the Psychic OS
the Mechanism of experiences
The Embodied Mind
From Mindscape in the storytelling realm now we are talking of an operating system in the sense of a definite processing container, providing a Workspace for the Mind, that is fully embodied within us.
Computing Analogy
We certainly are not keen on becoming programmed robots, but a computing analogy helps.
A digital computer is:
built on hardware with computing power,
access to which is coordinated through software called the operating system,
that manages machine codes to be run without interfering with each other, and
presented to users as Apps written using programming languages.
Thus too, the psychic processor of the human is:
run on the substrate of our nervous system, embodying the power of our intelligence power,
access to which is coordinated through the "wetware" of the Yoga Mind,
that organizes the subjective experiences of phenomena, creating a sense of distinct individuality, and
presented to us as Yoga stories, scripted with psycholinguistic languages.
To keep all of this work entertaining, remember "all we are doing" is storytelling, but this results in a psychological evolution when done in a certain manner as we are now describing.
We are not just doing NLP (natural language processing) in our heads, like an AI would be tasked with superficially, but a deeper processing.
Remember, evolution favors the doing of work to increase entropy, and this is why we are constantly telling stories to each other - mostly of course only weakly increasing entropy, but every so often we get an inspirational leap.
Processing Yoga Stories
Every single epic and tale in the Hindu literature that involves Devas, is actually symbolic of how the characters and their scripts map to structures of the Yoga Mind and its processes. Literally our Mind is a storyteller.
When we see these past epics as Yoga stories, and not mere legends or tales, they reveal themselves as in fact Yogic acceleration techniques, literally a Mind hacker’s guide to the Universe.
The Yoga Mind lets us see that :
All our past civilizational stories, epic and otherwise, are in fact Apps that run in our psyche, that outwardly exhibit the phenomenon of the religious Hindu.
These story-apps are scripted using psycholinguistic languages, Sanskrit as a predominant example.
All of this runs on a psychic OS with a very specific structure to generate evolutionary states.
Our life energy, called Prāna, runs all these constructs in the Yoga Mind and literally gives life to them as psychic intelligences and viruses that work in tandem for our psychological evolution.
To remind ourselves of how we have evolved our theory so far, normal stories running around in our Mindspace would probably be having a Sentient OS as their operating environment - but that is not our concern for now as we are going to the next level of depth with the Psychic OS and Yoga stories.
Sānkhya Yoga
A particular school of Rāja Yoga (the king of Yoga's) called Sānkhya, of which the Buddha was the prime exemplar, is also concordant with our inital observation that intelligence is universal, and provides a truly fitting self-reflexive Lens to view the Mind.
Meaning
In Sanskrit, Sānkhya means that which comes from Sankhya, a means of organizing a knowledge space
And Sankhya = Sum + Khya,
where we have seen Sum means refined/perfection as in Latin also Summa, and
Khya = Kh (space) + ya (this)
Purusha
This is where it all starts with the light of consciousness which it shines into Prakriti. It is quite like the notion of Self, since we all have one Purusha. It's also very akin to the deeper notion of Soul, or Atman.
And the goal is to realize it, hence self-realization.
Chitta - Mindscape
Chitta in the individual is our consciousness substratum that is subject to fluctuations with its continuous reactive Thought streams.
In addition, Chitta contains all memory from the accumulation of Thought.
In technological analogy, Chitta is the Cloud in which we store all of our life experiences, guiding us on our journey with impressions from the past, that keeps generating alerts that could wear us down like so many irrelevant Notifications from our programmable electronic out-brain devices, we wish we could shut down!
Hence we do Yoga, to quieten the fluctuations and stay in pure Awareness.
And thus Chitta becomes the Mindscape.
Buddhi
Sānkhya proposes a single Buddhi, called Mahat, a high level of discriminative intelligence, for all of Nature (Pra-kriti of "k"reation), the whole of the perceivable material universe.
