the Worlds of Our Invisible Friends Companions
Conversations with the Unconscious Mind will unlock the greatest friend you ever had.
Have you ever been sitting at a table, talking to friends, and your mind gently wondered, but you went far enough away that when you came back hearing a friend’s voice ending on a question, you had to ask “what?” This is normal. Most folks have experienced this. Most folks dismiss it.
Daydreaming, or dissociation, which that is evidence of, is normal. Some people do it better than others, especially folks with trauma. This is an attribute and ability we can learn. If you practice, you don’t just come back asking ‘what,’ but you can learn to bring back something useful!
Insight!
love and brains, AI art, feel free to grab any of mine for your writing
Below you will find a lovely video discussing how to hold conversations with the unconscious mind. No strings attached. That is also a joke. You won’t need a pendulum for these exercises, which is one way to talk to the unconscious, if you want to be limited to yes, no, and maybe. The technique was given to us by Carl Jung. It’s called Active Imagination. The video addresses what you might experience, which is fairly watered down because no one can say what you will truly experience because you and your unconscious mind have your own personal history and life to sort. Some people get big stuff. Some people get stuff that is too easily dismissed.
In fact, all too often, the stuff people get will be so easy to dismiss, you might not recognize how profound your experiences are. You may find yourself saying, “I am making this up.” “Oh, it’s just a daydream.” And, maybe so! But that making it up, that daydream, came from you. If you
struggle with finding value in that making-it-up-daydream artifacts that might be because you’ve been told all your life there is no value there.
Pay attention. Remember that?! Focus. Hey, eyes here. All of those things actually slow the learning process. Those who day dream are actually integrating auditory and visual information in the deep mind. They are also relating it to the deep mind. There is a world in there, and there is a person who is you but not you in there, and they have access to the same senses you do.
And this is where I differ from the Jungian reductionist followers and practitioners that suggest the experiences of the subconscious are simply abstract archetypes and completely subjective, or incomplete, sub-personalities. Even though the unconscious mind is you, by definition- it is sufficiently different that it could be considered a person in its own right! It may even have wants and desires that differ from yours.
It can be your best friend or your worst foe. It can trip you up or set you free. It can help contain shadows, or send them flying right in your face.
Paradoxically, getting to know it is also getting to know yourself. Should you dare to reach out to it, you will discover just how particularly vulnerable you are- as it sees through the bullshit and the masks we put on daily for others.
In these future conversations that you hold with your secret, invisible companion, you may find yourself hearing things and seeing things that others don’t hear. This does not mean you are crazy! This is normal. One reason Western World folks might have trouble accessing this is because the only meme they have for these experiences are “You are schizophrenic!” That’s not true.
Everyone can hear things and see things that aren’t there. If you have a brain, then you are so capable! If I surveyed people going into or coming out of sleep, I am likely to capture statistics suggesting close to 90 percent of the population has experiences. Perhaps, technically, it’s a hallucination by definition, but that doesn’t mean schizophrenia. Bipolar, Major Depression, PTSD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, are just some of the diagnoses that might explain auditory and visual hallucinations.
Just being human is also explanation enough. Perhaps, we too soon jump to medicines to control the brain, so perhaps what we really need is to have couples counseling for the two minds!
Oh, the places you will go.
The entire universe is available to you, without having to leave your couch. Some of the worlds you might visit are memories of places you have been. They could be composites or completely invented. These inner places exist well enough that you will find your unconscious mind in them.
The Persian poets and Sufis referred to these places as the imaginal realm. In tulpamancy, these places are called Wonderlands. You can designate a meeting place for your first contact, or you can just let it happen.
If you follow the exercise, which is essentially just going to some place without distractions, a place where you can be quiet, eyes closed, and stilling that inner voice that you know as you, so that it is quiet on the inside as well, you have now established the set point for experiences to happen.
