Source: The Times Of India
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Inception-and-the-subconscious/articleshow/6491489.cms
Hollywood
director
Christopher
Nolan has stirred the creative world and enthralled fantasy-loving cine
buffs by mixing the psychologists' old muse dream reading with a high-tech,
special effects bonanza called
Inception.
He has understandably made some compromises with the plot car-chase, shoot-outs,
killing et al to keep the audience engaged while dealing with a complex subject
and a mental game which could otherwise have easily gotten swallowed in
psycho-technical mumbo-jumbo.
While western audiences marvel at this "
James Bond
meets Matrix" tale, very few are perhaps aware that Sri Aurobindo, the renowned
mystic and spiritual master, had spent considerable years through his Integral
Yoga, probing what he called the `subconscient' human mind and came up with some
interesting insights on universal consciousness as a whole.
Sri
Aurobindo discovered, for example, that there are several realms of
consciousness beyond the physical world we live in, and that these planes of
consciousness are in fact the other worlds that are as real as we take our own
world to be. When one sleeps, he said, the subconscient mind is freed from the
shackles of the mind that operates in the physical world, travelling across
those other worlds soaking in experiences, both good and bad, that are needed
for further consciousness evolution of the individual in the dream state. Our
scepticism or ignorance notwithstanding, these "other worlds" not only coexist
with our physical world but they also impinge on it in myriad ways.
According to Sri Aurobindo, these other worlds are stacked in a spiral
of lower and higher levels of consciousness. We have good dreams or nightmares,
depending on where our subconscient mind chooses to travel in the labyrinthine
spiral, with each level having several sub-levels. Without our being aware, we
draw upon these worlds for some of the vilest, crudest or most noble and sublime
ideas that eventually shape our known world. It isn't surprising therefore that
for a Jesus who comes to redeem our world we are also visited by others who wish
to subvert and destroy it.
Sri Aurobindo believed through his own
experience of yoga spanning over 40 years that through regular practice one can
raise one's consciousness to various higher levels until one reaches what he
called the supra-mental level, the pinnacle of evolution. (He never took others'
word for any kind of truth, and insisted on testing it through self-experience.)
Sri Aurobindo made another profound revelation that unlike what scientists tell
us, man is not the pinnacle of Nature's evolutionary cycle. Human beings are
transitional beings. We will undergo transformation and reach our ultimate
evolution level when we reach the highest plane of consciousness. However, we
will have to delve deep into our subconscient mind and begin rising through the
spiral consciousness to reach the pinnacle.
Sri Aurobindo's spiritual
endeavour was not, however, aimed at his own personal salvation. He wanted to
share his experience with others and inspire them to follow this path so that it
would lead to a spiritual revolution in us and usher in lasting peace. He didn't
accept the old spiritual belief that one could reach moksha only if one quit
this so-called wretched world and ascend to a heaven above. "It is here on this
earth that we can create heaven and find release in our own lifetime," he said.
The writer follows Guru Siyag Siddha
Yoga system. juipagedar@gmail.com; website: gurusiyagyoga.org
Read more:
Inception And The Subconscious - The Times of India
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