https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=fpP74E-ouFY
Hello. What I’d like to talk about today is the unconscious or subconscious. This is a concept that is, you know, fairly well known in psychology and pop psychology in particular. But I want to talk about how we can think about this and why it might be important to understand what it is that the unconscious tells us about ourselves and how we’re actually interacting in the world. The unconscious or subconscious is this concept around what we know about in the moment, what we’re attending to at the time. And the way it’s usually couched is that you have a, you know, you have a conscious mind that’s aware of what’s going on around you and then there’s this underneath the subconscious or unconscious mind where there’s things going on in your head that you aren’t engaged in in the moment or aware of at the time. And the reason why this is important in my opinion is because it helps you to understand what’s going on with people, including yourself. So when we believe that we’re rational creatures, which all the science I’ve seen on it says we’re not, and most of it indicates we’re not capable of being rational to some extent, what happens is we get the concept that we know how to do stuff and we understand the stuff we’re doing better than we actually do. So the way this tends to play out is we’re hungry and we want a specific type of food. Now it turns out that in many cases the specific type of food you want is something that you crave unconsciously without really realizing it. This may be due to your gut bacteria or it may be due to a mineral deficiency. Some people have been caught licking chalkboards when they were young because it turns out they had a deficiency in minerals and that’s how they were making up for it. So your body sometimes knows, or at least your unconscious knows, what it needs and it’ll go after it. And so why did you choose pastries? Or why did you choose to get an ice cream? It turns out, oh your body thought it needed fat or at least wanted fat and sometimes it’s what you want and sometimes it’s just what you need and when you don’t engage with that at the conscious level your unconscious manifests it and you rationalize it after the fact you go, oh I was hungry for ice cream so I got ice cream. But actually know your body needed fat and some yummy dairy so it did that and that’s why your food tastes change you know both over your lifetime typically and in the moment right. You know you’re not gonna eat pizza every three days a week every day hopefully although I’m sure some people do because your subconscious mind, your unconscious mind is gonna tell you like no no we need this we need that and you may or may not listen to it that’s that’s still true. It gets filtered through the conscious mind but this manifests in all sorts of ways. So one of the more interesting ways that it manifests is if you feel upset unconsciously and that’s due to something inside of you like maybe you’re disappointed in yourself because we’re often disappointed in ourselves just look at how much we suck at doing the things that we say we want. What will happen a lot of times is if that will manifest as a projection onto other people and this gets into psychological projection where you have an unconscious feeling you don’t want to own it right you want to say oh well this feeling is being imposed from the outside world even when it’s not sometimes it is but sometimes it’s not and so you make up a story in your head about oh this person did this this person said that when that didn’t happen and you can feel upset at people for like a whole bunch of reasons and they those reasons can be false and then you generate a story a narrative in your head about why that happened the way it did or why you felt that way and the person did this or the person did that when in fact that just never happened and it’s hard to get people to see when they’re manifesting their unconscious because they you know in the modern age we don’t want to admit we have one right we’re sort of hiding this unconscious thing from ourselves so we don’t have to deal with it we’re like ah I’m not gonna I’m gonna deal with that I’m just gonna pretend like everything that happens to me is not me it’s somebody else or something else or some force that’s out there and and we do this quite naturally and it’s not necessarily bad it’s not necessarily avoidable it’s one of the things that meditation can help you with is to get in touch with all your unconscious sort of influences and manage them you can’t suppress them you’re not supposed to try but you can understand them better and negotiate with your own conscious and a lot of people don’t understand this and so they really don’t understand what they’re doing and why they don’t understand the situations they found themselves in right they may go and and get in a relationship with somebody and then not understand how that happened that happens people all the time right they talk about it constantly you know they may take an action and then justify it later you know I’ve seen people seal steal stuff and said what why did you take that and they’re like oh well this store ripped me off last week it’s like you weren’t at this store last week you know like that didn’t happen but they you know they feel a real weight right they’re they’re they’re feeling something whether or not if they’re feeling