“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”. Carl Jung hit the nail on the head with this quote. Life is not a matter of accident or fate. We can be the master of our lives if we choose to be. Most people though don’t bring their conscious awareness to their unconscious mind, and their lives grow as a reflection of this.
Napoleon Hill referred to the “rich garden of the unconscious mind“, in which “weeds will grow in abundance if seeds of a more desirable nature are not sewn therein”. Hill is referring to controlling the information which is “sewn” into the unconscious mind through conscious thought, in his book Think and Grow Rich. But what does it really mean to make the unconscious conscious?
Until You Make The Unconscious Conscious
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.
The conscious mind is only a small part of the whole. Much bigger is the unconscious mind which controls and regulates the body, keeps the heart beating and does all the jobs to keep you healthy and well. The unconscious mind can be likened to a vast warehouse of old memories, beliefs, attitudes and experiences which contain every aspect of your life. Childhood memories and trauma are stored there too.
Before we grow into adults, we experience a huge amount of information. Most of this information is accepted into the subconscious mind directly without conscious thought. Only when we are about 10 years old do we develop a filter for information which we can accept or reject.
This is a good thing because we learn to walk and talk within a very short time. If we were deliberating about the reasoning behind everything we absorbed, it would take much longer. But we accept everything like a “sponge” soaking up language, intonation, thoughts and beliefs.
Until You Make The Unconscious Conscious
Most people’s lives run on autopilot by the very virtue of the many beliefs and attitudes which they picked up as young children. A phobia is a good example of an unconscious behaviour inhibiting and controlling someone in their life. Many phobias stem from an unpleasant childhood experience which has been repressed.
In some cases, just by bringing your awareness to the event which caused a phobia, you can overcome it. Often a hypnotist or therapist can help you with this too, if you are unable to root out the cause of your behaviour.
But behaviour is caused by other things too. Many of your ideas about yourself and the world were inherited from your parents, and their ideas came from their parents. Your environment and experiences shape you and you build an idea of the world through your internal representation of it. This becomes your self image and is a major piece of your world view.
But what if your vision of yourself is a negative one? What if you don’t feel good enough? Perhaps you think you’ll never be happy, or achieve the life you really want. If these ideas stem from an unhealthy low self esteem or poor self image, how can you overcome it when it’s so deeply rooted in who (you think) you are?
Why Beliefs Shape Your World
Have you ever struggled in life and felt like nothing you can do will ever change things? That might be because your very identity is based on struggle. Without struggle, who are you?
When you go on holiday, who is always there with you? How can you ever take a break from yourself? It’s pretty difficult because you’re always there in your head, judging, labelling and remarking on everything around you. It can be difficult not to systematically label and judge things as you go about you day. So how can you escape this “portal” to your subconscious or turn it around to use it for better outcomes?
Self talk is the way we talk to ourselves in our heads. For our lives to change, this much change. Otherwise, we re-create the same outcomes again and again through our constant identification of the “self”. If that “self” never changes, you keep reflecting it’s ideas of “you” back into the picture. It’s a self fulfilling feedback “loop”. I am ________ so I do _______ so I am ______.
To escape the trap of the self image, you can become more aware of what information you “feed” your own subconscious mind. One way to do this is through meditation. Meditation allows you to become an observer of the mind without attaching yourself to it as the real “you”.
Unconscious Beliefs
Another way to observe the way you see yourself is to listen to yourself talking in general conversation. What do you say about yourself? Is it positive, or negative? Does your self image allow for any eventuality, or are you limiting your potential in some way?
The self image is one of the most powerful vehicles for change. Getting conscious about what you tell yourself on a constant basis is a major key to unlocking your potential. Feedback loops are those things you repeat to yourself. They are often stories you tell yourself about what kind of person you are:
- “I’ll never be able to do that”
- “That’s too much for me”
- “I’m the kind of person that _____”
- “I’m not very ______”
Many of our feedback “loops” are unconscious and stem from early experiences from childhood. If you have a current problem you want to overcome in your life, it may represent an old experience or belief which comes from a deeply rooted issue.
To dig out these unconscious behaviour patterns, it can be useful to look at our most important relationships as a child. This is often the relationship we had with our parents and siblings. How much do they control you now? In what ways are you living our your past, recreating experiences which are long gone? Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you’ll call it fate!
Reprogramming Your Unconscious Mind
Most people allow their conscious mind to run on autopilot unchecked, telling themselves all kinds of negative things, over and over in their heads.
Napoleon Hill states in Think and Grow Rich that everyone has complete control over
“the material which reaches the unconscious mind.”
But Hill also goes on to say that most do not enforce this control with any amount of certainty or direction. In fact, most do not exercise any control over it at all!
To train the unconscious mind for a better outcome in life takes some discipline. Once you’ve uncovered some of your unconscious thinking patterns, you can replace them with more positive and supportive ones which will produce better outcomes in your life.
Reprogramming The Unconscious Mind
To reprogram the unconscious mind, you need to replace all of the old programming and bad mental habits with new positive and encouraging ones. Consider though that you have been programming your mind for a serious amount of time already. Look at your life right now and see the results of your continual thinking patterns over the long term.
This is often the result of your repetitive patterns of self talk. To change your self talk takes some effort and repetition. Here’s a resource for using what Stuart Lichtman calls Cybernetic Transposition to transpose a memory into a new meta story. A meta story is a central story which you tell yourself repeatedly. It’s likely that you already have stories which you tell yourself and others about you. Meta stories are powerful because they are the stories you already believe and keep telling yourself. By telling yourself a new story, over and over, you can reprogram your subconscious mind to create any outcome you want. Find Stuart Lichtman’s book below.
