My unconscious told me it doesn’t exist

I find it brilliant the way you write these paradigm shifting things as if it’s no big deal Chris. You could do a whole book on this point, it’s that big.

Thanks Chris. Interesting and thought-provoking. Have to confess that having an unconscious mind is a comforting cop-out for me!

But I do believe that we all have different LEVELS of consciousness. Quite apart from keeping our hearts beating and walking without thinking about it just trying to retain all the knowledge that comes in would be a challenge for the most agile multi-tasker!

Perhaps one’s UM is merely a storage locker?

Warm regards
Angie

I thoroughly enjoyed this Chris.

It is a metaphor that I use if I am honest. Though not in a way that suggests it is the truth or that it is actually proven (I mean, heck, we’d all have split personalities) but to the extent that it becomes very easy to explain certain theories of hypnosis.

I really rather like the idea of getting to know our unconscious mind, of using its resources and trusting that we have more there than we might be consciously letting ourselves be.

Of course I know the reality is that no such thing exists, I am a fully fledged member of the nonstate theorists as far as hypnosis is concerned, amd find the metaphor useful at times.

Thank you, I enjoyed this

Best wishes, A.

What a relief Chris!
Thanks,
Love the one minded woman

Almost anything to do with my mind is a metaphor. I often define a problem and then leave it on the backburner whilst I get on with other stuff. When I return to the problem I just need to implement the solution that I have prepared. I am not conscious of the creative thinking that went on in the meantime.
so unconsious thought process or unconsious mind it seems to me they are the same thing.
It only becomes an issue for me when the “unconsious mind is treated as some strange distant unknowable thing when it is just a way of running two programmes at once but only having one in the foreground.

Yes!!! Thank you. I hate it when my NLP teacher says ask your unconscious like as if it’s a different person. Makes people crazy!!!

If consciousness is the “awareness of being aware” then what you are conscious of must be what you are aware of being aware of. If that is the case then… is what is commonly termed unconscious / subconscious in fact what you are aware of, but not (at this present moment) aware of being aware of?

I was thinking in terms of a “searchlight in a dark storeroom” metaphor. You can’t make out what you are not pointing the searchlight at – but it’s still there, whether you are pointing the searchlight at it or not.

I love this and have been musing about the subject all day while studying. In the end I have posted what I have written here.

http://www.nlpconnections.com/forum/14681-conscious-mind.html

It depends on what you’re calling a mind. If you’re only speaking about conscious processes, then you’d only have a conscious mind obviously. If you are calling all your brain activities as a mind, then of course there is an unconscious mind. It’s a no brainer.

I learnt conscious and unconscious as facts but have come to think of them as models of reality not reality. On my prac course someone asked which regions of the brain were unconscious and Bandler said all. Probably a metaphor but confusing at the time.

I think you need to go back to school Chris, the P in NLP is about programming your unconscious mind. You can’t claim to be an NLP trainer if you don’t believe it’s possible.

Yep – I’m with you on that one, it’s all one system. A person might find using metaphors at a linguistic level is useful as long as that person continues to notice that “everything” is a metaphor and as “everything” is a description of something that we may choose to apply our own meaning to how can we choose not use metaphor?

To put it another way. I like the use of the conscious/unconscious metaphor as I personally find it useful, but that’s all it is… a metaphor.

I agree with you about having one mind. The crucial word is ‘part’. Not all of our mind is in conscious awareness all of the time. Aldous Huxley talked about the reducing valve that prevents us from going mad. What is happening to the parts that are not in awareness in the moment? Perhaps those ideamotor signals are a clue?

Part presupposes that there is a unity; otherwise people are going to potentially end up with mulitple personality disorders or limited options. When a person tells me they are a ‘visual’ they are denying the whole or other PARTS of themselves in terms of sensory inputs and filters etc. The distinction may be useful when it is useful.

As far as not having a unconscious mind I disagree with you.

one hand clapping?!.

I am just astonished that this conversation is happening at all, especially from someone who claims to be an experienced NLP’er. What is this? Newbies corner?

