Manas: In defense of the inner self

Arindam Chakrabarti

"tan me manah siva- saIikalpam astu"
(may my manas have good resolves!)
Sukla Yajurveda, Ch 14

Whenever we think of an action performed by an embodied being, the very grammar of our thinking requires that we specify: who does it, to what, and with which instrument? Thus the agent of a particular act of cutting could be a tailor, its direct object-- a piece of cloth, and the tool-- a pair of scissors. The agent of dancing is the dancer, the object is the particular piece she renders, and the instrument- the movable limbs of her own body. The act of seeing or hearing, thus requires, besides the self or person who sees or hears and the colors or sounds seen or heard, a visual or auditory organ, distinct from both the seer and the seen, from both the hearer and the heard. This, in brief, could be the conceptual root of the idea of a sense-organ or indriya, a central idea of Indian psychology, very much in need of clarification from the modern perspectives.

Just one cautionary note here. The above: "All actions require an instrument; perceiving is an action; hence it requires an instrumental organ" - is not exactly the argument for the existence of sense organs (in Indian philoso­phy), because an awareness or an episode of object-directed consciousness is not regarded as an action in the strict sense (especially by Nyaya psychologists). Just because we have verbs like perceives ears an tastes, It does not follow that sensing or knowing by sensing is doing something, especially because in perceptions, unlike in thinking or inferring or imagining, we are supposed to be relatively passive rather than active, and knowledge is taken to be a special quality of the soul rather than an action or motion. So, what serves the purpose of a "tool" in a cognitive situation can be more neutrally described as a "faculty" or "means". In the Upanishadic fable of the competition among the senses, what the body lacked when, for example, the visual sense organ left it for a year, was not the self, consciousness or exposure to colors, but the faculty of seeing. And that is the sense organ. With this initial warning, we shall keep using the terminology of “cognitive act” somewhat loosely with respect to perceptions of different kinds. By “act” we don't mean some willful performance involving movement (spandiitmakam karma) but only an effect happening in the person.

Just like tearing and touching, talking and tasting, even thinking, remembering, imagining, desiring, looking within oneself to realize that one is pleased or sorry, attending to the fact that one is feeling, trusting or doubting something, also seem to be cognitive mental acts. They also require an inner instrument or faculty, besides the thinker, or the agent of desire, attention, or introspection. This job cannot be done by the outer senses. Surely, even the grossest materialist will not insist that we can find out with our eyes that we are pleased, or that we can figure out by touching that we are willing or imagining things. So we need an internal sense organ. This is what is called "manas" or "antahkarana" in Indian psychologies. From vernaculars we have picked up the habit of translating this Sanskrit word as "Mind" and at the same time we have continued to use the same word “mind” in phrases like "the mind-body problem,” translating the English word" “psychology” as "Manas-tattvam" or "Mano-vijnana". But, then we have to face the rather inexplicable fact that there is no mention of the manas ("mind"??) in classical or modern Western Science or Philosophy of the Mind, that in the West, they have managed to construct manas-tattvam without the manas!!

This is a translational blunder. Right from Aristotle's De Anima, all the way to William James' Principles of Psychology, what the Western psychologists wanted to study was the soul or the whole human person's inner or conscious life (after Freud the unconscious inner life was added to the agenda and after more recent advances in neuroscience, the physiological basis of this inner life also came within their purview). Never was psychology meant to be, "Mano- vijnana" or the science of the internal sense organ. When Descartes proved that the Mind that thinks is distinct from and more indubitable than the body that is extended, he was referring to the: “atman” the self, not to the manas.

Sometimes the West's non-recognition of the inner sense organ is reported in this way: Western psychology equates the self with the mind, the "atman" with the “manas”. But this is also a misrepresentation. How can they equate the two unless they have some idea of both!! Till 19th century they had some counterpart of the “atman”, now most psychologists and philosophers of mind do not even believe in that. But except for Immanuel Kant, as far as I know, no prominent Western psychologist or philosopher developed any theory of the "manas" or internal sense at all, so even the question of making the self do the work of the internal sense-organ, or the question of repudiating their distinction never arose.

