February 2009 Lesley Garner

A SHORT GUIDE TO THE SUBCONSCIOUS

I believe that many projects fail because some unacknowledged  part of ourselves is not on board. Jostling about under the surface of a well-ordered  mind are a crowd of unexamined ideas that, collectively, can sink the proud ship of your hope like the iceberg holing the unsinkable Titanic. It follows that if you want to change your life it pays to become acquainted with your subconscious.

You know your subconscious mind may be operating against you when you have strange  dreams. You suspect its influence when you apply your conscious mind fully to a project and yet are ineffective. You can detect its presence when you make silly errors even when you thought you were in control. It is probably no accident that you post the uncensored letter and throw your careful re-write into the bin.

You know your subconscious mind may be operating in your favour when you suddenly put two and two together and make five. You suspect unseen forces are operating when the perfect book jumps off the library shelf and solves a problem. You can be sure your subconscious mind is at work when you fall asleep with a problem and wake up with a solution.

Once you become aware of the ways in which your subconscious mind works then the next step is to harness its power on purpose. I believe that we should all become skilled at connecting with our unconscious mind because the best decisions are made by a mind co-operating with itself.

Here¹s a short history and geography of your unconscious to help you find it. In some ways it is a twentieth  century invention. Before Sigmund Freud reached down into the dark recesses of his patients¹ minds, human beings had found other explanations for the forces of unreason in their lives. Mostly they thought of them as gods.

If plans went awry, ships were wrecked and wars raged out of control that was because Apollo or Athene or Aphrodite was miffed and wanted to make things hot for human beings. You could attempt to appease the gods but they were essentially capricious. They were there to relieve you of any illusions that you were the master of your fate. They specialised in punishing ³ hubris², the overwheening  pride that affects people who think that they have everything under control, with a deflating shot of ³nemesis², the nasty come-uppance that punishes pride in the end.

The idea of Fate as an external force over which man had no control held sway for the next couple of thousand years. Then along came Freud and examined the random ragbag of contradictory ideas and symbols that came up out of his patients¹ minds when they stopped censoring themselves and he asked himself, could it be that we are somehow creating trouble for ourselves? Could the forces of sabotage be right inside us?

We have taken Freud¹s view of things ever since. Freud¹s followers, especially Carl Jung, developed and changed his ideas. Freud thought of the subconscious as a kind of cellar where we threw all the bad and inadmissible urges, particularly sexual, that 19th century Viennese society rejected. Jung¹s cellar was much bigger than Freud¹s and it had underground tunnels linking it up with all the other human cellars in one great Collective Unconscious. We weren¹t just driven by hidden factors in our own lives. No, we were all affected by the collective taboos of our history and culture.

The huge power of the unconscious over us comes from repression. It is the subversive power of the hidden and unknown. The surface problem may be that you have difficulty getting a job. But your lack of success may stem from a lack of belief in your own worth which comes from messages you may have taken in and buried in your own cellar as child. And they may originate from a collective  historical belief in your family that to rise above your station is to invite jealousy, even retribution. If you sabotage yourself then you will not offend your family taboo. That is a heavy burden to carry into the interview room.

So how do you let the light into your own unconscious? Better, how do you harness its benevolent power?  A long term approach is to consider psychoanalysis, the therapeutic method developed by Freud, but it is expensive and long. Plenty of methods of psychotherapy exist which create less dependency and cost less money but can still provide the space and listening which will bring unconscious fears and wishes into the light.

If you resist the whole idea of psychotherapy but would still like to change the areas of your life which are not working, it is worth sitting down calmly and asking yourself what you have to gain from things going wrong. There is always something to be gained from staying stuck in even the most difficult circumstances. Repeated patterns create a perverse comfort, the comfort of the familiar. If bad behaviour was what got you attention then bad behaviour is worth repeating as the only way you know of making people see you.

Even if the benefits of change are obvious to the reason, like weight loss or a better job, don¹t under-estimate the irrational resistance to change. If you change you could attract retribution or envy and this unacknowledged fear will make any escape attempt half-hearted. This is the power of the gods we are dealing with, after all.

The unconscious loves anything which isn¹t rational or prosaic. It won¹t give up its secrets if you harangue it, but it will respond to art and music and poetry. It likes to slip ideas into your mind when you are half focused on something else, so pay attention. It loves to pop up on journeys or in idle moments, which is why some people rely on the three Bs, bed, bus and bath, as places where inspiration can strike.

There are many workshops and processes which will give you access to your unconscious mind and the more complete self-knowledge which follows.  In the Hoffman Process, for example, they use the psychological model of a fourfold self, an emotional self, an intellectual self, a spiritual self and the body. When you learn to address each one in turn you see how often your internal selves are at odds, particularly the emotional and the intellectual selves. The intellectual self is often the bully shouting ³ go on² or ³ don¹t you dare²while the emotional self hangs back and says ³ shan¹t² or ³ but I¹d really like to.² No action comes out of these impasses.

Contacting the unconscious mind can be huge fun. It is a rich and endlessly fascinating place, not just the dark cellar of Freud¹s speculations. In the 21st century there are many roads to the unconscious and the treasure that we find there is our own. It can be what makes us whole.

Lesley Garner is an author, journalist, and artist.  Her latest book, Life Lessons, is available on www.Amazon.com or visit her website for more details:  www.LesleyGarner.com.