The Subconscious: Your Port in the Storm

Copyright © 2014 Felicia Drury Kliment.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-0502-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0503-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0504-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014901476

Archway Publishing rev. date: 7/9/14

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

Part 1

Subconscious 101:

How It Works and How to Connect with It

Chapter 1.

Your Hidden Well of Wisdom

Chapter 2.

Find Yourself by Losing Yourself

Chapter 3.

Navigating in the Modern World

Chapter 4.

Making Contact with the Subconscious

Chapter 5.

Mediums and Memories

Chapter 6.

Extraordinary Missives

Chapter 7.

The Power of the Subconscious to Change Lives

Chapter 8.

Your Life’s Shepherd

Chapter 9.

Meaningful Coincidences

Chapter 10.

In Limbo:

A State of Dual Consciousness

Chapter 11.

Your Internal Dream Catcher

Chapter 12.

Seeing Through the Mask:

What Are People Really Thinking?

Part 2.

What Prevents Contact with the Subconscious

Chapter 13.

Extreme Emotions: Weathering the Storm

Chapter 14.

Interpreting Impulses

Part 3.

How the Subconscious Can Change your Life

Chapter 15.

The Chameleon:

The Changing Roles of the Subconscious

Chapter 16.

A Needle in a Haystack: Finding Your Soulmate

Chapter 17.

Finding Your Muse

Chapter 18.

A Light in the Darkness

Chapter 19.

Using Your Subconscious to Help You Write

Chapter 20.

Creating a Masterpiece

Part 4.

Addressing Your Emotional Problems

Chapter 21.

Building Self-Confidence in a Sea of Uncertainty

Chapter 22.

Putting the Reins on Your Subconscious:

The Power Message

Chapter 23.

Body Balance

Afterword

Acknowledgements

I was lucky to nab one of the top editors in New York, Susan E. Davis to help me in developing my manuscript. Seeing it in its very beginnings, when it was nothing more than the glimmerings of a few ideas, Susan had the astuteness to recognize it as a diamond in the rough. Her wisdom and expertise were invaluable and her organizing ability indispensable. My deepest thanks to you, Susan.

I asked Katherine Wellander to look over my completed manuscript, expecting her to confirm my admiring assessment of it. No alterations, I was sure, were needed; it was as close to perfect as it could be. Much to my astonishment, she did what I assumed was impossible. She added a spark of her stylistic brilliance that raised it to an even higher level of excellence.

Many thanks also to my younger daughter Jennifer for her thorough job of copy editing, and to my older daughter Pamela for her marketing suggestions.

January 1, 2014

Felicia Drury Kliment January 1, 2014

I should like to try a little experiment. You have told us all that your conscious self knows, I want now to question your subconscious self. Hercule Poirot

Poirot Investigates Agatha Christie 1925

*Like Agatha Christie, I refer to the unconscious mind as the subconscious. I also refer to it as the intuition, the inner mind, or gut instinct. I don’t use the term unconscious, although it is the scientifically accepted term, as it can be confused with the temporary loss of consciousness as in knocked unconscious.

Preface

Get in touch with the subconscious and you are in touch with the universe…. I canalize the inspiration…it gives me…through pipes to work the turbines of my conscious mind.

Barbecue Smith, a character in

Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow.

My neighbor Jeff Kramer, a teacher,i spent a summer working with severely disabled children at Terrence Cardinal Cook Hospital in New York City. He came away from the experience surprisingly keyed up and energized with newfound knowledge he had unexpectedly learned—that normal people could learn something from the primal instincts of these special-needs children. (Kramer) While the children, all bound in wheelchairs, had no obvious means of expressing themselves, vocally or otherwise, Jeff discovered they possessed what he called a baseline thinking power hidden beneath their inability to conjure up conscious thoughts. It was these children’s reactions to what they loved—music, especially percussion instruments, and the humor they found in slapstick comedy (a nurse in the hospital where they live tripped over a stuffed animal and fell, which struck them as hilarious) that revealed to Jeff the strength of their intuition. The children manifested a joy witnessed only in babies—a pure joy unaltered by the inhibitions that come with self-awareness.

