How To Effect Permanent Change in the Subconscient Nature

It is often said that ‘you can’t change human nature’. One of the major obstacles turns out to be the seeds of all past habits, actions, behaviors, reactions and instincts that reside in the subconscious levels of the being. An individual may spend his life culturing his mind, his emotions and his vital nature. He may train the body and create an enormous power of will to impose his focus and his direction on the rest of the being; and yet, something occurs that suddenly awakens one of the embedded habits or instinctive reactions, and years of effort are seemingly lost. The individual tries again and again, with a repeat, in some form or another, of the failure to change human nature. Sri Aurobindo expresses the frustration in his epic poem Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol when he writes “Heavy unchanged weighs still the imperfect world; The splendid youth of Time has passed and failed; Heavy and long are the years our labour counts And still the seals are firm upon man’s soul And weary is the ancient Mother’s heart.”

Many approaches have been tried. Suppression, stoicism, self-flagellation, isolation and abandonment of life in the world, yet none of them has succeeded. Western psychology developed the concept of psycho-therapy with the understanding that much of what people are struggling with, the deeply embedded and mostly hidden complexes lurking in the subconscious mind, is simply unrecognised and therefore cannot be suitably addressed. Thus, they have developed methods to root around in the subconscient and bring up all the hidden, dark, turbid stuff into conscious awareness. The problem is that such therapy never seems to successfully root out the muck, but rather, leads to confusion, struggle, despair when the individual simply does not know how to deal with what is brought up into the open.

There is an analogy to one of the labours of Hercules, from the ancient Greek tradition. Hercules was tasked with cleaning out the Augean stables. The stables of King Augeus were the home of immortal cattle who created an endless and unending amount of dung. An impossible task awaited Hercules to clean out in a single day the result of 30 years accumulation of dung from the large and (prolific dung-producing) herd owned by King Augeus. The Western method normally would be to simply wade in and start shoveling! And as with the psycho-therapy, the result would have been failure. Hercules came up with a different approach. He opened the wall of the stables and diverted rivers to wash out all the accumulated dirt. If we reflect on this approach, we can more easily understand the approach that Sri Aurobindo recommends to actually succeed at the thankless and difficult task of controlling, cleaning up and upgrading the subconscient consciousness to support the higher evolutionary aspiration of the seeker.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “About the subconscient — it is the sub-mental base of the being and is made up of impressions, instincts, habitual movements that are stored there. Whatever movement is impressed in it, it keeps. If one impresses the right movement in it, it will keep and send up that. That is why it has to be cleared of old movements before there can be a permanent and total change in the nature. When the higher consciousness is once established in the waking parts, it goes down into the subconscient and changes that also, makes a bedrock of itself there also. Then no further trouble from the subconscient will be possible. But even before that one can minimise the trouble by putting the right will and the right habit of reaction in the subconscient parts.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pg. 55