Found this excellent information on yogic views of the mind, thanks to browsing through the comments on an old post of mine.

Vritti activity is the mind’s attempt at making sense of the experiences it encounters. It impacts our mental landscape by largely determining our perceptions of who we are and the world we live in.

Let’s examine how vrittis are born and the way they develop… The mind takes a solitary thought (pratyaya) and begins a tornado-like dance, rapidly weaving together webs of thoughts in a frenetic search for other related thoughts. Through a process of comparing, contrasting and categorizing, individual thoughts cease their existence as isolated bits of information and become part of a complex web of ideas, self-constructed conceptions of “reality” that build self-identity and our understanding of the world.

What this means is that our experience of life is largely determined by the nature of the webs we have woven. In a real sense, vritti activity is the practice of constructing and deducing concepts of reality from mental impressions.

Vritti activity acts like filters that can distort perception, selectively admitting and rejecting information. Our understanding of the world is limited and skewed by the biases and limitations that are built into and result from vritti activity. In other words, we project our conception of reality onto the screen that is Reality. When vritti activity ceases, when all thought processes are stilled, then every filter is removed from our vision and we perceive Reality in its entirety. In perhaps the most colossal “aha” moment a human being can have, we realize that we have been staring into the eyes and heart of Truth–almost assaulted by omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence all along–but have been only allowing bits and pieces of it into our minds.

Very interesting stuff and it’s always useful to have another cultural context from which to look at these things.