The Nature of Mind

In other words, it's not brain that sees and hears. The brain registers sound waves and photons from the physical world, but these are transmitted to a receiving station that's not in the brain, though it operates through the brain. This receiving station is called manas, the processing port of the mind. It's Sankhya's twenty-first element 

The renegade Western physicist Rupert Sheldrake explains this phenomenon in terms that parallel the Sankhya idea is closely it's positively eerie. He pointed out that a person who doesn't understand how a television set works believe Andy Griffith and his son Opie really live inside the TV. So if the TV st breaks, Andy and Opie no longer exist. In reality, of course, Andy and Opie filmed the TV show hundreds of miles away and their program is being broadcast to your TV antenna or routed through your cable service, which sends the signals into your TV.

According to Sheldrake , we in the West have a very primitive understanding of the brain. When the brain is switched on, images appear. When the brain switches off, the images vanish. Ergo, scientists assume the images exist only in the brain. But our thought processors may be going on in other dimensions entirely and may only routed through the physical brain if the Hindus, and scientists like Sheldrake, are correct.

In addition to manas, which receives transmits, and interprets sense data, there's the ahankara, or "me" awareness. In some people, this function shuts down, in whole or in part. You may have heard of people who, due to certain medical conditions, have lost the ability to tell that certain parts of their own body belong to them. The ahankara has flaked out.

Buddhi is the part of mind in which will kicks in. Manas transmits the immediate presence of Rum Raisin premium ice cream. Ahankara goes, " That's for me! I want it"! Buddhi is the part of intelligence that then deliberates: " I'm already 25 pounds overweight". And then makes the decisions to go and ahankara, but buddhi, or the capacity to make wise or foolish judgments based on reason, exists primarily in humans.

The real Self, consciousness, called purusha in this system, exists outside the range of mind and matter all together. The mind is the apparatus through which consciousness interfaces with the inner and outer worlds. But the mind is made of perishable patterns of energy and will dissolve away sooner or later. Unlike the real conscious Self within, which is eternal.

How do the Sankhya masters know this? Because they've been doing yoga!