The grossest form of desire projects itself out in space and time as the conscious
urges of the mind. What we call conscious activity, deliberate free will, or freedom of
choice, about which we speak—all these are nothing but the spatio-temporal
expressions of buried desires. When they become spatialised and temporalised, they
become conscious, and then it is that we say that we have freedom of will, and so on.
But, it is not true that we have real freedom of will. We are forced to act by the
potency of these impulses inside; and because these impulses, when they act, get
identified with our intellect, we mistake these actions for deliberate actions.
The moment an urge identifies itself with the intellect and ego, it passes for freedom
of will, just as a hypnotised patient may think that he is acting voluntarily though he
is acting under the power of the will of the physician who has hypnotised him, not
knowing that he has been hypnotised. If we ask a patient who has been hypnotised
why he is acting in that particular manner, he will say, “Well, I want to do that.” He
will never say, “I have been hypnotised.” He will not even know it. Likewise, these
impulses pass for freedom of action due to their identification with the ego and the
intellect of the individual, but there still remains behind this conscious activity a
layer of subconscious and unconscious impulses which, little by little, will come up to
the surface one day or the other for the purpose of fulfilment, so that we can never
know ourselves fully at any time.
We are always in the dark about our own selves, let alone about others; otherwise,
why is there a change of mood and behaviour every day? If we know ourselves fully,
why not maintain a continuous mood which is regarded by us as worthwhile and
desirable? Suddenly we say, “Well, something happened to me. I am thinking
something else today,” because of the fact that we are controlled by other rulers—
alien forces which are the latent impressions created by past experiences in many
lives. This is the history of the law of karma, which, in its various formations, goes by
the names of sanchita, prarabdha and agami.
As I mentioned, sanchita karma is the total store of the forces of previous actions
accumulated in the deepest layer of our mind—in the unconscious layer we may say,
in the anandamaya kosha, which always remains like a dark abyss into which we
cannot enter. It is completely dark, opaque and impervious, and shakes up its entire
structure and bodily constitution occasionally for the purpose of the ejection of a
particular group of stored actions from its own constitution. That becomes the
subconscious level.
The subconscious is nothing but the tendency of the unconscious to reshuffle itself
into a particular mode for the purpose of coming to the surface of consciousness.
That intermediate condition where the structure of the constitution of the
unconscious level is shaken up for the purpose of ejecting a particular group of
actions is the subconscious level. When it is completely projected into the arena of
space and time, it becomes conscious action, conscious desire. Thus, what we are
thinking just now in our mind—or rather, what we are thinking throughout our life in
this particular incarnation—is nothing but what we call the conscious manifestation
of what is already there unconsciously, subconsciously.
The whole of our personality cannot be revealed in the conscious level, because there
is no point in it coming to the conscious level. What is the good of it coming to the
conscious level when it cannot get anything? Only those particular aspects of the