Mind is a big topic. Fundamentally, mind is a kosha or field around our body that is the medium for what we experience as thinking. But there’s a great deal more to it than that. Let’s explore my current take.

This field surrounds the whole body but we feel mind is “in the head” because the senses are concentrated there. Mind is the hub that processes and integrates our senses.

It also interfaces with the brain and nervous system and emotional body in one direction. And the other way with the intellect, memory, and cosmic mind. The cosmic mind is essentially the lively inner surface of self-aware consciousness.

Mind isn’t really local. In a sense, mind is nothing in itself but a field attuned to the cosmic mind in one direction and the brain and body in the other. We might call it an interface.

We can say mind is powered mainly by the energy of the third chakra in the upper belly. This is the power center of the will and personal protection. We can consider it the highest personal chakra. It defends from the collective and universal to sustain a personal sense of self, the core identity.

For most, only the content itself, the thoughts are conscious. The mind itself and its underpinnings are not. We have what is conscious, what is subconscious, and what is unconscious.

Research has shown that the unconscious mind operates vastly faster than the conscious mind but runs only existing programs. Unconscious processing is typically over 90% of mental activity. What rises to the surface in the conscious mind can be contemplated and choices made but it is much slower.

If we don’t have good mental and emotional habits, which is typical of most, we often resist experiences and build up a backlog of unprocessed junk. That triggers a lot of background noise, babbling away as a “monkey mind.”

But by gradually becoming more conscious, we can complete the unresolved experiences and reduce the noise.

The Theosophists divided the 7 layers of expression into 7 sub-levels each but I’ve not found it this tidy. Certainly there are subsections though.

The Vedic tradition talks of 3 primary aspects of mind:

1: Manas: the sense-directed mind. This produces the content we’re most conscious of. The information from our senses is sub-consciously heavily filtered for relevance, compared to prior experiences to check for danger, then the net result pops in to our conscious mind. (Note this filtering and comparing is done by programs. See below.)

And yet the identified ego below claims these results as “my thinking.”

2: Ahamkara: the I-sense that helps us distinguish what is self and other. The intellect, more subtle than the mind, discriminates the distinction. The mind then builds this up as an I-sense. It adds a set of self-concepts and impressions. We become identified with the I-sense as a Me. I am a plumber who is married and lives in Albuquerque, for example.

This self-sense develops early on as we separate from mother and continues around age 2 into Asmita, the My sense or possessive. We identify with our body and possessions as aspects of myself. We should outgrow this stage but many don’t. Waking up kills asmita though.

3: Chitta: this word means ‘divided from consciousness’ aka subconscious. It is those aspects of mind that are stored away and unresolved yet create activity in the mind. Many translate chitta as mental activity but Vritti is the more accurate term for that.

Chitta is classed in 2 types:

a: Vasana: unresolved desires,