In my first post on Patanjali I talked about the way the mind "whirrs away... generating...froth." Patanjali classifies these movements of the mind into five separate and distinct types which he calls vrittis.
The first vritti or mental activity he identifies is True Knowledge. This is stuff we know and can rely on - things we see for ourselves, work out for ourselves or are told by a reliable source.
The second vritti is False Knowledge, things we believe but which do not have a reliable basis in reality. This could be the obviously (to us) false knowledge that the sun revolves around the earth, or the mistaken "knowledge" that someone we know definitely doesn't like us, when in fact they do; it's a spectrum.
Third up is Imagination or Prediction. This is where we use what we think we know (which may be true or false) to guess or fantasise about what might happen in the future. This is a sort of mirror image of the fifth vritti - memory. Memory is the playing back in our minds events which we have experienced in the past and we assume, because we were there when it happened, that our recollection is accurate. Hmm.
A curious thing about memory is that we are just as deeply if not more deeply attached to bad memories as we are to good. We are also probably more likely to embellish the bad than we are the good; we often remember things as worse than they actually were but less often as better. We do the same when it comes to imagination - we are strangely prone to imagining worst case scenarios and tormenting ourselves with the image of a disaster yet to come.
The fourth vritti, which I skipped over, is sleep. He calls it "unbeing" and leaves it there. Although we spend a third of our lives doing it, sleep is a closed book even to Patanjali.
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