of touch; and you would hear musical
notes made by the vibrations of the molecules, coming through the
sense of hearing, were it keener. If you had a perfect sense of
hearing. you would hear the sound of the orange also, for wherever
there is vibration there is sound. All this, synthesised by the
mind into one idea, is an orange. That is the root reason for the
"association of ideas". It is not only that a fragrance
recalls the scene and the circumstances under which the fragrance
was observed, but because every impression is made through all the
five senses and, therefore, when one is stimulated, the others are
recalled. The mind is like a prism. If you put a prism in the path
of a ray of white light, it will break it up into its seven constituent
rays and seven colours will appear. Put another prism in the path
of these seven rays, and as they pass through the prism, the process
is reversed and the seven become one white light. The mind is like
the second prism. It takes in the five sensations that enter through
the senses, and combines them into a single precept. As at the present
stage of evolution the senses are five only, it unites the five
sensations into one idea. What the white ray is to the seven- coloured
light, that a thought or idea is to the fivefold sensation. That
is the meaning of the much controverted Sutra: "Vrittayah panchatayych,"
"the vrittis, or modes of the mind, are pentads." If you
look at it in that way, the later teachings will be more clearly
understood.
As I have already said,
that sentence, that nothing exists in thought which is not in sensation,
is not the whole truth. Manas, the sixth sense, adds to the sensations
its own pure elemental nature. What is that nature that you find
thus added? It is the establishment of a relation, that is really
what the mind adds. All thinking is the "establishment of relations,"
and the more closely you look into that phrase, the more you will
realise how it covers all the varied processes of the mind. The
very first process of the mind is to become aware of an outside
world. However dimly at first, we become aware of something outside
ourselves--a process generally called perception. I use the more
general term "establishing a relation," because that runs
through the whole of the mental processes, whereas perception is
only a single thing. To use a well-known simile, when a little baby
feels a pin pricking it, it is conscious of pain, but not at first
conscious of the pin, nor yet conscious of where exactly the pin
is. It does not recognise the part of the body in which the pin
is. There is no perception, for perception is defined as relating
a sensation to the object which causes the sensation. You only,
technically speaking, "perceive" when you make a relation
between the object and yourself. That is the very first of these
mental processes, following on the heels of sensation.
Of course, from the Eastern
standpoint, sensation is a mental function also, for the senses
are part of the cognitive faculty, but they are unfortunately classed
with feelings in Western psychology. Now having established that
relation between yourself and objects outside, what is the next
process of the mind? Reasoning: that is, the establishing of relations
between different objects, as perception is the establishment of
your relation with a single object. When you have perceived many
objects, then you begin to reason in order to establish relations
between them. Reasoning is the establishment of a new relation,
which comes out from the comparison of the different objects that
by perception you have established in relation with yourself, and
the result is a concept. This one phrase, "establishment of
relations," is true all round. The whole process of thinking
is the establishment of relations, and it is natural that it should
be so, because the Supreme Thinker, by establishing a relation,
brought matter into existence. Just as He, by establishing that
primary relation between Himself and the Not-Self, makes a universe
possible, so do we reflect His powers in ourselves, thinking by
the same method, establishing relations, and thus carrying out every
intellectual process.
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