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A critical distinction to make in the flow of human experience is that between the superconscious and the subconscious. The former points to what we normally conceive as evolving skills and capacities that we learn and engage through our spiritual activity to participate in fashioning physical, emotional, and mental experiences. The latter points to what we conceive as fully formed mental, emotional, or sensory pathways of experience - already existing constraints on our spiritual activity such as beliefs, emotions, habits, and physical traits. The former weaves actively in form-free domains of integrated experience that are not yet bounded by definite forms, while the latter passively flows along with already finished and clear-contoured thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Any skill, technique, or overall way of being that can be potentially learned through experience belongs to the superconscious, while those learned skills that have since become routine habits and therefore run on autopilot belong to the subconscious.
The subconscious is comprised of relatively well-known or knowable experiences - beliefs, memories, habits, accumulated knowledge, etc. - but it is difficult to even imagine what the superconscious could be ‘comprised’ of. To begin approaching the latter, then, we should first confess that we have no idea how we think, solve problems, speak, animate our limbs, etc. When I build a piece of furniture, I know how I follow the stepwise instructions and fit one part into the next. After it is finished, I can look at the furniture and trace exactly how the various parts came together through my activity or activity that would have been similar to my own. What I don’t have any clue about, however, is how I was able to follow the instructions with mental pictures or to animate my hands while turning the screws. Whatever was going on inwardly to make it all happen remains enigmatic; some mysterious capacities that I instinctively drew upon to accomplish the task.
The paradigmatic reference of the superconscious is:
“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” (1)
Most of us can also confess that the above verse is but a mere abstraction for us to begin with. We have no concrete sense of what it means to experience Christ living in and working through us. We still feel that it is our familiar “I” who is thinking, feeling, and acting out of our personal knowledge and motivations on a daily basis. Normally, we don’t even think about this distinction between the familiar “I” and the Christic “I” or what it could mean. How can we tell the difference between these two as Saint Paul did? Only when we begin a path of inner development and self-knowledge do we start to sense a growing dichotomy between them as our soul life is stretched out between their boundaries, so to speak, and we feel our experiential content streaming from ‘above’ and from ‘below’. Then the paradigmatic reference becomes:
“For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.” (2)
No one wants to be greedy, prideful, slothful, gluttonous, and so forth, but rather the “I” suffers through these conditions passively and habitually. We watch ourselves engaging in greedy, prideful, etc. thoughts and behaviors as if watching a movie. The subconscious soul life makes our “I” dance like a puppet on strings held by shadowy forces that, if we are honest, are beyond our sphere of conscious control. It is not the existence of this subconscious that enslaves the “I” but our ignorance of it. Because of that ignorance, we often convince ourselves, after the fact, that we have been acting freely and rationally in response to sensory events. In reality, sensory events that we experience are often opportunities for deeply subconscious impulses festering within the soul life to come to expression.
For example, we may see some political message on TV and become outraged at the content, assuming that content is the source of our emotional outburst after we have thoroughly evaluated it. We forget to consider how we went out of our way channel surfing until we found something that could act as a vent for the rage that was already there and seeking outer expression. Those vents will start to turn up everywhere in our paths of experience once the sin that dwelleth in us has built enough pressure under the surface of outer life. Outer occasions will be attracted into our conscious vicinity to fulfill the shadowy purposes of the subconscious, like flies to an electric zapper. If we remain unaware of this inner process, as most people are today, then we idolize the outer occasions as the source of all our inner reactions and woes.
That is not to say the outer event is a mere non-factor. If we project our negative emotions and thoughts into an outer event, for example, our interaction with another person, that person can then be influenced negatively at a subtle level and start acting more defensively, mistrustingly, hostile, etc. toward us. Then what began as a mere projection from our inner state comes back to meet us as a reality from the outer world and we feel validated in our reactions, never suspecting our inner activity was complicit in the entire process. These subconscious projective cycles, if we were to become intimately conscious of their existence, could elucidate all manner of social and political problems in modern times. The sins of the World gradually grew out of such cycles conceived passively in ignorance of their existence.
In that sense, our mental, emotional, and physical reactions to the World content are rarely based on dispassionate logical contemplation that we freely choose to engage in, which would always lead back to dimensions of our inner activity. Instead the reactions, and often the content itself (insofar as we were instinctively pulled towards it), emerge as the last event in a chain of inner necessity that unfolded entirely without our conscious participation. We passively witness this last event unfolding as in a dream. To lucidly awaken within, and take more creative responsibility for, this inner chain before it crystallizes in outer content and reactions is to orient toward the superconscious. The latter is a more integrated domain of meaningful soul and spiritual experience that becomes ‘hollowed out’ into the negative images of sensory life.
