The Subliminal Consciousness Provides the Gateway to Knowledge and Creativity

It is typical for human beings to associate their knowledge, their artistic achievements, their skills as something they create within themselves. They tether the ego-consciousness to all such developments, believing that somehow they are unique and special in terms of the ability to create wonderful things all by themselves. In the West, successful people have the illusion of the ‘self-made man’. Yet, if we examine the creative process carefully and dispassionately, if we observe the process of thought and the method of the acquisition of knowledge, we soon begin to see that our conscious effort is not the true driver of this developmental process.

Albert Einstein once stated: “The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”

He goes on to further state: “I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”

Nikola Tesla similarly indicated that his insights did not come from himself but from a process based in silence and receptivity to the messages of the universal creation that reached in when the mind fell quiet.

As we let go of the egoistic attachment to the functioning of the particular mind-life-body complex we inhabit, we see that the surface mind is not a creative force, and that inspiration comes through the action of the wider consciousness that we can access through receptivity to the subliminal levels of consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “… from there [subliminal forces] come all the greater aspirations, ideals, strivings towards a better self and better humanity without which man would be only a thinking animal — as also most of the art, poetry, philosophy, thirst for knowledge which relieve, if they do not yet dispel, the ignorance.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pg. 68