Yoga Philosophy

The core teaching

Yoga chitta vritti nirodhah — yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of mind-stuff (Sutra I.2).

What follows: tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam — the seer rests in its own nature (Sutra I.3). Not a destination. A recognition of what was always underneath the noise.

Before practice, the mind presents itself as thought — and only thought. But every sensation, impulse, and perception that registers in consciousness is a vritti. The smell of coffee. A flicker of irritation. The sound of traffic beneath a conversation. All of it is the mind-field in motion.

Practice begins with recognition: noticing the reaction before it carries you. Not suppression — the weather doesn't stop. But learning, slowly, to see weather as weather rather than as the whole sky.

The Layered Self

Yoga's model of the inner instrument — antahkarana — is the architectural backbone of this whole framework. Experience is filtered through a series of layers: the senses (Manas), the ego (Ahamkara), the intellect (Buddhi) — all arising within the field of consciousness (Chitta), with pure awareness (Purusha) the unchanging witness at the still centre. Each layer can distort what passes through it; we mistake ourselves for the layers, and the practice is a steady loosening of that identification.

Every limb of the path works on one of these layers. The full model — each layer, how it distorts, and the limb that clarifies it — has its own home: the Layered Self.

The Koshas — the same self, mapped as sheaths

The Layered Self above is drawn mainly from Samkhya and Patanjali. The older Upanishadic tradition maps the same territory a little differently, as five koshas — sheaths nested like cases around a blade, from the food body at the surface to the bliss sheath nearest the centre. Not a rival model; the same recognition drawn by a different cartographer.

Most sheaths fall cleanly on a layer of the self; one or two we draw a little differently. Tap each sheath to see where it lands on the Layered Self — and why.

The experiential subtle body — the nadis, the chakras, and how prana actually moves — is worked on the Subtle Anatomy page under Asana. The shared life-force itself (Prana ≈ Qi ≈ Ki) is taken up in The Convergence.

Three aspects of self-realisation

What is Purusha, finally — the awareness the layers veil? The non-dual stream of the tradition (the Upanishads, later Vedanta) answers in three movements: not three Divines, but one, seen three ways.

• Transcendental — the Divine containing all. Awareness as the ground that holds every experience without being touched by any of it: the screen on which the film plays, the silence around every sound. Nothing is left out of it, and nothing alters it.
• Universal — the Divine as all. Not only behind things but appearing as them — every form a shape the one awareness is taking. "All this is Brahman." The wave is not separate from the ocean; it is the ocean, waving.
• Individual — the Divine within all. That same awareness, found at the centre of each being as its own innermost self (Atman). The Upanishads put it in three words: tat tvam asi — "that thou art." What you are at your core is not a small private thing; it is that.

Self-realisation is the recognition that these three are one: the awareness within you is the awareness that is all things is the awareness beyond all things. The sense of being a separate self, standing apart from the whole, is the last and subtlest layer to loosen.

(Held honestly: this is the non-dual, devotional reading — a step beyond the strict dualism of Samkhya, where Purusha and Prakriti stay distinct. Buddhism declines the language of a Divine or a permanent Self altogether, and describes the same centre as interbeing and no-self. Different maps of the same still point — the difference is real, and worth holding.)

Key concepts

• Chitta — the whole field of mind-stuff: consciousness, memory, impressions, and the vrittis that arise within it. Not just "thoughts" — the entire mental substrate.
• Vritti — a fluctuation or modification of Chitta. Five types: right knowledge (pramana), misconception (viparyaya), imagination (vikalpa), sleep (nidra), and memory (smriti). The problem is not the vritti — it is identification with it.
• Samskara — mental impressions left by past experience: the grooves that make certain reactions feel automatic. Practice works directly with samskaras.
• Vasana — tendency; deeper than samskara. The accumulated shape of character, the inherited flavour of how the mind moves.
• Klesha — the five afflictions that drive suffering: ignorance (avidya), ego (asmita), attachment (raga), aversion (dvesha), and fear of death (abhinivesha). Avidya — mistaking the layers for the self — is the root of all five.
• Purusha & Prakriti — Purusha is pure consciousness, the seer, recognised rather than manufactured; Prakriti is nature, everything that is not Purusha, including mind and body. Their interplay is the engine of Samkhya metaphysics.
• Prana — life force, the animating current beneath the physical body. Pranayama works directly with prana. Parallels: Qi (TCM), Ki (Japanese traditions). → See Pranayama.
• Abhyasa & Vairagya — sustained practice (Sutra I.13–14) and non-attachment, always paired: the committed return, and the clear-eyed letting go. → Fully treated on Samadhi.
• The three gunas — the three qualities present in all of Prakriti: Tamas (inertia), Rajas (activity), Sattva (clarity). Practice tends toward Sattva without clinging to it. Sattva is the door, not the room.

The eight limbs

Patanjali organises the path into eight limbs — from ethical foundations outward to pure absorption inward, each working on a particular layer of the self. Each has its own page; the eight limbs are where this philosophy becomes practice.