Psychology, Mental Health and Yoga

Sri Aurobindo and the Concept of the Unconscious in Psychology

"We are not only what we know of ourselves but an immense more which we do not know; our momentary personality is only a bubble on the ocean of our existence. "¹

SRI AUROBINDO

"Our mind and ego are like the crown and dome of a temple jutting out from the waves while the great body of the building is submerged under the surface of the waters."²

SRI AUROBINDO

As a metaphysical concept, the unconscious had been spoken of by several European thinkers, including the eminent philosophers Leibnitz and Kant. The first elaborate metaphysical theory of the unconscious was developed by Eduard Von Hartmann in Philosophic des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) published in 1869, according to which there is an intelligent, purposive, unconscious will which directs the universe. However, as a psychological construct used for the understanding of human behaviour, the concept of the unconscious is associated with two of the foremost personality theorists, namely, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Freud, who announced his discovery of the unconscious in 1885, described it as a domain of the mind containing desires, feelings, memories and images which have been repressed because they are too anxiety-provoking to be admitted into consciousness. Though these repressed

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contents of the unconscious are not accessible to conscious awareness, they play a powerful dynamic role in human behaviour, especially in its psychopathological or abnormal manifestations. To express the enormity of the unconscious as compared to the conscious mind, Freud used the well-known metaphor which depicts the mind as an iceberg, nine-tenths of which - the unconscious - lie hidden beneath the surface of the waters. William James hailed this discovery in 1901 as "the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science".³ Though the influence of Freud's theory of the human personality has considerably waned since its heyday, his concept of the unconscious still continues to permeate psychological thought to a wide extent. As a present-day psychologist, John Welwood, observes:

"The unconscious is perhaps the most powerful concept in all of modern psychology. The significance of a broad range of human behavior and experience that had been difficult to explain before Freud, such as dreams, neurotic symptoms, symbolic visions, selective forgetting, slips of the tongue, is now widely recognized, thanks to the explanatory power of the concept of the unconscious."⁴

Sigmund Freud

Freud arrived at the twin concepts of the unconscious and repression as a result of his early experience in treating patients with the "cathartic" method - consisting

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in the revival of painful repressed memories while in a state of hypnosis - which his older colleague, Joseph Breuer, had been using successfully with hysterical patients. Freud observed that among the painful forgotten memories, those of unacceptable wishes were predominant. He attributed such forgetting to the process of repression by which, according to him, the painful memories are pushed into the depths of the unconscious. Such forgetting through repression is distinguished from ordinary forgetting in that the former makes the forgotten material inaccessible to the conscious mind, whereas things which are forgotten ordinarily can be recalled as they lie in abeyance in what Freud called the preconscious layer of the mind. Thus Freud formulated his topographical theory which divided the mind into three layers -the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious.

Subsequently, Freud developed his structural theory of personality which conceives of the mental apparatus as made up of three components - the id, consisting of the primitive instinctual energies; the ego, constituted by the thinking part of the mind which exercises cognitive functions such as perception, memory, problem-solving, etc.; and the superego which acts as a conscience for the ego in censoring the instinctual demands of the id. In relating the concepts of the earlier topographical theory to his later structural view of personality, Freud stated that whereas the id is the true unconscious, "it is certain that much of the ego is itself unconscious",⁵ and the superego too is largely unconscious. Thus, according to Freud, all the three components of what in psychology is vaguely termed mind or psyche form part of the unconscious in varying degrees.

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Carl G. Jung

In 1912, Jung presented a more complex view of the unconscious in his work entitled Psychology of the Unconscious. He distinguished between the personal unconscious - which, he said, was what Freud spoke about - and the collective unconscious which was Jung's own great discovery. The personal unconscious, according to Jung, is made up not only of repressed painful memories -as Freud originally believed - but also of long-forgotten events, of subliminal perceptions which are below the sensory threshold, and of "everything psychic that has not reached the threshold of consciousness or whose energy-charge is not sufficient to maintain it in consciousness or that will reach consciousness only in the future."⁶ Thus with regard to forgotten events he states: "When a thing is forgotten... it simply means that the memory has become subliminal. Its energy has sunk so low that it can no longer appear in consciousness."⁷ On the other hand, the collective unconscious, said Jung, consists of basic universal human urges or instincts, and is also the "deposit of ancestral experiences accumulated over millions of years"⁸ which have established certain deep psychic predispositions in mankind as a whole. These inherited unconscious predispositions find conscious representation in various potent primordial images called archetypes. According to Jung, archetypes can be found in myths and fairy tales all over the world, and emerge in dreams, fantasies and even in the delusions of the psychotic. Some of the chief archetypes are those of the Mother, Father, Child, Woman, Man, the Great Mother, the Earth Mother, Mother Nature, God, Demon, the Old Wise

