(from September, 2020)
Remembering that the various mental states of the 3D world are all, themselves, substates of a greater world, let’s re-examine how things really are, as opposed to how they appear when one carelessly assumes that the 3D is primary.
Within the 3D world, looking from within the individual subjective personality, what is called the “unconscious” mind is actually the widest, most coherent consciousness. It does not sleep. It does not get interrupted, nor deceived by appearances, nor confused by the contradictory appearances that are the 3D trance state. The word “unconscious” is a tremendous misnomer, except in the sense of “that part of the mind that is inaccessible to the conscious mental apparatus.” In that sense, yes, unconscious. That is, you are not conscious of it. But the unconscious never sleeps, never gets interrupted, never gets bamboozled by appearances. Can your conscious mind say as much for itself?
Now, to say that the contents of the unconscious are inaccessible to the conscious mind is not to say they always must be, nor that all must be. “Talking to the guys” is itself a method of bringing unknown material from far places so you may look at it, and perhaps be changed by it. But, by and large, the unconscious is the unknown platform upon which your life rests.
And – this is important – it is not divided among individuals. It is more like atmosphere that is breathed by many in common and is not subdivided except temporarily while it is in someone’s lungs.
You should give this some thought. The implications are great and wide and important. If your ideas about the unconscious are wrong, the structures you try to build will have no adequate foundation.
Now, we have sketched a view of the unconscious level of 3D life, saying that it is normal 3D mentality that is not conscious of it, rather than that the unconscious is a larger mind that is unconscious of itself. If you have absorbed the implications of this fact, you should find them very encouraging. It is not as [Bernard] Shaw and [Colin] Wilson thought, that life is mind inserting itself into dead matter. Just the reverse. In fact, what they observed was mind reinserting itself in the 3D consciousness of your civilization. Had Shaw and Wilson ever considered the importance of animism as practiced throughout the world, they would have seen that many people already knew what they were struggling toward. This is not a criticism of Shaw or Wilson as thinkers. It is a criticism of the materialist assumptions of the society they sprang from, that they were fighting their way free from.
The greater world, which the 3D present-moment consciousness is normally unaware of, is itself conscious, and of a higher order of consciousness. What you call the subconscious mind, we would describe as a step inward from the universal consciousness. It is more particular to you, the 3D mind. It is the immediate penumbra to your everyday reality. By definition it consists of what you don’t quite bring into consciousness ordinarily. It is the license plate you see but don’t notice, the colors around you, the smells, the noises faint or loud that do not register because you are focused on something else – or, to put it another way, because your active RAM, your 3D conscious mind’s buffer, is already filled with other things. (Indeed, the act of clearing your mind through meditation may be seen as an act of clearing some of the RAM so that you will have room to experience consciously some things that ordinarily life does not allow you to see merely because it is filled with other things, mostly matters of habit.)
There are other categories of things in the subconscious than what has not been noticed. There are the things one does not want to remember: painful things, embarrassing or shameful things. Parts of your experience that you deliberately or by default repress. It is these sorts of things, mostly, that disturb conscious life, causing what seems to be irrational behavior or tendencies; compulsions; distortions in the thinking process; overwhelming, uncontrollable, moods.
This penumbra of 3D life, this mental attic filled with unnoticed or repressed material, shades off in both directions, naturally. (There are no hard and fast boundaries in the universe.) On the one end, it shades into the conscious realm; on the other end, it shades into the realm of which the 3D mind is unconscious. Regard it, if you will, as a buffer between 3D conscious awareness and non-3D unsuspected awareness. As such it is of course 3D and non-3D.
The 3D conscious mind is primarily an experience of limitation, as we have said. It is not that 3D consciousness is a triumph of rationality, fearlessly pushing back the curtains of ignorance and separation, etc. It would be closer to describe it as a special case of the universal mind, functioning as if in isolation, functioning under a continuous pressure of lockstep movement (the ever-pressing living present moment) functioning under deliberately imposed limitation on connection, on making connection, on even maintaining itself in continuity.
This – as you may have noticed! – is hard. Life in 3D is not (and is not designed to be) easy. It is by nature and by design and for a purpose, difficult. Even those around you who may seem to you (from the outside) to live easy lives, don’t find life easy, any more than you do.