In the Mother's Light

CONQUEST OF THE SUBCONSCIENT

AND THE INCONSCIENT

NOWHERE is the identity between the Mother's views (as held by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo) and those of Sri Aurobindo so strikingly significant as on the subject of the Subconscient and the Inconscient. Even if all other subjects were passed over, this alone would be enough to prove that the identity was not accidental, but rooted in the uniqueness of a mission which is fraught with the highest possibilities for human culture, and which could not be fulfilled except by their collaboration. The identity of their views was an outer expression of the identity of their beings, and a precondition for the accomplishment of their work. These two pioneer personalities, belonging to two opposite ends of the earth, met on the soil of resurgent India to sow the seeds of a new, a divine humanity and weave a luminous pattern of life for it. They did not meet to swell the traditional cry of world-renunciation and create a parked-up spiritual atmosphere for preparing a few souls to cross over the dark waters of life and reach the haven of Light beyond. They did not meet to widen the gulf between the secular and the spiritual, or preach a shallow, spiritual culture which would combine the two in a clumsy practical compromise, such as is fondly advocated by the modern idealists. They met to help man live in God and God in man; to convert human life into a vehicle of the divine Light, and human nature into divine nature. They met to declare that Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth, the One and the many are essentially one, and that their oneness can be dynamically expressed in every movement of human life. It was for the complete transformation of homo sapiens and his ascent into the Divine Life that they have laboured for long years of unrelaxed collaboration. But the transformation is impossible without a radical dealing with the very base of human life and nature. This base, as both of them realised early in their lives, is subconscient and, deeper down, inconscient, and the source and store-house of most

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of the invisible forces which move mankind and prolong in it the residual life of the plant and the animal; and they bent their energies to the conquest and conversion of this nether base as much as to the bringing down of the Supermind, by whose omnipotence alone can this conquest and conversion be effected.

Obviously, it was a new work entailing infinite difficulties. Even the conversion of the individual subconscient has hardly ever been tackled with any conclusive thoroughness since the short-lived heyday of the great but tragic Tantric experiment, let alone the conversion of the collective subconscient. The dominant trend of most of the spiritual disciplines being otherworldly and escapist, the impurities of human nature were not traced to their ultimate roots, but lashed or lulled, and left to seethe or slumber in their unlit depths. It was, indeed, deemed an achievement if the inner consciousness could be separated from the turmoil of the outer and launched upon the Infinite,— the outer, thus abandoned and discouraged, usually lapsed into a chafing quiescence or, in some cases, consented to undergo just a modicum of purification. But there was no question of a radical transmutation of the very substance of the base and a definitive triumph over the ignorance and inertia of the material part of human nature.

Significantly enough, both the Mother and Sri Aurobindo started their spiritual careers with a clear perception of the Subconscient and the Inconscient and their immense hold on the motor springs of human nature; and they resolved to make them the targets of their most determined and sustained assaults. Without knowing each other, they yet continued their efforts on identical lines; and when they met, their efforts were fused into one mighty churning of the dragon foundation of human life. They strove not only for the triumph of the soul in the kingdom of Light, but also—and more—for the triumph of God in the kingdom of the material life. They strove, both of them, with an astonishing equipollence of intuitive knowledge, for the complete illumination of the material life and an unflawed manifestation of the Divine on earth—an Epiphany in transfigured humanity.

