Vincent AcelingWhereWeBegin
October 15th 2007 04:45
Meditation, Subconscious Mind and Intuition
by Swami Durgananda, PhD
Selected Excerpts
Animal Behavior
Most people relate to life from the subconscious mind, the animal plane. What is
predominant in the animal kingdom? It is fear of the people and objects that are not known – territorial thinking. When we observe this behavior in animals we consider it quite sweet, but if we look closely we are behaving the in same way: we put our name next to the door bell to say, ‘This is my place .Human beings combine instinct with intellect. When we are building a nest, that is animal behavior. The intellect asks: what type of nest? A very special nest, a skyscraper out of glass. Then we sit in it, drink, eat and sleep just like the animal. Animals hide food underground for winter and we build big refrigerators, dry food or put it into tins. With air cargo we ship fresh mangoes in the middle of winter. It all comes from the survival instinct and has nothing to do with real intelligence as such.
Automatic functions of the Subconscious Mind
The subconscious mind contains many unnecessary thought waves, unfulfilled desires, memories and dreams of the future. None of them relate to the present moment at all: ‘I feel cold; I am hungry; Is he going to call?; Where do I have to go?; What do I still have to do?; I need to clean up, but I feel lazy; I want to loose weight; I want to gain weight’. All our life our mind has been occupied with this ‘me and mine’ thinking. As long as our intellect does not have the strength to apply proper discrimination, this type of automatic thinking continues like a tape recorder. If you allow yourself to be dominated by the subconscious mind in this way, you will remain a prey of your past.
Self-awareness and Detachment
It appears that we are thinking something unique and new. On closer observation we realize that we are being guided by thoughts which we have absorbed unconsciously. In raja yoga this is called viveka or discrimination. You take a step outside of yourself and just watch what is going on. Swami Vishnu-devananda compared it to a movie, watching our own film. It requires a certain detachment from our own emotions, which can only be found during the protected silence of meditation, undisturbed by the telephone or other interruptions. Then we can detach ourselves from our own mind and contemplate the movie of our life. Certain impressions in the movie tend to repeat themselves and these come from the depth of our subconscious mind to which we have not had any access so far.
Purifying the Subconscious Mind
Finally all three levels of consciousness have to be transcended. However, the subconscious mind is the main task because this is where we are stuck. We merely believe to be intelligent beings, but at present we are still very limited. It is only whilst learning a new job or studying at school or university that we apply our intelligence and then we go on automatically until the end. After the age of fifty we talk mostly about the past, from the subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind is stuck as in the story of the three young men who were rowing in a boat at night. They were drunk and wanted to cross to the other shore of the river. They felt very strong and rowed the whole night. Only at sun rise did they realize that they had forgotten to pull up the anchor! They had rowed the whole night but the boat had not moved an inch. We also feel strong and keep rowing, but forget to lift the anchor. The subconscious mind dominates our thinking. ‘Who am I?’ is the real question, but this question can only be asked by those who start having a subtle doubt that maybe they are not that which they believe to be. This is the beginning of the inner journey.
Siv
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