The unconscious mind
Imagine ...
... you meet a person unknown to you. In a few seconds you feel sympathy or antipathy with them.
How does this happen?
Your unconscious mind controls your emotions and often also your decisions. Like a harddisk it checks whether you have encountered such a type of person before and what experience you have gained with them. Your unconscious mind subsequently also controls the way you deal with the person you have just met.
The subconscious mind is a phenomenon that cannot be observed consciously and it cannot be influenced by reason. Since it is, as is the case with the spirit or the soul, not openly visible or detectable, one tends to pretend it does not exist.
Our subconscious mind is always actual and present, it guides and it protects us and it also provides us with information which we would not otherwise receive. It plays a decisive role which we should recognize and appreciate.
Here is another example:
You drive your car, everyday, without thinking about it, completely automatically. You get into the vehicle, start the engine, signal with the indicator, look briefly into the mirror and also over your shoulder, and off you go. In other words: daily and automatically.
But this was not always the case. At the beginning – during your driving lessons – it was rather demanding and complicated to remember everything. To operate the car manually caused problems. Just think of the clutch which was too fast or too slow. The car either reved or hopped like a hare. Also, everything else had to be observed: other vehicles, traffic signs, junctions, traffic rules …
But the more practise you gained the less you had to think about what to do next. Everything became routine. Put another way: the subconscious mind had taken over.
Not only when driving, but more often than you can imagine.
Sometimes the term „subconscious“ is used as an explanation for certain behaviour or as an apology or justification: “ .. I did that subconsciously”, “… I was not aware that …”.
We have not however learnt to pay genuine attention to our subconscious mind or to value it. In our cultural environment we have been educated almost to be “subconsciousless”. And yet: I believe it does a lot of work for us, especially when we do not realize or think of it.
During hypnosis the subconscious mind assumes a very important function:
The subconscious mind becomes the dialogue partner.