REFLECTION AND RECOLLECTION
Once a woman was walking to the market with a pot of milk on her head. She started thinking, “When I sell this milk, I’ll make a good profit and then I’ll buy some hens then I’ll have a big poultry farm. Soon l’ll become very rich… I’ll buy a big house and I’ll have the most handsome husband in the land, and I’ll have so many children, I’ll just jump with joy!” Thinking that, she suddenly jumped – and the pot of milk fell off her head and broke! Because she was thinking deeply in her subconscious mind, her sense organs were not receiving sensations from the external world, and her body acted according to the imaginings of her subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is more expanded than the conscioud mind, and has two functions : deep thought or reflection, and memory. The vast majority of most people’s thinking goes on at this level of mind. All intellectual, analytic reasoning, much scientific thought, and problem solving also. For most people this layer of mind handles the day-to-day problems of ordinary life and society: It is the layer of information-management and computation.
This is also the level of deep philosophical thought; the different philosophical controversies in the world including religious controversies – arise due to the mental differences in the different subconscious minds of their propounders.
It is also the layer of memory. According to yoga, there are two kinds of memory, “cerebral memory” and “extra-cerebral memory” – one associated with the brain, and one operating beyond it.
CEREBRAL MEMORY
A man drove to the local university one morning, in his usual absent-minded mood while driving. He was hardly even aware of the road because he was thinking so deeply about the problems in his office. When he reached the university, he participated in a hypnosis experiment, in which he was hypnotised and then asked many questions including, “How many telephone poles did you drive past on your way to the university this morning?” Immediately, without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “Two hundred and fifty-seven.” When the poles were later counted, it was found that there were exactly two hundred and fifty-seven poles on his route!
Much more is stored in our subconscious minds than we often realize; it is simply hidden by the turbulence of the conscious mind. When the conscious mind is calmed or suspended, as in hypnosis, we may remember experiences of which we were not even consciously aware when they happened.
After years of scientific search for the physiological basis for memory the chemical substance of memory, or its specific location in the brain, scientists have discovered that huge sections of the brain can be destroved by trauma, tumours, injury and old age, without any lose of memory. This has led them to believe that learning and memory create a certain field in the brain’s electromagnetic pattern, an “engram“ which preserves the vibrational impression of past events. This idea corresponds to the yogic explanation that vibrational impressions are received through the sense organs and agitate the nervous system and the conscious mind. This restlessness leaves an impression in the mind – either short-lived or long-lasting-depending upon the intensity of the vibration. Memory is the re-expression of this vibration in the brain, so that the past experience is relived.
In Bulgaria, a revolutionary new type of learning called “Suggestopedia” was developed in which students relax in reclining chairs, enter a meditative state under the direction of the instructor, and then listen to soothing classical music. Against this musical background, the instructor begins reciting vocabulary, grammar and conversational phrases of a foreign language, but the students are instructed to listen to the music, not to the lesson. In this serene state, the mind seems to absorb information like a sponge : the students learn a year of material in only one month! Their conscious minds are so relaxed by the music and meditation that their “learning anxiety disappears and the information is easily and directly absorbed and stored in their subconscious minds.
It seems that without the interference of the conscious mind, the subconscious mind’s ability to receive, store and retrieve information is virtually limitless. This system of learning, sometimes called “superlearning,” is now being used in many academic institutions within other subjects besides languages, with excellent results.
Many such progressive learning techniques involving meditation and relaxation will help the future humanity to develop the full potentiality of this subconscious layer of the mind. (More next week.)
