After all, everything we call heart takes place in this feeling and emotion center of the subtle body.

Doubt (saṁśaya) or indecision (vikalpa) resides in manas. Therefore, a person flies in all directions in life. Incoming stimuli are received in manas and outgoing action is set in motion by manas (emotion).

Manas presents the still unclear input to the intellect, buddhi. The intellect judges it on the basis of the conditioning and decides (saṅkalpa) what to do. This output is determined by your conditioning (saṁskāra), the set of complexes over many lifetimes.

The intellect (buddhi) is the center of interpretation of what comes in and decision of what goes out. If the mind (manas) is dominant, one will lead an uncertain life. With vedānta dominant and clear in the intellect, it is often clearer how to respond to the world. Because the intellect reflects the infinitely subtle consciousness better in its refinement than manas, buddhi is dominant over manas in a qualified person. This is because buddhi is the seat of crucial knowledge.

The sum total of all spirits is sometimes called hiraṇyagarbha. Manas is a special manifestation of jñāna-śakti, the power to know, and icchā-śaktiḥ, the power to desire. It consists of all kinds of vṛtti’s, which are constantly changing. So there is always a stroboscopic switch between vikalpas, doubts, options, and alternatives, until there is a saṅkalpa, decisiveness, efficiency of the intellect.

The increase and decrease of vikalpas can easily result in circles of bad feeling – bad thoughts. This is because a negative feeling gives a negative thought, and a negative thought gives a negative feeling. The well-known downward spiral. The invitation here is to see things neutrally in themselves and to do self-examination of my basic self-image. Do I think uplifting or do I think in dynamics of self-rejection. A negative feeling about myself is ignorance. I should immediately investigate what particular thought in me makes me feel so bad. I should not look for this in the outside world, which is also just neutral.

Through the identification with the body and the intervention of the sense of self (ego, ahaṅkāra) that goes with it, manas divides everything that is presented into “I,” “mine,” and “not I,” “not mine,” attributing to the self qualities that it does not have.

For a life in knowledge, an important condition is that buddhi masters manas and not the other way around.