Accessing the Unconscious Mind transcript

[Music] hey there how's it going this is James trip this is a video for James trip on YouTube video is going under the title question of the unconscious mind you'll see why in a moment we're just going to be looking at something of what the unconscious mind is how it works this kind of thing which should be relevant to you if you're a human being you know cuz you have a mind and it works in particular ways but obviously this question is particularly relevant for the people who watch this channel who have an interest in hypnosis change work this kind of thing so let me just say first things first I got this question that came in on the creating courage and fearlessness program that doesn't start officially till Sunday so you can still sign up for that but people are already in there there's almost 80 people in there and people are engaging with the material that's already there they're already asking questions this is one of those questions but it's kind of sits outside the frame of the program I want to make sure I answer it because I'm there to answer questions seems like here's a better place to answer it it is relating to the unconscious mind so let me just read this question this program is already pretty lifechanging it says I found that questions are a super high way to get to the deeper level content okay questions are a super high way to get to the deeper level of content question for you James are we accessing our unconscious that's our unconscious mind whenever we are in the process of retrieving answers to questions I am so interested in how we actually can know when ourselves and others are accessing the unconscious and it seems that questions instantly cause us to go there and scan our experienced beliefs can there be truth to this do you think now I want to answer this question but in order to do so we've got to look at this idea of the unconscious or the unconscious mind so to speak first thing I'll say about this is the unconscious mind as a concept is a way of making sense of something that's actually way more complex than that now if you think about this if you look at the Wikipedia article on unconscious mind it gives something of a historical overview it says the term unconscious was coined in the 18th century by German romantic philosopher Frederick shelling okay so it's not that old a concept just unconscious it's not even unconscious mind just the term unconscious it's relatively given the span of all human history it's a relatively new idea and then unconscious mind it goes on uh to say or it doesn't go on it actually says earlier on in the article I have to bring this closer because my eyes ain't what they used to be it says the emergence of the concept of the unconscious that is the unconscious mind in Psychology and general culture was mainly due to the work of Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigman Freud so we're talking about ideas that are only a bit over 100 years old old really now the reason I point this historical uh piece of information out is so that we can just reflect upon the fact that we haven't always thought about things this way right the unconscious mind isn't some given thing it's a way of making sense of something I often say our ideas are about reaching out and grabbing a world that is more complex than the ideas we grab with them and the ideas we grab the world with never are the thing so I want to make this absolutely clear because the idea of an unconscious mind which gets paired with a conscious mind is a simplification that is sometimes useful but sometimes not so much so okay now I really reference the unconscious mind when I'm working with clients but I do sometimes because it's a useful idea for them when I reference the unconscious mind with clients what I'm actually wanting them to realize is they don't have to wrap their head around everything that's going on consciously they can relax a bit let go of that need to make overt sense of everything and just allow themselves to connect into an experience and notice what comes up for them so often when I'm introducing the idea of an unconscious mind I'm doing it a lot like Milton Ericson would be the famous uh psychiatrist and hypnotherapist Milton Ericson I think if you look at his framework what he's often doing is he's just trying to get people to let go of tightly controlling let go of needing to know everything let go of insistence of what perhaps Albert Ellis would call masturbation this kind of thing that when people loosen their grip on how they think things should be then they free themselves to connect to other possibilities other ways of doing things they start to allow the natural unfolding of things rather than trying to control everything so I think this is how Milton ericon used the idea this is largely how I use the idea when I use the idea so the question is what is the unconscious mind what are we referring to with that idea if we go back to the Wikipedia article again it says in psychoanalysis and other psychological theories the unconscious mind or the unconscious is the part of the psyche that is not available to introspection although these processes exist beneath the surface of conscious awareness they are thought to exert an effect on conscious thought and processes and behavior okay I'm not going to read any more than that but an interesting piece from Wikipedia in that it highlights something important because it says although these processes okay now if I'm looking to make sense of the mind for myself and other people I want to accept the fact that uh unconscious processes are a thing I know some people some colleagues of mine in the world of hypnosis who are absolutely adamant the unconscious mind doesn't really exist it's just an idea there is no unconscious ious mind they are right in some ways but they are throwing the baby out with the bath water in my opinion one of the problems of the model of a conscious and an unconscious mind is that it tends to see them as two different machines so to speak there's a machine called the conscious mind and a machine called the unconscious mind and they don't necessarily interact too much maybe a little bit but you either running the conscious mind machine or the unconscious mind machine I don't think this is a good way of thinking about things they're not two different machines they're not two different containers they're not two different things at all I was used to teach many years ago when I was teaching hypnotherapy and that kind of thing I used to teach that in reality it's closer to the truth to say there is mind and there is consciousness and the analogy that I used to give which I do not believe is original with me at all is that if you imagine that the mind in total is like a warehouse this is one metaphor but sometimes I would use a different metaphor actually I used a different metaph for it's more like a factory that has no lights on right but all the Machinery is there working doing its thing Consciousness is like