Excerpt from "Self-Empowerment and Your Subconscious Mind"
Subconscious Knowledge—Power and Challenge
by Carl Llewellyn Weschcke and Joe H. Slate, Ph.D
The following passage is excerpted from Self-Empowerment and Your Subconscious Mind by Carl Llewellyn Weschcke and Joe H. Slate, Ph.D. Self-Empowerment and Your Subconscious Mind by Carl Llewellyn Weschcke and Joe H. Slate, Ph.D. © 2010 Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd. 2143 Wooddale Drive, Woodbury MN 55125-2989.
Used with the permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
Subconscious Knowledge—Power and Challenge
You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. You can, however, feel it, and you can talk to it and you can listen to it.
Your Subconscious Mind is your best friend and a mighty resource. It’s been with you since before you were even born, and well, forever.
Consciousness itself is universal, timeless, and everywhere. It’s often compared to a Great Ocean, a sea with no shores. And, then, each of us is a bit of that universal consciousness. We are separate, yet forever part of the whole.
Your Personal Consciousness that was once part of the Universal Consciousness remains forever connected to it.
Your Personal Consciousness is, at first, only what will later be your Subconscious Mind. “Above” it (but only figuratively) will arise your Conscious Mind and then your Super-Conscious Mind. These all pre-exist in a kind of matrix that becomes filled in with experience and development, and as their structure is completed they too—especially the Super-Conscious Mind—benefit from the continuous connection with the Universal Mind.
There are other elements to your Personal Consciousness that we will encounter later, but these three—sometimes also called Lower, Middle, and Higher Consciousness—concern our work in this book.
And, again “above,” but only figuratively, we have the Soul, which is not directly part of your Personal Consciousness in the same way, but it is your Immortal Soul that establishes basic guidelines for the
structuring of the contents of your Personal Consciousness for each lifetime.
Part of your life goal is to build an interactive “bridge” between the Personal Consciousness and the Soul.
Your Subconscious Mind
Your Subconscious Mind remembers every event, every hurt, every joy, every fear, every trauma, every happiness, every fantasy, and every feeling that you’ve experienced from the moment of conception in this life. And, as you will discover, you have memories of previous lives and times between lives, all the way back to some beginning of which we have no understanding.
We will discuss these early memories through childhood later because some of them still can affect you negatively with stress, persistent but not understood fears, and even powerful fantasies born out of misunderstood observations.
What we want to establish in this introduction is just what a wonderful and powerful resource you have in your Subconscious Mind, its memories, and its continuous connection with Universal Conscious through what is called the Collective Unconscious.
The Collective Unconscious
The Collective Unconscious is more than a repository of memories and a collection of knowledge sometimes referred to as the Akashic Records. Through the Subconscious Mind’s connection to our Universal Consciousness, we each come into contact with collective cultural, racial, mythic, and even planetary memories, and more importantly, the world of Archetypes that form intimate parts of our Psyche—that function of the Personal Consciousness that expresses the feeling of inner selfhood.
Because of the importance of the Collective Unconscious as a resource, to which a search-engine like Google is a very inadequate comparison, I want to add a little more detail here.
Within the Collective Unconscious, we can access the memories of all of humanity, and perhaps of more than humans. The contents of the collective unconscious seem to progress from individual memories to universal memories as the person grows in his or her spiritual development and integration of the whole being. There is some suggestion that this progression also moves from individual memories through various groups or small collectives—family, tribe, race, and nation—so the character of each level is reflected in consciousness until the individual progresses to join in group consciousness with all humanity. This would seem to account for some of the variations of the universal archetypes each person encounters in life.
We will speak more of these memories and the functions of the archetypes later.
The Subconscious Mind and the Collective Unconscious
It is through the relationship of the Subconscious Mind to the Collective Unconscious that many facets of the Personality—that portion of the Personal Consciousness that we feel to be our self, including the
Ego and the Psyche—develop.
I don’t want to burden our discussion with a lot of terminology, but there are many psychological terms you will encounter or have encountered that will sometimes seem different than our usage. What we really need to recognize is that many of these terms do not actually describe “things” so much as they do “functions.” Just as a hand can be described as a fist, or an open palm, or a light hand or a heavy hand, and so forth—these describe functions of the hand. You don’t have a fist, but you have a hand that can function as a fist.
So it is that a function of your Personality is described as the Ego—that which confronts the outer world. Another function is described as the Psyche—that which expresses the feeling of selfhood.
In this same regard, the Subconscious Mind is also called the Unconscious, and the Personal Unconscious. And, unfortunately, some writers have confusingly identified it as the Soul.
For our discussion, the Subconscious Mind is the lower part of the Personality containing forgotten and repressed feelings and memories; those feelings that make up the fundamental Belief or Operating System that filters Reality to our perceptions of the world; that collection of guilt feelings called the “Shadow”; the “Anima” or “Animus” collection of feelings representing our idealization or fear and sometimes even hatred of the opposite gender; and the various Archetypes and Mythic images formed through the history of human experience, all of which can operate as doorways or gates to the astral world and connect to the higher or super-consciousness. The Subconscious Mind is also home to our instincts and the autonomic system that cares for the body and its operation.
