I’m intrigued by the relationship of the concious mind, the so-called unconscious mind, and the hyperthetical superconscious or universal (and supposedly all-powerful) mind.
Recent brain research showed how our conscious thoughts emerge from the unconscious mind. Brain activity shows up before we are conscious of thinking the thought. This makes sense, but not to that part of us that likes to think it is consciously making decisions.
It’s a shock to the ego to realize that, actually, no, I’m not in charge!
The conscious mind that we know is little more than a pimple on the skin of the deep vast mind. It’s been called the tip of the iceberg. But I suspect that even that idea makes too much of it, as though the conscious mind is the pinnacle of mental achievement.
It’s worth questioning that assumption.
Unconscious mind. Unconscious means we are ‘not consciously aware of’… it’s happening outside of our conscious knowingness.
How are you beating your heart? Growing hair on your body? Repairing and replacing body cells?
You don’t know. What else don’t you know that is going on and being directed by the deep vast mind, the unconscious?
I like to explore by retracing thought trails back to their source. We’ve already established that thought originates at the unconscious level. So tracing thought backwards offers some hope of getting some kind of insight into the unconscious mind.
At least, that is what I am exploring.
I think it is problematic to have these ideas of conscious, unconsious, subconscious as it helps to create the sense of separation and isolation. You need to move into a state of mind in which you accept it all as the big YOU — even if you are not conscious of all it’s goings-on.
It’s like the body… when you start obsessing about one part of it, you create a sense of separation and disconnectedness from the body. But that disappears when you get absorbed in some physical activity like playing soccer or frisbee or something, and you are just in the body making use of it.
Tracing thought home does give you an opportunity to connect and merge with the deep vast mind. It’s like a meditation in that you have to go beyond conscious verbal thought and plunge into the vastness that is the core of your being.
Then, without thought, you can really only operate on intuition (perception and aperception), experience through being, and pure awareness.
I think the verbal conscious thought stream is a very thin and limited bandwidth data-stream from the unconscious. We need to create or become aware of other channels of data emerging from the unconscious mind. So far one of the best ways we’ve identified to do this is through something like Win Wenger’s image streaming process which taps into the same sort of data stream as we experience in regular night time dreaming.
I twittered the other day about a great piece of writing I had just read by Kevin Hogan and wanted to follow up by blogging about it, and giving it a permanent “high-five!” on my site.
They use the latest brain training processes to teach the brain how to function at the highest levels. It’s like applying a genius brain template to your own brain and getting it to adapt to the ’shape’.
My son and I just read, “Steve and Me”, Terri Irwin’s account of her life with wildlife warrior, Steve Irwin (aka the Crocodile Hunter).
