Unconscious mind

He's a, a philosopher and neuroscientist, and it's about, um...

It's called The Unconscious Mind, and the, the sort of thing that he's trying to do is, is to sort of come up with a theory for consciousness, like why does consciousness exist at all, um, and, and what is it? Like, um, is there a field of consciousness? Is this something that's purely just internal? Whatever.

But, but one of the things he said that really struck me in that book was how like, um, we tend to feel like something has answered when we explain a complicated process by a more like simple process.

And so we're like, "We're learning everything we can in the universe because now we know, um, you know, the, in, in this one part of the cell, it's, you know, this thing, this function in the cell is like not just happening by itself, but it's actually happening because, you know, there's this other like, um, you know, protein that exists that's like helping that cell function." And then you're like, "You're right.

It is indeed a tertiary formation in mental life if we assume a primary layer, sensations and simple emotions, and a secondary, images and their associations, certain elementary logical operations, et cetera.

Being composite, it may be decomposed into its constituent elements, which we shall study under these three headings, namely the intellectual factor, the affective or emotional factor, and the unconscious factor.

But that is not enough.

The analysis should be completed by a synthesis.

Essay on the Creative Imagination by Théodule Ribot.

First part, Analysis of the Imagination.

Chapter three, The Unconscious Factor.

One.

It's a big part of the culture at this point.

The Freudian idioms of the unconscious and the subconscious are closely connected with this use of conscious.

For at least part of what is meant by describing jealousy, phobias, or erotic impulses as unconscious, is that the victim of them not only does not recognize their strength or even existence in himself, but in a certain way will not recognize them.

It's funny because, yeah, I just reread Freud's account of the, uh, he wrote something called The Unconscious, and it's not clear that he thinks anything affective can be unconscious, 'cause affect is something kind of inherently conscious.

So if we have a feeling, what does it mean, mean to say we have an unconscious feeling? Freud is skeptical of that.

He thinks thoughts can be unconscious because they can perform these certain functional relationships to other conscious thoughts and feelings.

But he certainly says it's a very prime thing that you are absolutely conscious of this thing, but yet you are shirking of it.

That, that's the basic human condition of bad faith.

And I, and many, many other therapists, I'm turning away from the mic here to look at my wall, have a quote on their walls of his, which says, who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakens.

And I think he was very much about the unconscious mind, the stuff that's going on in our unconscious mind and how we need to bring that into, gently, into a conscious place.

And one of the other things and famous quotes that he has that I absolutely love is until you until we make the unconscious conscious.

It will direct our lives and we will call it face and it's about I think looking at all this stuff, particularly if we're able to do so compassionately with a curious lens all that.

We may notice that we're missing an odd session at the gym or we're not quite hitting our step goal in the way that we were or we're not paying as much you know we can stop planning if you're somebody who and I think everybody could benefit from a bit of planning over the weekend for the week ahead looking at what roadblocks might come up looking at scheduled problems looking at when we might have time to cook all of those kind of things and trying to get ahead of it a little bit if we stop doing that if you're somebody who finds batch cooking really helpful pre-tracking your calories, whatever tools you are using that have been really helpful for you.

If you notice them slipping a little bit, be curious as to why, compassionately curious.

Notice, is it a real, logical, genuine reason, or is it something that's just sort of happening that's coming from your unconscious mind? Bring that into the unconscious, and as Carl Jung says, take direction of it yourself and make sure that we're not allowing unconscious thoughts become behaviors that in the conscious real life stop us achieving what we want to achieve.

So self sabotage is a big, big area and one that will be very individual, although there's commonality in how it kind of shows up and in the patterns and behaviors that can be happening for people around it.

It came out of Dada.

Hugely influenced by Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious Mind.

Surrealism was an attempt to Bring the irrationality of dreams into art.

Andre Breton, he wrote the Surrealist Manifesto.

It was too new.

But his source material wasn't necessarily new.

not in the way that the surrealists what they were doing was that was modernist that was new that was art that was being informed by science the new science of understanding the unconscious mind flan o'brien used to take like in it swim two birds it's a book about a man who's writing a book and then the characters in his book write a book about him It has, I think it's two beginnings, three middles and two ends.

It's a book where American cowboys mix freely with characters from Irish mythology, like Fionn MacCool or King Sweeney, and then they mix with contemporary Dublin of the time.

What's been automated can be retrained, and what has limited you in the past can actually become a doorway to a much, much greater possibility.

Now, I've written a more detailed article about the prime directives of the unconscious mind.

If you'd like to explore the unconscious mind and look at the rules and the playbook for how it operates, we will put the link in the show notes.

But for now, notice one automatic pattern this week.

And you coined a phrase which is very popular in the field, the rider and the elephant.

And the elephant is the unconscious mind, and the rider is the conscious mind.

So describe the implications of that, that the unconscious mind is doing s-so much more than the conscious mind.

So when, when I started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, um, psychology was sort of coming off a period where there was kind of a war between these, a couple of schools, and there were the Freudians.

They were already fading out by '87, but there were the Freudians with this thick, dark unconscious that, you know, you wanted to have sex with your mother.

The real thing is, think of these symptoms, say the anxiety, the worry, the fear, the doubt, the nervousness, uh, say for example, for me back then, it'd be also, like, the blushing, the dread, all of those things.

Imagine them as symptoms or signals, okay? It's your body, your unconscious mind saying, "Hey, you need to pay attention." We, but we do pay attention, but we only pay attention to the signal itself or the symptom or the pain.

But that's not what your unconscious mind is trying to do.

It's just the only way that it can communicate is giving you these symptoms to pay attention to.

But you've got to look deeper beneath that.

Now, the other thing I'd like you to know about this, and this is going to really shift your awareness if you don't know already.

If you listen to me for a long time, you probably understand this a little bit.

Everything you do, your unconscious mind, including the symptoms or signals, is trying to protect you.

Finally got to see them and they were superb.

This is Stereolab with Tickety-Tap of the Unconscious.

[singing] It's safe at home.

I've had to remember these things.