The Nature of the Subconscient

0:00 CG Jung described what he called the collective unconscious, a repository of archetypal images and experiences that are universal to humanity. Sigmund Freud explored the subconscious realms of the individual and how they impacted the lives and responses of those individuals. The understanding they gained and shared is the first opening in Western psychology to the deeper implications of the working of consciousness, which is both a unified field of oneness and an individual experience factor built into each person's own unique interactions with that universal reality. When an individual remembers a dream, he frequently finds that it contains images, movements, individuals that provide a meaning, a warning, or an insight. In some cases, the undigested images received by the waking consciousness, but not directly perceived or addressed at that time, reappear in the dream state. There are also cases of an individual seeing something that made no sense until sometime in the future, when he met the individual he had seen in dream and recognized the connection. This illustrates both the universal and the individual aspects of the functioning of the subconscious. Experiments in the use of

1:32 hypnotism provide us further insights. In some cases, people have voluntarily undergone hypnotic trance and are then asked to recall details of certain incidents. They are able to report small details that they had not actually noticed with their conscious minds, perceptions which were kept and stored by the subconscious without active recognition in the waking state. This has helped solve certain mysteries, cases of crime or tracking down and missing individuals, etcetera. At a still deeper level, it must be recognized that all kinds of embedded habits, instincts, behaviours that developed in earlier stages of the evolutionary process, actually are not part of our conscious being, but reside in the subconscious and act from there essentially automatically when anything triggers them. Many such behaviours and ways of doing things are so deeply entrenched that they are able to defeat the conscious mind and will consistently and thus provide in some cases, a very much unwanted continuity of processes that we would like to change.

2:51 Fiora Bindo has addressed this concern by his recognition that human nature is not to be transformed solely by the action of the mind and the willpower. It takes the instrumentality of a yet higher force acting directly upon the subcontinent to effectuate and solidify this type of transformative change. Fiora Bindo notes quote The subconscient is universal as well as individual like all the other main parts of the nature, but there are different parts or planes of the subconscient. All upon earth is based on the inconscient as it is called, though it is not really inconscient at all, but rather a complete subconscience, A suppressed or involved consciousness in which there is everything but nothing is formulated or expressed. The subconscient lies between this inconscient and the conscious mind, life and body.

3:53 It contains the potentiality of all the primitive reactions to life which struggle out to the surface from the dull and inert strands of matter and formed by a constant development, a slowly evolving and self formulating consciousness. It contains them not as ideas, perceptions or conscious reactions, but as fluid substance of these things. But also all that is consciously experienced sinks down into the subconscious, not as precise, though submerged memories, but as obscure yet obstinate impressions of experience.

4:35 And these can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of past thought, feelings, actions, etcetera, etcetera. The subconscient is the main cause why all things repeat themselves and nothing ever gets changed except in appearance. It is the cause why people say character cannot be changed. The cause also of the constant return of things one hoped to have got rid of forever. All seeds are there and all samskaras of the mind vital in body. It is the main support of death and disease, and the last fortress, seemingly impregnable of the ignorance. All two that is suppressed without being wholly got rid of sinks down there and remains as seed, ready to surge up or sprout up at any moment.

5:31 End Quote reference. Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 5. Physical consciousness, subconscious sleep and dream illness. Pages 87 to 88.