What I argue in this paper is that we must bring the manas to the focus of psychology. We must examine the complex idea of "manas" or internal sense-organ from the classical Indian sources seriously, critically evaluate the arguments given for the postulation of such an intermediary between the body and the self, between the self and the external sense-organs, and then, enrich contemporary mainstream psychology with this central idea of ancient Indian psychology. Unless, of course, the traditional arguments for the existence of an inner sense are found to be unpersuasive and we have reasons to reject the theory of an inner organ or a special faculty of attention altogether. For, after all, we should not multiply entities beyond necessity. Since the Indian traditional philosophers are always keen on the law of ontological parsimony (laghava yukti), if we can show that this additional imperceptible cause of all conscious perception is redundant, then they would be the happiest to shed this metaphysical burden.

Compared to the orthodox (Samkhya, Vedanta, Vaisesika type) metaphysic of the mind, the early Buddhist meditational psychology has a very different understanding of the sense-organs as well as of the manas. In the list of 12 "indriya-s" the manas occurs side by side with separate organs for pleasure, for depression (daurmanasyendriya), for memory etc- a list which would look horribly guilty of cross-division according to the Nyaya Vaisesika scheme! The distinctions between citta and caitasika dharmas, and the role of a reflective "mano-vijnana" are all fascinating research-topics for any serious engagement with Indian Psychology. Though, as I shall show at the very last section, even the Vedic "astika" schools study the manas with a view to liberation, the Abhidhrama psychology is much more closely a phenomenology of meditational practice and its taxonomies are also openly ethically value-loaded. Thus one type of ego-erecting mental function is called: "The sick (klista) mano-vijnana”! In this paper I have not discussed the Buddhist theory of manas at all.

Just among the orthodox schools, at least six or seven different arguments have been given in the Sanskrit Philosophical texts for the existence of an inner sense organ. Let me state them briefly in what I consider their order of importance.

First: The argument from absent-mindedness

It is empirically well established that sometimes normal subjects whose eyes and ears are wide open cannot see or hear what is right in front of them. If the well-functioning external sense organs and their proximity or exposure to their appropriate objects were sufficient conditions for sensory perception, then these cases would be inexplicable. Hence, there must be an additional faculty or organ, due to the absence or non-operation of which externally stimulated sense­ organs also fail to register their given objects. And this additional sense is the manas. If the manas is disconnected from the appropriate sense organ where the relevant stimulus strikes, being caught up somewhere else, then even things presented to open healthy eyes or ears are not registered.

This argument occurs for the first time clearly in Brhadaranayaka Upanishad (I. 5. 3) where it is immediately followed by a fascinating detail observation: When a man is touched on his back by another person, without looking back, the first man is able to tell whether it is a touch of a hand or a touch of a knee. The tactile organ itself does not make those distinctions, since as sheer touch they might feel qualitatively pretty similar. After all, the concept of a knee or the concept of a hand are far richer than merely cutaneous concepts, they require the articulate recognition of different functionally distinguished body parts conceived in a partly rust-person fashion. It is the manas which, at an imperceptible, but now perhaps measurable speed, reflects upon and discriminates between the tactile sensations in terms of remembered and conceptualized body-schema of other people. The direct relevance of this keen observation to the proof of the existence of manas may be unclear. But it surely reminds us of the work of Merleau Ponty and more recently Mark Johnson (author of The Body in the Mind) who talk about our processing external sensory data through an internalized body schema.

Sankara’s commentary here is very succinct: "If the discriminator inner sense-organ were not there, then how could skin (the tactile sense) alone make such discriminations? That which is the cause of knowledge of distinctions is the inner sense" (yadi viveka-krn mano nama masti, tarhi tvan matrena kuto viveka­ pratipattih syat ? yat tad viveka-pratipatti karanam  tan manah)

