There are five vrittis in chitta, as defined by Patanjali. The first is pramana, cognition, and cognition is always dependent on memory. If there is no memory, there is no cognition. However, this cognition is not happening right now through your senses, mind or logic. It is not the present cognition, but past. That is pramana.
A child who has put his hand in fire will have that memory even twenty years later when he sees fire: ‘In my childhood I burnt my hand.’ That is pramana. Now, if as a child you were about to put your hand in fire and your brother removed it, you will not have any memory of your hand burning in fire, maybe a vague memory of heat and singeing, but no memory of actual burning.
This becomes viparyaya, when you are not aware of the final outcome and you waffle around in the periphery. When you have no association or experience with the final outcome, then it becomes viparyaya: ‘I am not sure.’
The third vritti is vikalpa. You remember something of the past and say, ‘I could have handled that better’; you see the choice that you had before you and begin to curse yourself, ‘Why did I not do that?’ That is vikalpa. Nidra is the fourth vritti, stopping the flow of information coming to the conscious mind. There is a time when you just block the flow, for you need to remove yourself from the activity in the mind, from the stress and the anxiety.
Therefore you stop, relax and rest, to maintain the balance. The fifth vritti is smriti, which means memory. However, as a vritti the reference is not to long-term memory, as long-term memory has become part of your impressions. The short-term memories are smritis: ‘What did I have for breakfast yesterday?’ You do not remember what breakfast or lunch you had one week ago, but you remember what you had today or yesterday.
These short-term smritis have to be revived in order to enter into pratyahara. Thus, smriti as a vritti and as impressions contained in chitta are two different things. The impressions of chitta are carried forward, the smriti is of the moment. The latent impressions in the consciousness of chitta are not called smritis; they are called pratyaya, which means a seed of information.
You have hundreds of pratyayas in your mind, or hundreds of seeds of information. It is like the bytes in the computer; pratyayas are the kilobytes and megabytes in your mental computer. They fill up your hard disk and every week you have to spend time clearing it. The less pratyayas you have, the easier it is to access your files and documents.
The impressions in chitta are pratyaya, whereas impressions in manas and buddhi are smriti. That is the difference.
Ganga Darshan Vishwa Yogapeeth, 14 October 2016
From the book “Progressive Yoga Vidya Training, Satsangs 2016”, pg. 55-56, Sw. Niranjanananda Saraswati