Dear Sundari, apologies for taking so long to reply to your last email on the difference between the cause and effect and non-origination teaching. It is a difficult and subtle teaching, as you point out. I am still trying to assimilate it. I ‘get it’ intellectually, but am constantly tripped up by repetitive patterns. Things happen that trigger ‘me’ that I seem to have no control over. This causes so much conflict in my personal relationships, not to mention my state of mind. Could you shed some light on this?
Sundari: It is very difficult being a ‘human’ being, and it is even more difficult to disidentify with being a human being. We tend to think of preferences, our likes and dislikes, as something we’ve reasoned our way toward over time. Vedanta says the opposite. How and when we respond to outside stimuli is shaped, in predictable and measurable ways, by our dominant motivational drives, our likes and dislikes.
The same could be said of most of our cognitive analyses. Or thinking patterns. Most of these mental and emotional patterns, especially the ones that cause the most trouble for us, are based in the unconscious mind. Vedanta explains this perfectly in its teaching on our likes and dislikes, vasanas and samskaras, and what gives rise to them—the three gunas, which I know you are familiar with.
The (Four) Major Drives
Evolutionary psychology and behavioral science have long recognized that human motivation organizes around three primary and sequential imperatives. The first is oriented toward security and physical nourishment: safety, comfort, the body protected and at rest. The second is oriented toward social belonging: group membership, collective relationships, and one’s position within a community. The third is oriented toward intensity and deep connection: peak experience, charged aliveness, full engagement with whatever matters most.
Vedanta adds the fourth, and most important drive, which is virtue or spiritual growth, which sometimes, but not always, comes after the first three are taken care of. These are not personality types in the traditional sense but something more primary, even primal. These biological imperatives operate below conscious choice, organizing what each of us pays attention to and finds meaningful. When we have not dealt with the first three motivational impulses, especially security, we are unlikely to be qualified for self-inquiry.
The Cause of Friction and Conflict in Relationship
All of our conflict/friction dynamics are driven by the unconscious mind(s), which contains our past. Most of who we are as conscious beings is driven by it, whether we like it or not. Our conditioning and our past weaves its way into our psyche like a parasitic vine wraps itself around a host tree, changing its shape. And sometimes totally deforming, even killing it.
The mind, whose deeper unconscious content makes up 95% of what propels it, is truly an awesome and potentially terrifying thing. There be angels, but also, dragons there. And they can only be slain when it’s their time. So much potential for freedom, expansion and joy. And for imprisonment, limitation and pain. Amazing and scary, being human. Especially when you are convinced that is all you are.
One has to see it all, understand it, to cut the root of that parasitic invader, to ourselves free of its grip. But because it has no actual substance, you can’t see it until you see it. When you do, it is only knowledge and love that have the power to cut the ties, for good. To burn those ropes so that they no longer have any power to bind. Vedanta gives us that power. Without it, the ‘you’ you think you are is not in charge.
Who Is In Charge?
What or who is in charge sounds like a spiritual or philosophical provocation, and it is that. Humans have been trying to answer that question since we became aware of time, and starting wondering who we are and why we were here. Most religions are based on this and have their versions of the answer to the question. It is a question at the heart of self-inquiry as well, relating to the investigation of who the person is, what drives them, how they relate to and transact with their environment, and what creates, sustains and destroys the whole creation.
The 5% You
But it is also a scientific question with measured, replicated and findings published in the most rigorous journals in psychology and neuroscience. The consensus is that the conscious mind, the part of you that reads these words, that deliberates and believes it is making decisions, controls approximately 5% of your cognitive and emotional activity. The remaining 95% is conducted by the unconscious mind.
The 95% is the vast, silent, invisible machinery that operates below the threshold of conscious awareness. It generates the thoughts you think are yours, producing the decisions you believe you make, generates the feelings you think are yours, and runs the biological systems that keep you alive. All without ever asking your permission or reporting its activity to your conscious awareness.
In other words, the person you think you are is just the very tip of the iceberg. The rest is mostly unknown. But not unknowable, if you have the right means of knowledge. Vedanta tells us upfront that reality is not what we think it is – that our sensory perception is vastly limited, and the information coming from it is biased and therefore, flawed. Though we relate to the idea of a conscious and unconscious mind, there is much more to reality than that. A whole level below our own personal conscious and unconscious, the macrocosmic unconscious or Causal body.
