Ignorance is Not Bliss : Sneak Peek (Chapter 5)
To truly study the mind, one would actually need something subtler than it, something like consciousness itself—the aware, knowing quality prior to sensation, emotion, and the very thoughts one is attempting to observe.
This is precisely why the contemplative traditions have always insisted that the study of the mind is an interior science. Not merely because they lacked the technology for brain scans, but because it was understood that the only ‘instrument’ refined enough to observe the mind, and thus to comprehend it, is the very field of awareness—one’s subjective experience—in which the mind arises.
The yogic tradition, drawing upon thousands of years of precisely this kind of direct, introspective observation, makes a far more useful distinction than the Western brain-mind conflation. In Sanskrit, the word for mind is citta (pronounced CHIT-tah), derived from the root cit, meaning to perceive, to be aware, or to know. Citta is not reducible to the brain or nervous system, though it certainly operates through them. Rather, citta is the field in which all of inner experience occurs—the medium through which thoughts arise, memories surface, emotions color perception, and the sense of ‘I’ takes shape. What Western psychology might divide into the conscious mind, the subconscious, and the deeper unconscious layers are all movements and patterns within citta. The surface chatter, the buried traumas, the barely-formed preferences shaping every decision—they are what the citta is doing, and it has a name: vṛttis.
Continuing our analogy from earlier, if the brain is the radio, and the citta the field or medium, then the individual waves of music are the vṛttis (pronounced VRIT-tees). The word comes from the root vṛt, meaning to turn, revolve, or spin—and is typically translated as "fluctuations," "modifications," or "turnings" of the mind.
Vṛttis, or movements of citta (mind), represent every thought, evaluation, memory, and reaction that ripples through the field. Some you hear clearly, the way you'd hear a symphony on a well-tuned radio. Others are barely perceptible, like distant stations bleeding faintly through the static. But all of them, loud or faint, are fluctuations of the same mind. And it is precisely these fluctuations that yoga, in its original, undiluted sense, was designed to address, and ultimately what the devoted spiritual seeker must learn to quell. Indeed, one of the very first lines of Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras—the foundational text of the yogic tradition, written sometime around the second century BCE—wastes no time getting to the point:
Yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ—yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.
That's it. All of yoga—its philosophy, its practices, its ultimate aim—compressed into four words: yogaś (yoga is) citta (mind) vṛtti (fluctuations) nirodhaḥ (cessation). Not “yoga is the perfection of the body.” Not “yoga is the cultivation of extraordinary psychic powers.” Not even “yoga is union with God” (though that follows naturally). Yoga is what happens when the mind stops doing what it compulsively does: thinking, hypothesizing, judging, fantasizing, ruminating, catastrophizing, and planning—or, in other words, fluctuating!
Some may hear "fluctuations of the mind" and think: ‘Oh, that’s the chatty inner monologue that narrates experience, replays conversations, and argues with itself about what’s what.’ And yes, that voice is certainly part of the vṛttis. But it is only the loudest, most obvious part—the whitecaps on the surface of a very deep iceberg.
The subtler (and far more consequential) fluctuations are the ones going unheard, the subconscious ones running beneath the threshold of ordinary awareness. These are your mind's constant, automatic evaluations—the citta ceaselessly and wordlessly cross-referencing every bit of incoming data against its accumulated impressions, and generating a verdict before the conscious, vocalized mind even registers that something has happened. These are the ones competing for your attention as you read this very sentence—a constant churning.
Consider: you walk into a room and feel immediately uneasy. You haven't consciously assessed anything—the lighting, the temperature, the people present—but the mind has already completed thousands, perhaps millions, of micro-evaluations: this reminds me of that one time, that person's energy signals impatience, why is everyone is standing at an angle towards the door? By the time the thought “I don't like this situation” emerges from the citta, the vṛttis have already done their work. That is, the thought itself is not the complete fluctuation—it's the residue of the fluctuation, the conscious mind's clumsy attempt to narrate what the other vṛttis already decided several milliseconds ago.