Subconscious mind

“ The subconscious mind is too often treated as a thing beyond control, and yet the pathological power of suggestion, by which a thought is implanted like a seed in the mind, which presently appears to be rooted and flowering, ought to show us that we have within our reach an extraordinarily potent psychological implement. ”

“ Hence we are hearing a great deal about the subconscious mind, or subliminal consciousness as some prefer to call it. Now that our attention has been directed to it, we are coming to see, as is usual with every new discovery, that after a fashion we knew it all along. The subconscious mind seems to be the seat of inspiration and intuition. ”

“ As the subconscious and its processes are fundamentals both in the structure of personality and in viiithe many mechanisms through which personality, normal and abnormal, finds expression, the first eight lectures are devoted to its exposition. Indeed, as has been said, the subconscious is not only the most important problem of psychology, it is the problem. The study of its phenomena must be preliminary to that of the functioning mechanisms of both the normal mind and of those special pathological conditions—the psycho-neuroses—which modern investigators are tracing to its perversions. ”

“ For instance, we can prescribe a conflict between the subconsciousness and the personal consciousness, between a subconscious wish and a conscious wish, or volition, and observe the resultant mental and physical behavior, which may be inhibition of thought, hallucinations, amnesia, motor phenomena, etc. The possibilities and limitations of subconscious influences can in this way be experimentally studied. Subconscious personalities, therefore, afford a valuable means for studying the mechanism of the mind. ”

“ Numerous instances might be cited to show that our subconscious mind is the record storehouse of all that has ever happened to us. Every thought, every experience, whatever passes before the eye, or that we see or hear or feel is registered accurately in our brain by our subconscious mind. ”

“ Well, I think that our whole inner life is like a single sentence, begun from the first awakening of consciousness, a sentence scattered with commas, but nowhere broken by a full stop. And so I think that our whole past is there, subconscious—I mean present to us in such a way that our consciousness, to become aware of it, need not go outside itself nor add anything foreign: to perceive clearly all that it contains, or rather all that it is, it has only to put aside an obstacle, to lift a veil. ”

“ While our attention was given over to other questions, the subconscious mind took up the search and troubled itself with the problem and neatly performed what our conscious mind was unable to produce. Moreover in every situation we are performing a thousand useful and well-adapted acts with our body without thinking of the end and aim. What else but the subconscious mind directs our steps, controls our movements, and adjusts our life to its surroundings? ”

“ The fact that the subconscious mind seems to function in a realm apart from anything that has to do with our conscious mental processes, and also that it has some definite functions as both directing and building functions to perform in connection with the body, and that it is at the same time subject to suggestion and direction from the active thinking mind, would indicate that it may be the true connecting link, the medium of exchange, between the soul and the body, the connector of the spiritual and the material so far as man is concerned. ”

“ All sight, all hearing, all function is in this psychic body, not in the physical one. What many of the psychologists call the subconscious mind is only the registered intelligence of the psychic self. This psychic self is in direct communication with the cosmic self and with the physical self, and it is through this we become cosmic in our human consciousness. ”

“ It is therefore easy to see how we have it in our power, when we are once awake to the relations between the conscious mind and the subconscious—and it in turn in its relations to the various involuntary and vital functions of the body—to determine to a great extent how the body shall be built or how it shall be rebuilt.
Mentally to live in any state or attitude of mind is to take that state or condition into the subconscious. The subconscious mind does and always will produce in the body after its own kind. ”

“ The psychology of suggestion, for instance, which we have now fully discussed without even mentioning the word subconscious, figures in most popular books in the treatises of both physicians and ministers as a wonderful dominance of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind alone receives the suggestions and makes them effective, the subconscious mind controls the suggestive processes in consciousness, and the subconscious mind comes into the foreground and takes entire hold of the situation when the hypnotic state sets in. ”

“ Modern psychologists tell us that much the greater part of our mind is subconscious. If the mind may be likened to a log floating in water, the conscious mind is like the small portion above the level of the water; the subconscious mind is like the greater bulk under the water. ”

“ They tell us nowadays that it's the subconscious mind that is really important. The more mental operations we can turn over to the subconscious realm, the happier we will be, and the more efficient. Morality, theology, and everything really worth while, as I understand it, spring from the subconscious. ”

“ Henry Wood says of the Subconscious Mind: “It acts automatically upon the physical organism. It cognizes external facts, conditions, limitations, and even contagions, quite independent of its active counterpart. ”

“ It is the Life, or the Life Force within, acting under the direction and guidance of the subconscious or subjective mind that is the agency through which this continually new cell-formation process is going on. The subconscious mind is, nevertheless, always subject to suggestions and impressions that are conveyed to it by the conscious or sense mind; and here lies the great fact, the one all-important fact for us so far as desirable or undesirable, so far as healthy or unhealthy, so far as normal or aging body-building is concerned. ”

“ It seems a trivial function of the body and yet it is the Key to the Soul——"
"The Key to the Soul?"
"Man sleeps," he said, "and his Conscious Mind is in abeyance. But his Subconscious Mind is still awake. It functions. ”

“ The Subconscious Mind in its vital activities is constantly at work building up, repairing, growing, nourishing, supporting and regulating the body, doing its best to throw off abnormal conditions, and seeking to do the best it can when these conditions cannot be removed. ”

“ Whatever man feels deeply or images clearly, is impressed upon the subconscious mind, and carried out in minutest detail. ”