The method of awakening to the superconscious is not so easy to discern, however. How do we gain knowledge of the superconscious if the concepts we usually use for acquiring knowledge in the sensory domain are themselves the final decaying corpses of its living flow? This may seem like attempting to restore the living reality of an object by piecing together broken shards of the mirror in which the object was once reflected. The anticipated efforts and obstacles are enough to deter most people before they even start. How we can work through the mirror pieces to restore the original image was the subject of a series of essays (spiritual retracing).
Suffice it to say here that our concepts must evolve new functional capacities that make them analogical portals to supersensible experience. The concepts should not only point to the supersensible experience but, at the same time, allow us to live out the supersensible experience they are pointing to. Our finished experiences then start to become portals into the form-free flow of spiritual activity, which also works back to further sublimate the finished experiences of soul life and make them more imaginatively pliable for our spiritual activity. This rhythmic movement gradually brings the superconscious and subconscious into closer alignment and greater coherence. They are gradually understood as polar complements rather than as mutually exclusive. Hopefully what follows will give us a better intuitive sense of what this approach means.
The effort needed to approach the superconscious is in many ways the polar opposite of what we do when acquiring knowledge of fully formed experiences, i.e. the subconscious. If we try to apply our mental and emotional habits from the latter directly to the former, we will quickly become frustrated and also experience fear, shame, and/or hopelessness, perhaps even anger and resentment like we often experience when some physical or personality trait is strongly criticized. It is like we are approaching a spiritual Sun that radiates not only the light and warmth that we normally experience, but also infinitely wise moral judgment blazing so bright that it is impossible to look upon directly. The light and warmth of the superconscious will blind and melt us if we approach it in our passive, unprepared state of existence. In that sense, we don’t approach the superconscious but allow it to approach us.
To get a sense of this difference, we can first listen to the following well-known musical clip. It will help to close our eyes and try to sense how our inner activity reacts to the song and moves along with its musical elements. We don’t need to listen to the whole song but about 30 seconds should suffice.
These are very familiar musical elements; they are well-worn rhythms and melodic progressions of the Romantic era. Our inner activity should feel relatively cozy and comfortable as it flows through these etched musical pathways of experience in the subconscious. It feels like something we can approach directly without further ado; we can simply let loose and relax into the flow. Keeping that experience in mind, we can now listen to the following clip introducing more exotic musical elements (written by a well-known atonal composer) and compare the two. Again, we should close our eyes and sense how our inner activity responds for at least 30 seconds.
That is akin to how the superconscious is experienced from the perspective of the subconscious while the latter is firmly entrenched in its habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. From that perspective, the superconscious is encountered as something unfamiliar and uncomfortable, not fitting in with the etched subconscious pathways. It can become so uncomfortable that we instinctively try to run away from it. As we can imagine, there is hardly an opportunity to let the superconscious approach us if our first instinct is always to flee its presence due to the anticipated unpleasantness and strain of allowing it to cohabitate in our psychic dwelling. That is one of the reasons why we need a wide variety of spiritual exercises that gradually acclimate our inner activity to this unfamiliar domain of superconscious experience.
A brief exercise we can use to inwardly sensitize to this distinction between the superconscious and subconscious is to close our eyes and imagine we have grabbed hold of a steering wheel. Imagine rotating the steering wheel for a few revolutions in one direction and then switching in the other direction. We should focus less on the visual image and more on the inner gestures we are making to rotate the wheel. After doing that for about 10-15 seconds, we can nudge the steering wheel to the left or to the right in a certain pattern, for example, “left-left-right-left-right”. If we were visualizing a steering wheel before, now we can try to let go of the image as much as possible and simply make the imaginative gestures, the ‘thinking-nudges’, without any corresponding image. The point here is to sense, as concretely as possible, the sort of inner movements we are engaged in.
The pattern we choose on this first pass is not based on anything we remember doing before but is entirely improvised on the fly. We couldn’t predict what thinking-nudges would come next in the series based on any past experiences. Now we can ‘reset’ by counting slowly to five, and on the second pass, we should try to replicate the same pattern that we did before. That pattern has receded into memory and become a kind of ‘aura’ that hangs over our activity, like the meaning of a sentence hangs over each word embedded within it, and constrains its gestures. If we don’t perform the same gestures as we did on the first pass, we will distinctly feel, “That’s not what I did before." Now we are experiencing spiritual activity that is constrained by a templated pattern of past activity; it tries to replicate/remember based on the receded context of fully finished experiences.
