The Buddhi or Intellect

Yoga philosophy distinguishes between mind and buddhi. The former gatherers information from sense experience and coordinates them with activity, which translates into personal experience or I-ness, I do, I see. The mind through the ego or ahamkara identifies itself with the experience which results in an individual identity, whereas the buddhi is the discriminating faculty evaluates the situation and decides on a course of action.

The mind can be seen not only as an obstacle to higher consciousness, since in its natural expression it attaches itself to sense experience and is therefore in a constant state of flux, but it also as the bridge over which one may reach that consciousness.

In analysing the workings of the buddhi (intellect), we can see that it evolves as personal growth takes place.

We will look at it in three different stages.

First there is a crude discrimination which simply reacts to the impressions of the mind.

It uses a primitive kind of judgement, decoding that something is good and pleasurable, or bad and distasteful. It is based on strong influences of past memories or emotions. Here reason is subservient to the circumstances one encounters in the environment, as well as to urges, or impulses.

Beyond this stage there is a more sophisticated development. This more mature intellect is associated with the power of reasoning and using intelligence to arrive at stable concepts and a coherent philosophy of life.

It is pragmatic, and is involving an intellectual framework which leads to a purposeful and rational organization of activities for functioning in the external world.

It can also decide on ethical standards of morality and a set of aesthetic values of what is beautiful and what is ugly and presents a reasonable notion of what one’s purpose should be. 

Beyond this, there is a further development of the intellect which concerns itself distinctively with the pursuit of pure truth. Its decisions are uncompromising and cut through all illusion, even that which is socially acceptable and ethically admirable.

It increasingly reflects immutable and transcendent laws of nature and the universe, which are those simplest and most unifying principles that bring meaning to life and coherence to understanding.

This description implies that the intellect goes through a process of differentiation as it becoming more evolved with each step. But in fact, the intellect does not evolve, it is simply being uncovered. It exists under the encumbrance of the cruder and less mature functioning.

But we need have to ask, what is responsible for the movement from one level to the next?

The intellect may give in to the pleasure of impulses and yield to the influence of habit and emotions or it may assert its authority over the impulses and habits and chose a different course of action.

By maintaining a detached observing attitude, one can allow them to simply pass by and dissipate; by doing so in a detached manner, one can step outside the chain of cause and effect, which is the result of previous programming and not be affected by them.

Each time the intellect steps free from prior programming, it becomes stronger and can move toward greater freedom.

We are now at the point where we enter the realm of higher consciousness and come to the place from which the mental events can be observed. This is the witness state, the state that lies beyond the body and mind. This is the state beyond the verbal and mental activities which we call thinking. It is here where one functions beyond the distractions of sense expressions or the narrow personal egoism. It is here where the mind is transcended and where intuition and wisdom arises.

But beyond this is an even higher state, a state where awareness of the phenomenal world ceases. Here consciousness exists in a purity that is indescribable. It is consciousness without an object, and beyond duality. It is here where the mind becomes the object of consciousness. It is the Self, or Purusha that uses the mind as an instrument of knowing.

When this state of consciousness is realized, one knows, that the difficulties that are experience in the world have their cause in falsely identifying with body, mind rather than with the Self.

Yoga sees awakening as a process that occurs in stages until one develops the discrimination and distance to observe it.