Second: The argument from necessary non-simultaneity of all cognitions

Sensory data as well as thoughts and acts of imagination come to us necessarily in a successive manner, one after another. This rule of successiveness of all mental representations, shared by Nyaya and Kant, has almost the status of an apriori principle, for untrained introspection seems to claim feeling and perceiving and thinking many things simultaneously. But logically, unless two events are perceived at distinct moments of time, how are we ever going to tell them apart as two distinct events? Thus perception of succession is impossible without succession of perceptions. Now, take our hearing of a sentence uttered, even at a great speed. Unless we hear its constitutive phonemes one after another, it would all get jumbled up as one noise and we would not know where one word ends and another begins. The same is true, as has been shown by Kant, for our visual perception of an extended thing or a long line. Without a sequential perception of different parts of it, we would have no sense of its expanse or length. Now, as far as the visual or tactile sense organ is concerned, they could easily function together, and a whole range of objects (with colors, textures, sizes, shapes, and perhaps varying temperatures) are simultaneously available to our skin and our visual range. Why is it that we can only go through them only one at a time? What breaks up the process to a sequence, so to say? The explanation of this is provided by this additional instrument of focusing attention, the manas, a tiny pinpointed organ, which cannot hook up with more than one sense organ object at a time.

A counter-example is standardly produced to this basic rule of "non­simultaneity of awarenesses" (jnana - a-yaugapadyam). When one eats a long twisty fried pastry (dirgha-saskuli) one may feel that one experiences five sensations at once through the five senses: that it smells good, that it is cold to touch, that it is elongated in shape, that it tastes sharp and that it even makes a crisp sound as we munch on it! Vyoma Siva and Jayanta Bhatta takes care of this counter-example by the famous example of a needle going through a hundred petals of lotus. It may look as if the needle goes through all the petals at once. But of course, that is physically impossible. It has to go through them one after another. Thus quick succession of the attention-function of the manas switching on and off from one sensory datum to another creates the illusion of a manifold perceptual data all presented at a single time.

Kant spent a very crucial part of his "Transcendental Deduction of Categories" on the three steps of this process of synthesis, this running through and binding together. And he was also postulating inner sense, parallel to the outer sense, calling "Time" the given form of inner sense. But Kant would not draw the metaphysical conclusions drawn by the Nyaya phenomenologists from these undeniable facts of subjective synthesis of external data that goes on behind the curtain of our knowledge of "objects" rich with qualities accessible to multiple sense organs. What Nyaya philosophers deduce from this evidence is that there is a fast moving, constitutionally restless, atomic, unconscious, but immaterial substance, other than the external sense organ and equally able to control the functioning of all of them- that is, non-specific to any particular external sense, but a different one for each individual living conscious body. Not only is the co-operation of that substance needed for the occurrence of any cognition in a body, the very life of a conscious animal is nothing but this activated contact between the self and the internal organ, thanks to the accumulated karmic residues undergoing the process of natural maturation (vipacyamana karmasya sahita atmamanha samyogo jivanam iti vadanti­Nyayamanjari). The self in Nyaya is regarded as all-pervasive on systemic ontological grounds. Such an all-pervasive self enjoys and suffers experiences only in those regions of space where a particular manas, in touch with the tactile sense-organ spread nearly all over the inside and outside of a specific karmically earned body, keeps contact with this individual self.

Third: The argument from the perceptual character of our knowledge of our own hedonic states

Fourth: The argument from cross-modal comparison by a "common sense"

External sense organs cannot do the explanatory work done by the inner sense because each of them is limited to a specific kind of quality of physical objects. Eyes cannot smell perfumes, the tongue cannot taste sounds. But we make cross-modal comparisons through very short-term memory such as: "This sound is more interesting than that sight", " The freezing touch of this ice-cream is not as pleasant as its nice flavor" etc. It is on the basis of these quick cross modal comparison that a subject reflexively takes the decision as it were to switch attention that is, attach one's manas- to a particular sensory stimulus to the neglect of another of a totally different modality.

Obviously, this comparison cannot be done through either one of the mode specific external senses. The ears do not help us remember the colors, neither does the olfactory organ mediate our recall of the touch. So there has to be an over-arching non-specific instrument of such sensory comparison. That is the manas: it is aniyata-visayaka. It also helps us feel bodily sensations such as thirst and excitement which are not specific objects of any one of the five external sense organs.

