Mind the content of consciousness.

The first thing that confronts a Spiritual aspirant on the path is his own mind.

So it is very important to understand what this mind is.

We know the mind to be a space somewhere inside our skull which is always buzzing with thoughts. When we try to come to grip with it we are bewildered by the complexities of this most intimate functioning and we thought it was only a mind- My mind at that. one on which I have total control, and we soon realize we were mistaken.

So it bides us well if we could come to an understanding of the "MIND".

Nisargadutt Maharaja terms mind as the content of consciousness (Pragnya).

Consciousness has many levels or layers. We will here deal with only two levels -

Normal conscious (that which a person is aware of)

Sub-conscious (that which the person is not normally aware)

The sub conscious is said to be more powerful in that it is ninety percent of our mental faculty.

the conscious is only ten percent.

This can be demonstrated by ice in a container of water.




(This is not a good image of the phenomenon of ice floating on water but the only good one i could find on the web)

The ice and water are both made of the same stuff but ice being less dense floats on water.

The Part of ice which sticks out of water is one-tenth the total volume of the ice and the rest nine-tenth is submerged below water.

This is very much like our mind. The part that peeks above water is the conscious, the submerged part is the sub-conscious and the water is of course the world mind. Our mind is derived or made up from the world mind only but because of our denseness (here we differ from ice) we feel we are different from the world mind.

One more thing that is noticed (not iced?) is that while the so called conscious part is not at all in touch with the world mind. Where as the sub-conscious is surrounded and in touch with the world mind from all sides.

cont.........