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Human reason understands moral self-discipline, which is, to quote William James's apt words, "but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure". It understands too something of religious fervour in which the fire of Godward emotions burns up some of the dross of human nature. But it has no idea of the elemental forces that go to constitute human nature, and does not know from what murky depths they emerge into overt play. When it sees falsehood, corruption, dishonesty and cruelty running rampant in civilised human society,—the animal completely unleashed—it wonders how these brute passions could subsist along with so much of intellectual and cultural advancement. When an unsophisticated man of ethical culture hears of great scientists (science is the parent of culture, it is claimed) betraying the political or military secrets of their own motherland; eminent university professors (the universities, it is asserted, are the radiating centres of knowledge) found guilty of flagrant moral depravity, and university students in one of the most civilised countries in the world manhandling their teachers or making raids into the hostels of the opposite sex in broad day light and in brazen defiance of all restraints of morality and decorum; when he sees most of the modern educationists, politicians, sociologists—all men of light and leading —competing with each other in the fruitful arts of lying and hypocrisy, and pursuing a career of unbridled power-lust and vile self-seeking; and above all, when he thinks of the inhuman brutalities that are being perpetrated by responsible men from day to day in cold blood and even in the very name of peace and patriotism, he cannot but reel under their shock. Is it civilisation, he asks in amazement, that turns men into beasts of prey ? Is it culture that nourishes on their aboriginal passions ? Is it education that educes all that is dark and barbarous in them and yokes their intellectual powers—God's precious gift to them—to the service of their animal self ?

Human reason can only marvel, but find no solution of this distressing, problem; for the solution lies beyond it. It lies in a double discovery; the discovery of that which is beyond the level of our mental consciousness and of that which is below it,

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Our present active self is but an outer fringe and surface of our far-ranging being which plunges into remote depths below and spreads high above in the infinitudes of the Spirit. The motive forces of our thoughts and actions, the impulses that drive us and the desires that dictate and direct our movements, all come from sources hidden from our view; and unless we plumb the depths and scale the heights, we live in a woeful ignorance of our self, of our nature, and of the world in which we are set to evolve. Most of these motive forces surge up from the subconscient and the inconscient layers of our being, and if we want to transform our nature, it cannot be done by any surface adjustments and reforms, but by a thorough exploration of those submerged regions as well as of the superconscient, and the conversion of all blind and brute energies into their divine counterparts. But if the being of man refuses to exceed its present mental limitations and ascend into the Infinite and Eternal, it will go on pandering to the base passions of its animal self with all the formidable powers of its developing intellectuality, as we see it doing today, and a universal resurgence of the animal in man with an almost limitless potentiality for evil and destruction will be the unavoidable dire result.

But that is not to be. Man's evolution cannot thus be wrecked on the shoals of his animal self. His inherent divinity must awake and assert itself. He must one day come to realise that this mind, however developed, is a tool of the obscure forces of the material life which emerge from the nether reaches of his being and express themselves in his character, temperament and action. This realisation will arouse in him an aspiration for freedom and mastery by his soul's union with the Infinite and Eternal. It was precisely to help this spiritual freedom and mastery of man by his union and communion with the Divine that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo undertook the tremendous labour of illumining and transforming the Subconscient and the Inconscient.

The subconscient is the main support of all habitual movements,

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especially the physical and lower vital movements. 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. The action of the subconscient is irrational, mechanical, repetitive. It does not listen to reason or the mental will. It is only by bringing the higher light and force into it that it can change.”¹

If we read these words of Sri Aurobindo along with those written by the Mother in her Prayer of Nov.25, 1913, we cannot help being struck by the identity of their views and experiences :

"The greatest enemy of a silent contemplation turned towards Thee is certainly this constant subconscient registering of the multitude of phenomena with which we are put into contact. So long as we are occupied with cerebral activity, our conscious thought veils for us this excessive activity of our subconscient reception of things... It is only when we silence our active thought ...that we find surging from all sides the multitude of little subconscient notations which often drown us in their overflowing stream. This is why it happens, as soon as we try to enter into the silence of deep contemplation, that we are assailed by innumerable thoughts—if thoughts they can be called—which do not in the least interest us, do not represent for us any action of desire, any conscious attachment, but which only prove to us our inability to control the receptivity, we might say, mechanical, of our subconscient.”

It is clear from these quotations that no attempt at a radical reform of human nature or a reconstruction of human society that fails to explore, illumine and conquer the Subconscient

¹Bases of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo.

