The layers mentioned, koshas—pranamaya, etc. are just the layers or the chambers of the human mind. It is the mind itself that appears as these various layers called the koshas. So these internal layers, not always being brought to the surface of conscious activity, lie inside, dissatisfied, sleeping with a sorrow of their own that they have not been brought to the surface of active consciousness, which means to say, we have been unfriendly with them, because an unconscious friend is no real friend. These inner chambers of our minds have not yet become our consciously known friends. They clamour for this recognition. If one of us is not recognised, we would clamour for recognition by thrusting ourself in the crowd and making ourself felt somehow or other, so that recognition becomes a conscious operation and we are not there as a very unimportant person, unknown to people. So this desire to project oneself into conscious recognition is the element present in every fibre of the mental make-up. But inasmuch as this is not possible due to the pressure of society from outside, we remain always, in some percentage, grief-stricken individuals, though outwardly smile as if everything is fine and milk and honey are flowing in the world. No person can be really happy in this world inasmuch as there is a restriction prevailing from outer circumstances on every individual.

This continuous repression of factors that are not pleasant to the mind later on becomes a thick cloud, as it were, covering the light of understanding. Here is the forte of all psychoanalytical observation—that no thought of ours on the conscious level can be regarded as a wholly free activity of the mind, and we are determined by the inner potentialities of the seeds of possible experience that have not yet come to the surface of conscious experience. Though psychology generally classifies human activity into the conscious, subconscious and unconscious layers, there are many more layers than these, and the mentioned ones are only the operative distinctions drawn, but not actually all the potentialities included there. Immense are the possibilities of the mind, infinite are the capacities, and we cannot count how many things are there in our own minds.

Though it is true that this is the state of affairs in which the human individual lives, the story does not end here. Psychology and psychoanalysis tell us that we are self-deceiving persons. There is no honesty in our efforts. This is so, and this has to be so, because we are always forced to behave as double personalities—consciously something and subconsciously or unconsciously another thing. Our conscious behaviour is well known. We know very well how we conduct ourselves in daily life, in family affairs, in political circumstances, in our office, etc. But there is something which is private, which is known by each person individually, though even privately it is not often known due to the flood of conscious engagements in our daily life which occupy our attention to such an extent, especially when we are very busy people, that we cannot believe that there are inner calls at all. A very busy person who has no time at all for himself or herself, being a very big gun in the office, in administration, in business, whatever it is, such a person does not know that he or she has another personality altogether inside, which will come up to high relief of potential action when business ceases, office ends, or there is deviation or separation from family circumstances, when everything is lost and one stands alone to oneself. At that time the true personality comes up. Spiritual seekers do not expect such a kickback of a psychological nature, though they know that such a kickback can be the fate of anyone, one day or the other, if proper attention is not paid to the potentialities in one’s own self.

So spiritual seekers generally create an artificial atmosphere of aloneness in themselves, which is not actually the aloneness that is thrust upon oneself by the loss of property or getting kicked out from the office, etc. They go to a sequestered place like Uttarkashi, Gangotri, etc. and live alone to themselves, not even having correspondence with people, not reading anything, not seeing people, just being to one’s own self. If we live like this in our own self for months and years, we will create an atmosphere within us which is almost similar to the atmosphere that comes upon oneself when everything is lost. It is at this time, when conscious activity ceases from its intensive operations, that the inner calls come out, the ungerminated seeds come up to the surface of action, and we begin to feel what we really are. We suddenly become unhappy. After a few years of staying alone in Gangotri, we will feel that we are a unhappy person. Do not be under the impression we will find ourself to be an angel after we do deep meditation. Nothing of the kind is possible; we will find that some trouble has suddenly emerged from within our own self, from sources that are unknown to us. People who live in such isolated places for a protracted period come down to the cities in order that they may not go crazy, because the pressure of the unfulfilled, frustrated feelings oftentimes becomes so into intolerable that they have to palliate them by feeding them with their requirements, which they cannot do in a sequestered place like Gangotri or on top of Mount Everest.

But all the same, it is worthwhile knowing what kind of persons we are. The necessity to know all our inner potentialities arises because we are all these potentialities. Unknown things are not non-existent things. Therefore the unknown potentialities in us are not something other than what we are—they are just us. So it is necessary for us to be good psychologists of our own self. We should not just be teachers of psychology to students in a college—we should also know how our own mind is working. If we are happy right now, why are we happy—what has happened to us? If suddenly a mood of depression takes possession of us, what is the matter? Something is not all right. Something is wrong with us. Many a time the extent of conscious life in which we get involved is so intense that when we are in a state of moody depression or in a state of melancholy, we cannot go deep into our own self and discover what has happened to us. “I am not well. I do not eat. Let me be alone. Let me go to sleep or go for a long walk, go for an excursion. Let me have a tour.” These ideas arise in the mind because of a sudden inner spurt of sorrow in being alone to one’s own self, for reasons which one cannot understand.

