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THE HOLY TRINITY.
The mana, chitta, buddhi and ahamkara of the Indian philosophy, for which it is not always easy to find suitable equivalents in different tongues, are the four different aspects of the mental outfit,' mana (the same as manas) being the point of the current of life's tendencies, i.e., attention, chitta the bed of the mental stream, so to speak, buddhi, the faculty of reflection, the same as is termed intellect, and ahamkára, the sense of "I-ness," that is to say, the clerk in charge of the central exchange.' The whole of this current is full of memory records preserved in the form of living, that is, active tendencies, called samskâras (impressions) in Sanskrit. Now, because we cannot have even an impression that is immaterial, the samskâras must have some sort of a material basis, that is to say, they must be composed of some kind of fine matter, though, as observed before, they do not exist as photos in an album, but in a fluid form in the current of life, and have a tendency to become fixed and solidified by reflection.
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As regards their formation, it is necessary to go back to perception. In mindless beings, whose consciousness is too much vitiated by the influence of matter, perception never rises to the dignity of cognition, and is confined to a feeling of sensations to which response is made in an automatic way. But the case with those who are endowed with a central mental equipment is very different. In their case, we have first of all a vague detail-less sense of awareness. This is called darsana (pure excitation or sensing) and is followed, if the soul so wishes, by avagraha, which means the singling out of an object with reference to its class
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