Theos-Talk Archives (September 1994 Message tl00017)

Nancy,

Sorry, the first transmission was interrupted somewhere along the
way.  This is a re-send.

PMJI, but this is a topic that holds a a particular fascination
for me also.  :-{)>

>> I too resonate to the psychological interpretations that are
current these days and have a real curiosity about how to explain
the concepts of the subconscious, unconscious etc using the
7-fold model.  Any thoughts?<<

The id in psychoanalytic theory corresponds to kama-manas.  The
experiencing ego corresponds to lower manas without the kamic
coloration.  The observing ego corresponds roughly to higher
manas.  Beyond that conventional psychoanalytic theory does not
go.

No one in psychology uses the term "subconscious" to denote any
specific technical concept.  "Unconscious" corresponds to the
term "automatic will" that sometimes appears in the
yogic/vedantic literature.  It refers to those mental processes
that lie outside of our awareness when we are referring to the
personal psyche and to processes of physical nature when
referring to the Divine automatic will.  It is of interst that
one well known neuropsychological theory of consciousness states
that we are not as "actively" ijnvolved in opur process of
mentation as we would believe and that most if not all of the
thinking that we do is performed outside of our awareness and
merely presneted to consciousness as a finished product, with our
experience of actively creating it just an illusion.  This
corresponds to the notion of the Witness found in the Vedantic
literature that states that our core Divine Self is merely an
observer of our personal mental processes.

In general, there are many correspondences between psychological
terms and those of Theosophy, but psychology, being interested
only in the problems of the personal psyche, stops short of
anything that would lead to the kind of comprehensive system that
we find in the TS literature.

Peace,
Frank Dyer