You've probably noticed how unpleasant memories, worries about the future, and even deep-seated
fears can arise sometimes when you meditate. They can emerge suddenly, and for no apparent reason,
even during deep meditation. This disturbing experience might seem mysterious,
but it's actually the result of hidden, unconscious forces
in your mind, forces that you can identify and learn how to manage.
To understand those forces, we'll have to explore certain psychological issues.
Great psychologists like Freud and Carl Jung showed how we all possess both a conscious mind
and an unconscious mind. Your conscious mind is composed of thoughts, emotions, and sensations,
the mental events or vrittis we've already discussed. Your unconscious mind, on the other
hand, is a repository of memories, fears, desires, and impulses that can enter your conscious mind
in the form of thoughts and emotions. We'll discuss how this happens shortly.
The unconscious mind can be described in various ways. The teachings of Vedanta say it's the
combination of vasanas, which are deeply rooted desires and impulses, together with samskaras,
which are mental impressions or conditioning caused by experiences you had earlier in this life
or in previous lives. Many psychologists say that your unconscious includes the id,
the source of powerful basic instincts, and the superego, your conscience,
your innate sense of right and wrong. To thoroughly explore the nature of the unconscious
is well beyond the scope of this course. But this brief discussion is enough to help understand
how the unconscious mind affects the practice of meditation.
Thoughts and emotions seem to emerge from your unconscious more freely during meditation than
at other times when you're busy with various activities. Why? When your conscious mind
is filled with vrittis, they tend to inhibit the emergence of stuff from your unconscious.
But when your mind is quieted by meditation, there are fewer vrittis present to push that unconscious
stuff away, so it can arise more easily. They say, "Nature abhors a vacuum," and that seems
to explain why a quiet mind is an ideal place into which unconscious stuff can emerge.
This phenomenon can be nicely explained with a modern example, based on a bottle of carbonated
soda. As you know, invisible carbon dioxide gas is dissolved in the soda, giving it its fizz.
The invisible gas represents the memories, fears, and desires hidden in your unconscious. You can't
see the dissolved gas, nor can you directly experience the stuff hiding in your unconscious.
When you open a bottle of soda, dissolved gas will start to bubble up. Likewise,
when you meditate, memories, fears, and desires will start to emerge from your unconscious,
metaphorically bubbling up into your conscious mind in the form of thoughts and emotions.
Now, what is it that keeps gas dissolved in the soda? What prevents it from bubbling up?
You might have noticed that soda bottles are never
completely filled. There's always an empty space at the top.
That space is actually filled with pressurized gas. The pressure pushes down and keeps the gas
dissolved in the soda from escaping. Then, when the cap is removed, the pressure
inside the bottle gets released, allowing the dissolved gas to bubble up from the soda.
That explains what happens in your mind. Your conscious mind is usually filled with thoughts,
emotions, and sensations. All those vrittis exert a kind of mental pressure on your
unconscious mind, like the gas at the top of this bottle exerts pressure on the soda.
As long as this bottle is tightly capped, the pressure inside prevents all the bubbles from
fizzing away. Similarly, as long as your conscious mind is filled with vrittis,
mental pressure prevents unconscious stuff from bubbling up into your conscious mind.
Meditation affects your mind like opening a bottle of soda. When the cap is removed, pressure inside
the bottle is released, and that allows bubbles to emerge from the soda. During meditation,
very few vrittis are left to exert pressure on your unconscious, and that allows memories, fears,
and desires to bubble up from your unconscious, just like a fizzing bottle of soda.
The next question is, Why do particular memories, fears, and desires arise from your unconscious
and not others? Unconscious stuff seems to emerge, in part, according to its intensity. For example,
memories of painful or traumatic events seem more likely to emerge than those of ordinary
events. Your memories of hurtful words and infuriating conflicts can be so powerful that they
relentlessly force themselves into your conscious mind. It's amazing that some painful memories
retain this kind of power, even when the painful events occurred decades ago. The tremendous
force exerted by memories like these is an issue that meditators can't afford to ignore.
In the soda bottle example, gas dissolved in the soda exerts pressure to escape as bubbles.
Highly carbonated soda exerts more pressure than less carbonated soda. And if the soda is warm or
vigorously shaken, even more pressure will be exerted by the gas in the bottle. This metaphor
helps explain the seemingly mysterious behavior of the forces hidden in your unconscious mind.
The pressure exerted by gas dissolved in the soda represents the pressure exerted by memories,
fears, and desires hidden in your unconscious. Just as greater carbonation creates more pressure
in the bottle, so too, some kinds of unconscious stuff exert more pressure in your mind,
like memories of heated arguments and hurtful words. And, just like a bottle of warm
soda can erupt with a stream of foam when it's shaken, in a similar way,
unconscious stuff can erupt with tremendous force when someone gets emotionally heated up
or agitated. Not surprisingly, we say that people can blow up like a volcano.
Of course, memories, fears, and desires can bubble up from your unconscious at any time,
not just during meditation. Traumatic memories, in particular, can emerge when you're at home,
at work, anywhere, and suddenly plunge you into emotional turmoil. Therapists and
self-help books offer lots of advice on how to manage serious issues like these. In this lesson,
we'll focus only on using meditation to help manage smaller, less critical issues.
Every day, you experience many little irritations, hurts, frustrations, and disappointments.
Each of these leave a trace or remnant in your unconscious. If those remnants
accumulate over a period of time, the pressure they exert can gradually build up,
and if the pressure grows large enough, the accumulation can erupt suddenly and forcefully,
possibly causing you to lose your temper or suffer a so-called emotional meltdown.
Everyone is subject these problems when mental pressure is allowed to build up. So,
it's best to release that pressure in a safe, healthy, and non-disruptive manner.
To release that pressure, you need to provide some time, when your mind is relatively quiet, to allow
accumulated unconscious stuff to bubble up and get released, or vented as some people like to say.
Usually, leisure time and socializing with friends gives you plenty of time relax and let off steam,
so to speak Physical exercise is also very helpful in this regard. But sometimes, you might be too
busy for all that. And, if a demanding lifestyle consistently prevents you from letting off steam,
mental pressure can gradually build up over a period of time.
Fortunately, it's easy to prevent this from happening by simply releasing just a little
bit of pressure each day. And daily meditation can provide an ideal opportunity for venting some
of that pressure. In meditation, you can quiet your mind enough to allow memories and other
unconscious stuff to bubble up and get released. In this way, meditation can be therapeutic.
Meditation can be like a short, relaxing vacation that gives you some time to unwind,
or decompress, as some people say. Meditation can be a ten or twenty minute
holiday you can enjoy every day of the week. Any meditation technique can be used in this way,
but the sakshi bhava meditation we practiced in the previous chapter is especially well-suited
for this purpose because it's specifically intended to allow thoughts and emotions to
bubble up from your unconscious. You can find a link to that meditation in the video description
below.