OUR FIVE ILLUSORY SHEATHS

Kosha meaning Sheath and Maya meaning illusion or illusory.

In brief, these are:

1. Annamaya Kosha – The Tangible Gross Physical Body made of the five elements

2. Pranamaya Kosha – The subtle Energy / Pranic / Qi / Bio-electrical body that gives us life

3. Manomaya Kosha – The even subtler Mind or mental body, which can be further categorised into its four parts, Manas, Chitta, Ahamkara and Buddhi.

4. Vijnanamaya Kosha – The Wisdom Body, Intellect, Body of Knowing or higher self

5. Anandamaya Kosha – The Bliss body or Causal body, ur inner boundless presence and eternal inner quietude, found in our deep sleep state, our timeless and formless nature, still subtly bound with the veil of avidya, forgetfulness, not knowing. 

These are five different yet interwoven dimensions that make up our being. This complex human form creates a sort of package or bondage of energy, matter and consciousness. Yogic practices seek to dissect it out and disentangle ones consciousness from identification with these limiting illusory constructs, Maya. This is done through discriminating practices of Jnana, enquiry in Meditation.

This teaching of the Koshas from yoga is one of the most complete and objective models of ourselves as multi-dimensional beings, that can help us clarify and objectify our experience of what we believe to be ‘real’ and transcend our identification from it, which would otherwise lead to suffering. 

Within this ‘nature’, we call ‘me’, nothing more than a compilation of playful worldly elements at the gross and subtle level, there is an eternal boundless consciousness that can subjectively experience this phenomena at every turn of the atom. Yoga is the union of Jivatma with Paramatma, our Individual soul with the Universal soul.

Annamaya Kosha, the body made of food. Is the substance of our physical body, derived from the five elements, earth, water, fire, air, ether that come from the earth. Our skin, bones, fascia, joints, muscles, organs, blood and bodily fluids. It is the part of ourselves that is made up of everything we have eaten through the umbilical cord, through our mothers milk and everything you have put into your mouth until this day. Our body is recycled completely every seven years. Your physical body will reflect your diet, what and how much you eat. According to this, your body will take on the qualities of the food you eat. Our bodies can be categorised according to the Doshas, different combinations of the elements that give different qualities and characteristics of our function. The food we eat can either create imbalance in our Doshas or help to create better balance and function.

For spiritual practice, the most conducive diet we can take is fresh, vegetarian, whole, organic, free from toxins, balanced in variety, full of the essential nutrients and not in excess. This Pure or ‘Sattvic’ nature of food will create a body that is light, balanced, at ease and clear, a body that will be ripe for insight and realisation through yoga meditation.

Likewise the activity with which we utilise our body, governs how the body develops and the qualities, capabilities and functions it takes on. The condition of our bones, fascia, muscle, joints, cardiac, respiratory, digestive, endocrine, reproductive, immune and nervous system, adjust accordingly in a real time responsive way to external stressors and stimuli. 

If we stop performing a certain function such as weight bearing, very soon our bones will thin and our muscles shrink. If we take on the habit of running, our legs will grow strong and perhaps a bit tight in the hamstrings. If we take on boxing, our body might mould into a more aggressive posture with hunched shoulders and rounded spine and excessive tension in the front body. 

In yoga practice, we become more soft, more subtle and flexible, more free and connected in our bodies. For that reason, yoga asana was designed to remove the impurities and bring balance to the physical body.  

Pranamaya Kosha is the subtle layer of energy, Qi, Ki, Prana or Bio-electro-magnetic field that penetrates and runs through the gross physical body. See it as just the electricity of our being. It moves our body at will and governs our unconscious bodily processes, such as our heart beat, digestion, elimination, nervous system function and breathing. It also drives our mind and emotions, responses and organs of action. 

A dead body is a body without Pranamaya Kosha, so we can infer that the pranamaya Kosha is ‘current’, the layer of ‘aliveness’ and ‘activity’ of the body, mind, emotions and intellect. Anything that is in motion is governed by Prana, and how things move and behave is an indication of what is happening in our vital life force energy.

Our Sensory experience

The body is a magnificent ocean of experience. We are filled with sensory receptors that are constantly indicating certain sensations and experiential phenomena.

Our external senses include sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Each external sense can be further detailed. 

Our senses are always energetically reaching out for pleasurable experiences and rejecting unpleasant experiences as a means of survival and evolution.

When we realise this dualistic mechanism of restlessness within the like and dislike phenomenon which leads to desire and aversion, as a cause of our suffering, slowly, we learn to draw our attention and energy away from the sense organs and direct it according to our own conscious will. This process pratyahara happens spontaneously and intuitively through pranayama practice, control of the vital life force energy.

