One of my favorite teachers tells this story:
There is a shy, young man who finds a woman he knows extremely attractive. For months he has endeavored to work up the courage to ask her out, and finally… he does! To his great amazement, she says YES! The days leading up to the date, his thoughts are only on her. What her smile will look like, the touch of her hand in his. He walks about in a happy cloud of thoughts for days. The big day arrives. She looks as beautiful as he had imagined. They go to the movies, the conversation is flowing, and in his mind, he is envisioning their life together. Just before the movie starts, he realizes he had not gotten them popcorn. Excusing himself, he walks to the lobby. By the time he gets back, the lights are out, and the trailers have begun. His heart is so full of happiness, but he is still feeling quite shy and feels a little foolish for forgetting the popcorn. He does not look at her as he sits down, placing the popcorn between them. The movie starts – it’s a RomCom – perfect for a first date, he thinks. His mind is more on her than the film. He sees the hero of the movie hold the heroine’s hand and he does the same for his date, still too shy to look at her. As the movie goes on, he follows the cues of the actor on the screen, and he eventually puts his arm around his date! His heart is beating so fast, every cell in his body is in pure bliss. At long last, he feels brave enough to look at her, and kiss her, as the two characters are doing on the screen. But suddenly, he turns – WHAAAAAAAT???? He realized that he sat down in the wrong seat!!! This is not the woman he came with – in fact, it is a person that he finds totally revolting. All the joy he had been feeling is gone, and he scurries away.
Poor guy! Wonder what his real date had been thinking? Let’s look at this. One moment, he was in ecstasy, the next, sick to his stomach. What had changed? It was still a hand that he been touching, a shoulder he had caressed. But now everything he had been experiencing had changed. Why? Because it wasn’t the physical sensation that brought him joy – it was his thoughts, his perceptions – and the place where we house all our thoughts, and actually experience our lives is the Mind. In Sanskrit the word for it is Citta.
What does Citta mean?
While sometimes the word Citta can be used to refer to thoughts, it is mostly used to speak on the producer of the thoughts, the very mind itself. As we see in the story above, it is really the mind where we experience things. Two people can have the exact same external realities, but they can see them completely differently depending on how it is playing out in their minds.
The mind, says the Bhagavad Gita, can be our worst enemy, because of it’s constant creating of thoughts that block what we really are – a soul, from seeing itself. Think of the mind like dirt on eyeglasses, the poor soul is trying to peek at itself in the mirror, but the lens of the mind is blocking it. In a way, you can’t blame the mind – it’s not personal, it’s just doing it’s job, which is to think. Every time a soul takes birth in a body, it gets this computer-like device called a Citta. From this we can conclude that the goal of any path of yoga, is, in some way, to deal with the mind.
Sometimes in English we interchange the words mind and brain, but in yoga, and for this discussion, we will really separate those two things. The brain belongs to the physical – what in yogic language is called the gross (not like ew, disgusting but tangible) body. It is the organ that is located in your head, and, to me anyway, looks like cauliflower. The mind belongs to what is called the subtle body – like the Chakras (energy centers) or the Nadis (energy pathways). It is not something that you can see on an MRI, but like the soul, it is no less real, and is said to be located in the region of the brain.
The nature of the Citta
When looking at the Citta the first thing to realize is that it is not, as the expression says, “set in stone.” It’s more like a lump of clay. Just as every time a piece of pottery is in the hands of a potter, it takes a different shape, so too does the mind constantly change shape due to the things that are taken in by the senses. Instead of an artists fingers sculpting a bowl, it is seeing, smelling, touching, and tasting that mold the shape of the Citta; the instrument that literally guides our day to day experience. And the impressions that shape the mind are called Samskaras.
Just as the brain has three main parts, so does the Citta. They are:
- The Manos – the lower, primitive, instinctual mind. In yogic texts, it is often referred to as “the mind”.
- The Ahankara – the seat of identity. This is usually the most utilized part of the Citta. The feeling of “I am American” or “I am a woman” or “I am a doctor.” The labels we wear in life live here. This is often called “the false ego”.
- The Buddhi – This is the seat of intelligence, or discernment. The place where the ability to see that one is a soul within a body, as opposed to being the body, resides. This is the part of the Citta that all the yogic practices try to get us to aspire to. For it is only from viewing the world around us from the viewpoint of the Buddhi mind, can the soul ever free itself from the illusion that it has fallen into when it takes on a body. This is most often labeled “the intelligence”.
Taming and training the Citta
Just as we are the ones that turn on and off our computers, decide what we want to download into it, how we want to set up the programs we use on it – the same can be said for our Citta. The fact that we have the ability to transform the Citta, and hence transform our lives is what yoga is actually all about. It is the thing that most of us either forget, or do not know we have the ability to do in the first place.
This awareness is the first step of something within the yogic text, The Caintanya Caritamrt called Ceto Darshan: Cleaning the mirror of the heart and mind. Is it any wonder that the concept known as Saucha (cleanliness of the body and mind) is the first principle listed in the Yoga Sutras as the way a Yogi wants to walk in the world (Niyamas)? It is the very key to wiping away the dirt which is blocking the view of the soul, which is our true identity. When we sweep away the false concepts of who we are, when we rise up from just the lowest level of thinking, when we take the time to get still and quiet, then the Citta, which has been racing around and blocking the soul from seeing itself, falls away. To quote the very famous Yoga Sutra, “Tada drastuh svarupe avasthanam” – The seer (who we really are) sees itself!
Deepen your understanding of yoga philosophy
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