Jeff spoke with the mother of a severely handicapped boy and found that she had made an observation similar to his. Inquiring further, she told him that she had discovered an emotional trigger in her son: dolphins. She now makes regular trips to Florida, placing her son’s wheelchair directly into the water close to where the dolphins swim. Just being in their presence rouses his senses, making him noticeably more alert and responsive to stimuli.

What is it in dolphins, music, and slapstick comedy that allows these disabled children to engage in some of the delights of this world, previously assumed to be inaccessible to them? Their subconscious minds are awakened in response to the vibrations emitted by the dolphins, the rhythm of the drumbeat, and the humor elicited by the ridiculous.

Given the enabling power of these handicapped children’s subconscious, how can we sentient human beings use our subconscious to overcome adversity and accomplish our goals?

__________________

i. Jeff Kramer, Elder of Sha’ar Adonai Messianic Congregation, Interview, New York City (September 12, 2011).

Introduction

Intuition is not a magical sixth sense or a paranormal process…but a highly complex form of reasoning based on years of experience and learning, and on facts, patterns, concepts, procedures, and abstractions stored in one’s head.

Kurt Matzler, Professor, Johannes Kepler University, Australia

Written records of the belief in the subconscious date as far back as the Hellenistic Era (346-146 B.C.) in ancient Greece. Philosophers who lived during this Golden Age of Greek history believed that the wisdom of this hidden mind was far greater than that of the conscious mind. Socrates called it his shadow. He spoke so freely and openly to the Athenian public of his conversations with it that he was charged by the government with corrupting the young men who came to listen to him. His true offense: He had put more faith in this mysterious being inside himself than in the gods of Athens. For this he received a death sentence.i

Plato, who carried on the teachings of Socrates after his death, had a more detached view of the subconscious. He stated, There are in a man true opinions concerning that which he does not know consciously. (Ibid)

Like Socrates, Plato believed that knowledge is inborn rather than implanted in the mind after birth. He and many great philosophers across time thought of the subconscious mind as a micro-universe, containing all knowledge of human history and the physical world in which it was played out, and he challenged his students with questions to bring their attention to this knowledge.

The ancient Greeks are just one of the many cultures in history that believed in the subconscious. The edition of the Talmud that came out in 300 A.D.ii took the existence of the subconscious for granted, describing it thus, Unlike the ideas of the conscious mind, intuitive ideas are realistic and fair-minded. In Europe, the existence of the subconscious—along with belief in the supernatural—was taken for granted until the first century A.D. when Christian missionaries began making their way into Western Europe. To convert the pagans to Christianity, missionaries called their belief in the subconscious and the supernatural—inspirations of the devil. In large part because of this accusation, by the fifth century A.D. Christianity had triumphed over paganism. Still, it was not until the scientific revolution in the 17th century—with the invention of calculus and mechanics and advances in astronomy, optics, and geometry—that belief in the subconscious came close to extinction. In an age when the Holy Mantra was only what can be seen, heard, touched, or smelled exists, the subconscious seemed too nebulous and intangible to be taken seriously. There was, however, one French philosopher and mathematician who stood apart from the prevailing skepticism. Rene Descartes wrote, Intuitive knowledge is more dependable than any other. All men are born with a residuum of it, though only the most reflective recognize its full potentiality.iii

In the mid-nineteenth century, Martin Charcot (1825-1893), a French neurobiologist and the teacher of Sigmund Freud, proved scientifically the existence of the subconscious. He conducted an experiment in which he hypnotized his subjects, thereby enabling them to follow the commands of their subconscious minds.iv The publicity resulting from this experiment elicited a host of theories on the subconscious.

Only one theory, however, caught fire—to wit, that certain subconscious memories are the underlying cause of neurosis, and that when brought to patients’ awareness, caused their neurotic symptoms to lessen or vanish altogether. Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung based their psychiatric practices on this theory, but each branched off with his own interpretations. Freud attributed mental disturbances to the traumatizing experiences suffered during childhood. He used free association—questions and answers—to trigger memories of those painful experiences, which he claimed resulted in a cure. Jung attributed his patients’ mental problems to their unawareness of their ancestral and historical past which he brought to their attention by analyzing their dreams. Neither Freud nor Jung, however, did any research on how the subconscious could be used to enhance the lives of people unfettered by mental handicaps. The following chapter describes experiments carried out in the 21st century that have begun to make inroads into this neglected function of the subconscious.

