The Nature of the Subconscient

C.G. 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 some time in the future when he met the individual he had seen in dream and recognised the connection. This illustrates both the universal and the individual aspects of the functioning of the subconscious.

Experiments in the use of 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 subconsious without active recognition in the waking state. This has helped solve certain mysteries, cases of crime or tracking down of missing individuals, etc.

At a still deeper level, it must be recognised that all kinds of embedded habits, instincts, behaviors 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.

Sri Aurobindo has addressed this concern by his recognition that human nature is not to be transformed solely by the action of the mind and the will-power. It takes the instrumentality of a yet higher force, acting directly upon the subconscient, to effectuate and solidify this type of transformative change.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “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 ‘sub’-conscience, 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. 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 form 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 subconscient, not as precise though submerged memories but as obscure yet obstinate impressions of experience, and these can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of past thought, feelings, actions, etc., etc. 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 for ever. All seeds are there and all Samskaras of the mind, vital and body, — it is the main support of death and disease and the last fortress (seemingly impregnable) of the Ignorance. All too 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.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 5, Physical Consciousness — Subconscient — Sleep and Dream — Illness, pp. 87-88

Understanding and Managing the Subconscious Part of the Being

The idea that significant events or forces can take place within us during sleep or in the twilight range between sleep and waking is something that has been part of human understanding for thousands of years. In particular, dreams, a particular form of the sleep state where the consciousness is attending and in some cases participating actively, have been explored to some depth. In modern Western psychology, the work of Freud broke ground with his study on The Interpretation of Dreams. Jung went further to describe what he called the ‘collective unconscious’ which holds archetypal images that are a bedrock of how we experience and understand the world and our lives.

What has been clearly recognised, however, has not been clearly and adequately defined and understood. Sri Aurobindo has provided a paradigm for understanding the different parts of the being, and in particular he has explained the subconscious as a distinct part of the being that has its own characteristics and relation to the rest of the being.

The subconscious is a part of the being not generally under the direct control of the conscious mind. If we use the analogy of what we see in our focus in the external world during daytime and during nighttime, we may be able to appreciate the difference. When it is daytime, our entire view is circumscribed and focused on the world around us. We do not see, nor do we generally pay attention to, the universe beyond our planet and its eco-sphere. At night, however, when we are no longer held captive within the framework of the external planetary view, we can see the stars, the planets, the moon and understand that there is a larger reality, mostly subconscious or unconscious to our normal focus, that far exceeds and has mysteries we have not breached in our daily lives.

Turning then to the subconscious part of the being in our individual lives, when the active mental awareness of our “day” is withdrawn into sleep, the control it exercises over what we attend to and how we respond to those things is essentially withdrawn. The subconscious acts as the repository of impressions, sensations, and all manner of suggestions and reactions that we experience in our lives, whether we consciously attend to them or not. These things are encapsulated and remain ‘dormant’ until ‘triggered’, which can happen by any new impression or sensation that opens up that encapsulated impression, an input from a force or energy that is in our ‘psychological environment’, or through an ‘undigested’ experience, emotion or thought process that we carry into our sleep from our daytime lives. It is in this way that things we have actively rejected in our external lives may suddenly arise in this mostly unguarded part of our lives.

Sri Aurobindo has noted below how this mechanism works and what we can do to begin to manage it. While he focuses on the control of negative impressions and experiences arising, it must be noted that there is also a very positive side to the mechanism of control he outlines. If we focus our attention before we sleep on our deeper aspiration, on prayer, on a turning of the mind and emotions to the objectives we seek to realize in our lives, this can influence the subconscious. As we flood the subconscious with these positive impressions, they can awaken and act in sleep. Many seekers report having experiences of their teachers or their Guru or some inspirational event occurring during sleep or dream, including receiving regular teachings from a guide or teacher. People also report that if they send a suggestion to their subconscious prior to sleep to work out a solution to a particular issue or concern, they frequently awaken with a new insight or understanding that helps them resolve the issue. Research into sleep-learning shows that certain types of learning can be programmed to occur during sleep as well. The field is wide open and there is an entire text on The Yoga of Sleep and Dreams: The Night-School of Sadhana, compiled by Dr. Dalal from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that explores these questions at considerable length.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “These thoughts that attack in sleep or in the state between sleep and waking do not belong to any part of your conscious being, but come either from the subconscient or from the surrounding atmosphere through the subconscient. If they are thoughts you had in the past and have thrown out from you, then what rises must be impressions left by them in the subconscient — for all things thought, felt or experienced leave such impressions which can rise from there in sleep. Or the thoughts can have gone out from you into the environmental consciousness, that is, an atmosphere of consciousness which we carry around us and through which we are connected with universal Nature and from there they may be trying to return upon you. As it is difficult for them to succeed in the waking state, they take advantage of the absence of conscious control in sleep and appear there….”

“It is to be hoped that as you have rejected them, they will not come again, but if they do, then you must put a conscious will before going to sleep that they should not come. A suggestion of that kind on the subconscient is often successful, if not at once, after a time; for the subconscient learns to obey the will put upon it in the waking state.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pp. 155-156