The Second Layer: Subconscious Mind

Once a woman was walking to the market with a pot of milk on her head. She started thinking, "When I sell this milk, I will make good profit and then I will buy some hens….. Then I will have a big poultry farm. Soon I will become very rich…. I will buy a big house and I will have the most handsome husband in the land, and I will have so many children, I will just jump with joy!" Thinking that, she suddenly jumped - and the pot of milk fell off her head and broke! Because she was thinking deeply in her subconscious mind, her sense organs were not receiving sensations from the external world, and her body acted according to the imagining of her subconscious mind.

The subconscious mind is more expanded than the conscious mind, and has two functions: deep thought or reflection, and memory. The vast majority of most people's thinking goes on at this level of mind - all intellectual, analytic reasoning, much scientific thought, and problem-solving. For most people this layer of mind handles the day-to-day problems of ordinary life and society; it is the layer of information management and computation. This is also the level of deep philosophical thought; the different philosophical controversies in the world - including religious controversies - arise due to the mental differences in the different subconscious minds of their profounder.

It is also the layer of memory. According to Yoga, there are two kinds of memory, "cerebral memory" and "extra-cerebral memory - one associated with the brain, and one operating beyond it.

Cerebral Memory: A man drove to the local university one morning, in his usual absent- m indeed mood while driving. He was hardly even aware of the road because he was thinking so deeply about the problems in his office. When he reached the university, he participated in a hypnosis experiment, in which he was hypnotized and then asked many questions including, "How many telephone poles did you drive past on your way to the university this morning?" Immediately, without a moment's hesitation, he replied, "Two hundred and fifty-seven". When later counted, it was found that there exactly two hundred and fifty-seven poles on his route!

Much more is stored in our subconscious minds than we often realize; it is simply hidden by the turbulence of the conscious mind. When the conscious mind is calmed or suspended, as in hypnosis, we may remember experiences of which we were not even consciously aware of when they happened.

After years of scientific search for the physiological basis for memory - the chemical substance of memory, or its specific location in the brain - scientists have discovered that huge sections of the brain can be destroyed by trauma, tumors, injury and old age, without any loss of memory. This has led them to believe that learning and memory create a certain field in the brain's electro-magnetic pattern, an "engram" which preserves the vibrational impression of past events. This idea corresponds to the Yogic explanation that vibrational impressions are received through the sense organs and agitate the nervous system and the conscious mind. This restlessness leaves an impression in the mind - either short-lived or long-lasting depending upon the intensity of the vibration. Memory is the re-expression of this vibration in the brain, so that this past experience is relived.

extra-Cerebral Memory: A group of American soldiers in the days of the old frontier fled from an army fort when it fell to the Indians, and escaped down the Ohio River on a hastily-built raft. They had no food with them and after a few days they were starving. A strong bond of collective survival instinct grew among them, and ultimately all of them reached safety…. Seventy years later, a man walked into a Midwestern barber shop and saw a little boy sitting on the barber's chair, eating crackers. The little boy looked at him with warm affection, and suddenly gave him the box of crackers saying. "Here, take this - you most still are awfully hungry!" The boy's father scolded, "Don't bother people you don't know!" The child looked at the man and said, "But I do know you, you were on the raft too - and we were real hungry then, weren't we?"

Such instances are being recorded more and more frequently as scientists, increasingly interested in reincarnation, find indisputable cases of past-life memories all over the world. This is called "extra-cerebral memory" because it recalls an existence beyond this brain, beyond this physical body. Often small children are able to preserve this memory - such as the young Lebanese boy who remembered the house of his previous life, his two wives, and even his oil pump … or the Alaskan Indian boy who insisted he was the incarnation of his own grandfather. The grandfather, who died six years before, had told his son before he died that he would come back as his own grandson, and hid his great-aunt "sister" - and walked straight to the hiding-place where his grandfather had kept the gold watch, took it out and said, "This is mine."

But after the age of five, the twilight of forgetfulness usually descends and the extra-cerebral memory is lost. If it is preserved long beyond that age, the child will actually be living in "two worlds" a t once, in the past life and in this one. In such cases, the child often becomes unable to adjust to the present body and environment and falls sick and dies, to take another physical form which will be more congenial for his or her further development.