The demons of the subconscious can be faced only in faith

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Acharya Prashant (AP): The mind has stored so much that it does not even know that how much it has stored. There are two portions of its storage. One part is where you know that I have stored something. The other part is where you have stored it but you have forgotten that it has been stored. Now, what is happening? This is like a place where you keep all your stuff. You brought some vegetables, brought lots of vegetables, you are like the mind, accumulative, always in a hurry to accumulate, afraid that there might be a famine, there might be a curfew. ‘I will not get vegetables’. That is what the mind is always thinking: hold, store.

So you keep on bringing vegetables even then when there no vegetables are needed. Your house is full of vegetables and because the refrigerator and other places can hold only as much vegetables as there is space, you keep your vegetables at very unseemly places, under the bed. Wherever you find space, you put some vegetables.

You are always storing vegetables. So much is there that some of it is remembered and some of which is forgotten. What will happen to that which is forgotten? It starts rotting. Now the house is stinking but you don’t even know that why it is stinking. That is subconscious. It is stinking because you kept something in it and forgot and that may not have happened just over the last thirty years of existence, your parents may have kept it somewhere and now it has been given to you through your genes. Maybe it happened one thousand years back and just the flow of DNA has brought it to you, but surely somebody forgot.

And because the mind of mankind is one, and because the mind of the universe is one, and because there can be only one mind, it has come to you just as it comes to everybody else. And your life is stinking and you don’t even know why. That is the subconscious. Now how do you find out that why is your house smelling so bad? What is the house?

Listeners (L): This mind.

AP: How do you find out that why is it smelling? I have not done anything, yet it is smelling. When it stinks you don’t run away from the house. You don’t just take up an artificial…