Can anyone tap into their subconscious? Also, what are some techniques to make this happen? And why does this happen?
For example: When your driving to a familiar place and before you know it you’re there. You don’t remember passing traffic, stopping, or turning etc… Is this a form of subconscious or just simply day dreaming?
You were probably perfectly aware of your surroundings during the drive - but due to familiarity nothing moved from short-term to long-term memory, so you couldn’t remember the details after. Research seems to indicate that our perception of time passing is linked to the formation of memories, and novel experiences are more likely to form recallable memories than familiar ones. So childhood summers seem long because we formed lots of new memories during that time. Adult summers rush by because the proportion of new memories is much lower.
This article is interesting.
This is why it’s important (for me, at least) to fill my time with new things - not necessarily wildly new things, just different stuff I maybe haven’t tried before. A weekend can feel like a lifetime if spent exploring a new, interesting place, or experimenting with making something new from scratch, but a weekend spent vegetating in front of the TV might as well never have happened.
If you could be conscious of it, it wouldn’t be sub-conscious
You are tapped into it. Your sub-concious is what’s running things, and it keeps your conscious mind more-or-less informed, with a slightly delayed consciousness of what’s going on.
You can learn to stop letting your conscious mind step in and mess things up while your subconcious is trying to get the work done. That skill is self-hypnosis.
And you can learn how to let your conscious mind straighten things out when your sub-conscious is messing up. Those skills are mindfullness and the-skill-taught-by-meditation, and they help you keep your mind on-task, as well as helping you avoid learned stupidness that cause things like bad relationships.
Management skills for the mind: not micromanaging, not too hands off.
Driving and not remembering may be either because you are driving in a state of fugue, with your conscious mind switched off (driving can be quite hypnotic), or because you simply didn’t bother to remember it. Both have been suggested. I’m not familiar with any studies. My guess would be that both happen.
There seems to be 100 different exercises for mediation. Also, is mediation actually slipping into a subconscious state or just a state of total relaxation? I believe there is a difference.
Read the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. This explains things better than the use of the terms “conscious” and “unconscious.” To be able to get anything done, humans have to have most decisions done by System 1 thought (fast, instinctual, and emotional) rather than by System 2 thought (slow, more deliberative, and more logical):
The subconcious is a concept. It’s used to explain things we can’t see and measure in our brains, but we can indirectly see must exist. So we know the brain can be doing something that we can’t directly perceive until it becomes part of the concious.
Sounds dangerous almost like someone or something else is in charge of what you think or do … a spirit perhaps?
Well, the guy who invented the word/concept “subconscious” which then became known to you, and everybody else, also invented ways to examine it.
Look into his works. Austrian, beard, cigar.
Yeah, but sometimes an Austrian is just an Austrian, or a beard is just a beard, or whatever.
Exactly
The mind is complex and we are under the delusion that our conscious mind is in utter control of everything. Experiments have shown that people can make decisions without being conscious of them but subsequently rationalize that they made a conscious decision. There’s no “spirit,” it’s just part of a complex process that is your mind.
For someone with many years of experience, a task like driving (when there are no extraordinary events involved like avoiding accidents) involves a lot of stimuli and reactions but these are so programmed that you can do it without conscious effort.
I have had the experience when driving long stretches of highway to be deep in thought about something then suddenly realize I didn’t remember the last few miles, almost as if I had just woke up. But I hadn’t been sleeping. I had memory of what I had been thinking about but not of the driving.
Meditation is not slipping into a subconscious state or a state of total relaxation.
Either of those would be self-hypnosis. Self-hypnosis is a state which helps you to do all kinds of things, including meditation. Meditation is a skill that helps you to do all kinds of things, including self-hypnosis.
Hypnosis can be used to remove distractions. Meditation helps you deal with distractions.
You can get to the same distraction-free state from either end, directly from hypnosis, or indirectly from deep meditation, but unless you want to try drug-free halucinations, there is not much point.
I would only suggest meditation or hypnosis as methods for helping you deal with the actual physical world as it exists, not as methods for trying to alter reality.
You can use meditation to help cope with a bad job, but it’s still a bad job and will still wear you down. You can teach yourself to ignore hunger, and not eat, and doing that you can live long enough to convince yourself that it is working, but you won’t convince anyone outside your own mind, so in what sense has that altered reality?
Of course, people do believe that the halucinations are more real than the illusionary world we think we inhabit, but I only have a weak grasp on reality to start with, and I’m not attracted to the idea of breaking that…
Yeah! It’s kinda of eerie, but, ultimately, it was still “you” doing the driving. Just not quite the same “you” we’re talking to here.
I have found some decent results in “self hypnosis” – at a very simplistic level. For instance, I want to remember to go to the Post Office on the way home. So I mentally visualize the street corner where I would want to turn. I imagine it, visually. I focus on the image. “When I next see this image, I will remember.”
And sometimes it works. I get to that street corner, and the little alarm goes off and I remember, “Oh, yeah, I want to turn here.”
Sometimes.
I know a few advanced techniques. For instance, I don’t have nightmares. I worked out a deal with my unconscious. (It really did feel like a process of negotiation!) And… Nice! As a kid, I suffered terribly from nightmares. Since the age of 25 or so? None. Best deal I ever made!
Right. “The Subconscious” sounds like woo (and it can be if applied inappropriately but rather recent groundbreaking work in psychology and neuroscience strongly suggests that subconscious processes are even more real and more important than believed even a decade ago.
Most body and brain functions are subconscious, even the ones that we believe are completely conscious. The conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg and often not under as much of our control as we like to think. The subconscious processes include mundane tasks like making you breath without thinking about it but it also includes a whole host of higher level decisions as well, many of which people believe are conscious.
That is because the conscious mind is constantly trying to reconcile itself with the subconscious processes and it is usually responding to those rather than the other way around. Panic attacks are one clinical example that shows what happens when those processes cannot reconcile but there are many others that everyone experiences.
It is fairly difficult to get the conscious mind to override the subconscious but it can be done. Your subconscious mind develops a kind of inertia for daily patterns even if they are unhealthy. That can lead to anything from diet and weight issues to substance abuse to interpersonal relationship problems. A key thing the conscious mind can do is to force a reprogramming of the subconscious processes through forced behavioral patterns that are leading to problems even if it takes time. You always have freedom of movement for example so you could force yourself into a different pattern until that becomes the new norm for the subconscious.
Most people give up before that process is complete because it is difficult because the subconscious is rebelling but it will work if you do it long enough. That is one reason that everything from church services, college classes, military training and AA meetings are repetitive at the most basic level. You aren’t just learning new knowledge but, more importantly, reprogramming your subconscious to a new norm of expectations.