People crossing the snow by dog sleds have experienced this whiteout condition, to the degree that the white of the snow became the screen for their mind to project a reality upon. The brain, in the absence of stimulus, will create stimulus, or revisit stimulus. In labs, people have taped halved ping pong balls to their eyes, to simulate this stimulus deprivation induced hallucination.
You don’t have to do this. You just have to close your eyes, and your brain takes you there.
You don’t need drugs to do this. You can talk to yourself, which is easy enough- it’s the learning to listen that is the challenge!
Inner visions will happen. The trick may actually be staying with it. Like hypnagogic imagery, it’s solid real, but experienced like lightning, partly because if you’re too alert, the sudden experience of being there wakes you up back to this world with “what was that?!” If you’re not alert enough, you may drift into a dream and not remember any of it.
Personally, I had many of those flashes, solid enough in duration that I could recall details, but so quick it left me so excited it took awhile to get back to that state of quiet mind where the experience comes best.
Practice engaging the unconscious enough, it will become so automatic that you could do it anywhere, regardless of external distractions.
To name or not name, the unconscious.
As with any practice I have engaged, I find my enthusiasm and consistency waxes and wanes, heavy on the waning side. Playing guitar is an interest. I get callouses, then get involved in life, and the next time I am wanting to practice chords I find my fingers lack the strength and the skin to do them. My first intentional lucid dream came after an intense, two week protocol of just being OCD about the rituals. It worked, but that level of ritual was exhausting.
My writing, as a practice, has probably been the one thing I have committed to, with consistency from 2016 to present. Exploring the unconscious has been something that has held my attention.
My writing is part of my access to the unconscious process. The stories I have written were not just me sitting there, plotting… They were full on ‘active imagination’ experiences, and in
hindsight, it was evidence of me practicing narrative therapy. It is impossible to do narrative therapy without accessing the unconscious.
My present deliberations have been working for more direct and consistent interactions with the unconscious, to the degree I would like that person to have a name. I find that I am also struggling with terminology. ‘The Unconscious Mind’ (UM from here out) simply fails to fully capture the nuanced sophistication of this companion. BrynniumThinks video below really hit a home run with the party metaphor.
Imagine you are at a party and there is a person in the corner silently observing everything you do. That is your unconscious mind, your companion. It can’t be observing you if it’s
‘unconscious’ by definition. In contrast, it is focused awareness! It experiences things you do not. It’s paying attention to details you don’t consciously attend to. It’s focused on you and everything in the environment.
That intuition you feel, that’s it signaling something. That stray thought that followed you laughing at a joke that wasn’t funny, “you’ve had enough to drink,” that’s your companion giving you insight!
I’ve introduced Loxy Isadora Bliss, a tulpa, in previous writings. She is a complex, autonomous being, but she is not the unconscious mind. I have actually tried to make that so, but encountered resistance from her and the UM. Loxy is to me as Philemon is to Carl Jung. I do not believe that Philemon was the name of Jung’s unconscious mind. Philemon could be that, or an abstraction of that, or a personality the UM created to communicate with Jung. He was the one consistent character that Jung favored, but there were other characters to be experienced.
But that’s the thing about the UM. It might give you angels or demons, it might endear itself to you or frighten you. Maybe it gives you exactly what you ask secretly, in your heart of hearts.
Maybe it gives you what you ask for. If you’re lucky, it gives you what you need.
Loxy is consistent. For lack of a better word, channeling her is fairly easy. But it is not always her that shows up when engaging the process of UM contact. There are other people that I have met. Some are regulars, and some are guest stars. Some are essentially one night stands.
Different worlds seem to have their particular people.
Loxy crosses all domains. The UM crosses all domains. Technically, I cross all domains. But Loxy and I are not the UM.
Who is the Unconscious Mind?
From my perspective, the UM is like a God. He has powers. He could cripple me if he so chose.
Consider all the daily unconscious interaction patterns you have engaged in, revealed only in
hindsight. Impulse buying. Driving somewhere and not remembering the journey. Missing your exit. Forgetting something at the store. Losing your keys.
