Conscious, Subconscious, and Unconscious: The Seven Layers of the Mind in the Puranas

Question

Sister, you mentioned that impressions (sanskaras) form in the subconscious mind, and over a long time they even move deeper, into what’s called the unconscious. Last time Brother Dubey asked a question—what exactly are the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious? Could you please clarify that a little?

Answer

We can’t explain it completely, but the Puranas give a very beautiful foundation for understanding it. They describe fourteen realms (lokas)—seven higher and seven lower. The seven lower realms are named Atala, Vitala, Sutala, Talātala, Mahātala, Rasātala, and Pātāla.

These seven, the Puranas say, correspond to the seven layers of our mind.

• The uppermost layer, Atala, represents our conscious mind.
  
  

• The lowest, Pātāla, represents our subconscious or unconscious mind—the deepest level.
  
  

Now, in some texts subconscious (avachetan) and unconscious (achetan) are used as the same thing, while in others they are treated as slightly different. Why? Because the mind has depth in layers—seven layers—and these are those seven depths. The Puranas named them symbolically, but we don’t know their exact psychological labels. What we do understand is simple:
the uppermost mind is the conscious, and the deepest is either called the subconscious or the unconscious.

I was reading a book that explained this with sleep cycles. It said that when we sleep, our dreams come in waves.

• The first dream comes from the conscious mind.
  
  

• Then the next, deeper dream comes from a deeper layer, and so on.
  The final dream cycle, the deepest one, arises from the unconscious—from the impressions buried there through countless births.
  
  

So you can think of it like this:
our waking, everyday awareness is the conscious mind—that’s our present life’s field.
Below that lies another layer, connected to our prarabdha (current karmic results).
Deeper layers still hold impressions from earlier births, and the deepest of all—what we call the unconscious—contains the oldest, earliest impressions of the soul’s journey.

Sometimes in dreams we see very strange or ancient scenes that make no sense—those likely arise from the unconscious.
Dreams that are less deep or more familiar may come from the subconscious.

The Bhagavata Purana even gives a symbolic example: when Vamana bound King Bali and sent him to Sutala Loka. Sutala represents one of those inner layers of the mind.

So we can’t define these inner realms very precisely, but what’s important is this understanding:
our impressions from many, many births are stored deep in the mind’s lower layers, which we call the subconscious or unconscious. And those impressions—those stored sanskaras—are what create obstacles for us today.