__________________

i. Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, Book 22 (New York, Standard Reference Works Publishing Co., 1958).

ii. Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, Book 23 (New York, Standard Reference Works Publishing Co. 1958).

iii. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Related Writings (Penguin Classics, New York, 2000).

iv. Lecons du Mardi a la Salpetriere, Vols 2 (1889).

Part 1

Subconscious 101:

How It Works and How to Connect with It

Chapter 1.

Your Hidden Well of Wisdom

The subconscious puts man so inclined in touch with the whole universe—as he sees it.

Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

In the mid-20th century psychologists began using humans in laboratory experiments. Dr. George A. Miller, a cognitive psychologist, set up a lab experiment in which he used men and women to prove that the short-term memory of the human could recall no more than seven new things at a time.i This study helped pave the way for the use of human subjects in studies on the subconscious.

Ideas and Skills Already Within You

Contrary to the claims of psychologists, studies on the subconscious are showing that many of our ideas and even some of our skills are not learned, but inborn, that is, contained in the subconscious at birth. When composer/balladeer Leonard Cohen crooned, I’ve had choices since the day I was born. There were voices that told me right from wrong, it is doubtful that he realized how true his words were.ii In his book Moral Minds,iii Harvard biologist Marc D. Hauser, maintains that our capacity to make instant moral judgments in life-or-death situations is a subconscious behavioral trait and is thus a part of us since the day we were born. Furthermore, he contends that the Church is just a social enforcer of instinctive moral behavior…that it doesn’t teach correct behavior from scratch.

Morality in Animals

Our moral attitudes, according to Hauser, are inherited from the animals closest to us on the evolutionary scale. Apes as well as elephants heal the sick in their group and mourn the death of close relatives. Chimpanzees and gray leg geese have been known to die of grief when their mates die. Barn owls can be impressively generous toward one another, regularly donating portions of their food to smaller, hungrier siblings, writes Natalie Angier of the New York Times.iv When a neighbor of mine spent months recuperating in bed from injuries as a result of a car crash, his dog would not leave his side, even to eat. His food had to be brought to him.

According to Paul Bloom in an article he wrote in the May 9, 2010, issue of the New York Times Magazine, the sense of morality in humans becomes apparent soon after birth. A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment, and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Karen Winn, a professor at the Yale University Infant Cognition Center published a study in 2011v in which she tested the innate moral sense of a group of 6- to 10-month-old babies. The babies watched a motorized toy car move up a hill in three different scenarios. The first time, the toy simply moved up on its own. The second time, a helper toy was introduced behind the car to aid in its movement up the hill. For the third and final trial, a hinderer was placed in front of the car, forcibly pushing it down the hill.

Afterward, the toys were removed from the track, and each baby was given the choice of either the helper toy or the hinderer toy. The overwhelmingly popular preference was the helper. What is intriguing is that, despite the fact that the babies were too young to have consciously learned the difference between help and hurt, their subconscious was able to make that distinction, and so recognize that the helper toy would be beneficial for self-preservation.

Why are morals instinctive rather than learned? Philosopher Philippa Foot offers this hypothesis in her book Natural Goodness: Morals are rooted in objective human needs that can be compared to the physical needs of plants and animals. vi

A study designed by Dr. Pierre Pica, a specialist in theoretical linguistics, proves that a skill, thought to be acquired, can be innate.vii The participants in this study were a tribe living in the rain forests of Brazil called the Mundurucu and two groups of children: one French and the other American. They were assigned problems in Euclidean geometry, such as Can a line be made to cross two other parallel-looking lines? and Can a line cross one of two parallel lines but not the other? The Mundurucu were able to solve these problems, as well as those relating to points, lines, and triangles as well as the French children who had had formal lessons in the subject.

