So much for the power of the unconscious mind and the power of hypnosis to influence the unconscious mind to make some of these things happen.
What about the responsibilities of the unconscious?
Function 1 – Protect & Survive
Well, we’ve already mentioned one of them. One of the prime directives, one of the most important responsibilities the unconscious mind has is to protect you. It is to insure your survival.
Now, protecting you means many different things. On the one level it means protecting you from harm in the outside world. So for most of us, we can’t stand in front of a bus moving at fast speed towards us because fear will kick in, our legs will move, and we’ll get out of the way.
In fact, it would take a pretty important event, some other value that is strong inside the unconscious mind to be present, in order for us to be able to override that fear system and do it anyway. For example, if you are trying to rescue a child, it becomes more important for you to do that than to run the “protect yourself” program.
Function 2 – Emotional Protection
As well as protecting yourself physically though, the unconscious mind is designed to protect you from emotional wounds as well. This is one of the reasons why we’re afraid to enter certain environments, for example, the fear of public speaking.
If, for whatever reason, the unconscious mind is convinced that you’ll make a mistake and embarrass yourself, it is going to try and protect you from that emotional pain by giving you the fear to not go in the first place, to find an excuse and avoid it so the event could never happen.
And likewise, the unconscious mind will protect you from certain memories, unpleasant memories from the past. This is what is typically known as repression.
Now, without going into the details of this psychological mechanism, a repressed memory is basically something unpleasant that happened in the past, something that still has a strong negative charge, and rather than deal with it, your unconscious mind just puts it away in some little storeroom for
use later on.
In other words, for you to deal with when you have time because you can’t necessarily deal with all the problems in life all in one go.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why just when life seems to be going so well you start having other things cropping up. It is kind of your unconscious mind going, “Well, I guess we have a nice stable environment right now. Everything’s going well, so I guess you’re ready to look at this
old memory now and deal with it. Here you go.”
That is one of the things that happens.
So the unconscious mind is designed to protect you both in the physical sense of survival, as well as from emotional wounds. Emotional wounds from the past by hiding memories from you, and potential emotional wounds from the future by creating things like fear that will prevent you from ever having to go near the situation in the first place.
Function 3 – Maintain Health
The unconscious mind also runs your body. It is responsible for running your body. It is responsible for your health. Everyone has had the experience of being able to switch off a little bit of hunger pains and ignore them while something else is happening.
However, if you are hungry enough, you will go to extreme lengths in order to satisfy that hunger. Because your unconscious mind knows your survival depends on it and your body needs it.
Likewise, your unconscious mind runs the body and makes sure it is regulated. We’ve already mentioned the temperature and the healing aspects. In fact, it’s ironic to say that the unconscious mind knows more about healing than modern medicine does.
After all, it’s the one that’s been responsible for millennia for healing us in sometimes miraculous situations, from overcoming the most profound diseases and problems and people have survived them. So it protects you and it runs your body.
Function 4 – Store Memories
The next thing that the unconscious mind does is it stores memories. Whilst focusing on something consciously helps us to make sure we retain something in our long term memory, it is really the unconscious mind that does the work for us.
And there are certain things that will motivate it, for example, pleasure, excitement, or enthusiasm. Also, believe it or not, a small amount of fear helps the unconscious mind to remember things. In fact, there are some people who go so far as to suggest that the unconscious mind stores and
records faithfully every single experience that you’ve ever had, even if you have no conscious recollection of it. It might even be difficult for you to find a way back to that memory. It records everything from the moment that your nervous system started to develop.
Now, the jury is still out on how true that may be. What is certainly true is that under hypnosis people can have remarkable memory feats. In other words, they can remember things that happened a long, long time ago, and that may have only been in their witness for just a brief, flash second of
time.
For example, someone flashes a book at you, you see the words but don’t really take them in, and later in hypnosis you might be able to read that page as though it was right there in front of you all along.
So this is what developed in police work for example, forensic hypnosis, the ability to go back in memory to find out details that people have either suppressed or forgotten about consciously.
Knowing this is of particular value to people who need to remember a lot of information, like students. The unconscious mind is an important part of any test taking, or any preparation for any test taking, because let’s face it, that’s where all the memories are at.
That is where you need to be able to draw the information from. Here’s an example of what I mean. Think about a telephone number that you are familiar with, for example your own home number or a number of a good friend of yours.
Now ask yourself this, “Where was that number a moment before you
thought about it?”
Was it hovering there in your mind somewhere?