So, on the first pass, we experience spiritual activity that doesn't know what it's going to do/think next but freely improvises from out of the superconscious. Then this spiritual activity recedes into conscious and subconscious memory and becomes something akin to a habitual constraint (although it is not yet so encrusted in the subconscious as most of the things we normally refer to as ‘habits’). If our patterns of nudges were practically useful for some Earthly task, then it could even become a technical skill after some repeated practice. It is a much more scripted spiritual activity that anticipates its next thinking-nudges simply because it tries to imitate the previous pattern from out of the subconscious. The more we experiment with such inner movements, the more these otherwise abstract differentiations and relationships between 'superconscious' and 'subconscious' will be elucidated.
In the course of life, we should seek to attain a harmonious balance between these two modes of spiritual activity. If we only keep nudging our steering wheel within the superconscious improvisational flow without any reference to the receded context, we will drive off the road into a ditch. That is to say, eventually, our inner activity will become paralyzed and our personality will dissolve (it is the subconscious that individuates our spiritual activity). Imagine that, every time you wanted to go somewhere, you had to pay attention to every single movement of your hands, arms, feet, and legs to reach the intended destination. If your attention lapsed for a single moment, you would freeze in your tracks. That is life in the superconscious - at our current stage of development, nothing on Earth would get done if that kind of permanent attentiveness was necessary for movement.(3)
On the other hand, if we only focus on replicating receded patterns of inner movement - on calculating our next thinking-nudges based on all previous experiences - we will only move in a straight line, accomplishing our routine tasks, and never visit unsuspected and more integrated experiential terrain (it is the superconscious that unites us with other perspectives). We will remain at the mercy of shadowy forces that have constellated our subconscious patterns and therefore never experience true inner freedom. Only through resonance with the superconscious domain of potential can we be gradually liberated from our habitual personality and blaze new trails of experience in mental, emotional, and physical life. An interesting normal-life example of that is bullet chess, where competitors are allotted less than three minutes and therefore must rely more on purely intuitive movements. That fosters an improvisational creativity that would otherwise be stifled by rigidly calculated moves.
In our time, due to the overall course of evolution, the receded context is encrusted to the greatest possible extent. The subconscious is woven from many automated patterns that constrain our spiritual activity within the mental, emotional, and physical spaces of experience. These patterns traditionally act as support for that activity but some of them, particularly the psychic patterns, now also hinder its further development. So, naturally, the most adaptive strategy for further progress is to focus more and more on cultivating the superconscious improvisational capacity by which we explore new supersensible terrain, bringing life and purity into the rigidified and selfish subconscious patterns. We gradually dispense with the crutches of passive sensations, thoughts, emotions, and impulses, and adopt active responsibility for their functions within our soul life.
Kuhlewind (4) wrote:If one tries to organize one's soul with an orientation to health, that is, to form it consciously, then one thing is of great importance. All exercises seek to dismantle the finished human being , habits and well-worn tracks of the life of the soul, and to call into life an unfinished human being capable of improvisation, assigning him his legitimate role. Briefly stated: one seeks to dissolve certain aspects of oneself and to form a real subject, that is, to bring oneself to self-experience instead of self-feeling. These two efforts should be made in balanced fashion, because habits are temporary supports that man needs if his true subject, the I, is not strong enough to always take the reins in hand by itself. On the other hand, exercises to strengthen the I cannot succeed if habits are too strong. In that case exercises aimed at concentrating the attention would only make the habitual man stronger. This is why exercises and techniques must always be directed in both directions.
A key strategy in this respect is to resist bringing subconscious impulses to outer expression. It is that externalization process that crystallizes their fluid elemental energies into fixed and dead forms and, at that point, they are impossible to work with and transform until we are given another opportunity. Each externalization and refusal to take responsibility makes it more and more difficult to begin the necessary work, i.e. what we commonly refer to as ‘procrastination’. For example, when we encounter a sensory event and some well-worn emotion and thought pops into our mind, we can try to resist verbalizing it either inwardly or outwardly, in speech or writing. Speech resides at the threshold of the superconscious and the subconscious, between intuitive meaning and outer perceptions. It partakes simultaneously in our life of thinking, feeling, and will whenever it is actively attended to.