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and the Inconscient can ever succeed. The dark depths hold the secret of our evolutionary growth as well as dangerous explosives that may disrupt our being. We are moved by their obscure forces, even in spite of ourselves; even when we think we are guided by our own will and intelligence. "We are governed ”, says Sri Aurobindo, "by the subconscient and the subliminal even in our conscious existence and in our very self-mastery and self-direction we are only instruments of what seems to us the Inconscient within us.” And yet, "the principle and power of perfection are there in the subconscient, but wrapped up in the tegument or veil of the lower Maya.”¹ Voicing the same truth, the Mother says, "...from many points of view our subconscient has greater knowledge than our habitual consciousness.”²

Locating and describing the subconscient, the Mother says in her Prayer of March 13, 1914, just a fortnight before her fateful meeting with Sri Aurobindo :

"The subconscient is the intermediate zone between precise perception and the total darkness of the ignorance; it is probable that the majority of beings, even of human beings, live constantly . in this subconscience; few emerge from it.”

It is interesting to compare with these words what Sri Aurobindo says on the same point:

"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,

¹The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.

² Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

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and these can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of past thought, feelings, action, etc., as complexes exploding into action and event, 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 samskāras 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.”¹

The goal of evolution, as conceived by Sri Aurobindo, is the complete conversion of the Subconscient and the Inconscient into luminous consciousness, and the principal means to attain it is a descent of the supreme divine Light into them. "Even the inconscient and subconscient have to become conscious in us, susceptible to the higher light, no longer obstructive to the fulfilling action of the Consciousness-Force, but more and more a mould and lower basis of the Spirit.”² This is the conquest that the Mother speaks of in many of her Prayers,—the conquest of the divine Light over the sombre night of the subconscience and the inconscience.

".. .And all Thy (God's) effort consists in drawing the substance from this first obscurity so as to make it be born into consciousness. Passion itself is preferable to inconscience. We must therefore constantly march to the conquest of this universal bedrock of inconscience, and making our organism the instrument, transform it little by little into luminous consciousness.”³

She speaks elsewhere of the subconscient passivity "which we have to conquer and awaken to the consciousness of Thy divine

¹Bases of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo.

² The Life Divine, Vol. II, Chap. XXVI.

³ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

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Presence,”¹ and calls this conquest "the work to be accomplished, the mission to be fulfilled upon the earth. ”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are both agreed that so long as we live under the dismal sway of the Subconscient and the Inconscient, we are almost amorphous in our psychological being, repeating indefinitely, helplessly, mechanically, the desires and cravings, the impulses and instincts, the passions and propensities which enter into us from the universal nature of Ignorance.

"To feel Thee and aspire for Thee, we must have emerged from the immense sea of the subconscient, we must have begun to crystallise, to define and so to know and then to give ourselves as that alone can give itself which belongs to itself. And how many efforts and struggles are needed to attain to this crystallisation, to come out of the amorphous middle state...”²

We do not remember having come across any instance of an organised spiritual campaign against the bedrock of the Subconscient and the Inconscient that can be cited along with that of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. And yet it is the most momentous humanitarian work ever undertaken, for, without a complete transmutation of the basic stuff of human nature, it would be idle to dream of a happy and harmonious human life on earth. Man can be redeemed and released into his inherent divinity only by the double discovery we have spoken of above : the discovery of the golden summits of his being and the dark base from which he has started on his evolutionary pilgrimage. A simultaneous conquest of the summits and the base has to be attempted, if the integral being of man has to have an integral divine fulfilment in life. This is the fundamental perception upon which the work of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo has been progressing, and its consummation will be the manifestation of God in life, the Life Divine. If we lose sight of this fundamental perception, we shall find ourselves

¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

² ibid.

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lost in the many-sided vastness of the aim and the incalculable swing and sweep of the process of the Integral Yoga propounded by them. This perception was the well-spring of all the efforts of the Mother even when she knew nothing of Sri Aurobindo, and it has ever been the same in their unwearied collaboration.

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