QA178 QUESTION: This Path that we are working on to get to our center involves exposing unconscious processes. Is there in us a basic misconception about the concept of the unconscious?

ANSWER: Yes, there very often is a misconception in the following ways. Very often people believe the unconscious is purely destructive and an enemy. In other instances people believe the unconscious – or the subconscious as it is also called – is purely positive and divine. In other instances, the unconscious is believed to be a separate entity, a separate thing.

Therefore people conceive of all different things in themselves. There is the divine aspect of the unconscious. This is one entity, as it were. There is the destructive child, the childish, neurotic self, which is also supposed to be a separate entity. And then there is the instinctual self, with its wonderful apparatus of building up the body, again, which is conceived of as a separate thing.

So all of this is a confusion, for there is only consciousness. Consciousness is in the living human entity; it is partly conscious – aware – and partially the consciousness turns away from it – be it the destructive element of psychic attitudes and influence or be it the constructive one.

Much of what is supposedly unconscious is not really unconscious at all. It is merely not looked at – but it is really quite on the surface. So these and other similar confusions exist.

You can think of it as one consciousness that permeates the entire universe. The separation of even one human being from another is but a spurious separation – a separation of time, of mind, of space, of concept, of awareness – but not in actuality. But this would really be very difficult for the human awareness – as the consciousness manifests – to perceive at the moment; it would be mostly a theory. These, I would say, roughly speaking, are some of the general confusions.

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