The Seeds of Thought, Emotion, Feeling, Action and Reaction Reside in the Subconscient Level of Consciousness

The yogic trance state called ‘samadhi’ has several levels, including one that is known as ‘with seed’ and one ‘without seed’. The difference essentially is that the level ‘with seed’ means that it still retains the capacity to be broken by the intrusion of external stimuli and internal reaction or awakening of suppressed items in the consciousness.

On a similar note, the attempt to eliminate various movements, reactions, thoughts, emotions or feelings from the mind-life-body complex has to be seen as being ‘with seed’ unless and until these things are actually able to be eliminated from the subconscient level where they reside and remain ready to assert themselves when appropriately stirred up either through internal processes or external stimuli.

Sri Aurobindo writes; “It is a known psychological law that whatever is suppressed in the conscious mind remains in the subconscient being and recurs either in the waking state when the control is removed or else in sleep. Mental control by itself cannot eradicate anything entirely out of the being. The subconscient in the ordinary man includes the larger part of the vital being and the physical mind and also the secret body-consciousness.”

“The habit of strong recurrence of the same things in our physical consciousness, so that it is difficult to get rid of its habits, is largely due to a subconscient support. The subconscient is full of irrational habits.”

“…We mean by the subconscient that quite submerged part of our being in which there is no wakingly conscious and coherent thought, will or feeling organized reaction, but which yet receives obscurely the impressions of all things and stores them up in itself and from it too all sorts of stimuli, of persistent habitual movements, crudely repeated or disguised in strange forms can surge up into dream or into the waking nature. For if these impressions rise up most in dream in an incoherent and disorganized manner, they can also and do rise up into our waking consciousness as a mechanical repetition of old thoughts, old mental, vital and physical habits or an obscure stimulus to sensations, actions, emotions which do not originate in or from our conscious thought or will and are even often opposed to its perceptions, choice or dictates. In the subconscient there is an obscure mind full of obstinate Sanskaras, impressions, associations, fixed notions, habitual reactions formed by our past, an obscure vital full of the seeds of habitual desires, sensations and nervous reactions, a most obscure material which governs much that has to do with the condition of the body. It is largely responsible for our illnesses; chronic or repeated illnesses are indeed mainly due to the subconscient and its obstinate memory and habit of repetition of whatever has impressed itself upon the body consciousness.”

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Living Within: The Yoga Approach to Psychological Health and Growth, Introduction, The Subconscient and Its Disturbances, pp. xxvii-xxxii