The operating word is discriminative, so as to enjoy the experiences, while avoiding the mess entanglements,
This cosmic Buddhi then instills a personal Buddhi within us, that helps us to evolve our consciousness, that then merges with the cosmic Mahat so that we become a Conscious Being that perceives that entire Mind of Nature.
This thesis follows an evolutionary process like any well-performing conscious adaptive system is supposed to do.
Note the sequence of material evolution that matter creates consciousness is the preamble to the Sānkhya model, so we are starting where today's Science leaves off.
It is thus we become the Conscious Being experiencing all experiences.
In order that the intelligence be put into operational usage, there is a particular model which Sānkhya offers to create this Conscious Being.
Needs a simpler abstraction
The architecture of Sānkhya Yoga
Structures of Consciousness
The structure of intelligence able to incorporate these kinds of conscious interactions is :
applicable to entities at all scales - individuals, groups, universe, and
does not make any statement of the substrate, biological, silicon, or otherwise.
This is not anthropomorphic per se because Sānkhya model below is only focused on enabling the process of intelligence, not on all the attributes that make a human, but we do wish to make the process of intelligence somewhat relatable, hence the approach.
Thus, every entity, including each individual, has their own Buddhi upon which shines the "light of consciousness" of their Purusha, very akin to a "soul", to enlighten the material nature of Prakriti.
The Buddhi then evolves down into a structured & active way of engaging with the world, compelled by the sense of self wishing to experience the world, because of the innate tendency of the Universe to favor the increase of entropy through evolution.
Ahamkār
Aham means the I-self, kār means that which comes from kr (action, remember krt is create).
If Purusha is the pure conscious light of self, then Ahamkār is what happens when the Self is put in action.
When we identify ourselves with what we create with our Thoughts, positively or negatively, forgetting that we are but co-creators in this journey, then the Self accumulates and becomes a formidable barrier to dismantle.
When Ahamkār is fossilized to Asura proportions it leads to Ego, which we all know is hard to be rid of.
The goal of the practice is to keep the Ahamkār active to enjoy Prakriti, but be able to pull back as needed.
Gunas
The core psychic vibrations behind all Nature herself, the Prakriti of our materialized Being are the three Gunas of :
Satva - neutral, pure that instills the structures
Rajas - excitable, energetic that impels action to enjoy or detach from Prakriti
Tamas - dense, materialistic that engages with Prakriti
These are all encased in the Ahamkār.
When these Gunas are fully balanced the Ahamkār of the Lens becomes a mirror, and the Purusha finally sees its reflection back and abides by the light of its own consciousness in Ānanda.
But for the purpose of evolution, we need to experience the Prakriti, so the excitable, energetic Rajas quality, which directs all of the structures, pushes us into Prakriti - with which we coevolve.
When the lens is messed up it is the Ahamkār that needs to be extricated from being enmeshed in Prakriti.
Ahamkār is the key mediator between our intelligence of Buddhi and the interactions of consciousness with the world of Prakriti.
Conscious Interactions
Observe on the bottom left we see the structures and organs of the mind that process the experiences
Awareness - Jnānendriya - sensory systems that input knowledge (jnāna)
Responsiveness - Karmendriya - motor systems that create output action (karma)
where Indriya means sensory & motor organs in our lens of Sānkhya.
Note that the key Sanskrit words, Jnāna and Karma, have identical etymology to their English counterparts.
So to the "soul-less", but super-efficient, perceive, predict, control trifecta of complex adaptive intelligence model of intelligence, we add various other triplets of intelligent interactions, for example the interaction processes at each level could be modeled as :
Buddhi "brain" - wisdom
inform
decide
choose
Ahamkār "ego" - active self
perceive
process
act
Manas - "heart"
feel
empathize
emote
Vritti - Movement of Thought
Vritti is the core fluctuation in the Manas for it is the core processing unit.
Vritti is what perturbs the Chitta, the Mindscape, like waves on an otherwise still lake.
