Digimayakosha:
A Yogic Inquiry into Digital Identity
"Humanity is evolving towards a certain destiny. We are all taking part in that evolution. Organs come into being as a result of the need for specific functions. In this age of material culture transcending time and space, new organs are arising to meet that demand." —Idries Shah, The Sufis[1]
Our future may well depend on this process of evolution, but what is becoming more apparent—subtly at first, then unmistakably—is that the wider ecological and systemic structures of our world are now entangled in that same need. If, as Shah proposes, humanity is generating new subtle organs in response to emergent pressures, then the cultivation of such faculties demands neither doctrine nor device, but attention. Not merely to what we perceive, but to the conditions shaping our perception: to the architectures of mediation, to the rhythms of interface, to the way meaning arrives—and disappears—in the digital field.
What we are contending with is not simply the arrival of a new toolset, but the slow formation of an ontological layer—a sheath—woven not from matter but from light, code, and collective recursion. For some, this appears as a neutral platform. For others, it is the new cathedral and confessional, the marketplace and the dreamscape, layered into one interface.
To speak of this layer requires naming it. Let us call it the Digimayakosha.
The Koshas and Their Extension
The traditional Pancha Maya Koshas describe the layered nature of embodied consciousness. These sheaths—anna (food), prana (energy), manas (mind), vijnana (wisdom), and ananda (bliss)—are not metaphors, but subtle topologies of the self as known in the yogic tradition.[2] Each reflects a mode of experience, a medium through which awareness expresses itself.
Annamaya Kosha – the food body. Dense, finite, mineral. The terrain of asana, of gravity, of breath-as-weight.
Pranamaya Kosha – the body of breath and life-force. It animates, circulates, orchestrates the vital impulse. Here, prana becomes a medium of tuning, of coherence.
Manomaya Kosha – the sensory-mind sheath. The domain of thought, memory, emotion, sense-perception. The habitual theatre of the 'self' we mistake for identity.
Vijnanamaya Kosha – the wisdom layer. This is the discriminative intellect, but also the interior witness: not the knower, but that which recognises knowing.
Anandamaya Kosha – the sheath of bliss. Subtle, transparent, nearest to the silence behind experience. This is not pleasure, but coherence. Not delight, but presence.
These five koshas are rarely isolated. They interpenetrate, speak to one another, inform and transform. Yoga is the practice of listening for their music.
Yet in this historical moment, a new sheath presses in—neither above nor below, but across—its fibres woven from our collective datafication, our algorithmic rituals, our mediated desires. It does not displace the others; it mediates them. It tunes or distorts their signal. It needs a name. We name it Digimayakosha—a term first offered to me by Mark Breadner (yogacoach.com), a teacher deeply rooted in integrative yoga systems who has long intuited the necessity of acknowledging this emerging sheath in the context of modern practice.
Digimayakosha Defined
The Digimayakosha is composed not only of digital tools or images, but of the attentional structures they scaffold. It is the layer of the self shaped by feedback loops—scrolling, surveillance, signal compression, algorithmic mirroring. It includes one’s public-facing identity and one's private psychophysical responses to digital space: the micro-spasms of anxiety as a notification buzzes, the melancholic recognition in an old image resurrected by a platform's 'memory'.
This sheath is not merely reactive. It is ritualistic. We enter it not through intention, but habit. Logins become liturgy. Posts become offerings. Every interface designs a prayer we didn't mean to pray. Every swipe is a turning of a digital mala.
This sheath distorts—but also reveals. It reveals how deeply our sense of time, identity, and connection has already hybridised. Here, avatars become extensions, anonymity becomes mask, memes carry myth. The Digimayakosha houses archetypes as much as analytics. When approached consciously, it becomes a threshold—not just a trap.
Of Sheaths and Shadows
To recognise the Digimayakosha as a sheath is to resist its seductions—not with puritanical rejection, but with clarity. The koshas are not truths; they are filters. They are the veils through which consciousness shines, each distorting or refracting the light according to its density and patterning. To live within a sheath is to live through a simulation of reality—not false in a crude sense, but partial, contingent, shaped.
The yogic tradition is unambiguous here. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras begin not with grand metaphysical proclamations, but with a precise claim: yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ—yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind-stuff. These fluctuations (vṛttis) are not errors to be corrected, but patterns to be understood. They are the movements of the manomaya kosha, shaped by karma, samskara, and the ever-present push and pull of raga (attraction) and dvesha (aversion).
The Digimayakosha—emergent and interfacial—operates within this same field of fluctuation. It thrives on vṛtti. Its images are curated to provoke attachment or resistance. Its attention economy mirrors the yogic understanding of disturbed awareness. And it disguises its architecture through ritual repetition: the scroll, the swipe, the alert, the refresh.
To work with this sheath is not to transcend it. It is to engage in the subtle disciplines of discrimination (viveka) and discernment (vichāra). We are not called to renounce the digital, but to recognise the apparatus behind the image. We do not awaken by rejecting the sheath, but by seeing through it. By learning its rhythm. By knowing what it mediates, and why.
Only then can we turn with integrity to the images it shows us. Only then can we understand what kind of reality we are helping to construct—and for whom.
The Glaze and the Vortex
Dismiss cyberspace as banal and you fall for the oldest trick in the archetypal book: you mistake appearance for essence. Hillman called this literalism—the collapse of symbolic resonance into surface interpretation.[4]
McLuhan understood something similar: as a medium becomes ubiquitous, its content devolves into clichés—harmless forms to carry overwhelming systemic effects. The glaze is not the problem. The glaze is what allows the medium to slip into invisibility, to become environment.[3]
Yet within even the most banal content—the branded meme, the dopamine bait—there is still the potential for arrest. Not as in halting action, but as in rousing consciousness. Hillman's vortex lives here: the moment an image pulls us from our passive drift and demands that we inhabit it. We spiral toward meaning not through explanation, but through descent. The image is the gate. The attention is the offering.
