Are You Conscious of the Unconscious

You might think you understand yourself better than anybody else. But, do you really understand yourself?

For example, can you tell me why people, maybe even yourself, go to the fridge, open it, look inside, then close it for no real reason. You are not hungry. You are not thirsty. You just open the fridge door and have a look. Well, you probably reckon that you do that on a regular basis to see if everything is still in the fridge.

In fact, I often have a look in the fridge myself, only I do not do a stock take. I think I do it because I want other members of my household to know I have my eye of things. Now, I could justify this claim if I only did it when other members in the household were present. The trouble is I do it when I am the only person at home.

Why do we do such a thing? The natural answer would be: habit. The reason why people look in the fridge is because it is a habit, just like smoking cigarettes or wearing a hat or looking in a mirror to see if we have not changed in the last ten minutes. That sounds like a plausible enough explanation, and I suppose it will do; but not if we want to be really in control of our lives.

It becomes worse when we are trying not to eat or drink something that is in the fridge, even though we know that we can do without it, and if we do consume any more it will give us indigestion, or put on more weight, or make us a little more giddy.

Consciously, we say to ourselves I am not going to look in the fridge because I do not want to consume any more, so I will leave it until tomorrow. But we find ourselves looking in the door, just in case it has somehow disappeared since the last bottle we drank, or the since the last piece we ate. To our surprise there is still some more left and before we manage to close the fridge door, our hand has mysteriously managed to lay hold of the bottle of drink or piece of food we were not going to have because we had decided that in the name of conservation we would keep that for tomorrow.

We can question ourselves and ask, Why do we do this? More to the point, we might be better off asking, Who runs our lives? Is it us or some other person living in us? Is it our conscious mind or is it our subconscious mind the gets the final say?

We might like to think it is our conscious mind, but really we somehow know it is the other person who lives inside our body submerged in the hidden world of our inner-self. How do we know? We know because, amazingly, some people seem to be able to push the buttons that causes that individual to take over and make us look somewhat foolish at times and leaves us feeling somewhat embarrassed afterwards. Since we know this is not another person, it can only be our subconscious.

Now that we have identified the subconscious, what about the unconscious part of us; that part of us which does not emerge during our waking hours, but, rather waits until we are asleep and then reassembles everything in our mind so we are refreshed for the next day.

Basically, we are not aware of this part of us, that is until we have a dream that lingers long enough to leave an imprint in our conscious mind, or maybe it is one of those Eureka-moments where we have a brilliant idea, or a nightmare that causes us to think hell is in the middle of the Artic circle as we wake from fear shivering all over with our hair bristling and standing on end, with goose bumps all over our body.

Learning to become conscious of our subconscious and unconscious elements can only be to our advantage. Although, you might think that running around in an unconscious state might be a better way to live, because then you can excuse yourself, since you are not conscious of what you have done if it happens to be embarrassing.

Becoming a more authentic you actually means you become a more happy you, and a more happy you will mean you will be all the richer as a person for the experience. Interestingly, a study into what sort of people are the more successful in life revealed that the happier a person is the more successful his or her life tends to be.

I would go a little further and suggest that this is because the more conscious we are of our subconscious and unconscious existence, the more in tune is our expression of harmony. For when stings on a guitar are not tuned, the sound is just not music to our ears; likewise your life will not produce happiness if you are not consciously tuned in to your subconscious and unconscious self.