Hi all,

2008/12/17 Donald Robertson <HypnoSynthesisUK@...>:
> "Subconscious" and "unconsious" are traditionally used to mean
> more or less the same thing, especially in hypnotherapy.
Thank goodness for that!

> There are as many "levels"
> of consciousness as people choose to define it in terms of, aren't
> there?
And wildly varying interpretations of each state too. If I try to
analyse it to any depth it gets odder and odder! 'Experiential
learning' is the study of our inner workings and it turns into a
'spiritual' path for most people. I belong to the minority 'sect' of
secular/agnostic/yogi/buddhists. But deep experience defies
scienctific explorartion - at the moment at least. I am hoping modern
science can strip away a lot of the fanciful interpretations that
attach themselves to these things - and can support them with
empirical proof of their beneficial effects.

We don't have subconcious thoughts if we define thought as only being
thought if it comes to concious awareness. But lots is going on below
concious awareness - most of what controls us in fact.
We seem to operate using a layered principle given to us by evolution.
Each layer influences those around it. The highest level layer 'makes'
conciousness - 'feeling' (all sentient beings) and logic (a small part
of humans processing!).
If I analyse what thought is I get the standard buddhist anwser to
everything - its empty! There is a continuum between subconcious
reflex and concious acting. They are electrical-chemical-mechanical
(possibly magnetic) processes operating at different levels. Thinking
is in that area of these layers where we apply our conciousness - or
(in most people) that unthinkingly dominates our conciousness.
I think the buddhist statement 'No sense in using thinking to solve a
problem that doesnt exist in thought' is saying that buddhism works at
the layers below thinking - on the processes that under-pin it. All
the mind/body techniques do - and when effective they have a profound
indirect effect on our subconcious & conciousness.
Yogis bring concious awareness to processes that were subconcious and
even go beyond that and get concious control of them. The border
between concious and subconcious is moveable. In our stressing
environment a normal persons conciousness is over focused on external
sensory processing and future planning and analysing the past. Many
subconcious processes are 'weighted' to serve conciousness so our
internal postural/mechanical and emotional management functions
'wither' and lose effectiveness. To make these processes more
effective we must take awareness away from sensory processing and
past/future thinking ie. meditate. This is why I believe a measure of
success in mind/body methods is shown by posture - if postural
collapse is reversed it is working at a deep level that improves our
shape and our emotions. Another rough measure is eye contact - fear
of this means there is a much 'false' fear still in the system.

These days I view many thoughts and emotions as just being served up
from subconcious processing - they are artifacts of my processing -
they arent such a big part of my 'self'. Many are irrelevant ,
spurious, misleading, negative, delusory. The subconcious is full of
layers of repressed fears and trauma - influencing my actions and
attitudes. This fear can be 'felt' when I turn my focus to some part
of my body - it comes to conciousness. This process allows the process
that releases the fear/trauma to do its job. This processing is
distant from our logic and verbal processing - thats why
psycho-analysis has little effect on it.

I am curious to know if people who do lots of self-hypnosis experience
this sort of thing. When conciousness is directed to awkward areas
part of the subconcious tries to deflect it - using subtle and
powerfully means. It seems to me an untrained person doing
self-hypnosis will be easily deflected from this sort of deep
exploration.
'Tantric' and many yoga type practises (that on the surface seem
really bizarre) are designed to help you get past this resistance.

Keith.