Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the tag “Conscious vs Unconscious”

22 Nov 2008

An Important Jigsaw Piece in My View of Life

Padlock by Victures

The only advantage of being sick over the last weeks has been my continuing revelations from Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. I’m nearly at the end and confident that I’ll be starting it again. Seminal.

So my reading really slowed down when I got to the chapter on ‘The Point of Consciousness’:

‘the intriguing possibility that areas of the brain might be getting on with their business at an unconscious level, without bothering to wait for consciousness to develop. A pool of neural activation may split into two, one part resonating with the self, and thus subserving the emergence of conscious awareness, while the other carries on with further processing such as planning a response’

‘These results indicate clearly that it is the conscious brain which decides what to do, and when; and that what we experience as intention is merely a post hoc confirmation of what has already been set in motion. Consciousness receives a kind of corollary ‘despatch note’, and then presents this as if it were the original order’

Had me in familiar territory already. Part of the reason for this blog’s existence was to understand a bit better what the other-than-conscious did. Not to necessarily ascribe meaning to it. As I noted in my first post in May, I firmly believe: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’ (Waiting for Godot, Beckett)

Trial Run to Overcome Your Procrastination

Back looking at Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind and I’ve hit a brilliant point where our belief system is explored:

‘We possess a whole variety of beliefs, many of which are themselves unconscious or unarticulated, which specify, more or less rigidly, and in more or less detail, our character and our psychology. They define what kind of person we are, our personality or ‘self image’, and even how our minds are supposed to work.’

He goes on to query whether our beliefs about ability, and needs to protect self-esteem can also lead us to become more mentally clumsy when faced with a challenge that increases our vulnerability.

Back to the game playing psychology that I have explored many times here (see tags in sidebar to right), we can trick ourselves into activity.

By starting work on something as a ‘practice’ or trial run, we both overcome the procrastination build-up against starting actually do something ‘that we may not be good at/ may not be actually able to do’. But we also ‘open ourselves to the undermind’ and the creativity latent within us.

So the key is to just start. Have a bash. Act as if you can do it.

Posted in Action Orientation, Conscious and Unconscious, Game Playing and tagged Conscious vs Unconscious, Game Playing, Pretend | Leave a comment

29 Sep 2008

The Value of Vision and Goal Setting

Optometry by S Nada

I read something fascinating at the weekend that really made me think. In David Allen’s book ‘Ready for Anything’, he entitles chapter 26 ‘The value of a future goal is the present change it fosters’: ‘It’s value is not about achieving something in time, but rather about how it changes the substance and quality of the decisions you’re making in this moment’…. ‘Imagining a positive outcome forward in time provides a believability of the scenario and matures the consciousness. In spite of ourselves, we begin to act as if it has truth’

Now how powerful is that?: It doesn’t matter what the goal is, or whether it is achieved. What matters is the present change that it catalyses and that this change is of value to you.

This thought was then compunded by further reading of Claxton’s Hare Brain (yes, I know it’s taking me forever to read)

Claxton made a comment about how the unconscious can take a set of inputs and act as if they were true. It will not question in certain circumstances the validity of the inputs unless they are tagged or raised within the conscious as being invalid: ‘the more vividly you can get someone to fantasise, the more likely they are subsequently to misrepresent this experience as a true memory’

To tie the two together therefore for you to see what I’m getting at:

1. We create a fully formed vision of a successful outcome (particularly using NLP techniques)

2. We consider in the first instance that this is a valuable vision or goal

3. We ensure that the vision or goal is as wild or inspiring as we want it to be (but we have to believe it to avoid the conscious stopping movement towards it)

4. We start to act as if it were true and unconsciously do all that we can in the present to take action to deliver

Job done.