Atma-buddhi-manas, is the result of the Purusha’s propinquity to Prakriti, the subject of the Samkhyan philosophy, the Self embodied in the highest sheaths, according to the Vedantic teaching.  In the one you have this Self and His sheaths, and in the other the Subject, a reflection in matter of Purusha.  Thus you can readily see that you are dealing with the same concepts but they are looked at from different standpoints.  We are nearer to the Vedanta than to the Samkhya, but if you know the principles you can put the statements of the two philosophies in their own niches and will not be confused.  Learn the principles and you can explain all the theories.  That is the value of the Theosophical teaching; it gives you the principles and leaves you to study the philosophies, and you study them with a torch in your hand instead of in the dark.

Now when we understand the nature of the spiritual man, or Triad, what do we find with regard to all the manifestations of consciousness?  That they are duads, Spirit-Matter everywhere, on every plane of our fivefold universe.  If you are a scientist, you will call it spiritualised Matter; if you are a metaphysician you will call it materialised Spirit.  Either phrase is equally true, so long as you remember that both are always present in every manifestation, that what you see is not the play of matter alone, but the play of Spirit-Matter, inseparable through the period of manifestation.  Then, when you come, in reading an ancient book, to the statement “mind is material,” you will not be confused; you will know that the writer is only speaking on the Samkhyan line, which speaks of Matter everywhere but always implies that the Spirit is looking on, and that this presence makes the work of Matter possible.  You will not, when reading the constant statement in Indian philosophies that “mind is material,” confuse this with the opposite view of the materialist which says that “mind is the product of matter”—­a very different thing.  Although the Samkhyan may use materialistic terms, he always posits the vivifying influence of Spirit, while the materialist makes Spirit the product of Matter.  Really a gulf divides them, although the language they use may often be the same.

Mind

“Yoga is the inhibition of the functions of the mind,” says Patanjali.  The functions of the mind must be suppressed, and in order that we may be able to follow out really what this means, we must go more closely into what the Indian philosopher means by the word “mind”.

Mind, in the wide sense of the term, has three great properties or qualities:  cognition, desire or will, activity.  Now Yoga is not immediately concerned with all these three, but only with one, cognition, the Samkhyan subject.  But you cannot separate cognition, as we have seen, completely from the others, because consciousness is a unit, and although we are only concerned with that part of consciousness which