The Importance of the Conscious and Unconscious Mind
You have two minds. One is conscious. The other one is categorically unconscious. One is present, the other one is behind the curtain. One displays your ego, the other one represses the notions that violate or contradict your ego. One is light, the other one is dark.
The purpose of this article is to get you to recognize that both the conscious and unconscious mind are of equal importance. That if the unconscious is not surfaced or evaluated, it could inform your conscious to buy into false premises, to dissociate from the truth, and to keep your being in a falsely comforted zone.
The better you get at becoming aware of your unconscious stream of thoughts, the more you will be able to connect the dots of where they are coming from. Through their patterns. Let’s play a little game. You’re going to answer the following questions in under 20 seconds. Get a clock. You ready?
The color blue is _______.
Mary’s last name is ______.
Sex with _____ would be amazing.
Big groups of people are _______.
Tight pants should be ______.
I believe that God is _______.
Ok. You made it. Based on your answers, I’m sure I can get to know a fair amount about you. If you’re courageous enough, you can share your answers in the comment section. Here are mine: the sky, Anderson, Idris Alba, annoying, worn more, not real. How do you evaluate your answers? Where do you think they came from? Were they just a matter of recency? (Sometimes dreams can be). Or were they connected to a theme over time? This is your unconscious mind at play. The more we understand it and can harmonize it with our conscious thoughts, the closer to our true selves we become.
A little history:
The Unconscious Mind
To my surprise, it was discovered long before Freud. It started as early as c. A.D. 130–200 when Greek, Roman, and Christian philosophers recognized that there were thoughts invariably happening in the background. St. Augustine (340–430) called it ‘a ghost that is experienced as a felt presence although invisible’. Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) believed the unconscious mind played into the etiology of disease. Freud assigned three layers to the mind: the conscious, the preconscious (commonly known as subconscious), and the unconscious. His second formation translated this to the infamous ‘Id, Ego, and Superego.’ Psychiatrist Carl Jung (pronounced Yung) assigned three layers to the mind: the conscious, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious.
The Conscious Mind
Both Jung and Freud referred to the conscious as our ego. To Jung, the ego was the ‘center field of consciousness, where our identity exists. It helps us organize our thoughts, feelings, intuition, and helps us access memory.’ “It is the part that links the inner and outer worlds together, forming how we relate to that which is external to us,” Jung states. Freud believed that out of all of our psychic output, only 10% of it was considered conscious.
According to Freud, the conscious mind “contains all of the thoughts, memories, feelings, and wishes of which we are aware at any given moment.” Freud says our memories are not always part of our consciousness but can be retrieved easily and brought into awareness.
“The psyche is a self-regulating system, rather like the body, one that seeks to maintain a balance between opposing qualities while constantly striving for growth, a process called ‘individuation.’” — Jung
We are very much aware that the conscious and unconscious mind exist thanks to a handful of curious thinkers who believed it was important enough to share and write books about. But much like any literature or story, information ossifies over time and we forget the relevance and importance of those discoveries.
So why are they equally important and what does this mean?
The better question is ‘How can I understand my unconscious and conscious mind better and how is that useful to me?’ The short answer is that it’s not easy and it doesn’t happen in one day. Once again — as I’ve said in my other article The low hanging fruit for getting out of your depression’ — I’m sorry if you’re in the quick fix business for yourself. Life is going to be very tangled for you.
The unconscious mind can be accessed in a few ways: through sitting down with no distractions and letting your mind go where it goes — including the abstract objects, lights, or lines that appear, the unappeased thoughts of you hitting a family member or being intimate with a colleague you would never expect — through dreams that you can recall, through an expert psychoanalyst, or, if you’re good enough, through an emotionally activated conversation where you can separate your conscious stream of thought (consciousness) from your visceral and bodily response (unconscious). Very rarely can people reconcile their ego with the actual truth of the situation.
In Jordan Peterson’s book The 12 Rules for Life, Rule #8 is to Tell the Truth — Or, at Least Don’t Lie. Peterson ties much of psychological work to religion and mythology and explains that in many religions, there was a God of Truth (good), and a God of Deceit (evil).
“You must make friends, therefore, with what you don’t know, instead of what you know.” — Jordan Peterson, Clinical Psychologist, PhD
Your conscious stream of thought is symbiotic with your unconscious — or with your personal and collective unconscious, as Jung would say. Not one thing you say has not been influenced by some other source. Your genetics, environment, experiences, and current people around you all register into your system and filter through your unconscious. You have every capability in recognizing how to connect the dots from the darkness, into the light.
Remember what I said in the beginning: that if the unconscious is not surfaced or evaluated, it could inform your conscious to buy into false premises, to dissociate from the truth, and to keep your being in a falsely comforted zone. To be further away from your truer, authentic self. And as the old axiom goes, the truth shall set you free.