is attached to we’ll call it intersubjective things that other people also experienced it’s a different different question but they often chin up a story why it’s not them because they wouldn’t do that and consciously yeah they wouldn’t but unconsciously the desire was there and it manifested so what happens when the unconscious manifests we rationalize it we say oh I did that for this reason and we’re not dealing with it though we’re not we’re not coming forth rightly with it and saying ah well this is this is really just something I didn’t wasn’t aware of in myself and there’s a lot of problems that this leads to we look back on our lives and we don’t like why did that happen why did you do this last week you know why did I eat that pint of ice cream when I didn’t I wasn’t even hungry you know why was I crying at that scene in the movie right we’re not always in touch with these things and over long periods of time in particular you can look back and go wow that was that was just a disastrous period of my life or I made a bunch of bad decisions I didn’t understand this is why a lot of people don’t do journals because if you do a journal and then you read it you’re like what happened how did these things go on like this why was I you know where did this time go or was I doing during all this time or you know what manifested here so people often don’t they don’t know for themselves they have no idea what what was going on so that’s just something to be aware of you know and you know we need a way to surface our unconscious thoughts and desires so that we can approach them forthrightly you know so that we can really dig into them and say what am I up to because sometimes maybe I don’t know what I’m up to maybe I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing you know how did I get hooked up with this person why is this person my friend why wasn’t I better to this person or this relative who’s treated me well like these are all things that that manifest that we don’t understand in any significant fashion so that’s just something we have to watch out for in the world and like I said you can see this manifest in others usually it shows up as psychological projection they’ll get angry at you when you knew anything wrong and you’re like what happened you know and it’s good to you know I mean you’re not gonna change it necessarily but it’s good to know what happens you can meet it with grace and compassion you can say oh they’re just having a bad day that’s not me right and you know because sometimes it’s not you you’re gonna be careful with that because sometimes maybe you’re being a jerk I do that all the time so you know that that could be but sometimes it’s not you and you don’t deserve the blame even though you have to take the punishment will say make a little sacrifice for somebody else’s well-being that’s always a good thing to do so it’s it’s it’s good to think about that we have an unconscious and it drives our behavior sometimes without our knowledge or understanding and sometimes we justify that behavior with these very complicated narratives when the simple fact of the matter is we were moved to do this and we didn’t have the awareness this isn’t about willpower that’s a different problem we didn’t have the awareness to resist in the moment we were possessed by the passion of the moment or something that’s your unconscious operating in order to have willpower you have to notice something but if you don’t even notice it willpower doesn’t come into it at all and there are stoic practices where you can cultivate the space to notice things better and then you can start to apply your will but your will really doesn’t show up until after you’ve cultivated the space to notice your behavior to understand what your interactions are so that’s all very important and just understanding having an idea of this unconscious things that were not consciously aware of things that are in our unconscious awareness right there are driving us and moving us that we’re not facing forth rightly is helpful because it gives us a sense for how much control we don’t have over ourselves so we’d like to have more control over ourselves but sometimes we don’t have that much control and that’s just a good thing to recognize and acknowledge and understand and deal with and a lot of things creep up in your unconscious a lot of things are there sort of hiding this is where meditation can be helpful because it can reveal some of these things therapy can also be helpful just talking to a friend can be helpful sort of talking out what you’re doing because as you know a lot of things in the unconscious can’t be surfaced because you’re not verbalizing them can verbalize them in your head that’s useful good stuff but it’s better to verbalize them to others get some distributed cognition going with another person or people let them help you figure out what these things are all about so that when they do move you they don’t move in a bad direction and so there’s a way in which understanding the unconscious helps us and helps ourselves because again we can free ourselves from the idea that we’re always at fault just because someone’s angry at us people are angry at me all the time and I realize immediately they’re not mad at me they don’t even know I’m there they’re projecting anger at me they’re like oh shut up mark what are you doing you stop talking about that you know and what the hell do you