What is a vritti?

The word vritti comes from the Sanskrit root vrit, “to turn, to revolve, to whirl.” A vritti is a whirl or modification of the mind-stuff (chitta) — a ripple, a wave, a thought-eddy. The classic image is a still lake: when its surface is calm you can see clear to the bottom, but when it is churned with ripples the reflection is broken and the depths are hidden. The Self shines at the bottom of the lake of the mind; the vrittis are the ripples that hide it. Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath calls them vividly the “random whirlpool vibrations of thought.”

The five kinds of vritti

We have thousands of thoughts a day, yet Patanjali (Sutra 1.6) says they all fall into just five kinds — which makes them far easier to recognise and calm:

• Pramana — right knowledge: what is correctly known through direct perception, valid inference, or trustworthy testimony.
• Viparyaya — wrong knowledge: misperception, seeing a thing as other than it is (the rope mistaken for a snake).
• Vikalpa — imagination or verbal delusion: a notion built from words alone, with no real object behind it.
• Nidra — sleep: the mental state resting on the absence of waking content (even dreamless sleep is a vritti).
• Smriti — memory: the retention and recall of past experience.

Coloured and uncoloured (klishta & aklishta)

Patanjali (Sutra 1.5) adds that every vritti is of two shades: klishta (afflicted, “coloured”) or aklishta (unafflicted, “uncoloured”). Klishta shares its root with klesha, the five afflictions — ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and the fear of death — so a klishta vritti is one stained by these and tending toward more suffering. An aklishta vritti is clear and neutral, even helpful, leading toward freedom rather than bondage. The same thought (a memory, say) can be either, depending on the colour it carries.

Stilling the vrittis

How are the whirlpools calmed? Patanjali names two wings (Sutra 1.12): abhyasa (steady practice) and vairagya (non-attachment). In practice, Gurunath teaches, you first gather the scattered thoughts and comb them into a single thought — the paradox being that the more the mind is emptied of stray thoughts, the more “full” it becomes of that one (see mindfulness, soulfulness and divine consciousness). The deeper transformation of these thought-forms is described in How a Yogi Transforms the Mind. As the vrittis subside, the lake grows still — and the Seer rests in its own nature: this is samadhi, reached through the inner discipline of samyama and steadied by the breath of Kriya Yoga.