It wasn’t even in the back of your mind somewhere, because you weren’t even thinking about it, you didn’t need it. And yet, it was there at a fingertips notice because your unconscious mind knows that is an important thing for you to remember whenever you need it.
Same goes for your name and a whole bunch of other facts that you have no conscious access to normally. But the minute it is important for you to have it, for example, someone asks you for your name, or you need to find your way home again, it is there for you.
And it is always there for you.
With hypnosis you can show people how to find the memories that they need to have to be able to succeed in life, in test-taking and other situations.
Function 5 – Regulate Emotions
The other reason that the unconscious mind is particularly useful for things like test-taking and examinations, is because the unconscious mind rules and regulates all your emotions.
Let me say that again.
All emotions are an unconscious phenomenon.
Think about it. Do you choose how to feel at any given moment?
When you feel happy or sad, do you say to yourself, “Right now I’m going to feel sad,” and then you have it?
Or do you respond almost automatically to something that is going on?
Now, of course, the emotion is a response to something that you’ve done consciously as well. In other words, your attitude, which is something you choose consciously, your beliefs, something you reasoned out to a certain extent consciously, or at least accepted consciously, these things will filter
through and decide what emotions you have.
So if you think that people are out to get you, then any small sign that something is happening will make you feel upset because it is within the plan that you’ve already programmed your unconscious for and vice versa. So one of the things you can do with hypnosis is go inside and first of all,
change an emotional reaction to something, and second of all, change the beliefs which will allow the emotions to adjust themselves automatically so that people can have more happy emotions, more success-oriented emotions, when it is more appropriate to do that.
Function 6 – Wisdom, Experience & Ethics
The final function of the unconscious mind that I want to mention for now is
that it’s the storehouse for your wisdom and your moral values.
In the same way it stores your memories, it also stores your whole life
experiences and the lessons you’ve drawn from it. As a result of this, it is
also the storehouse of your moral values.
Now you know this.
Sometimes you do something wrong and you know you are doing something wrong, and you feel bad about it. Think about it – it makes no logical sense for you to feel bad about something you’ve chosen to do on purpose knowing that it may not be the best thing to do because you’ve already
chosen to do it. Why choose to feel bad about it as well?
It is because it is not necessarily something that you’ve chosen to do consciously. It is an unconscious reaction. Whilst it is possible to override the unconscious mind on small details by telling a white lie, for example, it is virtually impossible to do that for larger details like committing murder or
even killing another human being – even if it is justified.
You see, in order to do these things we need to change the programming, change the moral rules by which the unconscious mind operates before anything like that happens.
Now this is important, not because I’m going to encourage anyone to go out and commit murders or anything like that, not at all. But because sometimes the unconscious mind gets stuck with a set of values that are outdated or are no longer appropriate for the person.
Let’s imagine for example that you grew up in a religious, very strict household. Now a lot of those attitudes may not be relevant for the modern world, for example, that dancing is evil, singing is bad, that dating someone is not a good thing, and even, as has been historically the case, that enjoying
sex is a bad thing, even if you love the person and are married to them. So these are attitudes, of course, which need to be readjusted so the person can have a happy and productive life. But these are attitudes which, of course, are at the level of a moral code or a moral value. So, in order to
change that you need to go into the unconscious mind and reason with it to help it evolve a more sophisticated moral code.
This is one of the keys by the way. You’re helping the unconscious mind evolve a better system. This is not a control mechanism. You don’t go in there and say to an unconscious mind, “Forget the old rule. Here’s the new rule.”
That’s not how it works.
The unconscious mind has its own way of reasoning which we’ll examine through the course of this program. And so part of the skill of a hypnotist, particularly of a hypnotherapist, is to negotiate with the unconscious mind a better outcome, a better set of values. This is one of the reasons why this
whole control myth of hypnosis doesn’t really exist.
It is not actually how the world really works, because the unconscious mind protects the individual and is a moral being. So just going into hypnosis and telling someone, “Okay, now commit murder. Now steal something.” If those things are against that person’s moral code, the unconscious mind is
not going to do it.
It knows it is a bad thing. It would have to have a significant reason in order to be able to engage in that, for example, war. Now one of the reasons why I’ve really teased out all these different rules by which the unconscious mind operates is because these become leverage points as hypnotists in order to become more persuasive with the unconscious mind.
When you attach anything you want the unconscious mind to accept in terms of a suggestion, in terms of improving one of its functions, in other words, running the body better, protecting the individual better, being in moral activity, or being able to store emotions or memories better, whenever you attach suggestions to those functions, they become much more less accepted
because it is in the person’s own interest.
