Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1. 1935

Letter ID: 1341

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

May 28, 1935

The word you stumbled against, is “whites”. I thought Mother would understand. And it is our ideal to imitate you, or at least to try to imitate you in everything!

Great Lord! What an h! I could not do worse myself.

When you said yesterday, “I am simply busy trying to get out of the mind” etc., etc., I sighed, “What a happy ignorance! Will it be folly to get wise?”

Not mind, sir. I have gone out of my mind long ago. I wrote “mud” mud, mud, mud of the subconscient.

Can you not tell us a few words on this subconscient? By the grace of Freud and other psychologists, we have come to look upon it as Dante’s Inferno or Michael’s Hell. Your description seems to come close to it, but you’ve said somewhere that in this subconscient, there is formed and stored the impression, besides that of previous lives, of everything seen, heard, etc., etc., and the waves surge up later on. If that be so, it can’t be all bad! It seems to play a tremendous role in our lives. But is there also a universal subconscient by tackling which you can tackle the individual’s subconscient? What will then be the meaning of these impressions in individual consciousness, a simple interchange between universal and individual?

So many questions come up!

Of course 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 subconscience in which there is everything but nothing formulated or expressed. The subconscient of which I speak lies in between the Inconscient and conscious mind, life and body. It contains all the reactions to life which struggle out as a slowly evolving and self-formulating consciousness, but it contains them not as ideas or perceptions or conscious reactions but as the blind substance of these things. Also all that is consciously experienced sinks down into the subconscient not as experience but as obscure but obstinate impressions of experience and can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of past thought, feeling, 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 appearances. It is the cause why, people say, character cannot be changed, also of the constant return of things one hoped to have got rid of. All seeds are there and all the sanskaras of the mind and vital and body,– it is the main support of death and disease and the last fortress (seemingly impregnable) of the Ignorance. All that is suppressed without being wholly got rid of sinks down there and remains in seed ready to surge up or sprout up at any moment.