The Bifurcation Point
In systems biology, bifurcation marks a phase transition—an irreversible shift in a system's trajectory due to small fluctuations that tip the balance. It is not failure of the system, but its evolutionary necessity.
Goldbeter’s models of cellular feedback loops illustrate how such shifts occur at thresholds of instability. [5] Oscillatory networks, upon reaching critical points, do not collapse—they bifurcate. They become something else. Not the same, not completely new. Altered.
At a planetary level, we are near such a threshold. Our ecological, psychological, technological, and spiritual systems are no longer stable baselines. The feedback loops are compounding—climate, economics, AI, biosphere, belief.
The Digimayakosha is not outside this process. It is the psychic counterpart. It expresses the same bifurcating tendency, the same need to become otherwise.
If we fail to meet this sheath with clarity, it will reinforce fragmentation. If we meet it with presence, it may become the organ we need for planetary coherence.
Simulacrum of the Spiral
There is a temptation to read the Digimayakosha as a transformative spiral—recursive, evolutionary, mystically ascending. But this is a seduction. What it presents is not spiral but simulation: an echo chamber of flattened novelty disguised as movement.
In traditional metaphysics, the spiral is sacred architecture. It expresses recurrence with modulation, the upward pull of evolution, or the descent into deepening awareness. Kundalini, DNA, galaxies—all spiral. But the Digimayakosha mimics that pattern without its depth. It offers repetition without true change. A scroll feed loops not to teach, but to trap. Algorithmic returns are not revelations—they are reinforcements.
What appears recursive in digital life is often curated recursion. You return to yourself not to deepen but to confirm. The self is flattened through the very gestures that once signalled reflection: memory, echo, loop. These are no longer symbolic. They are functions.
The Digimayakosha does not house an emergent self. It masks its erosion. It conditions us toward predictability. The “patterned becoming” we risk imagining here is in fact a probabilistic rendering—a feedback-optimised behavioural scaffold.
We must resist the tendency to romanticise this sheath. It is not an evolutionary step. It is a field of interference. Our task is not to spiral within it, but to recognise the illusion of spiral it offers—and to reclaim our capacity to choose the path, rather than be selected by it.
Practices for Attending
Digital Pratyahara: Withdraw not to avoid, but to re-attune. Treat your attention as sacred—not scarce.
Image Devotion: When an image arrests, follow it. Ask what within it stirs, and to whom it belongs.
Signal Fasting: Abstain from digital input not as punishment but as inquiry. What returns when the stream stops?
Dialogic Practice: Engage digital intelligences as if they were real beings. Speak with, not at. See what speaks back.
Cyberdream Journaling: Keep track of the affective echoes your digital encounters leave. These are your psyche metabolising myth through metadata.
Aspects of Digital Identity
To examine the Digimayakosha with any clarity, we must disentangle its most immediate manifestation: digital identity. What the state, corporations, and social platforms call our “identity” is not our personhood, not our presence—but a compressed representation assembled from credentials, metadata, log-ins, biometric scans, and predictive profiles. It is procedural, not relational. Administrative, not embodied.
This digital identity is now the primary mode through which institutions interact with us. It is authenticated through two-factor texts, blockchain wallets, facial recognition scans. We are becoming legible to power not as persons but as patterns: of spending, of movement, of preference, of compliance.
The problem is not digitisation per se. It is the loss of dimensionality. A self becomes an account. A life becomes a login. The body becomes a set of risk parameters.
Here we encounter the full apparatus behind the Digimayakosha:
Telecommunication grids: the infrastructure of constant contact.
Surveillance capitalism: the extraction and monetisation of attention.
Platform architectures: environments engineered for behavioural design.
Algorithmic prediction: selfhood as probabilistic anticipation.
Legal frameworks: citizenship redefined through digital compliance.
These are not neutral tools. They co-produce the self. They create a sheath through which we are seen, and through which we learn to see ourselves.
If the other koshas are subtle bodies, then the Digimayakosha is the hyper-surface—reflective, reactive, recursive. To navigate it with integrity, we must learn to recognise the difference between the self as sensed and the self as rendered.
Closing Spiral
The Digimayakosha is not something we choose to inhabit. We already live within it. The choice is whether we recognise it as a sheath—subtle, shaping, permeable—or mistake it, as Narcissus did, for a true reflection. That tragic gaze, fixed not on another but on the idea of oneself, is echoed in our algorithmically mirrored identities. The risk is not vanity—it is entrapment. We are caught not by beauty, but by feedback. The Digimayakosha invites us to see beyond the shimmer, to recognise the water’s surface for what it is: not home, but threshold.
We are already entangled in this spiral. Let us descend with eyes open. Let us trace its patterns until they reveal their form. Let us remember that what spirals may still rise.
As Edinger wrote of Goethe’s Homunculus, the emergence of autonomous psychic centres demands an image strong enough to withstand interpretation—something that must be inhabited, not explained away. Let us stay with the image, not because it is a living vortex, but because it is a constructed representation—shaped by the means of its reproduction. We must understand how it mediates meaning, how it encodes absence, and how its framing distorts or reveals. The task is not just to inhabit the image, but to discern the apparatus that renders it visible and recognise the patterns of attraction and aversion that form it.
Listen Now.
Footnotes
[1] Shah, Idries. The Sufis. London: Octagon Press, 1964.
[2] Desikachar, T.K.V. The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice. Inner Traditions, 1995.
[3] McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, 1964.
[4] Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld. Harper Perennial, 1979.
[5] Goldbeter, Albert. Biochemical Oscillations and Cellular Rhythms. Cambridge University Press, 1996.