In the Mother's Light

THE SUBCONSCIENT AND THE INCONSCIENT

THE Inconscient is the origin of the evolutionary creation. It is an apparent negation of the superconscient, an infinite abyss of absolute darkness in which the transcendent omnipresent Reality gets involved for playing at self-loss and self-finding, for the delight of a plunge and a subsequent emergence, a progressive evolution into multiple forms and a manifold self-expression. The engulfing darkness of the Inconscient turns the eternal effulgent substance of Reality into Matter, the dense and obscure primal substrate. In this fathomless night of existence or apparent non-existence, there is no stirring of life or mind, only a blind mighty Energy weaving stupendous systems of worlds and suns and moons and star-clusters and planets, as if in a dumb, creative sleep. Out of this tranced involution of the Spirit in Matter evolves Life, making the earth smile with a splendour of verdant beauty and shudder with a secret, unknown delight. With Life emerges consciousness, first, as faint shadowy sense-tremors, then as sensations, then as instincts, impulsions, volitions, feelings, and later as a sort of rudimentary reason, which constitute the variegated marvels of animal creation. Last emerges man out of the animal, with a far more evolved set of organs and faculties, a more extended and sensitive gamut of psychological functioning, and a fully conscious mind equipped with a developed reason and a self- directing will. But however free and self-directing man's will may be, however wide and limpid his waking consciousness, the roots of his life and nature lie still embedded in the swamps of the Inconscient. The inertia, the insensibility, the ignorance, the dual tendency of atomic aggregation and disaggregation, attraction and repulsion, play such a dominant role in his life and nature that he can be called only a super-animal or a sub-man, rather than a full-fledged man. His conservatism, his un- willingness and inability to change, his forgetfulness of his divine origin and essence, his easy subjection to doubts and dull fatigue, to disease and death are all a trailing heritage from inconscient

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Matter. Besides, there are in Matter the seed-impressions of all the past cycles of creation, the brute instincts and hungers, the falsehood, the ugliness, the ingratitude, and the perversity, which surge up to eclipse the soul of man and prolong the reign of Ignorance in his nature.

The Subconscient is above the Inconscient and just below our surface physical consciousness, below the threshold, as it is called. It is, to quote Sri Aurobindo, "the extreme border of our inner existence where it meets the Inconscient; it is a degree of our being in which the Inconscient struggles into a half-consciousness; the surface physical consciousness also, when it sinks back from the working level and retrogresses towards the Inconscient, retires into the intermediate Subconscience. Or, from another viewpoint, this nether part of us may be described as the antechamber of the Inconscient through which its formations rise into our waking or our subliminal being. When we sleep and the surface physical part of us, which is in its first origin here an output from the Inconscient, relapses towards the originating inconscience, it enters into this subconscious element, antechamber or sub-stratum, and there it finds the impressions of its past or persistent habits of mind and experiences,—for all have left their mark on our sub-conscious part and have there a power of recurrence. In its effect on our waking self this recurrence often takes the form of a reassertion of old habits, impulses dormant or suppressed, rejected elements of the nature, or it comes up as some other not so easily recognisable, some peculiar disguised or subtle result of these suppressed or rejected but not erased impulses or elements.”

The Subconscient is the builder of most of our dreams, the source of our mechanical, repetitive habits and idiosyncrasies, and the seed-bed of most of the obstinate ailments, physical or mental, to which we are all too prone. It is the repository of all our life-impressions which it throws up pell-mell from time to time, either in dreams or in the waking state, to cloud or confuse our consciousness and disturb our poise and balance. The animal propensities, the passions and cravings of the lower nature, when renounced or repressed by the waking self, sink into the Subconscient and bide their time for a vindictive eruption.

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That is why, in spite of our best efforts, the old Adam often takes us by surprise and knocks down many a Vishwamitra from a hard-won eminence of poise and purity. Only what is raised, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, expunged and utterly expelled from the nature, disappears for ever.

It is clear from the above description that the roots of our being, especially of the vital-physical being, lie deep in the Subconscient and the Inconscient out of which we have emerged by evolution, and unless we illumine and transform them, our nature cannot become free and pure, as our soul is free and pure. We may attain to the freedom of the soul or the Self, but we shall remain more or less bound to nature and her three modes, so long as we live on earth, our peace and purity, knowledge and bliss will be always menaced or darkened by the waves from the Subconscient and the Inconscient. An integral purification and transformation of the whole being is the only means of realising an integral union with the Divine in life, and for this a radical purification and conversion of the Subconscient and the Inconscient is an indispensable condition. If we have understood it, we shall be able to understand why the Mother speaks again and again of these nether regions, their exploration and conquest; why she has dived into their murky depths, touched with her fingers "the horror of the inconscience”, invoked from there a descent of the Divine, and come out to announce to humanity: "A new light shall break upon the earth, a new world shall be born.”

It is said that one day a young man came to Vivekananda and took his seat in the room where he was discoursing on spiritual matters to a spell-bound audience. When the discourse was over and the crowd thinned, the young man approached the Swami and asked him with evident earnestness, "What should I do to progress in spirituality ?" The Swami turned his large penetrating eyes upon him, took his measure at a glance and queried, "Can you tell lies ?" "No, Sir", was the bewildered reply, "Go and try to tell lies," counselled the intrepid preacher of Vedanta, and, when the young man was gone, turned towards his friends and disciples saying, "Can

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you teach virtue to a wall ? That young man is like a wall, a mass of inertia, tamas, and he has perforce to pass through a stormy period of desires and passions, get many a staggering jolt and knock before he is fit for a sattwic or religious life."