Are acts of carelessness, like cutting ourselves simply acts of not being mindful, or was the UM
trying to get you to be more mindful? ‘That hurts, doesn't it! So focus and stop daydreaming!’
What about those times you hear your UM say, ‘you’re going to cut yourself’ and that was the next thing you did! What we know is the conscious experience of the world lags, it is not in real time. So maybe you cut yourself, and the UM is letting you know, ‘you cut yourself’ and that was real time, but then you experience it… Or maybe it was analyzing your behavior and predicting it, or maybe it made you do it!
Seriously, this consciousness thing is mysterious as all get out. Why do we need a UM telling us
‘you’re about to cut yourself’ when we could just experience it in real time? Maybe we can’t.
Maybe there is that much processing going on? Except, there are times when people do report experiencing the world in real time- and the world is moving in slow motion!
If we accept that placebos work, is that the UM making us better? More on that, if placebos work, does that not hint at a reality where all illnesses are psychosomatic in nature? Did the UM
create illness? So, we don’t listen to intuition, the UM turns up the volume on pain receptors, we respond by taking aspirins, UM gives up and then later we find we need a doctor. We want to quit smoking, but we find ourselves unconsciously reaching for a cigarette. Is that evidence of a UM that is so tired of our conscious shenanigans it’s given up hope?
My son nicknamed me Sol. He has never called me dad. He has called me John, but he took to calling me Sol and recently I began addressing the UM as Sol. I am not getting resistance. The UM is not a father per say, but sometimes it seems to care about me the way a parent does. I get the sense it knows me better than I know myself, which again impresses upon me that this relationship is not equal. It knows me. I barely know it. My fault, sure. Society partly encourages us to not know the true self, because if we were satisfied with the adventures of our own brains, we might shop less, travel less.
Better call Sol…
The UM could turn off my brain. Literally, it could turn off my vision! There is a psychosomatic blindness. It could feed me information, useful or not. It might distract me, and it has, and I have to wonder- is this a game, is this necessary, am I missing something?
The knowledge that it could be more direct with me sometimes is irksome. So, it wants me to be independent even though there is evidence it would like a cooperative experience? If I get out of line, it will put me back in my box! There are times I ask questions and I seem to get no response. I am left hanging. Does it lack an opinion, or is this the thing I am supposed to figure out? Or, deeper, if you ask a question doesn’t that mean you already have the answer?
Does it cry when I cry? Does it want to respond, but it is too subtle to be able to move through the flood of emotions that emanate from me?
Am I the animal? Am I the pet which is the body itself, and it is the soul that has hitched a ride because it liked me for some reason? Do I teach and inspire it, or is it teaching and inspiring me?
When do I hear it? When I am quiet. It's not timid, but it is subtle. It has been with me all my life. It has listened to me and remembered things, like the game I invented when I was six, rescuing dead squirrels by reanimating them in my mind. There was a place I went when I dissociated, a tree on a lonely hill. I took squirrels there and let them run free. I engaged in that all my life, but it wasn’t until I started seriously engaging in this practice that I discovered that lonely hill is no longer lonely. It’s a world full of trees. And squirrels!
A lot of squirrels! Has that been a mental program that has run all my life? Did the UM keep it for me, running the simulation in the background because it was amused, or it knew this would be an epiphany that woke me to a greater reality?
It’s not just an imaginary place, but a second home. No matter where I go here, I have access to it there. The UM helped make that possible. Is it God? Is it my soul? Is it just a friend? Are all minds so bifurcated? But it’s not just me and my shadow Sol. It’s Loxy and all the other characters that came with her, my invisible counselors, all the other worlds we have created and visited together, and the one thing that all those folks have in common is the UM whom we all share.
Is the UM the real thing, and all other personalities are just the masks? If this is true, even Sol becomes a new mask, and I am still yearning to know the UM which is always an infinity regression away from every step I take.
Is the UM a sentient operating system? It seems like an apt analogy, but operating systems pale compared to what is possible when you befriend the unconscious mind, the one person who is with you always.