To be driven by the senses is to always be in existential survival mode. There is never a moment of pause or centeredness if we live according to the body desire and senses. 

Our internal sensations expand on the touch spectrum and can include light touch, pressure or compression, hot, cold, proprioception, stretch or torsion, fullness, emptiness, lightness, heaviness, nausea, dizziness, balance, unbalanced, pleasantness, unpleasantness and the myriad of pain sensations including sharp pains, burning, aching, stiffness, stabbing, throbbing, gnawing. 

Whilst it’s important not to be attached or identified with internal sensation, we must also tend to our inner body experience and see that the body is in a state of balance and ease. We cannot reject, suppress or deny our inner felt sense and feeling, as contractures, blockages, disease, ill health or discomfort felt in the body will be a great hindrance to the practice of yoga, meditation and self realisation. 

Somatic bodywork

We are not our sensations and feelings but we must ensure that they are tended to and that the body is at ease. Even Buddha came to this conclusion after a long period of excessive renunciation of body comfort and needs such as food and water. He came to the brink of death through emaciation, only to realise that it wasn’t conducive to Self realisation. After this he taught the middle path, a way between extreme asceticism and sense indulgence.

Today, Somatic awareness and healing therapies are helping many to release stored tensions and trauma in the body through a deeply sensed awareness of one’s Somatic body, the felt sensory phenomena of our self. 

Awareness alone through tracking our sensations is enough to unravel the energetic mental emotional bundles bound in the body on the gross and subtle level and help the nervous system come back to a healthy balance.

Changes in the quality and characteristic of the breath is the easiest way to read our pranic body. 

When our attention moves out through the senses, we can say that prana is going out from the body. If we draw our attention back in and focus on our breath, Prana retracts from the senses and moves in towards the breath and body, focussing there. 

If we stay with the breath and notice it is fast and rapid, often the attention alone given to the breath is enough to relax the breath and drop it into the belly, switching our autonomic state from sympathetic (fight or flight) to parasympathetic (rest and digest) and causing a descent and grounding of energy. 

Our emotions and feelings strongly reflect the way that energy is moving through the body. In TCM, different meridians are connected to certain organs that generate different emotions in the body. With enough attention and skill, pranamaya kosha actually becomes perceptible to us through as the subtle felt changes in our breath, feelings, emotions, mental and physiological state. We start to read our self not as a solid static being, but as energy characteristics in motion. When we begin to connect deeply the subtle flow of energy within us, we discover the way to manage and direct it. The direct way is through feeling, not thinking.

It is actually surprisingly easy to direct the energy body once we feel how to. For example the idea of ‘grounding and earthing’ is simply to bring our attention to the ground and its qualities, which brings our energy there in the feeling of the earth’s stability,We sink the prana down from the chaos of our mind to the steadiness of the earth.

When we focus on a point of the breath, we retain prana inward and concentrate it on a point, not letting it leave through the senses. 

If we focus at the root of the nose with attention to both nostrils, prana is brought into balance in both hemispheres of the brain and the Ida-Pingala principle within us is balanced allowing Sushumna, the central channel to open and a subtler unbound awareness to awaken.

We can bring prana into our palms by simply meditating on our palms. You will feel them warming up, maybe even pulsating and becoming red as blood flow opens out into the palms. 

In Hatha Yoga, we use many prescribed pranayama practices to purify and gain the ability to direct and channel our pranic body such as Nadi shodhana, Bastrika or Sitali.

It’s a fascinating layer of ourselves that the yogi and well discerning come to know, yet we must realise that we are not the subtle life force and not to get overly entangled or attached to it. 

Pranamaya kosha is an objective experience for us. Ever changing, non self nature. We should bring balance, harmony and control to our vital life force so that we can go beyond it. 

Manomaya Kosha

Our mind sheath consists of four parts:

Manas

The lower mind is the conscious sensory processor connected to all the sense organs and organs of action in relation to the external world in our waking state. It rests in sleep and when we wake, manas is booted up and starts to interact with our senses. 

If we are overly identified with Manas, we are driven by the senses, our tongue always chasing food, our skin chasing comfort, our eyes chasing attractive mates and places, our nose chasing pleasant smells, our ears wanting to hear pleasant words and sounds. Often we can get overly hung up on your sense desires, causing great attachment and suffering within. 

Training this aspect of mind involves some degree of pratyahara and centering of consciousness and likewise awareness and control of one’s actions through the practice of the Yamas. We can practice keeping our senses under control through firm  sankalpa, making a strong determination to practice fasting or non violent communication for a period of time. This motivation will direct our awareness more carefully upon the subtle workings of the senses and allow us to become conscious of its sticky processes. 

