Mind-Body Architecture
Hello everyone.
My name is Ramya Iyengar. Welcome to the second episode of Algorithm of Yoga.This is my ongoing attempt to explore Yoga the software way!
Last week I spoke about Perception Debt. It is the burden of unresolved sensations, thoughts and feelings which distorts our experience of this world and shapes our evolving process of perception itself. It directly correlates to stress and prevents us from being the best that we can be.
But how is this Perception debt created?
To understand how Perception debt is created, we have to open the bonnet and look into the Mind and Body Architecture. Disclaimer: I have tried my best to simplify things for easy understanding. If you want to get technical, let's talk in the comments section.
The perception interface is the interface through which we interact with the world outside. We receive inputs in the form of a sound, sight, touch, taste or smell and we respond by our actions of speech, movement, grasping, excretion and procreation through this interface.
The core entities which implement this interface are the mind and the body.
What I call the mind here is not something located in our heads! It is not the brain. It permeates the whole body. It is the sum total of all faculties that create my experience, in which 'I am' is also a subject.
Similarly, what I call the body is the sum total of all physical and physiological processes that enable my survival. The body is gross and the mind is subtle. Infact, the body is held in the field of the mind and the mind is experienced through the body.
What links the mind and body?
The breath.
The mind, body and breath are very closely interlinked. The breath is the real-time communication channel between the gross and the subtle, the body and the mind.
Let’s now look at the subsystems of the mind.
The ‘sense-controller’ is in direct charge of the senses. You can think of it as the supervisor who collates the incoming information and coordinates the outgoing response.
The supervisor cannot take decisions. It is simply an administrator. It looks for guidance and the manager responds. This would make you think that the role of the manager is to make decisions. Well, not really.
The primary job of the manager is to define and reinforce the identity of the self. It labels all experiences as ‘mine’ by categorizing information into attachments and aversions with varying intensities.
To make decisions, it forms close partnerships with the mind-field reservoir. It is the storehouse of impressions, experiences, perceptions, beliefs and events. The mind-field reservoir is the single source of truth for perception debt.
Think of it as a memory database - but mind you, it is not a passive repository. This memory bank has daemon processes that run in the background all the time to awaken memories from time to time.
The reservoir and the manager, work together to guide the supervisor towards a thought, feeling and action.
Now, in this architecture, there is another entity, which takes objective decisions. It is neither biased by the senses nor by memories. It holds the power to decide responses based on what each moment demands. This is the Leader.
The Leader holds the highest power and can guide any component he desires, directly. However, the Leader comes in, only when invited. Almost, 99.9% of the time, the manager assumes that it is doing well enough and doesn’t need the leader.
Think of the Mind-Body architecture as an MVC Architecture (Model-View-Controller Architecture) where the View is the Supervisor, Model is the Memory DB + Manager and the Controller should be the Leader. However, the Model is so tightly coupled with the View that the power of the controller is lost.
Are you able to relate to this architecture in how you perceive in your day to day life ?