But it is necessary to understand what is happening to us. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. If we are unhappy, we must know why we are unhappy. We cannot say, “I don’t know.” This “I don’t know” business will not work in the world. Everyone has to know the law operating in nature, in society, and also in one’s own individuality. So psychoanalysis, particularly, has taken the trouble of going into the depths of these mental operations and disillusioning us from the complacent view that all things are well with us. We are not such angels as we appear to be or we pretend to be in human society; we are crude matter inside our own self, which comes to the surface only when it is rubbed hard. This rubbing hard of the inner potentialities takes place when either the conscious activity ceases because of the exhaustion of its own momentum, or because conscious activity becomes impossible due to conditioning factors operating from outside in human society. So psychology, especially in the field of psychoanalysis, has found that we are a big cloud of unknowing rather than an illuminated radiance of all knowledge. To such an extent are we cloud that even our intellection, ratiocination and education, we may say, even the culture that we seem to be putting on, are just adumbrations of the cloud that we essentially are— ignorance conditions even our knowledge.

All our knowledge, all our education, all our culture also seems to be a sort of projection of a basic ignorance of the values of life, and this is the reason why, educated or not, cultured or not, we are capable of being unhappy one day. Neither have we the power that we expect to have, nor are we happy in the manner we would to like be, nor are we wealthy—nothing of the kind is our prerogative. This is one side of the picture of the human personality, which psychology brings to the surface of our understanding. We are not just that which we appear to be in social life—we are also something which we are in our individual life.

The Indian counterpart of Western psychology has a theory of its own which explains, perhaps in greater detail, the inner contents of the deeper potentialities, in Western language called the unconscious, but in Eastern philosophical parlance called the anandmaya kosha, the deepest recesses of our own self. This anandmaya kosha, or the unconscious level of our personality, is not just something created only in this life. It is not that we are suddenly born into this world from nowhere and all our experiences, pleasurable or otherwise, are created by actions and reactions of only this life. Western psychology does not have the leisure to accept that a previous life of the individual also could be possible, but for which present experiences can not be entirely accounted for. The anandamaya kosha, or the deepest unconscious, is the reservoir of potentialities stored up within our own self of all frustrated feelings come from various incarnations through which we have passed in earlier types of creation and ages.

The stored-up potentialities in the anandamaya kosha, or the unconscious, do not all germinate suddenly, but gradually, little by little, as it may happen if rain falls only in some part of the world and in some other parts of the world it does not rain at all. So while seeds can be thrown on the soil throughout the earth, all the seeds may not germinate at the same time due to scarcity of rainfall. They will germinate only where conditions are good, atmospherically. Likewise, all the potentialities in us do not manifest into action in our life, and only certain portions of the existing stock act in conscious life. These percentages, or certain aspects or certain packages of the existing stock coming into action in conscious life are called prarabhda karma. The prarabhda is only a retail commodity that is kept by the shopkeeper outside for daily use, but he has more commodities inside, in the storeroom that is the reservoir of his resources. What we experience is said to be prarabhda karma, which simply means we are not the whole of what we are even throughout our life. We cannot be that due to the fact that the whole storage of the unconscious, or the anandamaya, cannot come into action because conditions in the world do not permit the manifestation of all these potentialities.

We have to be cosmic individuals, suddenly enlarging our dimension to the entire cosmos in order that all the potentialities stored up within can come into action —which we are not, and therefore which we cannot do. Individuals that we are, we have a limited capacity to manifest all the potentialities, and so we are just some little things in our individualities, and not all things. In the future births that we are likely to take, certain other unused packages of potentialities will be brought to the surface of action and we will be different things altogether. Next birth may not be the same thing as now, nor will our experiences of this birth be the same in the next birth—we may even change our sex. A man today need not be a man in the next birth. A woman today need not be a woman in the next birth. One can be anything and everything, pleasant or unpleasant, higher or lower, as there are so many things in a particular individual.

So to restrict our view of life only to what is available to us today on the conscious surface is not wisdom, says Indian psychology; and in a similar way Western psychology also tells us, of course not going to such depths, that the vision of things manifested by the human mind on the conscious level is an artificially conditioned projection and it is not even the whole possibility. There is therefore a chance of the individual reverting to the baser instincts when the occasion arises, though a human being does not always behave like an instinctive animal.