Karl Potter's description of the function of manas is very accurate:

“It acts as a sort of secretary for the knowing self, passing on one sensation at a time so that the self will not be swamped with too many data at once... the time it takes the self to synthesize its awareness of an object from the data gathered by the senses is due to the time it takes for the internal sense-organ to get into and out of contact with each of the several organs”.

(Encyclopedia, Vol. n, p. 94)

In his De Anima (Book III, 425a-b) Aristotle argues against a common sixth sense. He first admits that there seem to be "common sensibles" such as motion, number, unity etc which are not specific to any particular mode of external sensation. We can count colors as well as sounds, we can even detect a smell to be moving. But the non-specific recognition of these common qualities can be easily explained by a co-operation of several senses, by one external sense, "incidentally" drawing our attention towards the quality accessible to an­other external sense, as in synaesthesia. The sight of sandalwood may evoke in us an olfactory perception of its fragrance. Even Nyaya has an account of such incidental non-ordinary contact between the sense of sight and a smell or taste.

We don't need to postulate a "common over-arching inner sense" for the sake of explaining this.

But how can the eyes alone, while making us aware that the wall is white, also make us aware that we are seeing that white wall? Surely our awareness of white does not cast an image on the retina as the white wall does! Here Aristotle gives a pretty smart argument, first anticipating the hypothesis of an inner sense­ organ and then rejecting it:

“Since it is through sense that we are aware that we are seeing (notice that he is talking about awareness of seeing or anuvyavasaya here, and not of seeing)... it must be either by sight that we are aware of seeing or by some sense other than sight. But the sense that gives us this new sensation must perceive both sight and its object, viz color: so that, either (1) there will be two senses both percipient of the same sensible object or, (2) the sense must be percipient of itself. Further, even if the sense, which perceives sight, were different from sight, we must fall into an infinite regress, or we must somewhere assume a sense, which is aware of itself. If so, we ought to do this in the first case". Thus he makes each sense organ self-perceiving, thereby dispensing with the need for a meta-sense-organ like the Indian manas.

The Nyaya Vaisesika psychologists are very much aware of the difficulty that if manas does the job of a meta-cognition or apperception of the seeing then it has to grasp both the visual awareness as well as the color that is the object of the visual awareness. But if the inner sense can "see" colors in this incidental fashion (through jnanalakshana) a link), why cant we say the reverse, that the outer senses can also perceive cognitive inner events such as seeings and hearings and that the visual sense-organ apperceives itself? But there is a subtle difficulty here in Aristotle's position, which is not there in the Nyaya position. Once we have given an account of a direct normal perception of a kind of sensible object or quality through its own appropriate sense organ, we can then complicate that story with another sense organ accessing it in an incidental or associative non-ordinary way. Thus once sandalwood is smelt through olfactory sense, later on even visually perhaps one could perceive its smell. But Aristotle refuses to give us any account of the direct, non-incidental perception of one's own cognitions, and expects the special senses to pick up their own cognitive episodes as they are picking up colors and sounds and smells. He himself feels uncomfortable in the very next paragraph about eyes seeing both colors as well as seeing of colors, but solves it by distinguishing two senses of "seeing", one of which applies even to perception of darkness where we have to be aware that we are not seeing anything. (According to Richard Sorabji, Aristotle does believe in a "common faculty" residing in the heart, and asserts this in his short work On Sleep).

The reason why Indian psychology can never admit the external senses to be self-revealing or introspective goes very deep into its Vedic roots: The Upanishads announce that the Self-born Creator had cut out the sensory holes in such a way that they only open out-ward, but cannot see the self inside or their own functioning. Hence, the doctrine that the sense organs are themselves imperceptible and only a manas can infer its own existence even the manas is not accessible directly to itself. The only self-luminous aesva-prakasa or svayam­jyotih entity is pure consciousness. Aristotle's infinite regress problem does not daunt the Nyaya epistemologist because there is no need for every act of perception to be self-aware. But there is a need for an explanation of our direct acquaintance with our own mental states, and Aristotle could not make eyes or ears or the tongue do the work of informing a thinker or a wisher that he is thinking or wishing.