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Man, Birth, Death, Rebirth, Magic, Unity, the Self and the Circle. Thus, according to Jung, instincts and archetypes are the two chief types of contents which constitute the unconscious. Instincts which are for the preservation and propagation of life, are likened to a stream of psychic energy, the archetypes being the permanent course through which the stream flows. Both instincts and archetypes are of unconscious origin, but operate in the conscious mind - the former as impulses of self-preservation and self-procreation, the latter as universal ideas.

Besides the difference in the nature of their contents, the personal unconscious differs from the collective unconscious in two chief respects. First, the former differs from person to person in the nature of its contents; the latter is the same in all individuals the world over. Secondly, the personal unconscious comes into existence subsequent to the formation of the conscious mind, whereas the collective unconscious antecedes the appearance of the conscious mind.

Freud and Jung - Comparison

There are some similarities as well as differences between Freud's and Jung's views of the unconscious. Chiefly, these consist in the following:

(a) In his earlier topographical theory, Freud looked upon the unconscious as the outcome of repression. Thus he at first held that the unconscious was made up of repressed materials only. Jung, on the other hand, maintained that besides repressions, the personal unconscious contains also long-forgotten memories

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and subliminal impressions.

(b) In his later structural theory, Freud spoke of the id as the primary stuff out of which the other two structural components of personality - ego and superego -subsequently develop. Since the id is wholly unconscious and consists of instinctual drives, Freud's later concept of the unconscious concurred with Jung's in regarding the unconscious as consisting of instincts as well as what is repressed. However, Jung attributed the repressed memories to the personal unconscious, and regarded the instincts as belonging to the collective unconscious.

(c) The major difference between Freud and Jung regarding the unconscious lies in the distinction made by Jung between the personal and the collective unconscious, and the far greater importance given to the latter.

(d) Freud and Jung differed also in their emphasis on the role of the unconscious in human life. According to Freud's theory, the unconscious plays two main roles. In the first place, being a storehouse of instinctual drives, the unconscious provides the biological energies which motivate all behaviour. Secondly, due to its contents of what has been repressed, it causes various types and degrees of disturbances, ranging from "the psychopathology of everyday life", such as slips of the tongue and selective forgetting, to psychiatric disorders of the various psychoneuroses and psychoses. It is this latter role of the unconscious, related to abnormal and negative aspects of behaviour, that looms large in Freud's theory. All the constructive and creative aspects of behavior were attributed by Freud to the sublimating activities of the

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conscious ego. On the other hand, Jung, while recognising the role of the unconscious - both personal and collective - in psychopathological behaviour, maintained also that the unconscious is the source of creative ideas and that "archetypal images are among the highest values of the human psyche".⁹

(e) A well-known difference between Freud and Jung pertains to their concepts regarding the nature of the instinctual energies of the unconscious. According to Freud's earlier views, the instinctual energies of the id, which he termed the libido, are essentially sexual. Subsequently, Freud re-formulated the concept of instincts and spoke of two classes of instincts - Eros or the life-preservative instincts, including the sexual instinct, and Thanatos or the death instinct. In this later formulation, libido came to be regarded as the energies of Eros, and aggression, turning away from pleasure, etc. as the expression of Thanatos. This subsequent modification of Freud's concept of the instinctual energies never dominated psychoanalytic thinking; the id and its libido have tended to retain their exclusively sexual connotations. On the other hand, Jung, who did not place much emphasis on the role of the sexual impulse, regarded the libido as a general psychic energy which expresses itself in numerous forms, including the sexual urge (Freud), the urge for power (Adler), etc.