Psychic Probes
The Yoga Mind is always modeled as reaching out into Prakriti, in order to probe for signs of consciousness.
This probing occurs in 5 different ways, and successively more material in nature
आकाश Ākāsh, Space, or Ether, originates with the sense of sound, Shabda, the most fundamental vibration that makes sense to humans
वायु Vāyu, Wind, or Air, then results as sound vibrations are felt, with the sense of touch, Sparsha, not just physical but also heartfelt
अग्नि Agni (cognate with Ignite), Fire, results with the friction of touch, Rupa, and gives birth to the sense of sight, and thus arises form
आप Āpa, Water, from form comes forth the wanting to taste, Rasa, a faculty associated with wanting to lick the juices of life, and also knowing the essence
पृथ्वी Prithvi, Earth, from taste comes the sense of smell, Gandha, the most primordial faculty hidden deep in the sensory system, reminding us of life coming into being, echoed in the unforgettable smells of the earth after a fresh rain, connected to a deep memory store.
Shabda packets
Shabda is the key psychic information package that encodes all other information for transmission. we will see this shortly in how Sanskrit enables this.
It includes all the intentional messages formed with mantra, music, stories, designs etc. and these are then sent through a Shabda packet to another psychic space.
The outbound transmission occurs through the Karmendriyas, and the inbound transmission occurs through the Jnyanedriyas, so if there are a pair of conscious Beings interacting then their Karmendriyas are connected to the others' Jnyanendriyas.
To boot up the whole system of a conscious Being, in the very first transmission the Buddhi wraps the Ahamkar with the Sankhya model as a story in a Shabda-package, and with the help of the Satva guna it descends and establishes the Manas-and-Indriyas structures in the Mind.
This is exactly what is happening right now in your head. Stop reading and absorb.
All subsequent transmissions of Shabda now, using the Tamas guna, descend with the intent of enjoying the experiences from the Bhutas of Prakriti.
Eventually having received sufficient Shabdas, the psyche is re-patterned and is in fact reformed - usually into a messy mind, but then we awaken hopefully into the Yoga mind.
Clearing the Lens
With these intricate interaction mechanisms in the psyche, usually, the Purusha is unable to see a clear vision of reality, as without a proper discriminative Buddhi, the Ahamkār gets enmeshed in an entangled Prakriti.
You probe and get trapped and the sense of Self, or Ahamkār, becomes increasingly fossilized and is not able to reflect correctly back to Purusha.
Hence, in order for Purusha to understand itself, our material nature has to disentangle itself from all the knots which we have put ourselves into.
In the reversal process, evolutes of consciousness are retracted back into the Conscious Being, in order that it evolves with all the experiences it has received.
This quiet time allows the Ahamkār part of the self-reflexive lens to become:
first clarified into a multi-faceted crystal of diverse but clear experiences, and then,
when completely satisfied with experiencing Prakriti, the internal energies of Ahamkār come completely into balance.
The Ahamkār now properly reflects the Purusha's light with perfection.
Then the Purusha's lens itself becomes pure Buddhi, and it abides in the light of its own conscious intelligence.
Such a Conscious Being with an unmuddied view for the Purusha, puts humans in the prime position to mediate the evolution of consciousness.
This is the Yoga we are embarking upon.
The Yoga of Storytelling
This is where the Mind becomes a Yogic Storyteller because it is now capable of interacting with all the objects in the Mind Space with a uniform empathetic model we have outlined.
Albeit in the outside world they may have different capabilities, but once instilled as objects in the Mind they are as conscious as we are.
It is fascinating that by probing the experience, the Mind determines the actual nature of a conscious experience - very similar to the latter-day Turing test conceived of for us to determine whether "behind the screen" is indeed a living intelligence or just a well-programmed Ai computer.
The further fascinating point is that similar to how today's computing mechanism of AI evolves its models in response to its interactions, so too the Mind evolves its own structures, by coming to a deep understanding of its world of experiences.
Neuroplasticity in action.