The Subconscious Mind is never asleep and is always aware, and while it normally functions below the threshold of consciousness it can be accessed by various techniques including meditation, hypnosis and self-hypnosis, prayer, ritual, automatic writing, forms of divination including the Tarot, and dreams and other contacts during sleep.
The subconscious is not only a content domain but a dynamic constellation of processes and powers. It recognizes that the wealth of our subconscious resources is complementary to consciousness rather than counteractive. It’s a powerful component of who we are and how we function (from Slate and Weschcke: Psychic Self-Empowerment for Everyone, Llewellyn, 2009).
The Developmental Process
From even before birth, we grow into our Psyche just as we also grow into our Psychic Potentials, which we will also discuss later.
Our childhood experiences are the foundation of the Personality, but we live most of our lives as adults and not as children. As the Bible says, we have to put aside childish things (and even many perceptions of our young adulthood) and learn to see and think as an adult. But, to put our childish ways behind sometimes requires our conscious remembering and recognition of those childhood perceptions in order to see them freshly as an adult.
After all, you don’t want to spend your adult life as a Big Baby! Yet, when you see news of barroom fights, child molestation, rape, road rage, mass shootings and suicides, sports violence and violent demonstrations, and more—not to even get into the matter of mass terrorism, piracy on the high seas, dictators who are responsible for mass murder and genocide, and demand for nuclear weapons—you realize the terrible consequences that can be associated with the adult child.
But, as an adult, you can relieve your inner child of those childish terrors, fears, and misperceptions that in those few cases have turned good people into monsters. You can recall those lost and repressed memories and relieve them of their fearful distortions, and regain the energies and the pure vision of the innocent child. And it is not just big and dangerous things that will benefit from your work, but even relatively innocent functions that never grew up that you can now reach and bring into adult consciousness.
Don’t blame the Subconscious Mind for any of these bad things. It just does its job of remembering everything. It’s up to the adult Conscious Mind to do its job and change childish conditioning into adult strength and wisdom. And, as a knowledgeable adult, it is your responsibility to do so.
The Good Beyond the Ugly
Don’t harbor any ideas that the Subconscious Mind is a bad place. Early psychologists first recognizing these units of Personal Consciousness often considered the Subconscious as a kind of garbage dump, and blamed it for a variety of emotional and physical illnesses—mostly female, since those early pioneers were all male.
The personal memories that fall into the Subconscious Mind are also all the beautiful experiences of love, of delight, of beauty, of personal discovery and adventure, of friendship, of success and reward, and your growing independence as you reached toward maturity.
More than personal memories are those universal memories that allow us to perceive not merely with our own eyes but those of generations past and even of the great philosophers, artists, scientists, and those who have attained spiritual enlightenment. The Subconscious Mind and the Collective Unconscious are the foundation of the greatness of Humanity, the glory of civilization, and the magnitude of our Spiritual future.
As you learn techniques to not merely access the Subconscious Mind but to work with it, you will be able to open doors and windows to the glory of human experience, the knowledge of Nature, and the wisdom of Universal Consciousness.
All this is available to you. You don’t need to go to school for advanced degrees or sit at the feet of purported teachers and masters. You, yourself, have the ability to expand your consciousness and become great. There are no known limitations to the potentials of the human person, for we are made in the infinitude of our Creator’s image. And it is this, the development of our potentials and their integration into our Whole Person, that is our ultimate purpose in life.
And the wonderful thing is that you need not put aside life and go into some retreat; you don’t have to take vows of poverty and chastity, or anything else. It is through living life, through loving and giving, through daily work and aspiration, and the personal experience gained in working with the techniques shown in this book that will lead to your personal attainment.
It’s a wonderful journey.
About the authors:
Carl L. Weschcke, dubbed the “Father of the New Age,” is the Chair of Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd., a leading publisher in the new Age movement, and founder of Gnosticon and the Gnostica School for Self-Development, which established the Twin Cities as a major center for New Age thought. A lifelong student of a broad range of metaphysical, spiritual, and psychological subjects, Weschcke devotes much of his time to the study of quantum theory, kabbalah, self-hypnosis, and psychology.
Dr. Joe H. Slate is a licensed psychologist, emeritus professor of Psychology at Athens State University, and founder of the Parapsychology Research Institute and Foundation (PRIF). He studied clinical hypnosis and psychosomatics at the University of California and his research has been funded by the Parapsychology Foundation of New York and the US Army Missile Research and Development Command. He is a member of the American Psychological Association and a platinum registrant in the National Register of Health Care Providers in Psychology.
Self-Empowerment and Your Subconscious Mind by Carl Llewellyn Weschcke and Joe H. Slate, Ph.D.
US $16.95 CAN $19.50 | Trade Paperback Original | ISBN 978-0-7387-2301-3
Publication date: December 8, 2010 | Llewellyn Publications
This book is available from your local bookseller and online at www.llewellyn.com.
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