How Deep Does Your Subconscious Mind Go?
The depths of the subconscious mind are nearly unfathomable.
Every human being is of 3 minds.
The unconscious mind is not in our control in any way, shape, or form. It is via the unconscious mind that your heart beats, neurons fire, internal organs do their thing, and so on. While breathing is part of this, your control of it is through a conscious act (and for some, the ability to speed up and slow down their hearts).
The conscious mind is your present, aware mind. As your eyes scan these words on your screen, your conscious mind translates them to something you can make sense of and understand. Decisions and choices are made via the conscious mind. You can also use your conscious mind to access your subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is where your memories, beliefs, values, and habits live. Whenever you allow yourself to simply go with the flow of life, it’s your subconscious mind driving, via rote and routine. Everything you take in, actively and passively, makes an impression on your subconscious mind. Some you retain and can easily access, and some goes really deep.
But how deep does the subconscious mind go?
The depths of your being
First and foremost, I have no formal training in psychology, neuroscience, or any other sciences of the brain. What I share here is based on my study, observations, and life experience.
I believe that part of what determines the depths of your subconscious is experience, education, environment, and both passive and active observation.
Thus, people who do more, study more, constantly learn, and work to better understand life, the Universe, and everything, develop a lot of depth. Unlike a hard drive, which has limited capacity, the human mind is nearly limitless.
The thing is, the subconscious mind is not just deep, but multi-layered. Because it’s subconscious, it’s not accessed via the conscious mind without active intent. So, the subconscious will not just hold things within, but sometimes bury them deep.
Why? One reason is that when we learn something new, something old and less useful gets shunted away. You forget it, or it is so infrequently accessed that it gets buried out of the way in the depths of your subconscious mind.
Probably the main reason is trauma. Shit happens that is unpleasant, painful on one or many levels, deeply upsetting, and traumatic via random happenstance, malice of forethought by another, accident, and the like. Once this has been experienced, it can create shadows, echoes, and other residue that can lead to PTSD, memory loss, depression, anxiety, and other issues.
Sometimes this is quite obvious. Other times, it’s far more mysterious and multilayered. It can also be a matter of memory, beliefs, values, habits, and/or all the above.
Sharing some parts of my subconscious mind
I’m going to share two examples from my life. One is passive, the other more active.
Let’s start with the passive. On November 30, 1999, I was hit by a car crossing the street about a quarter mile from my apartment.
This incident created traumatic amnesia. Hence, I have no memory at all of leaving my apartment, crossing the street, the impact of the car, the first hospital they took me to, or most of the first week after the accident.
Why do I define this as passive? Because I appreciate my brain locking this away. I do not need to recall what it was like to be hit by a car while on foot, nor any of the immediate unpleasantness, pain, and suffering that ensued. Somewhere, deep in my subconscious, I know the memory lives. It can stay buried there for the rest of my life, thankyouverymuch.
Now, the active bit. Somewhere around the age of 5 or 6, my parents divorced. This was in 1977 or 1978, before it was as common as divorce is today. This created a whole lot of impressions on my young psyche, many of which would be buried in my subconscious – even with therapy over the years – for decades.
Please note – I don’t blame my parents for this. However, the result has been ongoing issues I’ve been working through via mindfulness, meditation, and therapy tied to deep-seated fears. These mostly manifest in me as a fear of failure and an equal fear of success, as well as repeated self-sabotage.
The root fear, in the deepest depths of my subconscious, I’ve long believed, is abandonment. If I do or don’t do this, that, or the other thing, I’ll be abandoned.
Recently, I’ve discovered that something deeper than that might be the root.
A bottomless chasm?
Every time I’ve dug as deep as I thought I possibly could, another depth often was revealed even deeper down.
For years, I’ve believed that the root of my fear, the reason for all the times I’ve self-sabotaged, was fear of abandonment. Again, no blame towards my parents and their divorce – but that’s what started that notion.
If I fail, people will abandon me. If I succeed, people will abandon me. Get it right, get it wrong, abandonment. Then? Suffering.
Yet now I’ve learned something new. Fear of abandonment and suffering from abandonment doesn’t sufficiently explain numerous aspects of who I have been, who I am, or who I desire to become. It doesn’t explain certain aspects of my self-sabotages. It’s something deeper, something else.
But what is it? I don’t know yet. However, I’ve seen that the roots are deeper down than I realized before. I see there’s more digging to be done.
Meditation, therapy, journaling, and all the tools I’ve developed along the way will be used to see how deep the chasm goes. Is it bottomless? I doubt it. Only time will tell what I’ll find.
The subconscious mind is a many splendid thing
The more I explore the depths of my subconscious mind, the more I learn. But then, the more I learn, the more I see that the learning will never end. That might upset and infuriate some people. Me? That excites me.
Learning is how I grow and evolve and become more and better along the way. While there’s always something new to learn from without, there’s also always something new to be learned from within.
Not all beliefs, values, or habits are obvious and up-front. Many are in the untold depths of the subconscious mind. Often, they’re hiding, passively, behind some disguise or other.
Fear of failure and fear of success have reflected a deeper fear of abandonment in my psyche. Now, I’m learning the fear of abandonment is a mask for something else. Yes, this is frustrating and disturbing. But it’s also enticing and exciting.
Why? Because I have a desire to know myself to my core. And to be the best me that I can be, in this meat popsicle I’m existing within, which involves constant, ongoing learning both within and without. The unknown and what I might uncover can be scary and uncertain. It can also be exciting and enticing.
My subconscious mind is deep, and I know this from years of probing. And I am excited to see what I might learn tomorrow, and how that might alter the direction and approach I take for my life experience.
So – how deep does your subconscious mind go?
This is the six-hundred and nineteen (619) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
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