The lowest of the mental principles is the instinctive mind. This is the lower part of the subconscious mind. You remember the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, right? Well, the instinctive mind is found in all of them. It is the one that taught the animals how to build its nests, how to migrate before winter, how to hibernate, and countless other things. It is the first plane of mental activity reached in the scale of evolution.
Among humans, the instinctive mind can also be referred to as the "habit" mind. It does many things instinctively. It learns tasks from the intellect and then performs them automatically. When we say we learn to do things "by heart," it means we have mastered them on the intellectual part of our mind, and then passed onto the instinctive mind.
The woman with her sewing machine, the painter with his brush, the cyclist riding a bike, all are using the instinctive mind. It is astonishing how many of our daily tasks are performed under the direction of our instinctive mind, only supervised casually by our intellect. In fact, the intellect would get exhausted if it had to do all these tasks.
The instinctive mind is really useful for us. We couldn’t exist without it. Every function in our bodies is being performed by this part of the mind, all without our conscious knowledge. All the feelings; all desires and cravings, such as hunger and thirst; all passions, such as physical love, hatred, envy, and revenge; the desire for material things. All of them belong to this area of the mind.
The instinctive mind was there during our evolution to do the things we couldn’t reason about. And many of those survival instincts are still within us. The Yogis teach that we must learn to control these lower instincts. To subordinate them to higher ideals.
Knowledge is power; we must learn to recognize the instinctive nature within us and tame our wild beasts. Our higher principles will always obtain the mastery. We just need patience, perseverance and faith.
These instincts have served us well. They have been used for the purpose intended, but now that we are reaching higher points on the path, now that we see clearer, we must learn to control the lower impulses of our minds.
This is a series of emails describing the composition of us humans. I will briefly write about the general nature of each of these seven principles. At the end of this email series, I will send a downloadable PDF file so that you can have them handy and continue studying them to gain a complete understanding of yourself.
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