Default Mode

Show a bone to a dog and watch what happens. Something deep in its operating system just fires up and it moves toward the bone, same with ants and sugar or moths and light. They have a default mode for this, programmed so deep they cannot help but follow them.

Humans aren’t that different, we just have more layers of defaults and most of us don’t even know they’re running in the background. Some parts are physical like fear, hunger, pleasure, and others are psychological formed by memory and experience.

Beneath all that are deeper patterns that ancient teachers called samskara, tendencies stored inside us from past actions and thoughts.

You get cut off in traffic and anger rises before you’ve decided to be angry, someone criticizes your work and defensiveness kicks in automatically, you reach for your phone when bored and open the same apps in the same order “without thinking”. These aren’t really conscious choices but defaults executing themselves unconsciously.

In yogic psychology, there’s this concept called the samskara-vritti cycle where samskaras are deep tendencies and vrittis are the thoughts that bubble up from them. The cycle works like buried tendencies rising from unknown depths, surfacing as thoughts, getting expressed through speech or action, then sinking back down to reinforce the original tendency even stronger. It keeps rotating continuously and building the same tendencies deeper with each cycle.

But there’s this tiny window that exists between the tendency starting to rise and the thought fully forming at the surface of your mind. In that moment, before you’ve invested psychic energy into it, there’s a split second where you can actually choose whether to allow this thought or redirect it somewhere else.

Advanced yogis spend years developing the ability to catch these bubbles rising from deep inside before they reach the surface and become fully formed thoughts. This takes lots of dedicated practice in meditation. For most people, this window is invisible because the bubbles rise too fast.

If you catch them enough times at the seed stage, the samskara itself starts to change. The tendency that used to bubble up automatically becomes weaker while new patterns you’ve been choosing start to strengthen. This is what true transformation looks like as your defaults slowly get rewritten not by forcing different behavior at the surface but by catching things at that barely noticeable point where they first emerge.

The samskara-vritti cycle comes from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Samskaras are often understood as tendencies carried across lifetimes, though the mechanism works whether you accept that framework or simply view them as deeply conditioned patterns formed in this life.