Science has named the three orders the three orders: 1) the personal conscious, 2) the personal unconscious and 3) the impersonal unconscious—the explicate, implicate and super-implicate orders. In Vedanta this is the triumvirate of jiva (Subtle body/System 3), Isvara (Causal body or System 2), and the knower of both, Pure Consciousness (System 1). We have written extensively on these three systems.
Are You the Candle or the Sun?
The person we take ourselves to be is only aware of a small spectrum of stimuli coming in from the senses at any given time. Whereas the personal and impersonal unconscious, the two levels of the Causal body, is processing millions of bits of information per second. The conscious mind is a candle, and the unconscious mind is the sun. But the candle believes it is illuminating the room. If we had to compare the conscious and unconscious minds to a computer, the conscious mind has a computational ability of 40 bits per second, and the unconscious mind 400 million bits, per second.
This finding is not new. Freud proposed the existence of the unconscious mind in the 1890s, arguing that the conscious self is the tip of an iceberg, with the vast bulk of mental activity occurring below the waterline, invisible and inaccessible to ordinary awareness. Freud’s metaphor has become so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.
But the shock is deserved, because Freud was not merely proposing that some mental activities are unconscious. He was proposing that most mental/emotional activity is unconscious. That the conscious self is a thin veneer over a deep, powerful, autonomous system that has its own goals, its own logic and its own agenda. That is a scary thought for most. Is it any wonder that freedom from and for the jiva is so difficult?
The unconscious is vast, powerful—and it is running your life. Modern sciences’ view of the unconscious begins not with Freud, but with Benjamin Libet, whose experiment on free will demonstrates that the brain initiates actions approximately half a second before the conscious mind becomes aware of the decision. The readiness potential or electrical buildup in the motor cortex precedes voluntary movement—it begins before consciousness arrives. The decision to act is made ‘in the dark’. Without your knowledge.
The conscious mind is notified after the fact. John Dillon Haines extended on this finding to 7 full seconds of unconscious brain activity, detectable by MRI pattern classifiers, preceding the conscious experience of choosing which button to press. In the investigation into free will, this puts things into very sharp focus.
Is There Free Will?
Who is really doing the choosing? What is weighing alternatives, committing to a course of action before the conscious mind has any awareness that a decision is underway? That something is the unconscious, the micro and macrocosmic causal body. And it is not merely fast and automatic. It is highly sophisticated and intelligent.
The unconscious does not merely decide before you do. It perceives subliminally before ‘you’ do. This framework suggests that our conscious awareness is like a small spotlight, illuminating a tiny fraction of the brain’s activity. While the vast majority of processing occurs in the regions outside the spotlights beam. In the unconscious systems that the (superficial) global workspace cannot reach.
The topic of freeway will investigates the relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds. Libet’s readiness potential, the unconscious initiation of action before conscious awareness, is the unconscious mind generating a neural template. ‘Free will’ is the conscious mind’s ability to veto the stimulus before it morphs into automatic action generated by the unconscious.
Standing Up to Your Vasanas
This is what Vedanta means by ‘standing up to your vasanas’. Start with identifying the low hanging fruit – your likes and dislikes. Track them and that will lead to the deeper samskaras in the uncosncious twhere hey originate from. Knowledge of our likes and dislikes and what drives them, affords us the power to select the  options generated by the unconscious. Mature worldly people without non-dual knowledge and the tools it offers, such as karma yoga and guna yoga, often manage a high degree of self-management and control. But this does not equate to freedom from and for the person.
For this you need Self-knoweldge, and there is nothing to beat it. Only by applying the nondaul teachings to our lives do we gain the freedom from the person without the pressure to become a different or ‘better’ person. Though that will happen because when you understand who you are you will never break dharma and cause injury to yourself or others in thought word or deed.Â
But becoming a better person is a benefit of Self-knowledge, not the aim. You are told upfront that there is nothing wrong with you other than ignorance of your true identity as the unborn, unchanging, whole and complete Self. Knowing that gives you the power to discriminate between the two orders of reality, duality and non-duality. And like David going up against Goliath, the power to slay the dragons in the unconscious.
Self-knowledge is your super power. Dedication to your sadhana and commitment to clearing up the repetitive patterns with it are the only way forward. Take it easy, love yourself, and trust that the scripture has your back. You are on the right track.
Much love
Sundari