The child that is born does not seem to have all these complications in its mind, because all the instincts lie sleeping in the child and it has practically no conscious desires. It has mostly a biological existence and very little of what we call a psychological existence. It lives, it breathes, but it cannot think as a developed conscious mind can think. It gradually grows into the capacity to manifest what was lying latent in itself. It was a biological content earlier, in the womb of the mother, and the question of a psyche operating in it does not arise at all in those rudimentary stages. It gradually manifests its potentialities as it grows into the awareness of society and also the awareness of what was lying dormant in its own self.

Basically, hunger and thirst are the primary instincts in the human individual. Everything else comes afterwards. When all things go, only these remain. We would like to eat, we would like to drink and keep breathing—that is all that we want, and nothing else would be asked. Conditions which are atrocious in life may drive us to that acceptance of our minimum requirements—only food and drink and breathing. This vegetable existence, biological existence, is seen manifest in a newborn child, but it becomes more and more artificially construed and constructed when externalising impulses manifest themselves by way of intensive activity for self-protection and self-preservation. It moves earth and heaven to see that it survives, and in any manner it has to survive. The psychological aspect of this situation is that, at least from the point of view of Western psychoanalysis, the mind that the human individual uses in a developed state of individuality is just a kind of instrument that biological instincts use, so that from this point of view at least, even today, at the height of our mental and rational understanding, we are basically biological, animalistic, full of instincts that are subhuman, and the so-called cultures of mankind and the education of humanity are outer circumstances created by biological conditions for their own survival. All social life is selfish life. This would be the final conclusion of psychoanalysis —basically everybody is selfish to such an extent that we are indistinguishable from animals.

This vision of life, which is briefly stated for the further consideration of its implications, is to highlight what we can be, other than what we are socially, culturally and educationally from our present-day understanding of what education is, culture is, or social life is. That there is some truth in these findings of psychology and psychoanalysis can be appreciated by every one of us who lives a private life, if at all anyone has a private life in this modern world. We are never private at any time. We are busy people. We are always with somebody, in a family, in an office, in a marketplace, in a railway train, in a bus —wherever we are, we are with somebody. We are never alone. We cannot be our own self, and therefore we cannot know even our own self.

The problems that are besetting humanity today are considered by these systems of findings as the outcomes of the hidden potentialities of unhappiness which cannot be brought to the surface of consciousness due to their being conditioned by social life and it not always being possible for the individual to be wholly free to act as one would like to act. Though it is true that we have inner potentialities in the anandamaya kosha, in the unconscious levels, and sometimes some of these are experienced by us translucently though not very transparently in the dreaming condition, yet Indian psychology goes deeper than Western psychoanalysis and says that there is something eternally operating in us, and not merely psychologically as we are often told.

Hence the vision of psychology is entirely true of course, from the angle from which it is operating and acting and telling us; it is true and yet it is individualistic in its approach and does not take into consideration the non-individualistic associations of the human individual. Earlier we had occasion to consider certain aspects of human nature which are not just individualistic. For psychology and psychoanalysis we are only individuals; we are like animals, and our entire life is mentally constructed from the point of view of those unseen forces buried in us, so that our conscious life seems to be an arena of utter sorrow appearing to be a life of happiness.

But this is not the whole truth of the matter. We have an eternity inside our temporal occupations and experiences. All the problems and sorrows of life are misconceived adjustments, or rather maladjustments, we may say, of the human individual. Basically, at the essence, we are not constituted only of sorrow. Human nature is not a bundle of grief. It is basically a preparation for eternal happiness, which cannot be had under conditions of pressure exerted by any kind of wrong maneuvering of the mind by a maladjustment of itself with the circumstances in which it is placed. So the considerations of these doctrines—materialistic, humanistic, psychological, whatever they be—do not seem to exhaust all the possibilities of human nature. There is still an asking beyond us. Granting all freedom from problems in human existence, making one happy in social life, giving all the wealth that the earth can bequeath, with all these things, there would be an asking further. A ‘more’ is there beyond the ‘more’ that is given to us. Life is a more and more and more, an endless more, and an asking for further and further possibilities, the end of which one cannot reach. Infinity seems to be the potentiality of the individual, and not merely a limited possibility of socially restricted individualistic operations.

Thus our considerations of the different visions of life, appearing to be interesting, very incisive in their probes, very valid also in certain fields of life, are not exhaustive. Whatever description one may give about oneself, though apparently complete in itself, is not really complete. No one can describe what a human being is. Though we can give some sort of a description from the point of view of the physical body, social relations, office that one holds, wealth that one possess, and so on and so forth, all these definitions, the bio-data of the human individual, would not be an exhaustive consideration of the individual. There is something more about us than we can think of in our own selves. There is an infinity masquerading in the form of individuality, an eternity crying for recognition even in the midst of temporal vicissitudes.