Sri Aurobindo

From the viewpoint of Sri Aurobindo. the fundamental limitation of modern psychology in delineating the nature

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of what it calls the unconscious stems from the mistake of describing the whole of a vast and complex reality in terms of a minuscule part, very much like the groping blind men of the well-known parable who, having each grasped a particular part of an elephant, depicted the whole elephant in terms of the particular part of the elephant's body which he happened to grasp and palpate. Sri Aurobindo has pointed out this error on more than one occasion. ¹⁰

Sri Aurobindo's remark that "you must know the whole before you can know the part"¹¹ finds elucidation in his description of the various parts of the being given below.

Broadly speaking, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes four elements which make up the totality of man's being: the surface or outer being, the subconscient, the subliminal and the superconscient. In order to understand the nature of this fourfold constitution of the being, certain fundamental views of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy need to be grasped. First, man's being is part of the being of the universe, man being a microcosm of the macrocosm; therefore the psychological nature of man is intimately related to the metaphysical nature of the universe. Secondly, all of the universe is a manifestation of consciousness which has been evolving from the nethermost level - the Inconscient - towards the highest levels of the Superconscient; thus "the emergence and growth of consciousness is the central motive of the evolution and the key to its secret purpose."¹² Thirdly, the evolution of consciousness is preceded by its involution; therefore the Inconscient is a concealed consciousness and "an inverse reproduction of the supreme superconscience"¹³; evolution thus is a process of the return of Inconscience to the supreme Consciousness. Implicit in these fundamental

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propositions is the view that nothing is truly unconscious or totally devoid of consciousness; therefore the unconscious spoken of in psychology is a misnomer; what is called the unconscious is simply that which lies outside the surface conscious awareness and of which the mind in its ordinary state is not conscious.

In the evolutionary process, the first emergence from the Inconscient is Matter from which the human body is evolved. Regarding the workings of the Inconscient in Matter and the body, Sri Aurobindo states:

"The body... is a creation of the Inconscient and itself inconscient or at least subconscient in parts of itself and much of its hidden action; but what we call the Inconscient is an appearance, a dwelling place, an instrument of a secret Consciousness or a Superconscient which has created the miracle we call the universe. Matter is the field and the creation of the Inconscient and the perfection of the operations of inconscient Matter, their perfect adaptation of means to an aim and end, the wonders they perform and the marvels of beauty they create, testify, in spite of all the ignorant denial we can oppose, to the presence and power of consciousness of this Superconscience in every part and movement of the material universe. It is there in the body, has made it and its emergence in our consciousness is the secret aim of evolution and the key to the mystery of our existence."¹⁴

From the seemingly inconscient Matter emerge successively Life and Mind. Explaining the nature and function of Life as a middle term between Mind and Matter, Sri Aurobindo writes:

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"Life then reveals itself as essentially the same everywhere from the atom to man, the atom containing the subconscious stuff and movement of being which are released in consciousness in the animal, with plant life as a midway stage in the evolution. Life is really a universal operation of Conscious-Force acting subconsciently on and in Matter; it is the operation that creates, maintains, destroys and re-creates forms or bodies and attempts by play of nerve-force, that is to say, by currents of interchange of stimulating energy to awake conscious sensation in those bodies. In this operation there are three stages; the lowest is that in which the vibration is still in the sleep of Matter, entirely subconscious so as to seem wholly mechanical; the middle stage is that in which it becomes capable of a response still submental but on the verge of what we know as consciousness; the highest is that in which life develops conscious mentality in the form of a mentally perceptible sensation which in this transition becomes the basis for the development of sense-mind and intelligence. It is in the middle stage that we catch the idea of Life as distinguished from Matter and Mind, but in reality it is the same in all the stages and always a middle term between Mind and Matter, constituent of the latter and instinct with the former."¹⁵

The Surface Being

To return to Sri Aurobindo's fourfold classification of the human constitution, man's surface consciousness, derived from the three universal principles just mentioned, is composed of mind, life (generally referred to by Sri Aurobindo as the vital) and body-consciousness. Sri

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Aurobindo states that the term "mind", which has been used indiscriminately to cover the whole surface consciousness, connotes in the language of his yoga that part of the being which is related to cognitive elements and functions, such as ideas and thoughts, intelligence, thinking and reasoning. He distinguishes mind from the other two elements of the surface nature, namely, the vital and the body-consciousness, which are mixed up with mind on the surface. The vital is the Life-Nature made up of sensations, energies of action, instincts, impulses, desires, feelings and emotions. The body, says Sri Aurobindo, "is not mere unconscious Matter: it is a structure of a secretly conscious Energy that has taken form in it. Itself occultly conscious, it is, at the same time, the vehicle of expression of an overt Consciousness that has emerged and is self-aware in our physical energy-substance."¹⁶ Regarding the confounding of the vital and the body-consciousness with mind, Sri Aurobindo explains:

"Mind identifies itself to a certain extent with the movements proper to physical life and body and annexes them to its mentality, so that all consciousness seems to us to be mental. But if we draw back, if we separate the mind as witness from these parts of us, we can discover that life and body,- even the most physical parts of life,- have a consciousness of their own, a consciousness proper to an obscurer vital and to a bodily being, even such an elemental awareness as primitive animal forms may have, but in us partly taken up by the mind and to that extent mentalised. Yet it has not, in its independent motion, the mental awareness which we enjoy; if there is mind in it, it is mind

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involved and implicit in the body and in the physical life: there is no organised self-consciousness, but only a sense of action and reaction, movement, impulse and desire, need, necessary activities imposed by Nature, hunger, instinct, pain, insensibility and pleasure. Although thus inferior, it has this awareness obscure, limited and automatic;... when we stand back from it, when we can separate our mind from its sensations, we perceive- that this is a nervous and sensational and automatically dynamic mode of consciousness, a gradation of awareness different from the mind: it has its own separate reactions to contacts and is sensitive to them in its own power of feeling; it does not depend for that on the mind's perception and response."¹⁷

The Subconscient

Sri Aurobindo defines the subconscient as follows:

"The subconscious in us is the extreme border of our secret inner existence where it meets the Inconscient, it is a degree of our being in which the Inconscient struggles into a half-consciousness;... Or, from another viewpoint, this nether part of us may be described as the antechamber of the Inconscient."¹⁸

An important distinction to be made for understanding the nature of the subconscient is between the submental and the subconscient. The former refers to that which, from the evolutionary point of view, is lower than or inferior to mind. The physical consciousness of the body and that of the vital are in this sense submental, but they are not entirely subconscient, for in them consciousness

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has already evolved a certain degree of its formulation and expression, though for the most part the operations of consciousness in the physical and vital parts of our being are subconscious to the mind and would therefore be regarded in modern psychology as part of the unconscious. "The true subconscious", says Sri Aurobindo, "is other than this vital or physical substratum; it is the Inconscient vibrating on the borders of consciousness. ..."¹⁹ In other words, whereas the submental is that which is below mind, the subconscient is what lies below even the physical and body-consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo elaborates the description of the subconscient in the following extracts which reiterate some of its basic characteristics:

"In our yoga we mean by the subconscient that quite submerged part of our being in which there is no wakingly conscious and coherent thought, will or feeling or organized reaction, but which yet receives obscurely the impressions of all things and stores them up in itself and from it too all sorts of stimuli, of persistent habitual movements, crudely repeated or disguised in strange forms can surge up into dream or into the waking nature. For if these impressions rise up most in dream in an incoherent and disorganized manner, they can also and do rise up into our waking consciousness as a mechanical repetition of old thoughts, old mental, vital and physical habits or an obscure stimulus to sensations, actions, emotions which do not originate in or from our conscious thought or will and are even often opposed to its perceptions, choice or dictates. In the subconscient there is an

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obscure mind full of obstinate Sanskaras, impressions, associations, fixed notions, habitual reactions formed by our past, an obscure vital full of the seeds of habitual desires, sensations and nervous reactions, a most obscure material which governs much that has to do with the condition of the body. It is largely responsible for our illnesses; chronic or repeated illnesses are indeed mainly due to the subconscient and its obstinate memory and habit of repetition of whatever has impressed itself upon the body-consciousness."²⁰

"It is a known psychological law that whatever is suppressed in the conscious mind remains in the subconscient being and recurs either in the waking state when the control is removed or else in sleep. Mental control by itself cannot eradicate anything entirely out of the being. The subconscient in the ordinary man includes the larger part of the vital being and the physical mind and also the secret body-consciousness."²¹

"When something is thrown out of the vital or physical, it very usually goes down into the subconscient and remains there as if in seed and comes up again when it can. That is the reason why it is so difficult to get rid of habitual vital movements or to change the character; for, supported or refreshed from this source, preserved in this matrix your vital movements, even when suppressed or repressed, surge up again and recur."²²

