concentration is mild, we will feel nothing. It looks as if nothing is happening. It will
be like pouring water on a rock—it will not percolate, and the rock will not even feel
the water falling on it. This is what one would feel even after some months of
concentration, because months of effort may produce no result, for reasons which are
very peculiar and are very guarded secrets of nature. Nature will not reveal her
treasures like that, at one stroke, merely at the call. But when the effort becomes
insistent and we persist in our concentration irrespective of the results that follow,
not bothering about what happens—“results or no results, I will continue and
persist”—if this is our attitude, then some miracle will take place.
That miracle will be, in the beginning, a torture. It will not be a pleasant thing that
comes, because we are trying to reconstitute the existing set-up of things. We can
imagine the difficulty that has to be faced by a pioneer in any field, whether it is in
the political field, or the social field, or any kind of work. The pioneer has to work
very hard because he has to rearrange everything that is already there, from the
standpoint of the idea that is in his mind, according to the goal which he visualises—
the ultimate aim of his endeavours. In the beginning, the reactions would be such
that it would be difficult to understand what is happening. In rare cases one can
know what is happening. In some cases, it is not possible to know what is
happening—though we will feel that something is happening. When people are
running about from place to place, we may not know why they are running about. Are
they happy or unhappy? Is something wrong or is something right? What is the
matter with these people? Why are they running back and forth? We do not
understand this merely by looking at their movements. But if we have a
foreknowledge of the circumstances in which they are living, the atmosphere which
they are in, we will have an idea as to what is happening. Similarly is the case with
these psychological conditions that arise at the time of intense concentration of
mind.
As I mentioned, concentration is a pressure that is exerted in a particular manner at
a particular point. The point is not isolated; it has a subtle inward relationship with
many other things in this world. It is like a social group, if we would like to designate
it thus. A society of individuals which introduces a sympathetic character or quality
of a uniform nature among the individuals which constitute it will naturally tell upon
each individual when its order is interfered with. The Indian nation, for example, is
such a social group. When we interfere with the national character of the country, we
are interfering with the character or the position of every individual, because each
individual is connected with that character. Likewise, there is a social group of forces,
we may say. They may be called ‘social’ in the sense that kindred forces group
themselves into a particular pattern in respect of a particular individual. The way
in which this kind of grouping is done depends entirely upon the structure of the
individual personality and the subtle relationships it has with the external
atmosphere on the basis of its own needs and desires, whether fulfilled or unfulfilled.
It is this peculiar atmospheric condition, or the psychological environment, which I
designate as the social group of forces subtly working around the individual, that the
psychoanalysts—especially Jung, etc.—call the collective unconscious. It is not really
unconscious, as they call it. Well, we may call it unconscious in the sense that it
cannot be probed into directly by an individual intellect. But it is not unconscious,
because it is alert, it is active, it can work, and it can have an effect upon us. So
how can we call it unconscious? It is not unconscious; but for practical purposes of
individual psychological investigation, we call it unconscious. Whatever it is,