Hi Lawrence,
I agree with Chris yet am interested in how you know he is wrong. For me there is a paradox in knowing something which if true is unknowable.

As Shakespeare said ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’, the post says a lot about the model of the world that Chris holds to be true, which may be similar or not to others models of the world. Mind as a nominalization is itself a metaphor, depending on your perspective and there is that which we are conscious or aware of and that which we are unconscious or unaware of at any moment.

To say that ‘we don’t really have two minds’ & ‘we aren’t really separate from our thoughts’ are beliefs and may or may not be useful in different contexts.

When we respect people’s models of the world it means we can work with them in different ways to assist them open up more possibility for themselves, develop greater flexibility & increase perceived choice in ways that are ecological and empowering.

What matters is what something is, not what it is called so dive in and ‘feel into the experience instead’!

This subject has trigger me to dive again into chapter 12 “the subconcious mind ” in napoleon hill book “think and grow rich” , sooooo i will be back;-)
0035799037444

Thought this TED talk might interest you, sort of on this subject.
She is a bit weird, but very interesting:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

This is one of my favorite subjects. No there is not an unconscious mind. I have written about this extensively over the past year or so. I began studying neuroscience and how the brain really works. It is amazing. I made a video about it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W25MXiZlTZQ if anyone is interested.

Nice post.

But in fact you just affirm that there is only one mind, and that it can be seen/taken (for practical use) as two entities.

That is, you say what has being said since Freud… by the way, the Freud idea of unconscious mind and the one present in Richard and John’s first writings are not the same thing, really.

O’Connor says that!

I disagree.
I have a body and ‘chunking’ allows me to selectively focus on parts such as arms and legs, and those distinctions are useful and real. Granted, discussing the mind is difficult because it’s mental stuff rather than physical stuff. For physical stuff you point and say ‘leg’, for mental stuff, you have to rely on introspection and metaphors. That’s why the physical sciences are so far ahead of the mental sciences. Those of us that studied psychology are aware of the dominant ‘behaviourists’ who wrote the early text books and denied the reality of the mind altogether!
The conscious mind refers to our faculty of (conceptual) awareness; it holds what we are aware of at any given moment, which includes those things stored or integrated from previous experiences. We know that we’re not aware of everything all at once, the limits to what we can hold in conscious awareness can be introspected and is well studied (Miller). We also know that we can bring things into awareness from memory and that it takes effort and sometimes we fail to recall something we know is there. Our unconscious mind contains whatever isn’t in current awareness, whether retrievable or not – and I hope that I don’t need to persuade anybody here about the influence all those unconscious items have upon our behaviour – even the stuff we think is long forgotten.
These differences are clear, obvious, introspective and useful. If somebody comes to me for help, it’s often learning they need, sometimes it’s to bring learning into consciousness, sometimes it’s to send it away. ‘Strategies’ which are a central topic in NLP modelling and change work involves working out the flow of information into the conscious mind, Visual external -> Auditory internal -> Kinesthetic, for instance. Stuff in and out of consciousness. Stuff in and out of the unconscious. Two things. An important distinction.

I think there is an unconscious/conscious mind conflict present in most cases of self-sabotage. It’s deeper than a logical/emotional split and explains why people continue to do things which are so obviously (consciously) detrimental to themselves.

People get hooked up on terms like conscious snd unconscious, Chris is correct in essence. There is no unconscious mind and no unconscious mind. Those terms are nominalisations, and are really adverbs that descibe how we process information.

We are able to attend to some things consciously, but it is far more useful to imagine that consciousness is an illusion, created for humans, in part by their ability to make sense of sounds, to construct sounds that resulted in the formulation of language structures.

The biggest part of human consciousness is around our self talk.

We have a brain, the main part of the nervous sytem, that was designed to process information from the environment and produce a response apropriate to that information .

Information flows from our senses through the pathways that we call memories and down throufgh the nerves that control responses.

That which we call consciousness is a tiny, tiny part of what the brain does, and much of what we do consciously is just part of that same response pattern mechanism.