“ Ones is usually termed the objective, or conscious mind, the other the subjective, or subconscious mind. Some call it the subliminal consciousness. The former controls our waking hours, the latter is dominant when we are asleep.
"You are, no doubt, familiar with the functions and powers of the objective mind, so we will not discuss them. The powers of the subjective mind, which are not generally known or recognized, are what chiefly concern us in this instance.
"My belief that your uncle is not really dead started when I first heard your story. ”

“ We learn of our internal machinery by what it does. We must infer a part of our minds which introspection does not reveal, a mind within the mind, able to work for us even while we are unaware of its existence. This inner mind is usually known as the subconscious, the mind under the level of consciousness. [16] We forget a name, but we know that it will come to us if we think about something else. Presently, out of somewhere, there flashes the word we want. Where was it in the meanwhile, and what hunted it out from among all our other memories and sent it up into consciousness? ”

“ If one is disposed to recognize a theoretical subconscious mind as a practical working hypothesis in the otherwise unified intellectual life, then, to be consistent, one should postulate a similar and corresponding realm of ascending intellectual activity as the superconscious level, the zone of immediate contact with the indwelling spirit entity, the Thought Adjuster. ”

“ Through a similar incubating process, the stored material needed for the solution of baffling problems is gathered together and oftentimes assimilated and arranged and formulated as an answer to the question. On the other hand, subconscious processes may be but a hidden part of that mechanism which determines our everyday judgment and our points of view, our attitudes of mind, the meanings of our ideas, and the traits of our characters. Antecedent experiences functioning 264as such processes may determine our fantasies and our dreams. ”

“ These are, first, that the subconscious is amenable to control by suggestion, and secondly, that it is greatly influenced by emotion. Tracing back the principles behind any example of the power of mind over body, one finds at the root of the matter either a suggestion or an emotion, or both. ”

“ Furthermore when we bear in mind that sentiments thus originating and organized are conserved in the subconscious forming what I call the "setting" which gives idea meaning, the meaning being the most important component of any idea, and when we bear in mind that this subconscious setting is an integral part of the total mechanism of thought—each sentiment in the setting striving to carry itself to completion, and for this purpose repressing every conflicting sentiment—I think we find a satisfactory explanation of the disturbances due to conflict in the psycho-neuroses. ”

“ But the subconscious has one great limitation, it cannot reason inductively. Given a premise, this mind can reason as unerringly as the most skilful logician; that is, it can reason deductively, but it cannot arrive at a general conclusion from a number of particular facts. However, except for inductive reasoning and awareness, the subconscious seems to possess all the attributes of conscious mind and is in fact an intellectual force to be reckoned with. ”

“ With all its inherited skill, the subconscious, if left to itself, can be depended upon to run the bodily machinery without effort and without hitch. The only things that can interfere with its work are the wrong kind of emotions and the wrong kind of suggestions from the conscious mind. ”

“ It is accordingly supposed that they really exist as desires for ends, but in a subconscious part of the mind, which the patient refuses to admit into consciousness for fear of having to think ill of himself. ”

“ The mind through a mechanism which has been understood better and better by the psychologists in recent years suppresses the ideas which are contrary to the secret wishes and makes those ideas flourish by which those "subconscious" impulses are fulfilled. ”

“ Foremost in importance is the discovery that, in addition to the ordinary realm of conscious thought, there exists in all of us a second realm—that of the so-called subconscious—in which, quite without any will-directed effort of our own, the most varied mental processes are carried on. ”

“ In other words, there are in us mental processes which have consciousness, but no self-consciousness. This is precisely what I mean by the subconscious,―mental states which have consciousness, but do not reach the personal consciousness. In short, the only possible psychological assumption is a subconscious consciousness. ”

“ In many cases it is not easy to determine what the exact character of the subconscious manifestation is, how far it is conscious, dimly conscious, how far it has gone toward the development of an independent personality, and how far it shades in the direction of the purely physiological. ”

“ Science, it is claimed, deals with artificial concepts, while personal will is concerned with the real values of life. It is claimed that the concept of the subconscious is illegitimate, because it involves a confusion of this metaphysical double book-keeping. ”

“ Even these most rational achievements of the subconscious bear unmistakably the stamp of the normal habit of thought, and emphasize their conformity in spirit, along a variable divergence in form, to the characteristic traits of human psychology. ”

“ As with unconscious processes, any conserved experience of life, under certain conditions and given certain other factors, may thus function coconsciously, particularly if organized with and activated by an innate emotional disposition. So we may have subconscious processes both without and with conscious equivalents. ”

“ By making use of the testimony of a subconscious personality and its various manifestations, we can not only establish the 160actuality of subconscious processes and their intrinsic nature in these conditions, but by prearrangement with this personality predetermine any particular process we desire and study the modes in which it influences conscious thought and conduct. ”

“ In other words, in the process of disaggregation, conscious, or rather self-conscious experiences fall into the region of subconscious life; what is absent in personal thought may be present in impersonal, subconscious states. ”

“ From a preoccupation with the conscious it has turned to the Unconscious (or subconscious) , to the vast area of mental activity which exists outside the circle of our awareness. In doing so it has grasped at the very roots of life itself, has groped down to the depths where the "life-force," the élan vital, touches our individual being. ”

“ Which incarnation and self-manifestation seems to be the whole goal of the unconscious soul: the whole goal of life. Thus it is that the unconscious brings forth not only consciousness, but tissue and organs also. And all the time the working of each organ depends on the primary spontaneous-conscious center of which it is the issue—if you like, the soul-center. And consciousness is like a web woven finally in the mind from the various silken strands spun forth from the primal center of the unconscious. ”