Understanding the Action of the Subconscient

The field of psychology in the West has developed over the last couple of centuries with a focus on the influence of the subconscious levels on our external lives, fixating on trauma, past events and their effect on the way we respond to circumstances in our lives. This has led to techniques such as psychotherapy, dream interpretation, regression therapy, and hypnosis as mechanisms to unlock the subconscious realm to gain an understanding of what lies hidden there.

Western psychology has notably failed to expend much effort on understanding levels that are superconscient, or, circumconscient. Sri Aurobindo has included these planes or levels in his more comprehensive review of human psychology. Without an understanding of these additional segments of our existence, it is virtually impossible to truly resolve the issues that arise through a deep examination of the subconscient areas, and thus, such examinations as Western psychology have undertaken have revealed a number of dangers for the individuals involved, who get labeled as having certain ‘conditions’ and who create a surface personality around the existence of those conditions and act to actually strengthen and embed them further rather than find ways to resolve them and move forward freely without them. Thus, few people ever succeed in going beyond the need for therapy in the currently understood methods and techniques of psychological practice. Without the active intervention of the forces active at the superconscient levels, such a review of the subconscient acts primarily as a stirring up and awakening of those forces that lie hidden there.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “The subconscient is a concealed and unexpressed inarticulate consciousness which works below all our conscious physical activities. Just as what we call the superconscient is really a higher consciousness above from which things descend into the being, so the subconscient is below the body-consciousness and things come up into the physical, the vital and the mind-nature from there.”

“Just as the higher consciousness is superconscient to us and supports all our spiritual possibilities and nature, so the subconscient is the basis of our material being and supports all that comes up in the physical nature.”

“Men are not ordinarily conscious of either of these planes of their own being, but by sadhana they can become aware.”

“The subconscient retains the impressions of all our past experiences of life and they can come up from there in dream forms: most dreams in ordinary sleep are formations made from subconscient impressions.”

“The habit of strong recurrence of the same things in our physical consciousness, so that it is difficult to get rid of its habits, is largely due to a subconscient support. The subconscient is full of irrational habits.”

“When things are rejected from all other parts of the nature, they go either into the environmental consciousness around us through which we communicate with others and with universal Nature and try to return from there or they sink into the subconscient and can come up from there even after lying long quiescent so that we think they are gone.”

“When something is erased from the subconscient so completely that it leaves no seed and thrown out of the circumconscient so completely that it can return no more, then only can we be sure that we have finished with it for ever.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Ch. 2 Hidden Forces Within, pp. 36-37