The Subconscious, the Subliminal and the Superconscious Influence on Our External Lives

When we are focused on our external being, we tend not to recognise that forces unseen actually not only impact how and what we perceive, understand, and respond to impressions and pressures, but actually very much define who we believe we are. There are forces that are subconscient to our external awareness which send up suggestions, thoughts, impulses, drives, habits, and instincts that drive our action. There are also forces superconscient to our external awareness that help us see, and grow beyond the limits of our physical-vital-mental existence. If we look carefully at the sources or seeds of our external reactions, we can begin to trace back much of the way we act to specific vital or mental patterns that human beings have brought forward from animal nature. The very way we respond to pressure, the ‘fight or flight’ response, the ‘pecking order’ response all come from an earlier stage of evolution and remain active in our existing lives. Even our evolved mental life is very much conditioned by past habits of human thought, as well as by social conditioning, education, and interactions we have as we experience our human childhood. It becomes difficult to determine what is ‘unique’ within us other than the specific assemblage of these pre-existing and trained responses that are packaged to represent a specific external personality.

There are also many elements which are subliminal which act without our conscious attention. Many of the metabolic functions, for instance, are not controlled by our conscious thought and will, but take place at a level that is not easily perceptible by our waking mind.

At a certain point, we also find that as individuals grow and evolve, as they optimize the powers of body, life and mind, they experience what can only be named a ‘calling’ to another focus and life-direction. They begin to reorient their actions and thoughts towards this higher calling, a response to the pressure coming from regions of awareness superconscient to our normal human range of perception.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “The subconscious is the evolutionary basis in us, it is not the whole of our hidden nature, nor is it the whole origin of what we are. But things can rise from the subconscient and take shape in the conscious parts and much of our smaller vital and physical instincts, movements, habits, character-forms has this source.”

“There are three occult sources of our action — the superconscient, the subliminal, the subconscient, but of none of them are we in control or even aware. What we are aware of is the surface being which is only an instrumental arrangement. The source of all is the general Nature, — universal Nature individualising itself in each person; for this general Nature deposits certain habits of movement, personality, character, faculties, dispositions, tendencies in us, and that, whether formed now or before our birth, is what we usually call ourselves. A good deal of this is in habitual movement and use in our known conscious parts on the surface, a great deal more is concealed in the other unknown three which are below or behind the surface.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 5, Physical Consciousness — Subconscient — Sleep and Dream — Illness, pg. 88