a flashlight right so without the Consciousness switched on the Machinery is all there doing its thing but the the switching on of the torch of Consciousness means that you can shine that torch of Consciousness into different places anything that the torch is shined upon is conscious and anything that the torch is not shined upon is uncons conscious it's not the unconscious mind it's not different all of it is mind and then there's Consciousness that operates as a faculty within it now that is a simplistic model because whilst we can take our Consciousness and shine it into the workings of our own mind it's not easy to do always because Consciousness wants to flash where it wants to flash when we intentionally direct it into the workings of our you know that are going on outside of Consciousness it is not true to say that we can illuminate everything that's there so going back to our metaphor of the factory in the dark some of the Machinery is tucked around corners that we can't get round with the flashlight so you could say that stuff is perpetually outside of Consciousness okay so I want to go back to the question that's being asked here with this new model there's mind and there's Consciousness so the question is are we accessing the unconscious whenever we are in the process of retrieving answers to questions we are accessing we are in we are of the total processes of our mind at all times okay and most of the processing we are doing most of the time is unconscious even if we have you know you think of an iceberg and there the tip of the iceberg the conscious thought is the tip of an iceberg always there is no conscious thought without unconscious thought it's all part of the system of mind and most of what's going on in the system of mind is going on outside of Consciousness so we are always engaging our faculties that are outside of Consciousness and we cannot not do that it is impossible to not do it okay so are we accessing unconscious whenever we are in the process of retrieving answers to questions yes we absolutely are right we absolutely are the powerful thing about asking questions okay now change what practitioners learn to ask questions hypnotherapists learn to ask questions people who know how to self- coach understand there's a phenomenal power in asking themselves questions because questions direct Consciousness more specifically they direct attention let me just say that questions direct attention attention and Consciousness are not the same thing you can pay attention to things outside of Consciousness if you don't believe me recognize next time you find yourself having driven anywhere on autopilot if you drive a car right you go oh I missed those last two turnings cuz I was on autopilot you were still driving you were still not hitting other vehicles not hitting pedestrians why because your attentional systems do not rely upon Consciousness you can pay attention outside of Consciousness so it isn't quite right to say that questions direct Consciousness it's more accurate to say questions direct attention so they direct where the Mind goes where it flows and often in response to a question attention will automatically go in a particular direction right so if I say to somebody how do you feel about that well their attention will go towards their feelings if I say to somebody well so what do you think about that their attention will go towards a different quality of their processing towards what they might call thoughts right just a very very simple example if I say to somebody you know when was the last time you just felt really good for no reason at all you know like those mornings you get up sometimes maybe they're rare but you just I don't know things just seem okay and you get a spring in your step if I ask a question like that in order to process what I'm asking somebody's attention has to go in that direction right so their attention shifts and of course the material they access is somewhere stored within their metaphorically speaking their data banks and it must be retrieved in order to make sense of it so questions stimulate attention and cognitive activity the only way somebody cannot be stimulated by a question is if they blank it out if they don't hear it if they don't process it as soon as they start to engage with the question then of course they are processing it oh I just want to say something else about questions by the way because I just want to mention that this is in session six in the intro material for creating en courage and fearlessness and the session is on asking questions one of the things that is very common in the world of coaching hypnosis NLP this kind of thing is that facilitators of change one of the most powerful tools they have are questions right so they ask clients questions to direct attention to lead cognition to seed ideas for the purpose of leading them into a different kind of experience a different kind of mindset a different kind of learning space often this is very commonly accepted as a coach myself and as a student of learning okay because I'm very interested in how people learn grow and change how they build different patterns of Engagement with the world different awarenesses different structures of Consciousness this is my field of Interest one of the things that gets overlooked is the power of formulating questions yourself the power of formulating questions getting in and going what is it that I want to understand here what's the question that I need to formulate to get to that answer there's an incredible transformative power in the formulation of questions now the process of formulating questions of listening with curiosity and with an intent to formulate questions that I believe also stimulates activity of mind which if we're looking at it in the conscious unconscious frame will lead to an accessing of the unconscious which is not really an thing of the unconscious it's just a an engagement of mind which is going on outside of Consciousness okay so I wanted to see that so going on with the question here I am so interested in how we actually know when ourselves and others are accessing the unconscious and it seems that questions instantly cause us to go there and scan our experience and beliefs so you can know that somebody's accessing the unconscious if they are alive right because they are of their mind they are of this it's not that it's something they are separate from and they access they are of it literally the person sat in front of you is unfolding from those unconscious processes what you are engaging with is a person who is of all of that that you are attempting to engage right so it's there it's absolutely there often people can narrow themselves by becoming overly transfixed with conscious line of thought right it doesn't mean that the unconscious stuff isn't happening but they become overly transfixed and the system becomes biased towards that conscious line of thought that's where hypnotherapists like Milton Ericson are getting people to fall out of that and fall back