On a depressing, rainy day, when your meticulous and exuberant plan for life is just not working well, when the next raise won’t come, when the business is not taking off, or the fiance’ cancelled the engagement, you are drawn to find solace in these therapeutic quotes. Aren’t you?
Samskaras are the foundation of one’s psychological, mental and physical construct. A whole collection of them. It is amusing that the term ‘samskaras’ has found colloquial usage in Indian society, with a meaning far removed from its original one. We seem to understand today that good ‘Samskara’ is essentially a good value system which we imbibe in our families.
Vrittis roughly translate as the fluctuations of our psyche-mind unit. We experience ‘vrittis’ consciously, we are aware of these fluctuations of our psyche-mind. We ‘know’ what we are thinking and conceiving. Or ideating, liking and rejecting, desiring and abhorring. This conscious psyche-mind unit is about as diverse as there are people on this planet.
The Ahamkara, or the “I am this____”, is one’s definition of oneself. It could be many things like “I am a generous person”, “I am great”, “I am a loser”, “I am intelligent” or every way we define ourselves. Ahamkara is many times misjudged as ‘egoism’ in colloquial Hindi. It is actually that sense of identification, that ‘arrogating’ of the traits of our pschye-mind, its ideas, cognitions, preferences or desires to oneself.
Samkaras evolve from exteriorisation to interiorization over the course of the Jiva’s life cycle. This does not mean one life, but as many lifetimes as a Jiva needs to exhaust and spend all its samskaric baggage. When the Jiva’s life cycle begins, old samskaras produce experiences which further produce new samskaras and this process goes on and on.