It is in the unconscious mind’s interest to do so. So now you have the keys for increasing your influence over the unconscious mind.
What about the responsibilities of the unconscious?
Function 1 – Protect & Survive
Well, we’ve already mentioned one of them. One of the prime directives, one of the most important responsibilities the unconscious mind has is to protect you. It is to insure your survival.
Now, protecting you means many different things. On the one level it means protecting you from harm in the outside world. So for most of us, we can’t stand in front of a bus moving at fast speed towards us because fear will kick in, our legs will move, and we’ll get out of the way.
In fact, it would take a pretty important event, some other value that is strong inside the unconscious mind to be present, in order for us to be able to override that fear system and do it anyway. For example, if you are trying to rescue a child, it becomes more important for you to do that than to run the “protect yourself” program.
Function 2 – Emotional Protection
As well as protecting yourself physically though, the unconscious mind is designed to protect you from emotional wounds as well. This is one of the reasons why we’re afraid to enter certain environments, for example, the fear of public speaking.
If, for whatever reason, the unconscious mind is convinced that you’ll make a mistake and embarrass yourself, it is going to try and protect you from that emotional pain by giving you the fear to not go in the first place, to find an excuse and avoid it so the event could never happen.
And likewise, the unconscious mind will protect you from certain memories, unpleasant memories from the past. This is what is typically known as repression.
Now, without going into the details of this psychological mechanism, a repressed memory is basically something unpleasant that happened in the past, something that still has a strong negative charge, and rather than deal with it, your unconscious mind just puts it away in some little storeroom for
use later on.
In other words, for you to deal with when you have time because you can’t necessarily deal with all the problems in life all in one go.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why just when life seems to be going so well you start having other things cropping up. It is kind of your unconscious mind going, “Well, I guess we have a nice stable environment right now. Everything’s going well, so I guess you’re ready to look at this
old memory now and deal with it. Here you go.”
That is one of the things that happens.
So the unconscious mind is designed to protect you both in the physical sense of survival, as well as from emotional wounds. Emotional wounds from the past by hiding memories from you, and potential emotional wounds from the future by creating things like fear that will prevent you from ever having to go near the situation in the first place.
Function 3 – Maintain Health
The unconscious mind also runs your body. It is responsible for running your body. It is responsible for your health. Everyone has had the experience of being able to switch off a little bit of hunger pains and ignore them while something else is happening.
However, if you are hungry enough, you will go to extreme lengths in order to satisfy that hunger. Because your unconscious mind knows your survival depends on it and your body needs it.
Likewise, your unconscious mind runs the body and makes sure it is regulated. We’ve already mentioned the temperature and the healing aspects. In fact, it’s ironic to say that the unconscious mind knows more about healing than modern medicine does.
After all, it’s the one that’s been responsible for millennia for healing us in sometimes miraculous situations, from overcoming the most profound diseases and problems and people have survived them. So it protects you and it runs your body.
Function 4 – Store Memories
The next thing that the unconscious mind does is it stores memories. Whilst focusing on something consciously helps us to make sure we retain something in our long term memory, it is really the unconscious mind that does the work for us.
And there are certain things that will motivate it, for example, pleasure, excitement, or enthusiasm. Also, believe it or not, a small amount of fear helps the unconscious mind to remember things. In fact, there are some people who go so far as to suggest that the unconscious mind stores and
records faithfully every single experience that you’ve ever had, even if you have no conscious recollection of it. It might even be difficult for you to find a way back to that memory. It records everything from the moment that your nervous system started to develop.
Now, the jury is still out on how true that may be. What is certainly true is that under hypnosis people can have remarkable memory feats. In other words, they can remember things that happened a long, long time ago, and that may have only been in their witness for just a brief, flash second of
time.
For example, someone flashes a book at you, you see the words but don’t really take them in, and later in hypnosis you might be able to read that page as though it was right there in front of you all along.
So this is what developed in police work for example, forensic hypnosis, the ability to go back in memory to find out details that people have either suppressed or forgotten about consciously.
Knowing this is of particular value to people who need to remember a lot of information, like students. The unconscious mind is an important part of any test taking, or any preparation for any test taking, because let’s face it, that’s where all the memories are at.
That is where you need to be able to draw the information from. Here’s an example of what I mean. Think about a telephone number that you are familiar with, for example your own home number or a number of a good friend of yours.
Now ask yourself this, “Where was that number a moment before you
thought about it?”
Was it hovering there in your mind somewhere?
It wasn’t even in the back of your mind somewhere, because you weren’t even thinking about it, you didn’t need it. And yet, it was there at a fingertips notice because your unconscious mind knows that is an important thing for you to remember whenever you need it.