Fifth: The argument from deep sleep

During deep sleep we breathe through our nostrils and keep our ears open and of course our skin touches a whole lot of things, yet we neither smell, nor hear nor feel anything. What is missing could not be the self or its occupation of the body, for we are not dead. So it must be a disconnection between another common cause of all sensation which, during such sleep, leaves all the sense­ organs and takes rest in a special place. The ancient Indian physiology gave it a name "puntat nagi" and it could be a part of the central nervous system where the manas remains in a standby off-line position.

Sixth: The argument from memory and imagination

Remembering and imagining are other mental events, which require an instrumental cause. Not only does the man who has now gone deaf remember sounds, he is sometimes able to imagine a hitherto unheard combination of notes. We must not forget that Beethoven composed music after going deaf. The hearing organ or faculty, which is absent in those cases, cannot explain such recall and imagination. So we need an inner sense to do the work. Even the somewhat strange list of "nine properties" of the manas, found in Mahabharata (Xll.255.9) mentions imagination:

“Holding attention, asking ‘why?’ to find the reason, recollection, error (reversing the order of things), imagination, forgiveness, the good, the bad, and quickness or speed- these are the nine qualities of the manas.”
(dhairyopapatti vyakti sca visargah kalpana ksama sad asad casuta caiva manaso nava vai gunah.)

When we read or listen to poetry, we have to understand such sentences as:

‘The mud taunted the potter “One day I shall knead you the way you are kneading me now”.

The resulting awareness is not classified as knowledge by testimony (sabda­bodha) or information gathered from words, but a make-believe awareness generated by the manas (aharya-manasa bodha), which can creatively put together mud and, taunting, otherwise thought to be incongruous. The Dvaita school of Vedanta goes to the extent of classifying memory as a kind of inner perception of the past by the internal sense organ!

Seventh: The argument from resolution, intention, and desire

Close to imagination is another fundamental job of the manas: resolution or intending: “samkalpa”. The verb for imagination “kalp” is present in “samkalpa” as well, because in order to intend to accomplish a project we have to first imagine it. The assignment of intent to the manas is at least as old as the Yajurveda. Till today, in the beginning of a Vedic ritual one has to make a resolve first: "This is the ritual I am going to perform", to prepare the body-mind of the performer for the entire sequence of actions that is to follow. The following mantra from the Yajurveda is called the "samkalpa-sukta"-- the hymn of resolution, because it tries to focus the internal organ of attention to the task at hand:

“That which goes up and far ahead for a person who is awake,
That which returns back to him when he is asleep,
That light of all lights, which travels very far,
May that manas of mine have this good resolve.

That which turns into wisdom, sentience, and steadfast attention,
That which is an inner immortal light in people
Without which no action is ever done
May that manas of mine have this good resolve”.

When the Upanishad gives the above mentioned argument from absent-mindedness, in that context, it also mentions the following processes: “Desire, resolution, doubt, trust, distrust, forbearanc, lack of forbearance, shame or modesty, wisdom, fear- all of these are nothing but manas"(B.U. 1.5.3). The language of the original is worth noticing here: "etat sarvam mana eva", as if these functions themselves constitute the manah. This functional concept of the inner organ seems to me to be more defensible in modern terms than the Nyaya concept of a fast moving atomic substance running around the body hooking up with one sense-organ at a time. Actually, the Samkhya-Yoga and Vedanta concepts of citta or antahkarana are concepts of a fluid substance capable of assuming the form of objects and also reversing its flow. As the Yoga-bhasya beautifully comments: “The river of citta flows both ways, it flows towards evil, it flows towards the good also.” The ancient commentary Yuktidlpika (YD) on Sarhkhya Karika develops the argument for the existence of manas simply on the basis of the function of "sarnkalpa"or motivating resolution which is after all the mother of desire: “samkalpa-prabhavan kaman”, the Bhagavad Gita reminds us. Infact YD simply identifies resolve with intention, desire, or thirst, and defines the manas as that which does this job. (This will not be approved by the Nyaya where desire is the property of the self, but in Samkhya the self is pure consciousness which cannot have desire or even knowledge of objects, all of that being done by evolutes of prakriti). Neither singly nor together can the external senses do the work of wishful resolution, since the outer senses can only grasp what is given to them at the present time,' whereas the resolve-making organ has to deal with the future and the past. Next month I intend to present the paper which I wrote last year. In making that resolve, the manas has to make both the past and the future its object. Because of this capacity to access the data of all the senses and also the past and the future, the manas has to be postulated as a special organ of intention. Even life-sustaining functions like breathing are generally attached to all sense organs, one may say, why cant they help the special senses to make motivating resolves? YD answers this objection by remarking that breathing etc cannot perform the intentional job of resolving because they simply happen in the body but do not take "objects" like a sense organ does. So we need the inner sense-organ. (Even breathing seems to become intentional when you put your manas to it by attending to it as in pranayama. But then it is actually the intention of the manas and the breathing is its object n. Since most of our resolutions involve both our inner and outer life (these being seamlessly continuous), the manas stands in between the so-called mind and the body, so much so that in Samkhya it is categorized as both a karmendriya and a jnanendriya, a motor as well as a sensory organ, an initiator as well as a receiver.

