The place of the conscious and the unconscious mind in non-duality

In the very beginning of my journey, when I was still studying NLP, one morning I had this thought reverberating in my mind:

“When the unconscious becomes conscious, man will rise”.

I did not know what it meant. Actually, it took me 8 years to fully understand it. But I knew it was true - it came from somewhere different, it did not belong to my ‘personal mind’.

This is how I understand it today: in psychology, we are taught that we have a conscious mind (which can pay attention to 7 ± 2 bits of information), and an unconscious mind (which is informing every thought and decision of the conscious mind).

The so-called ‘conscious mind’ can be used to ‘dive into’ the unconscious mind, and in this way bring ‘deeper’ thought patterns to the surface. Slowly but surely, Awareness (or what some call the Super-conscious or Spirit) becomes known by the mind. Or so it seems. This is where it is useful to begin to refer to a ‘small self’ and a ‘True Self’. It seems that the ‘small self’ sometimes finds the ‘True Self’, before making a story out of the experience and losing sight of it again.

Continuing along this journey, it becomes obvious that it is Awareness itself that dives into itself. The conscious and the unconscious are actually both unconscious, and cannot be conscious. It is Awareness/Consciousness that is conscious of itself in the form of thoughts, not the thoughts that are aware of Awareness. And this same Awareness takes the appearance of 7.7 billion 'conscious and unconscious minds'.

As such, I would today re-phrase the initial thought that came to me years ago in the following way:

“When the conscious and the unconscious mind become known as Consciousness, man recognises there is only One Being experiencing itself”.

Continue exploring by reading more about the place of the mind in non-duality.