Our mind is as unexplored and as deep as Earth’s oceans. Yet both are constantly filled with garbage, polluting our marine life as well as our thoughts. Both are immensely deep, dark, and not easily accessible; one holds our meaning of life, through the likes of emotions, dreams, and imagination while the other supports all life on our planet. American self-help author Oliver Napoleon Hill states “The reason man may become the master of his own destiny is because he has the power to influence his own subconscious mind.” This suggests that we are not as hopeless and powerless as one would assume. How then can we explore and optimize the psychological depths of our minds?
Borrowing from Sigmund Freud’s topographical model of the mind (1900, 1905), instead of the iceberg, I like to use the ocean to illustrate the immense and fluid nature of our mind. As one of the most important substances, the ocean covers about 70% of the Earth’s surface, drives the weather, and sustains sea navigation, and trade. It supports all living organisms. Similarly, your subconscious mind, accounting for a theoretical 50-60% of your brain function, serves as a pool of data storage. Executing commands from your conscious mind, your subconscious stores your master program and the conditioned patterns you are not aware of. And beneath it lies the more inaccessible unconscious mind, with a 30% of brain function, containing our lifelong-repressed emotions and traumatic experiences, that are deemed unacceptable by the rational conscious mind.
Both our mind and the ocean represent a profound and curious place that is discounted due its overwhelming vastness. Up to now, the interaction of different levels of thoughts, between the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious mind, and how this affects our behavior is hard to explain and detect scientifically. However, there still exist more intuitive and inventive methods to engage the subconscious mind. This is analogous to the lack of clarity and understanding which has, throughout history, given birth to imaginary mystical creatures of the sea such as ancient sea gods and sea monsters, Atlantis, mermaids, etc. Beneath the waves, past twilight, the deep waters in the oxygen-deficient zones, down to a place where pressure would flatten a human being, you find a bizarre and alien world of the deep sea. To this day, the sea remains the biggest mystery.
The unconscious mind, according to the psychologist Dr. Sigmund Freud, governs behavior to a greater degree than people realize. After encountering a patient whose symptoms had no physical cause, and whose case improved after her doctor recovered her memories of traumatic experiences she had repressed, Freud founded his psychoanalytic theory of the personality. “The goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious,” aiming to release repressed emotions of patients. This is one of the professional methods to uncover and heal pent-up trauma and fears in the unconscious, as well as mental disorders.
The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), also known as the royal road to the unconscious, was Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams, in consistence to his psychoanalysis theory. This was the first introduction of dreams in psychology. It is still popularly used today in psychotherapy as the emotional regulation through dreaming model, or the dream-to-heal approach. Dreaming is a space for expressing and releasing for the unconscious mind. Indeed, dreams can be vivid, exciting, terrifying, or just plain weird, once again replicating an almost alien, alternative world which is not unlike the bizarre world of the deep sea. What gives dreams more significance, however, is the way they leave us with a hazy impression of something deeply profound when we awake. They offer us an open window into the deepest parts of your psyche. A chance to uncover our hidden motivations and resolve traumatic memories.
Our subconscious is more accessible and malleable than the unconscious mind. In Books of secrets, famous Indian guru, and author, Osho, compares the mind to a garden and thoughts to seeds which can either grow flowers or weeds. And this perfectly sums up the interchange between the conscious mind and the subconscious. The subconscious represents a fertile soil which could grow a beautiful garden, and the conscious mind represents a gardener who plants different types of seeds. Therefore, all beliefs, memories, habits, and patterns stored in the subconscious are subject to change. This makes the subconscious a powerful tool to harness for personal improvement and self-mastery. Hence why a healthy mindset facilitates the wealth and success creation process.
Just like the rain washes up our plastic trash into the sea where it accumulates and continues to endanger aquatic species, so does the mind amass negative and destructive emotions, some completely repressed and others still apparent in our habits, that pollute our thought process, and communication with others. Proactive solutions are promptly needed for both scenarios. To reprogram our subconscious, self-help authors and life coaches suggest effective methods to start shifting our consciousness in a more positive and clean direction, one day at a time. Some of these methods include meditation, conceptual thinking, journaling, manifestation, relaxation coupled with visualization, and repetitive actions such as affirmations, inspirational self-talk and uplifting daily routines. By releasing the trauma from our unconscious mind and reprogramming our subconscious mind, we become healthier and more empowered individuals.