Chapter 10The Environmental Consciousness and the · Illumining the Subconscient
Book 10. Part Three: Sadhana on the Physical, Subconscient · Section Four: The Subconscient and the Inconscient and the Process of Yoga
The subconscient is a dark and ignorant region, so that it is natural that the obscurer movements of the Nature should have more power there. It is so indeed with all the lower parts of the nature from the lower vital downwards. But it does send up good things also though more rarely. It has in the course of the sadhana to be illumined and made a support of the higher consciousness in the physical nature instead of a basis of the instinctive lower movements.
* The work [going on in the subconscient] is of a general nature, not individual, but necessarily everyone here is to some extent affected by it.2 If consciousness and light is not brought into the subconscient, then there can be no change. For it is in the subcon-scient that there are the seeds of all the old lower vital instincts and movements and however much they may be cleared in the 2 This letter was written in November 1937. — Ed.
lower vital itself, they may sprout up again from below. Also the the Truth light.
* [First effects of the Light penetrating and changing the subcon-scient:]
1. The subconscient begins to show more easily what is in it.
2. Things rising from there come to the awareness of the mind before they can touch or affect the consciousness.
3. The subconscient becomes less the refuge of the ignorant and obscure movements and more an automatic response of the material to the higher consciousness.
4. It gives less covert and less passage to the suggestions of the hostile forces.
5. It is more easy to be conscious in sleep and to have higher forms of dream experience. Hostile dreams — e.g. sex-suggestions can be met and stopped in the dream itself and any result like emission prevented.
6. A waking will put on the dream state before sleeping becomes more and more effective.
* The subconscient is to be penetrated by the light and made a sort of bedrock of truth, a store of right impressions, right physical responses to the Truth. Strictly speaking, it will not be for use.