Let me conclude by pointing at an important eighth explanatory function of the concept of an inner sense. Just as, for fidgety distracted people like us, the manas is constitutionally vacillating, restless, and constantly getting attached to and desiring to get attached to this or that external sense-organ, escaping to a distracting stimulus when we are trying to focus on something “asamsayam mahabhao mano durnigraham calam” -- to try to "control" it seems as absurd as trying to restrain air, fora Yogin the manas itself IS an aid to detachment and control. Kanada the ancient author of Vaisesika Sutra defines liberation in this fashion:

“When the internal organ abides in the self but not in the senses, there results the absence of pleasure and pain, which is called Yoga. In the absence of adrsta which causes transmigration, there is the absence of contact between the internal organ with the self (which results in life), and also non-appearance of another body: this state is liberation (Potter: Encyclopedia II, p 217)”

This brings us to the fundamental spiritual underpinning of Indian psychology. Again, spirituality must not be taken as a denial of the life of the body. Indeed, the manbmaya kosa, the internal organ, along with the cognitive sense organs, is after all a very important body that we need to take care of in order to lead a flourishing spiritual life. The spiritual "use" of the theory of inner sense defies the Cartesian division between mind and body, since even the most elementary yogic postures require focusing of the inner sense on parts of the body and on the most spiritually significant bodily function of breathing!

Justas much of Western psychology is proudly applied in nature, being usable in industrial development, management, clinical practice, education etc., much of Indian psychology too is for the sake of application. But the goal of that application is not utmost exploitation of what is called human resources, as if human beings are like coalmines or oil fields to be harvested for material productivity. The goal is a healthy, unsuffering, ecologically and interpersonally harmonious life, ultimately ending in freedom from frustrating desires. For that purpose, the manas is first diagnosed as the cause of distraction, sick desires, doubt and error and then explored as a possible tool of focused attention which cures those pathological states. There must be such an internal tool of involvement as well as withdrawal, if ultimate tranquility and freedom of the self is possible. And the very restlessness and far-imagining nature of the manas shows that the human person seeks such a freedom in the fullness of God or in Omnipresent Self. Since liberation is possible, and concentration is a means to it, the first instrument of concentration, manas, must exist.

In this context the words of the Maitrayani Upanishad clearly bring out the value-orientation of most traditional Indian theories of the inner sense:

"Manas is of two kinds: pure and impure. The impure manas is filled with resolves to get what is desired. The pure manas has no desire. When, being made waveless without waning and distraction, the manas is well-fixed, then it ceases to be a manas - and that is the ultimate state to be in. The manas has to be held fast in the heart only as long as it is still there. This knowledge is moksa, all the rest is proliferation of theories and books. The manas that has washed away all its dirt with samadhi enjoys a bliss which cannot be described in words, only the inner organ can feel it (just as it is about to disappear). Just as water cannot be separated from water, fire cannot be seen apart in fire, sky cannot be distinguished from the sky, an inwardized citta vanishes from the sight of the self. It is the manas which is the cause of bondage as well as of liberation for human beings. A manas addicted to worldly objects makes for bondage and a manas that is objectless leads to liberation."