This tamas, of which the young man was a living embodiment, is a legacy of the Inconscient. It is more or less in all men, confined not only to their physical parts, but attacking also their minds and hearts and paralysing the springs of their life. Referring to this immobilising and disintegrating tamas, the Mother says, "The only thing which must be feared and shunned is the inertia of inconscience, of blind and heavy ignorance. That state is quite at the nethermost of the infinite ladder which leads to Thee. And all Thy effort consists in drawing the substance from this first obscurity, so as to make it he 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.,”¹

The transformation of inconscience into luminous consciousness is, therefore, the main business of a dynamic spirituality in the present world. And how is it to be effected ? The Mother's experience discovers the secret presence of the divine Force in the inconscient depths of Matter as the "Irresistible Healer ”, setting in motion, stirring and churning the innumerable elements, so that "from their primal darkness, their primitive chaos, they may be awakened to consciousness and to the full light of knowledge.” It is the supreme Love of the Divine, His redeeming and transfiguring Grace that informs the Force which heals. But man has to collaborate with this Force, enter into these obscure stretches of his being with a conscious will, and establish there the Light and Law of the Divine. It is perhaps the most difficult work and discipline ever undertaken by spiritual seekers, the most perilous exploration and bitter combat; but it is also the most glorious endeavour pregnant with the possibilities of a divine perfection of man upon earth.

The conquest of the Subconscient and the Inconscient will

¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother; February 9, 1914,

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mean the conquest of material life and nature, and the conversion of human nature into divine nature. The Mother says that the majority of beings, even of human beings, live constantly in the Subconscient, "few, emerge from it,” and she affirms that "this is the conquest that has to be made; for, to be conscious in the true sense of the word is to be Thou integrally; and is not that the very definition of the work to be accomplished, the mission to be fulfilled upon the earth ?”¹

One of the most harassing and hampering actions of the Subconscient is the upsurge of its chaotic vibrations in the forms of random thoughts, unpleasant or painful memories, fickle fancies or swarming impressions, incoherent and senseless, which oppose our silent ingathering and contemplation. Every beginner in the practice of meditation knows how troublesome and tiresome this opposition is, how we are sometimes swept away along the stream of these surging vibrations and find it extremely difficult to silence the mind and concentrate. These vibrations are the outcome of the "constant subconscient registering of the multitude of phenomena with which we are put into contact.” "Quite a portion of our sensibility, and not perhaps the smallest, plays the role of a cinematographic apparatus without our knowledge and, indeed, to our detriment.” Throughout the day, in our waking state, all our sense-perceptions, thoughts, imaginations, day-dreams, feelings, emotions, sensations, all the actions and reactions that take place in us, are recorded by the Subconscient in a sort of cryptic notations which are jumbled up to form fantastic patterns and thrown up in our dreams and even in the waking state. Modern psychotherapy tries to trace many of the mental and physical illnesses to this obscure action of the Subconscient. Most of the strange and stubborn symptoms of psychoneurosis can be safely attributed to it and successfully grappled with by one who has a spiritual knowledge —not the empirical, conjectural, hypothetical knowledge of the psychotherapist—of the subconscient working. But it must be remembered—psycho-analysis ignores this truth—that though the Inconscient is the origin of our evolutionary birth and the

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, March. 13, 1914. :

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Subconscient the nursery where our animal-human traits and proclivities are developed. Heaven is our eternal father and the divine qualities are the stuff and composition of our essential self and nature. It is not the Inconscient and the Subconscient that are the ultimate determinants of our destiny, but the Superconscient, the Divine.

Fear is one of the gifts of the Subconscient to the body. The Mother says, "In fact, 90 per cent of illnesses are the result of the Subconscient fear in the body. In the ordinary consciousness of the body there is a more or less hidden anxiety about the consequences of the slightest physical disturbance. It can be translated by these words of doubt about the future : 'And what will happen ?' It is this anxiety that must be checked.”¹ Fear, by inoculating our being with its suggestion, actually produces the symptoms of an illness for which there may be no traceable cause. To get rid of this fear we have to root it out from the Subconscient.

In the integral Yoga which means to effect a radical conversion and transformation of human nature into the divine, a complete conquest of the Subconscient and the Inconscient, as we have insisted above, is indispensable; otherwise half of our being will gleam in the light of the Spirit and the other half lie sunk in obscurity and be moved by the forces of Ignorance and False- hood. Inertia, weakness, dullness, an easy proneness to physical and psychological disturbances, inability to change and progress, a supine subjection to material conditions and circumstances, a general predisposition to suffering, fears, passions and restless desires are the normal constituents of the surface human nature, and all this is derived from the Subconscient and the Inconscient. The Mother's main work is a complete transformation of this subterranean base of human nature, so that a divine race of supermen may reveal God's glory and fulfil His Will in the material world.

The present state of humanity, torn and distracted, and convulsed with passions and fears, is the result of the volcanic eruption of the Subconscient and the Inconscient into human

¹ Words of the Mother.

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nature. The more the divine Light descends into Matter, the more desperate is the resistance of the material darkness, which rules the earth-nature today. But the very desperateness of the resistance forebodes its eventual end. And that is exactly what is heralded by the following heartening words of the Mother from her message of the i5th August 1950 :

"Our sadhana has reached a stage in which we are mostly dealing with the Subconscient and even the Inconscient. As a consequence, the physical determinism has taken a predominant position, bringing an increase of difficulties on the way which have to be faced with an increase of courage and determination.

"In any case, whatever happens and whatever you do, do not allow Fear to invade you. At the slightest touch of it, react and call for help”

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