more into the whole totality of their processing and not just that which perhaps sits within that more tip of the iceberg sort of line so to speak are this though Erikson wasn't using the term conscious and unconscious to Simply highlight facts about people's minds he was using it as an entrainment tool to get people out of a certain mode of Engagement and into another so a lot of what he calls your conscious mind like he might say your conscious mind thinks very linearly you can think linearly outside of Consciousness right that's not only a conscious thing okay but if you just pay attention to what your Consciousness is able to illuminate it tends to illuminate things in a line so you don't attend to what might be going on on a deeper level but yes that's how you can know when you're accessing someone's unconscious mind now maybe you're talking about something different here maybe you're talking about when you're sitting with a client how can you know whether they're two caught up in a certain mode of mind which is probably likely to be a logical analytical rationalistic mode of mind which is a very narrow track versus more in the totality of who they are what I recommend is that you look for if you're working with clients or working with other people is you look for shifts in patterns of Engagement this is how I know so I'm calibrating patterns of Engagement I might do this when I'm working with a client if they're really caught up in their logical mind I'll say it seems like you got a lot of thoughts about this right and they go yes I say let me ask you this these thoughts to your thinking right now how familiar are they and mostly people go they're pretty familiar because people don't do fresh new thinking much of the time a lot of the time when people think they're thinking they're just rehearsing old thought Loops over and over again now to me real thinking Cuts new ground now if I'm working with somebody um or even if I'm just conversing with somebody and I'm looking to help them shift their mind somehow really what I want them to be doing is cutting new ground with their thinking that's what's generative I don't want them rehearsing the same old reality over and over again on a loop that's more important to me than whether they're accessing their unconscious mind or not are we getting fresh new thinking here have we shifted gears into new spaces of possibility or am I seeing a rehearsal of the same old thoughts and the same old way of doing things okay so if part of somebody's problem is ruminating around the same thought Loops it's not whether or not they're accessing the unconscious mind or not it's whether they put down that rumination or they transcend that rumination or they fall out of that rumination into new possibilities new lines of Engagement all sorts of new good stuff right so my basic calibration when I'm working with somebody is am I seeing change here am I seeing a shift in state a shift in patterns of speech a shift in um I'm going to be a bit of a hippie here for a moment but to me I often experience this as a shift in energy people will say what on Earth you talking about a shift in energy people deal with energy all the time they pick up Vibes subtleties this kind of thing when you spend a long time in a particular game you start to do synesthesia based processing so I do a lot of felt sense synesthesia based processing of what I see but it's absolutely important to say here if if you know the person asking this question who I've kept their name blurred out it's absolutely important to realize here that it is difference that's the key to look for there isn't a special clue that says now they're in their unconscious now they're in their conscious the thing you want to look for is new possibility right so a different way of looking at this is that when people are caught up in their way of seeing things their current habits their current ruts their current tracks they often have certainty right when I'm working to facilitate change certainty is the enemy if somebody is absolutely everything that they are certain of will keep them stuck right so most the time people's problems are held in place by a bunch of certainties and I want to find out what those certainties are right they don't need to necessarily know but it can help if they know if they're on board for the change project but once we get a clear bead on those certainties then we can start to loosen them off now you could call this belief change in the world of NLP people are obsessed with belief change it's not really belief change it's the loosening of certainties and the opening to possibility so as a practitioner of change work coaching whatever the most important mind space that I want to get somebody into is not the unconscious mind quote unquote it is the realm of possibility and fresh new thinking right the realm of generativity the realm of creativity this is about bringing the totality of who they are which includes their Consciousness not their conscious mind but their Consciousness remember this idea of mind and Consciousness so this is how I tend to work so I'm calibrating more for shifts in patterns shifts out of certainty and into possibility a lot of that is about picking patterns sometimes you just get that sense of when somebody connects into a new possibility they show that kind of curiosity about it or they go that oh I was working with somebody the other day and um here's a good example actually I was working with them I'm not going to give the details of their their case at all but it was a pretty horrific backstory to this person's problem and they had a lot of guilt about their actions and I think they said something like they did all they they did what they did and I said did you do what you did did or did you do what you could right so I asked that question did you do what you did or did you do what you could now that might seem like a simple distinction but he stopped and he paused and he went H you got me there no I don't know what that meant you got me there but there was a big shift at that point right a significant shift he had now got out of his old thought Loop that was creating a lot of guilt he went into a different space if I was calibrating visually I would have seen shifts in muscle toone this kind of thing but the issue here is not whether they access the unconscious mind it's did they move into a different mode of thinking a different mode of being okay so I got somebody banging on the Bell I've got the dog going crazy so I'm going to close the video now if you got value from this video If you like this video please do give it a thumbs up please do subscribe please do ask questions in the comments section below if you want to get on creating courage and fearlessness you absolutely can still do that this should go out on maybe Thursday the 4th of April maybe the Friday but you can still get on board until Sunday the whatever the Sunday coming is you figure it out all right thanks for being here and I look forward to when we next connect