Thanks Jason for the note on the long comment reload time. I’ll start working on it. It’s all a learning process…

I think, Mark, that such a thing can happen when your conscious and subconscious get stuck in a feedback loop… the emotion is strong enough that your subconscious says your conscious mind needs to handle it, but your conscious mind is overwhelmed with emotion and says “I can’t handle this” and tries to shove it off to the subconscious, which tries to pass it back, etc.

Definitely. But I suspect it can also happen in the absence of strong emotional content, appearing to be the simple lack of a response where in fact it’s a comparatively unemotional inhibition of a response.

But that’s just my speculation

The subsurface is something that you are intentionally hiding from yourself.

Would you say the subsurface is a metaphorical conscious container for those things you’re trying to deny?

I assume that if you actually manage to deal with ALL of your issues, the subsurface is empty… but I haven’t reached that point yet, so I’m not sure. I know that it is much emtpiER since I’ve resolved the majority of my biggest issues, and I feel that this will continue, but I have no real way of knowing for certain until I reach that point.

And the power lies in distinguishing between things that you ARE choosing, consciously, but “hiding” from your surface, the part where you put things into more concrete concepts and words. The fact that it is in your conscious mind, though, means that it has the power to set your patterns for your subconscious to follow… which makes it far more dangerous than your actual subconscious, which merely follows what it has been trained to do.

I learned to have a lot of respect for my subconscious mind as a physics major at Stanford. After our first year, every problem set would contain a couple of problems that required a flash of insight to solve. Most of the students just couldn’t solve them, but some of us could. I invariably got them, but not until the night before the set was due. Then I would go to bed thinking about the problems and be woken up in the middle of the night by an idea. I would get up and do the math to see if the idea worked. Usually the answer was no the first few times, so I would go back to sleep until the next idea came.

It was a frustrating process, but also exciting, so that’s why after I graduated I went into creative problem solving, writing software for scientific research. Whenever I had the chance I would pick projects that no one else could do, and one of my goals was to learn to trust the process, even when I had the inevitable deadlines.

So, my guess is if you asked most creative people if they think the conscious mind trains their subconscious, they would say no. I, for one, try to give my subconscious the best environment for creating. I do not try to micromanage.

Thanks for continuing the conversation.

Jean Browman
Cheerful Monk
Transforming Stress Into Personal Power

By the way, I should mention that there is the subconscious mind, the conscious mind, and a state that is somewhere in-between… most people group it with the subconscious, but I prefer to think of there being a surface conscious and subsurface conscious. The difference is that you attempt to hide the subsurface from your own consciousness, but it’s still there and training your subconscious.

An example is where you are consciously attempting to do something, but on the subsurface you want to fail, even though you don’t admit it to yourself.

I learned long ago that my puny conscious mind couldn’t control very much. Fortunately it had the good grace to accept the situation and make friends with the subconscious. I took a workshop once where a woman said the subconscious was like a dog and the conscious mind was the master. Yeah, sure. Not for me it’s not. That may seem to contradict what I wrote in A Habit Is Just a Habit and Reprogramming Our Robot Minds, but trust me, no habit gets changed without the approval of my subconscious.

Is this a literal description of what happens? It doesn’t matter, it’s a powerful metaphor that works for me. Fun stuff. Thanks for talking about one of my favorite subjects.

Jean Browman
Cheerful Monk
Transforming Stress Into Personal Power