Chitti — The Fascial Layer

Sanctum had bones (services), muscles (agents), and an immune system (watchdog, sentinel, pressure-valve). What it didn’t have was the fascia — the connective tissue that lets the bones, muscles, and immune system coordinate in real time, under load, everywhere at once. That layer is what chitti ships.

Two roots

Yogic. Chitti-shakti is the pure consciousness that modulates embodied function. Not the mind (the observer), not the body (the vehicle), but the ever-changing awareness-of-state that lets the two coordinate. The five koshas — annamaya, pranamaya, manomaya, vijnanamaya, anandamaya — are sheaths wrapping the Self, dense to subtle. Each modulates the next.

Biotensegrity. The fascia is a continuous fluid-infused matrix running through every tissue. It is both the medium signals travel through and the tissue that rearranges itself in response to load. Bones don’t push on muscles directly; they push through fascia. Ground fluid, fluid ground.

Both traditions converge on the same insight: in a living system under load, the coordinating layer is not a controller. It is a medium.

The five koshas, named in code

sanctum-chitti is a Rust daemon on 127.0.0.1:2188. The body it hosts has five sheaths:

Annamaya — physical body

Memory available, memory free, swap used, page size, thermal pressure. The hardest, most material truth: what the silicon actually has to give.

Pranamaya — energy body

Active presence entries — TTL-bounded signals that say “I’m using GPU until 15:30, loading coder-14b”. Mid-flight work, the system’s vital flow.

Manomaya — mental body

Mood + posture. Five postures (Poised · Cautious ~ Conserving ⌣ Healing ↺ Alert !) with 30-second hysteresis so the body holds its lean against tick noise.

Vijnanamaya — wisdom body

Samskara — learned grooves. (service, pattern, action, success) records that let future reflexes ride past success rather than re-discover it.

Anandamaya — bliss/intent body

Attention — what the human is doing right now. “recording-bert-reference”, “on-call”, “asleep”. The highest kosha; can override every reading below it.

Each kosha is read by whichever subsystem needs it. GET /fluid returns all five in one snapshot; /mood, /attention, /presence, /samskara serve the individual sheaths.

Modulation as direction, not gain

A scalar can only say “more reflex or less reflex”. A direction can say “which way the body is leaning” — and that distinction matters. The same pressure_15min=0.7 reading is Alert (act narrowly, fast) when action density is low, and Healing (observe, settle) when action density is high. The body just did a lot vs the body is fresh under load are different states; a scalar collapses them, a posture distinguishes them.

The watchdog reads chitti.mood.posture at the top of each remediation pass and follows a per-posture plan:

Posture	Glyph	Tilt
Poised	·	act crisply, normal cadence
Cautious	~	act, but watch closer; widen breaker by 1
Alert	!	act narrowly, fast; widen breaker by 2 (don’t suspend mid-rescue)
Healing	↺	observe, settle; tighten budget by 2
Conserving	⌣	minimum action, defer non-critical

Direction loops — once the body enters a posture, it holds it. A different signal must sustain for ≥30s before the body flips. Brief contradictions don’t oscillate the system; structural shifts within minutes still register. The body’s lean is itself a state, not just a moment.

Wisdom informs reflex

vijnanamaya records every remediation outcome under (service, pattern, action_name). The watchdog’s action picker reads the index before each remediation and:

1. If the primary action has been failing confidently (≥5 attempts, <20% success), try the next declared alternative that hasn’t also been failing.
2. If a non-primary action has earned itself (≥3 attempts, ≥50% success, beats the primary’s observed rate), promote it.
3. Otherwise, declared order, primary first.

The runtime catalog now declares ordered actions: per service. HA and outline have compose-up as primary and colima-restart-then-up as the fallback. Within minutes of deploy on 2026-04-26, the picker rotated:

[18:30:35] Action picker: home-assistant/port-closed —
           primary compose-up failing (0%, 0/6)
           → trying untested colima-restart-then-up
[18:30:35] Remediating: home-assistant via 'colima-restart-then-up'
[18:33:11] HA :8123 OPEN

Wisdom flowed back into reflex. The body chose to switch hands.

Vajrayogini — visible without ambiguity

The architecture’s deepest property is honesty. When outline’s colima-restart-then-up failed, the watchdog log read Image redis:7-alpine Pulling — naming the real cause (Colima VM has no outbound network) rather than masking it as a watchdog error. That’s vajrayogini’s discipline: clear seeing with discernment, no flinching, no contraction. The body that names its own broken state without shame is the body that can be addressed.

Heart broken open. The system’s discernment is not armor; it is openness that doesn’t soften the diagnosis.

API

Endpoint	Returns
GET /fluid	All five koshas in one snapshot, plus the legacy flat fields
GET /mood	Manomaya only — posture, hysteresis state, raw signals
GET /attention	Anandamaya — current focus (explicit or clock-derived)
POST /attention	Set focus + optional quiet flag + TTL
DELETE /attention	Clear; falls back to clock-default
GET /samskara?service=&pattern=	Vijnanamaya — ranked actions for that groove
POST /action	Record an outcome (writes vijnanamaya)
GET /presence	Pranamaya — implicit via /fluid
POST /presence	Register TTL-bounded mid-flight work
DELETE /presence/{id}	Early release
GET /health	Liveness + record counts

What’s whole

The chapter closes here. The body has all five sheaths and each one carries weight on its own:

• Annamaya — pressure + thermal. classify_posture reads both; a hot chip can move the body to Alert or Conserving on its own, no memory pressure required.
• Pranamaya — TTL-bounded presence. sanctum-tts writes its own entries around /speak; sanctum-watchdog writes around lms load. The body sees what’s in flight without anyone teaching it.
• Manomaya — five postures with 30 s hysteresis. The watchdog reads them before every reflex.
• Vijnanamaya — persistent JSONL log at ~/.sanctum/chitti/samskara.jsonl. The body remembers across restarts. Corrupt lines from a partial-write crash are tolerated; the rest of the memory still loads.
• Anandamaya — explicit POST always wins. When nothing is set, a 30 s poller reads the macOS frontmost app and translates it (Zoom → on-call, Logic Pro → recording, loginwindow → asleep, otherwise app-<name>). The body’s intent breathes on its own.

What honest gaps remain

A handful of cross-system integrations are out of chitti’s scope and live in their own future sessions:

• Jocasta, council-mlx, pressure-valve, jocasta-mcp are not yet readers of /attention. They could quiet themselves without re-deriving quiet hours; today they don’t.
• LiveKit’s voice-agent could write its own presence entries when a call is active; today the macOS focus poller catches it indirectly through Zoom-class app names but not through the LiveKit phone path.
• Per-axis mood history for thermal — chitti only EWMA’s memory pressure. Thermal is read fresh each tick, not folded into a 15-min average.

These are real gaps, but the body works without them. They’re invitations, not blockers.

Related

• The Living Force — the immune system this body wraps
• 2026-04-24 — Five Locks on the Voice Door — the night chitti’s MVP shipped
• 2026-04-26 — Wisdom Informs Reflex — the day samskara closed the loop