Our imagination both drives and is driven by these processes. Our thoughts stimulate our imagination and we respond more to the images and sounds from our imagination than we do to the reality of our surroundings.

People experience a trauma or upsetting event that may have lasted only seconds, but we play those events over in our mind for days, weeks, months or even years. New events are then anticipated on long before the event actually happens.

Fear of an event aproaching is nearly always worse than the event itself, and underneath the imaginary events the body is responding as though it was actually happening now.

In the process it is performing millions of other tasks that lay way outside the levels of awareness, indeed we would become paralysed if we tried to process that information consciously.

Awareness is selective and allows us to make moment to moment choices or decisions when we have different options to make. Of course language and it’s involvement in human awareness, and it’s ability to generate imaginary scenarios, (arn’t worriers incredibly gifted at that) has enabled us to put our dreams into into action and developed a world, certainly in western society, which is where we are now.

Of course there are many that would ask whether or not that is a godd thing or not, depending upon tyour values and the ecology of those things.

But that would lead to a million lines of thought exploring lost performatives and the like.

Make a gfood day

Mike

Thought I’d report back into this thread with an interesting discovery I’ve made. For those of you that subscribe to New Code, nstep process or similar (i’m sure there’s other similar methods out there – not arsed which you use)… Set up your signal system, then instead of asking your UC for a signal, ask “a green telescope” for a quick chat, or “frank” or “bob”, “cisco”, “IBM”, “blue”, or whatever to help you out. the label doesn’t matter. Just have the same intention when internally asking the question as when you used the phrase “unconscious” when you do so? I’ve found that the signals/responses still happen. So don’t get too hung up on the label “unconscious”. Personally – I quite like it.

As Shakespeare said ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ (thank to Bryce Redford above for the quote)

Dear chriss, I apreciate your opinion about our conciousmind and unconciousmind…are built in ONE SINGLE MIND ONLY !
I want to share about it, according to my experiments and experiences during about 30 years about unconciousmind power, that I learned from a book : “The Magic Power Of Your Mind”, this book released in USA, in 1960, and I read it and intensively practised in 1968, and after learned and practised for about 4 years, I got the Unconciousmind Power/The Magic Power Of Your Mind is really exist…I practise it continuesly more than 35 years untill now, much usefull to built a grealife: Healthy, Wealthy anda Happy…
I agree with you that we have ONE MIND ONLY, but our single mind is work in 4 Frequencies, there are: Betha, Alfa, Theta and Delta….
Our Unconciousmind Power will be exist if our single mind work in Theta and Delta Frequensies, it need full concentration and relaxasion training for a long time…not instant…
If you want to know my experiments and experiensies, please browse my blog: www,tirtaamijaya,wordpress,com…I am a brain power consltant…I live in Bogor City, West Java, Indonesia…I am a Military Police Colonel Retired, my age is 67 years old…
Thanks and forgive me if I talk to much…from Nurhana Tirtaamijaya

[...] remember that you don’t actually have “an unconscious”. I wrote about that here. The conscious mind / unconscious mind distinction is a useful metaphor, in some contexts, but [...]

Do latitudes and longitudes exist? They are human constucts to chunk doen reality. I suppose, it is the same with sub/unconscious, preconscious & conscious. Maybe it is the same with time and space….

[...] Titulo extraido de http://www.chrismorris.com/blog/2009/11/my-unconscious-told-me-it-doesnt-exist/ [...]

One thing that I’ll never accept is the thought that I have a second mind thinking and reasoning independently behind my back. (That probably contradicts my fascination with the idea of a universal meta-mind though.)

Well, I, for one, find that rather disappointing if it turns out to be true. I always felt some kind of comfort in the idea that if I were hesitant or downright clueless about a situation, then I could at least rely on some instinctual/intuitive part of me to react in an appropriate way. Now, you’re basically telling me that if I don’t know what to do, then I can just go f… myself. Hmmmm….

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My unconscious told me it doesn’t exist

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