"That part of us which we can strictly call subconscient because it is below the level of mind and conscious life, inferior and obscure, covers the purely physical and vital elements of our constitution of bodily being,

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unmentalised, unobserved by the mind, uncontrolled by it in their action. It can be held to include the dumb occult consciousness, dynamic but not sensed by us, which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life process and automatic responses. It covers also those lowest functionings of submerged sense-mind which are more operative in the animal and in plant life."²³

It is interesting to note that some of Freud's basic views regarding the unconscious strikingly reflect the description of the subconscient as given above. The following are among the chief of such Freudian views of the unconscious which are corroborated by Sri Aurobindo in describing the nature of the subconscient:

(a)The unconscious is far more extensive than the conscious.

(b)What is repressed or driven out of conscious awareness becomes part of the unconscious.

(c)The contents of the unconscious powerfully affect the workings of the conscious mind.

(d)What lies in the unconscious emerges in dreams. (Dreams, said Freud, are the royal road to the unconscious.)

(e)Certain experiences rooted in the unconscious tend to be re-enacted repeatedly in a compulsive way - what Freud termed "repetition compulsion".

However, according to Sri Aurobindo, "the lower vital subconscious which is all that this psycho-analysis of Freud seems to know,-and even of that it knows only a few ill-lit corners,-is no more than a restricted and very inferior portion of the subliminal whole."²⁴

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The Subliminal

The term "subliminal" literally means below the threshold, and in its current usage is generally employed with reference to sensory stimuli which are below the detection threshold, that is, are of less than the minimum intensity or duration required to excite a sensory neuron and be perceived. In 1886, F.W.H. Myers, to whom the discovery of the subliminal is ascribed, used the term to describe certain psychological processes which take place below the level of awareness. Subsequently, in the writings of Jung and others, the term was used at times as a synonym for the unconscious (or the subconscious as it has sometimes been called). Referring to this last-mentioned usage of the term as co-extensive with what in modern psychology has been called the unconscious or the subconscious, Sri Aurobindo states:

"Subliminal is a general term used for all parts of the being which are not on the waking surface. Subconscient is very often used in the same sense by European psychologists because they do not know the difference. But when I use the word, I mean always what is below the ordinary physical consciousness, not what is behind it."²⁵

Sri Aurobindo has occasionally used "subliminal" as a general term to denote all parts of the being which are not on the waking surface consciousness, "so conceiving it as to include in it our lower subconscient and upper super-conscient ends."²⁶ However, for the most part he distinguishes three parts of the being which are outside the surface consciousness: that which lies below (the sub-

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conscient), that which lies behind (the subliminal), and that which is high above (the superconscient). Regarding the distinction between the subconscient and the subliminal, Sri Aurobindo states:

"... when we say subconscious, we think readily of an obscure unconsciousness or half-consciousness or else a submerged consciousness below and in a way inferior to and less than our organised waking awareness or, at least, less in possession of itself. But we find, when we go within, that somewhere in our subliminal part,-though not co-extensive with it since it has also obscure and ignorant regions,- there is a consciousness much wider, more luminous, more in possession of itself and things than that which wakes upon our surface and is the percipient of our daily hours; that is our inner being, and it is this which we must regard as our subliminal self and set apart the subconscient as an inferior, a lowest occult province of our nature."²⁷

Sri Aurobindo states further the nature of the subliminal self as follows:

"There is a 'subliminal' self behind our superficial waking mind, not inconscient but conscient, greater than the waking mind, endowed with surprising faculties and capable of a much surer action and experience, conscient of the superficial mind, though of it the superficial mind is inconscient."²⁸

"Our subliminal self is not, like our surface physical being, an outcome of the energy of the Inconscient; it is

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a meeting-place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has descended from above for involution. There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. ... There is here a consciousness which has a power of direct contact with the universal unlike the mostly indirect contacts which our surface being maintains with the universe through the sense-mind and the senses. There are here inner senses, a subliminal sight, touch, hearing; but these subtle senses are rather channels of the inner being's direct consciousness of things than its informants: the subliminal is not dependent on its senses for its knowledge, they only give a form to its direct experience of objects; they do not, so much as in waking mind, convey forms of objects for the mind's documentation or as the starting-point or basis for an indirect constructive experience. The subliminal has the right of entry into the mental and vital and subtle-physical planes of the universal consciousness, it is not confined to the material plane and the physical world; it possesses means of communication with the worlds of being which the descent towards involution created in its passage and with all corresponding planes or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw from the surface activities whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance."²⁹

