During meditation recently, as I was striving to distinguish my chitta from my buddhi, I realised how inseparable my awareness and my intellect have always been. That's when it dawned upon me how the chitta can become so immersed with buddhi that it loses the ability to disentangle from the maya of the material realm.
All my life, my chitta and buddhi have moved as one. My intellect analyses, plans, worries, remembers and I had no idea that there even was an awareness behind it all. As a child, while my mind was developing, my awareness would have been the silent guide. When my ahamkara had developed and I grew a sense of self, I had no clue that there were separate parts of my mind, each performing its own task.
The intellect mostly lives in the past and the future, two realms that are only virtual. The past is nothing but a residue of memory stored in the manas and the future is simply an arena of possibilities that the buddhi keeps examining. Together, they fill the mind with constant agitation. Only fleeting moments of attention are focused on dealing with the present.
All of that mental agitation is additionally churned by the emotions carried and nurtured by the ego. And these emotions govern the scant attention the buddhi pays to the present. In that morass, the silent field of chitta awareness becomes overwhelmed. Only with careful training is the chitta able to recognise its own nature.
Meditation offers the opportunity to identify the difference. The self is not the mind! The storm of thoughts and emotions belongs to the body’s mental instrument. The self is the stillness against which the roil of thoughts and emotions plays out. When awareness learns to stand apart and recognise itself, a new freedom begins. Life need no longer be governed by memories and projections.
But I now suspect that the entanglement goes deeper.
If the chitta has not learned to distinguish itself from the buddhi, it remains entangled with the maya and continues to carry strong traces of the other layers of mind even after death. The impressions that it carries would continue as confusion, residual thoughts and emotions that it mistakes for its own. Perhaps this is why some souls remain lost, lurking in the material realm and seeking to reconnect with it - we call them ghosts. This may also be why past memories sometimes carry over into the new life that the soul incarnates into. And the reason why the karma of the body is able to afflict the soul as well.
Those who train the mind to be still are already preparing for that transition. The more strongly the awareness grasps its own silence, the closer it comes to liberation - in life and beyond it. Those who are able to attain full identification of their awareness are Raja Yogis. They gain the ability to read the akashic record and are deemed to have become enlightened souls.
By recognising the true nature of the Self, we disentangle ourselves from karma and no longer need to return to any more lives in the flesh. The reincarnation cycle is broken!
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