By actively resisting certain impulsive patterns of speech that overtake us when we remain passive, we become more sensitive to the subconscious patterns that are conditioning the experiential flow. This naturally makes us more vigilant and attentive as we discern impulses gradually ‘bubbling up’ from the depths that we can intercept and redirect. We gradually repurpose the elemental energies of these patterns into the archetypal forces that originally birthed them. Then we are no longer at the mercy of our habitual thoughts and emotions but have brought them within the sphere of our conscious activity. This can also be done when we have flashes of insight - we can resist the impulse to immediately verbalize the insight to ourselves or others and rather let them germinate as seeds within our intuitive consciousness until their fruits ripen. (5)
Imagine you are trying to work out a kink in your back and decide to use the foam roller. At first, we need to roll around and search for a good position to apply pressure, but then we stop rolling and relax into that pressure. After imaginatively rolling our spiritual activity through the meaningful landscape and reaching some insight, we can relax into that insight and let the superconscious patiently work out the kinks. These insights will subtly refine themselves through the palette of past experiences and knowledge. In that sense, the subconscious still plays its critical role but is directed from above rather than from below. In freedom and gratitude, we return the insight to the superconscious as a choice offering. Then an entirely new life of the soul gradually dawns; a more expanded and intense life of cognitive feelings and impulses.
The subconscious reaching from below is also characterized by rushed activity, by impulses that seek to consume a lot of experience in a small amount of time. We can call forth its polar opposite in the superconscious by becoming more deliberate with our inner and outer gestures. For example, when eating we can try to quiet the distractions for a few minutes and concentrate on each bite, on the individual tastes and textures. We can start our meal this way before we turn on the TV or log onto YouTube and methodically masticate the food. Our activity will become slower but not less eventful because we are much more present and concentrated within the experiential flow. Every bite will be packed with more intimate and dense meaning. Eating can even become a way of gaining subtle inner knowledge that isn’t quite evident at first, but gradually permeates our inner life. Our cognitive life then begins to extend beyond the neurosensory system to the rhythmic and digestive systems.
An especially potent method of resisting the well-worn tracks of the subconscious is as follows:
There are infinitely many similar resistance and concentration exercises that can be practiced throughout the day based on individual considerations. We should always pay attention to the intuitive feedback we receive from such efforts. Pursuing too many at the same time will become counter-productive as we are swamped with free elemental energies that we don’t know how to properly assimilate and channel into productive purposes. Then they become like ‘free radicals’ and we may find ourselves developing even more pathological habits to replace the old ones. Nature abhors a vacuum and if our “I” doesn’t take responsibility for these freed energies, some other beings will. Maintaining a healthy rhythm between the subconscious and superconscious is highly artistic soul work that must be continually refined within evolving circumstances. Each new set of circumstances requires moral intuitions that are kindled anew. If we manage to resist and transform just one impulsive habit, however, we can rest assured that this achievement will also make itself known in other seemingly unrelated domains of our soul life. It will serve as inexhaustible inspiration for our further transmutation efforts.GA 227 (2) wrote:In ordinary passive thinking we may be said to accept world events in an altogether slavish way. As I said yesterday: In our very thought-pictures we keep the earlier as the earlier, the later as the later; and when we are watching the course of a play on the stage the first act comes first, then the second, and so on to a possible fifth. But if we can accustom ourselves to picture it all by beginning at the end and going from the fifth act back through the fourth, third, second, to the first, then we break away from the ordinary sequence—we go backwards instead of forwards. But that is not how things happen in the world: we have to strain every nerve to call up from within the force to picture events in reverse. By so doing we free the inner activity of our soul from its customary leading-strings… When possible even the details should be conceived in a backward direction: if you have gone upstairs, picture yourself first on the top step, then on the step below it, and so on backwards down all the stairs.
As we allow the superconscious to flow through us with greater degrees of freedom, new unsuspected domains of thinking and feeling will emerge. Now we have a greater spectrum of finished inner experience for our superconscious activity to draw upon and refine the orientation of its flow. In that sense, our work is simply to clear the tangled and disharmonious paths of the impulsive soul life so that the Grace of the superconscious can more effectively visit and dwell within us, just as John prepared souls before the baptism of Jesus at the river Jordan. We can lend our preparatory efforts from below so that the real transformative work can unfold from above, while our impulsive and arbitrary desires recede further and further into the background.(6) Our receded subconscious context stops being an opaque covering that traps the Light and instead becomes a transparent chalice for the superconscious Sun forces to continually fill with fresh moral intuitions and impulses.
CITATIONS:
(1) Galatians 2:20
(2) Romans 7:19-20
(3) Rudolf Steiner, GA 227 (3)
“Now in the spiritual world nothing is done without attentiveness, for there is no such thing as habit… There, we have to follow with individual attention every smallest step, and even less than a step.”
(4) Kuhlewind, Georg. From Normal to Healthy (pp. 110-111).
(5) Matthew 7:6
“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”
(6) John 3:30
“He must increase, but I must decrease.”