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Sri Aurobindo has called the subliminal self the inner being as distinguished from the outer or surface being. Thus he states:

"There are, we might say, two beings in us, one on the surface, our ordinary exterior mind, life, body consciousness, another behind the veil, an inner mind, an inner life, an inner physical consciousness constituting another or inner self."³⁰

The outer being is connected with the subliminal and, though unaware of it, receives from the subliminal its inspirations, intuitions, etc. As Sri Aurobindo states:

"It (the subliminal] is, according to our psychology, connected with the small outer personality by certain centres of consciousness of which we become aware by yoga. Only a little of the inner being escapes through these centres into the outer life, but that little is the best part of ourselves and responsible for our art, poetry, philosophy, ideals, religious aspirations, efforts at knowledge and perfection."³¹

Thus though the surface being of the average individual is largely influenced by the subconscient it is also influenced to a significant extent by the subliminal.

Jung's concept of the collective unconscious contains, besides other elements, some aspects of what Sri Aurobindo describes as the subliminal. For example, in the subliminal, as stated above, are inner senses of sight, touch, hearing, etc; the subliminal is therefore "the seer

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of inner things and supraphysical experiences."³² Jung, who reports having had frequent supraphysical experiences such as visions or what he called "extremely vivid hypnagogic images",³³ ascribed such experiences to the collective unconscious. Another striking resemblance between Sri Aurobindo's description of the subliminal and Jung's view of the collective unconscious lies in tracing the source of predictive, veridical and deeply symbolic dreams. According to Sri Aurobindo such dreams, which Jung ascribed to the collective unconscious, come from the subliminal, which he described as "a greater dream-builder"³⁴ than the subconscient. Yet another similarity between the subliminal and the collective unconscious is that just as Sri Aurobindo ascribes the best part of ourselves - our art, poetry, philosophy, etc. - to the influences emanating from the subliminal, so does Jung, as stated earlier, look upon the archetypal images of the collective unconscious as some of the highest values of the human psyche. However, the most significant resemblance between the concepts of the subliminal and the collective unconscious lies in that both are regarded as extending beyond the individual consciousness, though the subliminal has also its separate formation for each individual.

The Superconscient

As stated previously, the superconscient is the starting point of the involution of consciousness and the ultimate goal of its evolution. Regarding the superconscient, Sri Aurobindo writes:

"If the subliminal and subconscient may be compared to a sea which throws up the waves of our surface

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mental existence, the superconscience may be compared to an ether which constitutes, contains, over-roofs, inhabits and determines the movements of the sea and its waves. It is there in this higher ether that we are inherently and intrinsically conscious of our self and spirit, not as here below by a reflection in silent mind or by acquisition of the knowledge of a hidden Being within us; it is through it, through that ether of super-conscience, that we can pass to a supreme status, knowledge, experience. Of this superconscient existence through which we can arrive at the highest status of our real, our supreme Self, we are normally even more ignorant than of the rest of our being; yet is it into the knowledge of it that our being emerging out of the involution in Inconscience is struggling to evolve."³⁵

"In the superconscience beyond our present level of awareness are included the higher planes of mental being as well as the native heights of supramental and pure spiritual being."³⁶

Among the higher planes of mental being, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes various distinct levels which he terms Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind, culminating in what Sri Aurobindo calls Supermind or the Truth-Consciousness which secretly supports all the universe and leads all towards itself through the evolutionary process.

Knowing the Unconscious

In the last chapter ("Late Thoughts") of his Memories,

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Dreams, Reflections, Jung points out the inability of the mind to know the unconscious. He writes:

"Science employs the term 'the unconscious', thus admitting that it knows nothing about it, for it can know nothing about the substance of the psyche when the sole means of knowing anything is the psyche."³⁷

Sri Aurobindo goes a step further and points out that the mind, because of its inherent limitations, is incapable of knowing anything in its essential nature. As he states:

"Mind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer."³⁸

"Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects."³⁹

Because of the intrinsic limitations of the mind as stated above, the method employed for understanding the unconscious, consisting in a mental analysis of what are believed to be the products of the unconscious, namely, dreams, free-associations, etc., has yielded only fragmentary and relatively superficial insights into the so-called unconscious. From these limited insights the mind has