know fair enough but often it’s because they had a bad day and they don’t really understand that and you know they usually they see it and they go oh gee I’m sorry about that like I didn’t mean that it’s like yeah whatever I know all right and people often do this when you when they feel like their views of the world or their values or their virtues have been compromised and you can obviously trip this accidentally in a way that they won’t even notice that happens but it can be tripped by other people and then they cannot understand that maybe they’re at work you can’t really like tell your boss off hopefully you don’t do that and then the next person you run into it’s you know it’s not your boss you are ready you’re ready and you see those signals everywhere even when they’re not there then start going off and that person instead of your boss things like that happen we do that to other people other people do that to us we just have to have some understanding so that we can make it better for them and for us and sometimes you know you don’t even have to call it out necessarily sometimes you just have to understand and not take things personally when they’re not personal and that’s hard to judge granted but it can be done and you know it’s it’s really all about getting along with people and the best way to get along with people is to realize that they’re flawed just like you except you’re probably flawed worse you just don’t see it which is scary scary that we don’t see how flawed we are we don’t really know what we don’t know there’s the sort of known unknowns and the unknown unknowns and we have that about ourselves and part of that is your unconscious so just bringing it into awareness thinking about every once in a while what am I really up to why did this happen what’s going on in my head well what’s going on in that person’s head they seem a little more angry than usual right or they seem upset about something or they’re more emotional than normal all of that is really all about the unconscious mind and it’s really sneaky a lot of people this is told to me the other day a lot of people will they want you to make a decision for them so that they can see how a decision is made and then accept the decision now this can be really annoying like oh you wanted me to make a decision whether explicitly or implicitly you know oh somebody asked you where do you want to go for dinner they ask you where you want to go for dinner they’re asking you to make a decision so if you say well I want Mexican food and they go I don’t like Mexican food it can get a little annoying why did you ask if you’re gonna reject my answer but really they don’t have enough contrast they don’t have a container to see the decision point of where to eat and so they’re asking you to provide them with a landscape of contrast to help them make a decision and once you understand that that behavior is a little more reasonable right it’s a little more intelligible it’s understandable to you and then you can deal with it better instead of getting upset which is what I do probably not gonna help me but it should you get upset you could get angry about that over over years of having people do it to you right you could be resentful you could stop trying to answer the question and say I don’t know whatever you want which isn’t helpful because now you’re not providing the person with what they need even though they may not know to ask for it because again it’s their unconscious at work too so there’s a way in which the unconscious things that are manifesting can make each party worse but if you understand it you can understand you have an unconscious response they have an unconscious response a little grace maybe a lot of grace will go a long way to making sure that doesn’t get worse for both of you so that’s something to think about and to grapple with and hopefully it’s you know a little bit of attention towards it will help you to engage with it better in a more healthy way that helps you to sort of move forward in your life and not be quite so sensitive to these things and also you know meet these people with grace and and give a little grace to yourself because there’s things driving you and everybody else that we don’t really engage with so I hope you find this helpful and I hope that if you choose to engage you can give me some feedback on how I’m doing and whether or not you want more of this sort of thing or you know more dialogues or whatever else because really that’s what this is about it’s a community efforts cooperation so I’m trying to reach out and connect and give people tools that they can use that are hopefully useful that they want to use and I think I’m doing that because people are watching videos never enough of course but but plenty to help fix even a little part of the world like if I make one person’s life better just a little bit for ten minutes mission accomplished and if you choose to to find a topic or you have a curiosity leave in the comments I’ll try to do a video on it if I can I can’t promise videos on things but I try to have a big list I had can’t do most of these still working through how to explain some of the stuff and make it accessible and if I’m doing that let me know I’m not doing that let me know let me know what I can do better and I just want to express my gratitude that anybody at all watches any of this stuff and so I want to thank you for your time and attention