72 QUESTION: What is the psychic law operating between the conscious and the unconscious mind? Is there a strict dividing line and what is the law regulating what stays down and what comes up?
ANSWER: There is no strict dividing line between the conscious and the unconscious mind. You may have noticed in this work that you often expect to find recognitions that were completely unknown to you, but in some way you know that what you are now finding as a new recognition, with a new understanding of its significance, is not really new. You merely looked away, but it was always there. It was somewhere in a region between the conscious and unconscious mind. There is no strict dividing line between the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is rather a fading transition, so to speak.
Imagine the entire personality, psyche or mind, both conscious and unconscious, as a rounded form. The more evolved and developed a person becomes, the more this form is free of haze and fog. The less developed a person, the greater the part that is fog-bound. The part which functions consciously is a smaller area.
Spiritual philosophies and teachings use the term “raising consciousness.” It means exactly that. If you visualize such a form, you can imagine that as the consciousness is raised, the form comes out of the fog of unconsciousness. Gradually the haze recedes and you become more and more conscious of yourself.
Since the universe is in you, and since you are a universe unto yourself, the universal consciousness can only be gained by this very process of self-finding through which you lift the fog. You cannot gain this consciousness by concentrating on things you learn with your brain alone. That may be valuable as a tool for the work of self-finding, which is the process of making the fog recede, so that the part which was unconscious becomes conscious.
QA123 QUESTION: We are working and bringing everything that is in the subconscious mind into the conscious. As the conscious mind is limitless, whereas the unconscious must be limited, there must come a time when the unconscious mind disappears. Is this correct?
ANSWER: No, this is not quite correct, because in the first place there are not two minds: it is not a conscious and an unconscious or subconscious mind. There is one mind. Part of this mind, this great mind, is – if you want to divide it this way – conscious and the other one is not conscious. And certainly what is conscious is much, much, much less than what is unconscious. So there it would be just the opposite.
What is hidden from your awareness, from your consciousness, is certainly more, so even on that more limited scale, you must realize mathematically that there is more contained together in your unconscious and conscious mind than in your conscious mind alone.
But even apart from the point of view that in your unconscious mind are many false concepts and distortions, there is also the area of the conscious mind which harbors all the truth, much, much more so than the conscious mind which is primarily fed – to begin with, at the development stage at any rate – from the outside, from outer concepts.
The unconscious also includes the divine cosmic source of all knowledge and wisdom. And this indeed is limitless, while your conscious mind is very limited. It is limited on the one hand, on the one side, by the barriers of knowledge. No human being can possibly possess all the conscious knowledge existing on this Earth sphere. You only have a certain amount of knowledge that you could absorb from the outside. But in addition to this, it is limited by the obstructions, blocks, images and misconceptions which govern you, and which limit you in the direction of the vast and superior divine mind which exists within yourself.
QUESTION: Can this be achieved on the Earth sphere?
ANSWER: Only to degrees. You can never say, or only in rare instances can one say, something can be or cannot be achieved. Whatever man can achieve on this plane are degrees, and you work toward the relatively high degrees in which this can be accomplished on this Earth plane.
For instance, it is certainly conceivable and possible and feasible that man can free himself from misconceptions and images, and can eventually get to the point when new experience is assimilated in a live way, without looking away from the new experience, so that more and more the threshold to the real self – I would not want to call it “mind” because that may be misleading in this sense – all the knowledge, all the wisdom begins to open. More and more access to it is possible. More and more knowledge from it is available.
But there will always be certain limitations on this Earth plane due to matter, which in itself is an obstruction. But once this stage is reached, such a being will no longer appear – after such a stage is reached – in the human form, in the human vibration and the matter as you know it. And then higher stages of awareness open the vistas and diminish the barriers.
QUESTION: What position would a person be in in society today with complete open consciousness? And what effect would this person have on society and vice versa?
ANSWER: Such a person would be a tremendous benefit to mankind, of much more far-reaching effect than his immediate environment – those he knows, those he comes in contact with. For each person who comes in contact with such a person will, in ever so subtle a way, be influenced by the mere emanation.
An example will be created which, even unbeknown to the conscious self of the other person, will influence others so that these in turn will influence others they come in contact with – even those who are far away from a stage of development where they can really explore the regions of their own obstructions, thereby eliminating these obstructions.
Even these people will somehow be affected in their emotions, in their perceptions, in their reactions. And this will be like a seed in them. Much more will others be affected who are fundamentally ready for much more than their current life makes allowances for. For you know, there are so many human beings, my friend, who could utilize so much more – who are actually ready for much more than they do in their own self-development.
When this is the case, many depressions and much unhappiness exist which need not exist otherwise, if they really develop to their potentials. Such people would be tremendously influenced by the contact with such a person. Moreover, the influence would also be on a more material scale, in direct material influences, to the better. So there is no doubt that this has much more far-reaching effect than meets the eye, certainly.
QUESTION: Was Jesus Christ such a person?
ANSWER: Yes. Of course.