I have written a lot about quantum physics and its effects on your daily life, and today I'm going to take a deeper dive into the unconscious mind.
If you are familiar with my work, this will be a more detailed look at the power of the unconscious mind and its overall effects on your daily actions. If you want to read the blog that inspired this piece, click here.
Where to begin? How about with the Father of the study of unconsciousness and a person you know fairly well. His name is Sigmund Freud. He was born May 6th, 1856, in Austria and was a major contributor to the world with his work on better understanding the human consciousness.
Freud is credited with creating the method of psychoanalysis, the fundamental approach of dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. He is also recognized for developing the process of free association, discovering transference, creating terms like the Oedipus Complex, id, ego and superego, and finally, his work on the unconscious mind.
In the years 1900 - 1905, he started using a model of an iceberg to describe the three different levels of the human mind. He would use the tip of the iceberg as the conscious mind. The part everyone can see. for example, when you're hungry, you recognize that sensation and look for food to eat. The second level is the preconscious mind. This is just below the conscious mind but takes a little more awareness to bring the thoughts up to the conscious level. An example of this would be when you see someone that you haven't seen in a while, and it takes a second for you to recall their name. The third and last level is the unconscious mind. These are mental processes that are inaccessible by the conscious mind but directly influence judgment, feelings, and behaviors. Freud's iceberg model fits in nicely here. He believed that the majority of our behavior was being influenced below the conscious mind.
The Three Levels of Consciousness
The fact that we are fully aware of just about 15 to 30% of our thoughts gives me pause. My question is, what the hell is going on in the remaining 70%, and how does that affect me daily?
Freud goes deeper into the id, ego, and superego to provide answers to these questions, but I'd like you to start thinking about the unconscious mind and how you can learn to be with it.
Let's consider that your unconsciousness is a place where you retain all your significant and maybe somewhat disturbing thoughts. You keep these thoughts out of your consciousness because they may be too hard for you to deal with. All of this may be true if you are learning this information now, but to continue to move forward, I contend that you must be with the unconscious information. At this point you may be asking yourself or me, how do you access the inaccessible? Well, you can do hypnotherapy or dream analysis, or you can learn to do meditation.
When you meditate, you do not control or think about how to access or fix anything. You go from the thinking mind into the heart. There is a tremendous amount of data out there that explains what meditating can do for the human body, mind, and soul, but for today's blog, I want you to consider getting out of your mind and into your unconscious.
If you are storing 70% of your information, thoughts, and feelings in an inaccessible area of your mind, then I think it is worth the time to try and get to know it or at least be with it. This practice is the opposite of taking action, this process is about being still and letting go of control. What information will be unveiled to you? I do not know only you can access it. But I will bet you that it will support you in ways you could never imagine.
