The Surprising Unconscious

The second in a series of posts about you

Hi everyone.

Welcome back to my series about the unconscious mind, or what I call the Inner Self. This is a subject I’ve been obsessed with for a long time, because the Inner Self is literally the basis of all creativity and desire, which means that it affects all of us, all the time.

And I think we completely misunderstand it—and I mean, deeply.

For most of us, the Inner Self is this dank repository of memories and suppressed urges, a catacomb of dark secrets. If you’ve ever been traumatized, it’s also a conveniently offstage version of Hell that will roar up now and then to re-traumatize you.

We tend to think of this space as off limits—it seems the very definition of “unconscious”—so if we dare trek into that forbidden terrain, we either need meditation or hypnosis.

For some of us, this exploration might be like walking into a mine field. Our inner contents can be frankly dangerous.

They spill out in dreams anyway, in flash images and visions that inspire artists, in the hollowed-out fears that drive our worst behaviors, in the insights that seem to come out of nowhere but which, in reality, have come from us.

No matter what you believe about this inner container, I think it’s worth investigating it yourself. Why?

Because it’s you.

It Talks

The first thing that truly matters about your Inner Self is how much of it you believe you have access to.

One of the easiest discoveries you can make about your Inner Self is that it can talk. And it’s pretty easy to hear. Just shut your eyes and ask a question—you’ll get a response.

For example, I think: “I want a raisin.”

And then I think: “Ok, they’re on the shelf behind the blender, and they’re ten years old.”

Surely, I knew that information before, but I hadn’t thought of it for years. Where was the memory stored? Technically, it was unconscious. But I drew it up with ease.

Freud introduced the whole idea of the unconscious as a space of repression, and we became obsessed with it.

If you’re studying the space yourself, you’ll start to notice that a lot of your unconscious thoughts are right there, helpfully not clogging up your conscious mind, but fully accessible.

Today, I’d like you to perform a thought experiment: Look at your Inner Self as accessible to you. This requires discarding the crusty idea that you are, by nature, cut off from yourself. You are not.

Not only are you not cut off from yourself, but your Inner Self talks easily. It will cough up a thought if you ask it to. You do it all the time and barely think about it, that’s how easy it is.

Therapists, shamans, priests, and healers can all be useful in helping you access your “unconscious” or “hidden energy,” but in fact you are the first and only person who can say whether it is accessible or not.

So Much More

We’re building up to something here. Let’s look for a minute at what else the Inner Self can do—even when you’re not inspired. This is just a regular day in the life.

Any writer can tell you that the Inner Self communicates in a huge variety of ways: in symbols and ideas and images and stories. When you ask about a raisin, it may reply with words, or smells, or it may just show you a location.

The Inner Self loves association. If you give it a raisin, it will cough up a memory of those little raisin boxes you were forced to eat as a child and those nasty golden raisins that you picked out of your Christmas Panettone, and it will give you these associations on a sliding scale of “most memorable” all the way down to “utterly boring.”

In this sense, it also really enjoys making associations. It’s like that one friend you have whose trigger words involve puns. You accidentally say the word “mushroom” and suddenly they’re off. How fungi that you mentioned their favorite food! They were thinking of putting a cap on it.

Finally, your Inner Self is filled with more information than you imagine.

For most writers, this needs no explanation. We start writing, and stuff just pours out like a magical storytelling machine. You ask us: Where did the idea for that character come from? We have no clue. Even if we have an answer, it’s something we have to think about, because it wasn’t really conscious.

You do this, too. You don’t know why you really hate raisins. But maybe you do, after thinking about it for a while and dredging up associations that take you back to that day in grade school when you first realized they were not candy but desiccated fruit.

Your Inner Self is practically a universe of information. It is massively responsive, and, as writers know, with a little practice, it can pour forth entire novels. You can build a whole career unleashing that beast.

So far, this is your Inner Self:

• It contains vast amounts of information.

• It can talk.

• It likes to talk.

• It can even make associations.

• It remembers things.

What IS this thing? I mean, these are creative, human abilities we exhibit consciously (sometimes). Does this mean your Inner Self can think on its own? Or is it more like a robot that just appears to think?

We’re going deeper in my next post. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!