The American children, like the Mundurucu, had not been taught geometry, but unlike the latter, they performed poorly on the geometry test. The irony is that, with a language that doesn’t have any geometrical concepts, the Mundurucu were nevertheless able to solve problems that the American children, descended from cultures steeped in advanced mathematical systems, could not.

What is a probable explanation? The Mundurucu, like other indigenous peoples, relied heavily on their intuition to help them survive in their very precarious environment. Thus their subconscious, having come to their aid for at least hundreds, if not thousands of years––and thus being in the habit of frequently rescuing them–– could have done so again when the Mundurucu were asked to solve problems which must have been baffling to their conscious minds.

The Subconscious Thinks—But Not Like Us

Research studies have brought to light what is arguably the most important aspect of the subconscious—how it thinks and how its thinking differs from the way we think. The subjects in the studies are presented with situations in which their conscious minds are either occupied with a task or are not given enough information to solve the given problem—thus forcing their subconscious to solve it. One such study was described in a medical journal by Psychologist Ap Diijksterhuis of Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands.vii The subjects in this study, divided into two groups, were asked to judge the quality of several apartments in photographs. One group was assigned a problem to work on at the same time they were looking over the photos, while the other group gave the photographs their undivided attention. The subjects who were occupied with the task used their intuition, evaluating the apartments by a series of sudden perceptions. Overall, this group made better choices than the other group whose deliberate, step-by-step evaluations stemmed totally from the conscious mind. The rational logic of the modern mind could not compete with the inborn thinking power of the subconscious.

An Ancient Way of Problem Solving

The following study was designed to switch on the subjects’ subconscious by assigning them a problem, but withholding the information needed to solve it. This forced the subconscious to fill in for the conscious mind. The study, carried out at Yale University,xi is in the form of a skit. One group of subjects acted as waiters; the other played the role of students. The students were instructed to bump into the waiters who were carrying a tray of heavy books in one hand and a mug of either hot or cold coffee in the other. The waiters were then told to react by asking the students to help by carrying the coffee they were struggling to hang on to. The students were then asked to describe the moral character of the waiters based on this encounter.

The students came to the conclusion that some of the waiters were warmhearted and generous, while others were heartless, stingy, and selfish. How could they have made this assessment, having had only the briefest of contact with them? Obviously, a logical evaluation was impossible. That meant the students had only their subconscious’s way of thinking to rely on, which they automatically turned to. It presented them with a method of problem solving commonly used in ancient times: within any problem there are likenesses that hold the key to its solution. In the vein of this axiom, the subjects noted that the temperatures of the coffee in the containers were opposites—hot or cold—and that human morality also consisted of opposites—good or evil. They intuitively matched up these opposing likenesses, thereby concluding that the waiters carrying hot coffee gave a much warmer impression than those carrying cold coffee.

Two Examples of Likenesses

Samuel Hahnemann used the principle of likeness to invent Homeopathic medicine. He deduced that a patient’s illness could be cured by giving them remedies that produce the same symptoms as those caused by their illness.x

During the religious celebrations conducted by the Plains Indians in a sweat lodge, the shamans heated 28 stones, symbolizing the moon’s and women’s monthly cycles and the 28 ribs of the buffalo. The number 28 was the likeness that these sacred offerings held in common and that the life of the tribe depended upon: the seasons, women’s reproductive cycle, and the buffalo that supplied all their needs—food, shelter, clothing, implements, and medicinal substances.

In the following study, conducted at Northwestern University in 2006,xi the subjects were asked to recall an unethical act they were guilty of. After they did so, they were asked to choose a gift to take with them, either a pencil or an antiseptic wipe. Those who had confessed to behaving badly must have turned the choice over to their subconscious. They were twice as likely to choose the antiseptic wipe. Their intuition, focusing on finding a like solution that would absolve them of guilt, chose the antiseptic wipes to wipe away their guilt, leaving a clean slate. Conversely, the students with no such guilt did not have this subconscious drive, so most of them took the pencil, a neutral item.

Focusing:

A Key to the Subconscious’s