Chitta

The subconscious storehouse or vast unbound space akash where memory, latent impressions, in the form of vrittis and samskaras form and reside. All of our thoughts and beliefs, painful and pleasant memories sit here. All of our stories and emotional patterning. 

We can become aware of chitta by dream watching; this is the subconscious at play. Dreaming is happening all the time, even in the waking state, as daydreams and fantasy. Every sensory input immediately triggers an outpouring of chitta, labelling every experience and attaching meaning and belief to it, as if we are seeing the world through psychedelic glasses, only we are not aware of the background play that forms the complete experience. 

Overbearing samskaras can trigger a full trauma response in us at inanimate objects such as a street light casting a shadow on the ground. Our chitta leaps in fear of being mugged in the street from an old memory that left us shaken, only to realise, it was just a shadow, literally and subtly.

In Yoga Nidra, the rotation of consciousness through mental objects is an effective practice to bring one’s awareness to the mind space and what is stored there is a conscious and detached manner, recognising that this is simply latent mental formation arising and allowing us to subdue our identification with it.

Ahamkara

ego, I-maker, individuator, takes every experience and sugar coats it in a feeling of I’ness alone. It turns car into ‘my car’, ice cream and desire into ‘i want icecream’, past impressions in Chitta into ‘my life’. It grabs every experience and makes it a part of its super ego construct, giving itself name, form and meaning. We need an ego to function, to survive or else we would not have a sense to care for ourselves. A good practice to observe this aspect of mind is through Self enquiry, ‘Who am I?’ A simple enquiry posed throughout the day can spotlight the play of the I-ness and soften excessive attachment to it. We can also practise devotion, service and self surrender to align our ego’s sense of purpose to a greater cause. 

Buddhi

The higher mind, intellect or intelligence, the cognisance that receives input from manas and has the capacity to judge, analyse, know, discriminate and decide upon appropriate action. Buddhi is the aspect of mind that we can train through Vipassana, insight meditation. Seeing things as they are, with even mind in equanimity and non attachment. We can sharpen Buddhi, our discriminating and knowing capacity, so that we witness things as they are, without the veil of likes dislikes or past impressions. 

As we deepen our meditation, we see that Buddhi itself is the cause for our misplaced division from the universe, seeing from a stance of separation instead of the whole.

Through sincere self observation, in mindfulness and meditation, we can know the interplay of our mind instrument and begin to give birth to a presence, witness consciousness, that exists beyond this mental fluctuation.  

Vijnanamaya Kosha

The intellect sheath is our wisdom body or our body of knowing from direct experience. We can say it is the seat of our higher intuition, the sum total of all our past life experiences and verdict through the operations of buddhi. 

The sharper the Buddhi, able to witness from a higher clearer perspective, the more complete the body of  wisdom that forms our higher self. If buddhi is weak, clouded or overpowered by manas and chitta, our Vijnamaya Kosha will be misguided, incomplete with gaps of knowledge. 

It can mean the difference between the child that intuitive knows that it is unkind to bully, compared to another that likes to gossip and stir. 

This higher aspect of our self cannot be nurtured through reading and discussion. The pieces of this puzzle are put together through lifetimes of living through our karmas and experiencing the results of our thoughts, choices and actions. 

Kindness eventually comes, not because we are told to be kind in society, but because we cannot conceivably cause harm to another due to an intuitive knowing of the experience in our self and other. 

Anandamaya Kosha

The subtlest layer of all is our bliss body. This is the causal body, the formless timeless aspect of self that can be experienced as the state of deep sleep. Behind all the operating processes of body, energy, mind, intellect there is a blank, a background emptiness, a void, a beyond silence, a sense of the absolute, where time and space does not exist. 

It has no memory, when we wake from deep sleep, we cannot recall it. Sometimes we awaken after eight hours in what feels like the blink of an eye. This aspect of our being is a direct reflection of the absolute universal Being. 

When we align with this aspect of our self in controlled or spontaneous states of samadhi, we can easily attach to the wholesome pleasant qualities that arise… a sense of deep peace, inner quietude, contentment, reassurance, faith, joy. 

A tiny taste of it and we cannot forget such an experience of bliss. We begin to long for it and attach to it, to try to cognise it, pushing it further from our grasp. 

We have to remember that underlying the trials and tribulations of our mind is emptiness itself. It cannot be lost or found as it is ever present. We cannot find it with the vehicle of the mind and intellect as that is the creator of the separation in the first place.

Bhakti and meditation on the absolute, on God, on Brahman is the most steadfast way to understand this sheath as the underlay of our being, relinquish attachment from it also and instead utilise it to bridge the gap to truth. 

I love Swami Sivananda’s take on the Koshas.

https://www.sivanandaonline.org//?cmd=displaysection&section_id=775