Same goes for your name and a whole bunch of other facts that you have no conscious access to normally. But the minute it is important for you to have it, for example, someone asks you for your name, or you need to find your way home again, it is there for you.
And it is always there for you.
With hypnosis you can show people how to find the memories that they need to have to be able to succeed in life, in test-taking and other situations.
Function 5 – Regulate Emotions
The other reason that the unconscious mind is particularly useful for things like test-taking and examinations, is because the unconscious mind rules and regulates all your emotions.
Let me say that again.
All emotions are an unconscious phenomenon.
Think about it. Do you choose how to feel at any given moment?
When you feel happy or sad, do you say to yourself, “Right now I’m going to feel sad,” and then you have it?
Or do you respond almost automatically to something that is going on?
Now, of course, the emotion is a response to something that you’ve done consciously as well. In other words, your attitude, which is something you choose consciously, your beliefs, something you reasoned out to a certain extent consciously, or at least accepted consciously, these things will filter
through and decide what emotions you have.
So if you think that people are out to get you, then any small sign that something is happening will make you feel upset because it is within the plan that you’ve already programmed your unconscious for and vice versa. So one of the things you can do with hypnosis is go inside and first of all,
change an emotional reaction to something, and second of all, change the beliefs which will allow the emotions to adjust themselves automatically so that people can have more happy emotions, more success-oriented emotions, when it is more appropriate to do that.
Function 6 – Wisdom, Experience & Ethics
The final function of the unconscious mind that I want to mention for now is
that it’s the storehouse for your wisdom and your moral values.
In the same way it stores your memories, it also stores your whole life
experiences and the lessons you’ve drawn from it. As a result of this, it is
also the storehouse of your moral values.
Now you know this.
Sometimes you do something wrong and you know you are doing something wrong, and you feel bad about it. Think about it – it makes no logical sense for you to feel bad about something you’ve chosen to do on purpose knowing that it may not be the best thing to do because you’ve already
chosen to do it. Why choose to feel bad about it as well?
It is because it is not necessarily something that you’ve chosen to do consciously. It is an unconscious reaction. Whilst it is possible to override the unconscious mind on small details by telling a white lie, for example, it is virtually impossible to do that for larger details like committing murder or
even killing another human being – even if it is justified.
You see, in order to do these things we need to change the programming, change the moral rules by which the unconscious mind operates before anything like that happens.
Now this is important, not because I’m going to encourage anyone to go out and commit murders or anything like that, not at all. But because sometimes the unconscious mind gets stuck with a set of values that are outdated or are no longer appropriate for the person.
Let’s imagine for example that you grew up in a religious, very strict household. Now a lot of those attitudes may not be relevant for the modern world, for example, that dancing is evil, singing is bad, that dating someone is not a good thing, and even, as has been historically the case, that enjoying
sex is a bad thing, even if you love the person and are married to them. So these are attitudes, of course, which need to be readjusted so the person can have a happy and productive life. But these are attitudes which, of course, are at the level of a moral code or a moral value. So, in order to
change that you need to go into the unconscious mind and reason with it to help it evolve a more sophisticated moral code.
This is one of the keys by the way. You’re helping the unconscious mind evolve a better system. This is not a control mechanism. You don’t go in there and say to an unconscious mind, “Forget the old rule. Here’s the new rule.”
That’s not how it works.
The unconscious mind has its own way of reasoning which we’ll examine through the course of this program. And so part of the skill of a hypnotist, particularly of a hypnotherapist, is to negotiate with the unconscious mind a better outcome, a better set of values. This is one of the reasons why this
whole control myth of hypnosis doesn’t really exist.
It is not actually how the world really works, because the unconscious mind protects the individual and is a moral being. So just going into hypnosis and telling someone, “Okay, now commit murder. Now steal something.” If those things are against that person’s moral code, the unconscious mind is
not going to do it.
It knows it is a bad thing. It would have to have a significant reason in order to be able to engage in that, for example, war. Now one of the reasons why I’ve really teased out all these different rules by which the unconscious mind operates is because these become leverage points as hypnotists in order to become more persuasive with the unconscious mind.
When you attach anything you want the unconscious mind to accept in terms of a suggestion, in terms of improving one of its functions, in other words, running the body better, protecting the individual better, being in moral activity, or being able to store emotions or memories better, whenever you attach suggestions to those functions, they become much more less accepted
because it is in the person’s own interest.
It is in the unconscious mind’s interest to do so. So now you have the keys for increasing your influence over the unconscious mind.
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