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sought to construct the total reality of that which lies below, behind and beyond mind. As a result, the whole has either been reduced and explained in terms of a fragment, as in Freud's concept of the unconscious, or subsumed under a nebulous and conglomerate concept such as Jung's collective unconscious. The latest major school of psychological thought - Transpersonal Psychology - has come to recognise a wider range of phenomena, experiences and states of consciousness which have hitherto been regarded by most psychologists as belonging to a "fringe" area, such as extrasensory perception, telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, clairvoyance and clairaudience, "peak" experiences, altered states of consciousness, etc. which are now classed under the ill-defined concept of "transpersonal consciousness", the heterogeneous nature of which may be seen from the following statement:

"Transpersonal content includes any experiences in which an individual transcends the limitations of identifying exclusively with the ego or personality. Transpersonal content also includes the mythical, archetypal, and symbolic realms of inner experience that can come into awareness through imagery and dreams."⁴⁰

According to Sri Aurobindo, in order to know what lies outside mental awareness and be able to distinguish among the subconscient, the subliminal and the superconscient, it is necessary to break the walls that separate the surface consciousness from what lies behind and beyond it so as to emerge into the subliminal and the superconscient. As he states:

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"A descent into the subconscient would not help us to explore this region, for it would plunge us into incoherence or into sleep or a dull trance or a comatose torpor. A mental scrutiny or insight can give us some indirect and constructive idea of these hidden activities; but it is only by drawing back into the subliminal or by ascending into the superconscient and from there looking down or extending ourselves into these obscure depths that we can become directly and totally aware and in control of the secrets of our subconscient physical, vital and mental nature."⁴¹

"... Though large parts of it [the subliminal] can be thus known by a penetration and looking within or a freer communication, it is only by going inward behind the veil of superficial mind and living within, in an inner mind, an inner life, an inmost soul of our being that we can be fully self-aware,- by this and by rising to a higher plane of mind than that which our waking consciousness inhabits. An enlargement and completion of our present evolutionary status, now still so hampered and truncated, would be the result of such an inward living; but an evolution beyond it can come only by our becoming conscious in what is now superconscient to us, by an ascension to the native heights of the Spirit."⁴²

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REFERENCES

1. The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1970-73), Vol. 18, p. 555.

2. Ibid., p. 556.

3. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longman, Green & Co., 1928, p. 233.

4. John Welwood (Ed.), The Meeting of the Ways. New York: Schocken Books, 1979, p. 151.

5. Cited in Roger N. Walsh and Frances Vaughan (Eds.) Beyond Ego: Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychology. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1980, p. 109.

6. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Translated by RFC. Hull. Bollingen Series XX, Vol. X. New York: Pantheon Books, 1964, p. 8.

7. Ibid.

8. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. VIII, p. 376.

9. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. IX, Part I, p. 84.

10. Vide references 3 and 16 of the essay on "Sri Aurobindo and Modern Psychology".

11. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 24), p. 1609.

12. The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings (SABCL, Vol. 16), p. 16.

13. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 18), p. 550.

14. The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings (SABCL, Vol. 16), pp. 10-11.

15. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 18), p. 186.

16. Ibid., p. 305.

17. Ibid., pp. 558-59.

18. Ibid., pp. 422-23.

19. Ibid., p. 559.

20. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 22), p. 353.

21. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 23), p. 898.

22. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 22), p. 357.

23. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 19), pp. 733-34.

24. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 24), p. 1606.

25. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 22), p. 354.

26. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 18), p. 557.

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27. Ibid., p. 557.

28. The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings (SABCL, Vol. 16), p. 261.

29. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 18), pp. 425-26.

30. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 23), pp. 1020-21.

31. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 24), pp. 1164-65.

32. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 18), p. 427.

33. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 201.

34. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 18), p. 424.

35. Ibid., pp. 561-62.

36. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 19), p. 736.

37.C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 310.

38. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 18), p. 162.

39. Ibid., p. 127.

40. Frances Vaughan. "Transpersonal Psychotherapy: Context, Content, and Process" in Beyond Ego: Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychology, p. 185.

41. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 19), p. 734.

42. Ibid., p. 736.

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