Presently there is much attention paid to “consciousness,” the awareness of surroundings and the awareness of being aware. Where does it come from, how is it generated, and how much can it be trusted or controlled. This is sharp in a time when so many people deliberately use substances to change their consciousness one way or another. Some experiment with being deranged and others are trying to control their minds in hopes of “normality,” whatever that is for a phenomenon of great flexibility — “plasticity” as they say.
Once something has a name, it becomes real to us. Thus consciousness seems like this “thing” we know. And once something is conceived, its binary appears on the other side of the boundary we imagine. Thus the sub- or un-conscious also seems like a “thing” though frustratingly, it is unreachable in any direct sense. We can only get glimpses in dreams, slips of the tongue, extraordinary circumstances like separated brain hemispheres, hypnotism, art, and the assumption of other personalities or dissociations.
The unconscious contains all the operating instructions for the mammalian body plus the addition of primate directions plus the humanoid potential. It seems like “potential” is a big part of being human. But how do we get at it? Psychology has recently been able to devise all sorts of little experimental situations that reveal parts of thinking.
Habits are a convenient way to move what was conscious to the unconscious so that, for instance, a musician uses a chord without having to think where his fingers should go. Some abilities are evidently kept not in the brain but in the body, or at least we know that sensory information can trigger memories.
Sensory information is far in excess of the five senses but one’s balance, the sense of where one’s limbs are, and the mirror cells of empathy are all unconscious. Focusing attention on these subtle senses may be so distracting that they are disturbed, yielding false information.
Though one can consciously move one’s attitude from one mode to another, it more often happens in order to fit the variation to the circumstances, whether formal or joking or focussed on a task. But achieving flow, though it may be intended consciously, is achieved unconsciously, something like a reverse of going to sleep where one’s focus is dispersed and lost.
Since the advent of such vivid depictions of life as movies are, we can step into a familiar “script” and act out a part as though we had entered a version of what we already know from second-hand experience. It’s a bit like being seized. “Why do I do what I would not want to do?” Or people who live among forces that trap them in repetitions guiding emotion can lose awareness of anything but the impelled violence of the moment, the familiarity of it, the seeming inevitability. The ability to “re-frame” is lost. Events seem inevitable.
Yet the subconscious can also be either logical, reacting to facts and logic, or creative, so that someone with a question in mind upon retiring can wake up with the answer right there on the top of their conscious mind. Consciousness and unconsciousness can both be layered and self-contradicting, yet jump to something definitive.
None of this addresses the shared consciousness and shared unconsciousness of a community — a concept rarely considered — or what we know are the framing systems of thought that are formed by experience, both nutrition and experiences. These build on the organic state of the creature.
All of these factors have a social dimension: a lot of people starving, a lot of people overwhelmed by a virus, a lot of people convinced by a narrative that explains their lives, are the essence of culture. The sharing of experiences come from an ecosystem which might be consistent over long periods when climate stays the same or economic resources and practices stay dependable. This will mean a lot of people working together and feeling confident.
But now things are changing too fast to adapt. We are also very conscious that the generations have matured under different conditions — some shared in large proportions which formed them into personalities with both conscious and subconscious aspects. Famous media forces inhabit both. Something like “Star Wars,” basically a Western, is inside many people’s heads. Now Trumpism has infested us all. Winning elections is probably a function of the subconscious, considering how all-over-the-map the conscious thinking works.
It’s well-known that chaos and even dangerous moments can produce leaps of new thought that must be coming out of the subconscious somehow — creative, unexpected, and not necessarily even from known precursors, or possibly from a demographic that has a different structural system of thought, perhaps indigenous or from immigrants or simply from a previously suppressed sex/gender category.
Erik Erikson proposed that sometimes certain persons are so aligned with the conscious and unconscious nature of their people that they become embodiments, physical expressions of things otherwise too various to be clearly described. His examples were Gandhi and Luther. There’s something to it, particularly on the unconscious side, because the persons may innocently believe that they are reasoned and deliberate, not like others.
It has been suggested that Trump is an example of who we really are. Certainly he’s an example of who the mafia really is — though he’s a weak link who could not exist without the system of support and control that is a sub-government among nations, maye a kind of unconscious, active and enabling without the deliberate voted power we suppose is us.
Whatever else the unconscious is, the concept is a useful metaphor and a source of humility for those who bring it to mind at least to some degree. It is consistency but also a potential for change. Remarkably it is like music and can switch among major, minor, genres, like a pipe organ playing chords. Learning to move purposefully from one “frame of mind” to another is an achievement of great power.
Those French/Algerian philosophers like Derrida or Foucault who have been so influential in recent decades were applying the idea of the subconscious to meanings under the conscious spoken words from authorities and poets. It’s a bit scary.
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