Shaping Your Reality: The Six Principles of the Unconscious Mind

The unconscious mind relates to the psychic contents of a person that are not readily accessible to the ego, but has its own functions and organized systems of laws. In other words, our psyche is embedded with material that we are both conscious and unconscious of. Both sets of material govern our behaviors and cognitive, emotional and physical actions.

If something you are unaware of is directing your thoughts, perceptions, attitudes and behaviors- do you have free will? If your perceived reality is shaped by the unperceived contents of your own psyche, do you know what reality is?

Free will of every person can only be exercised to the degree in which the unconscious becomes conscious.

Emotions give us many clues about the unconscious material that has authority over us. Jealousy, contempt, fear, insecurity, and shame that pop up repeatedly in themes are the greatest indicators of unconscious authority. It’s normal to experience all of these feelings, but for example; if one cannot transcend jealousy into admiration or contempt into forgiveness then they are being controlled by an unconscious algorithm. Here are six principles to learn about the unconscious psyche, or the energetic forces behind your own subconscious:

Every experience becomes a memory which then builds itself into your perceptual rubric. The unconscious stores everything; think of it as your own personal cloud server. Your conscious represents all of the windows and files that you have open on the desktop, and the unconscious is everything else, and it creates and names the storage folders and decides where every document, photo, download, email, app or file goes. This organizational function of the unconscious is dictating how every experience you have, every minute of every day, how you perceive your experiences and the world around you. 

Think of the social media algorithm: once you react to a puppy video with a thumbs up or a heart, you will start seeing more animal videos. Based on the ones you react to, or even stop scrolling on, it then begins to show you videos of only those specific animals. 

The takeaway from this principle is that how you perceive anything may not be the entire picture of reality, and your perception is just one puzzle piece amongst a thousand others.

The unconscious will construct the image of you in the likeness in which you perceive and judge others. This is the mirror effect. How you see it is how you are.

If you judge another person as ignorant, the unconscious mind processes that personally, as if that is directed at yourself and, absent of any merit, perpetuates the feelings and ideas of personal inadequacies, stupidity and ignorance.

How you see others is how your unconscious sees you. 

You can take this deeper into the layers of it: If you perceive your husband as “less than” because he’s not fully reached the ‘perceived potential’ that you have imagined for him based on what you need to feel safe, then the unconscious self constructs you as “less than” which perpetuates this fantasy < disappointment < victim cycle. Not only is the unconscious mind mirroring your judgement back onto you, it’s reinforcing you to believe that what you need is what he must be, do and have, which creates a double-layered disillusionment. You can even add a third layer! (1) he is not becoming what I need him to be in order to feel safe, therefore (2) he must not love me, therefore (3) I am not enough.

The best way to really understand this principle is to imagine as many different possible scenarios in which you have found yourself judging, criticizing or holding contempt for another person or group. When you have landed on an example that you feel comfortable working with, engage it. For example:

1. “He’s a toxic narcissist”
2. Why?
3. “Because he lies to get what he wants”
4. In what ways do you lie to yourself in order to justify something you want?
5. “When I eat things that I know will make me feel terrible, or when I spend money on things I don’t really need and know that I should be saving it, when I gossip and justify it by saying I’m just needing feedback about what I’m feeling”… etc
6. In what ways can you see someone who lies in their highest potential?
7. By imagining that they grow more awareness around their dishonesty and are able to hold themselves accountable to it while celebrating & embodying more truthfulness
8. and therein you change the likeness of your subconscious image

Someone may very well be a liar or a narcissist, and you can observe them as such, but when you begin to judge and dehumanize them for it, be mindful what you’re programming into your mind about yourself. If you see everyone and everything as their greatest potential, the unconscious will create your image and life as such.

When you state an intention, need, want or desire, the unconscious processes those literally, and with the least effort. If you say to yourself “I want to complete this course” then the unconscious will process that with no deadline, no goals on the grade, and leave little room for actual learning. That’s because the unconscious only sees its job as completing it. 

If your doctor tells you that you need to lose weight, you may leave the office with some intention of losing weight, but if you only repeat to yourself what the doctor advised then the unconscious will determine upon itself that losing 1.6 pounds is losing weight, or that shedding water and inflammation is losing weight, or losing muscle mass is losing weight. But if you are bold and specific by saying “I want to lose 15 pounds of stored fat in my body and drop down from a size 12 to a size 8, increase muscle mass in my glutes and upper back, and eliminate cravings for inflammatory foods by drinking 120oz of water everyday, going for a 30 minute walk each morning, lift weights 3x a week, going to bed by 10pm every night, and all eliminating alcohol and white sugar from my diet”- you have now given the unconscious enough to reinforce your goal of losing weight because you have included specific details, goal posts, and stated all of the how’s in collaboration with a bold want. 

You can get yourself into trouble and find yourself feeling “unlucky”, or resorting to being a victim of circumstance by not being specific about what you want and how you will attain it.

This is the trick of inception. Any statement that can be divided into a positive and a negative will negate the negative. For example, do you ever notice with children that when you tell them not to do something it actually increases their will or desire to actually do the thing?

Saying "You can’t eat sugar" is divided into you can’t (negative) and eat sugar (positive). This becomes an unproductive statement because while the conscious processes the rule “can’t” as a negative, the unconscious will process “eat sugar” and the conscious will then work to suppress the positive in order to follow the rule. But the more you suppress the positive, the stronger its will grows.

This can also be productive. This is where reverse psychology came about. If you want to get someone to do something, tell them they can’t! 

If you value health and continue to wrestle with making healthy decisions, this is because the unconscious mind has a conflicting belief about what the conscious mind wants. Let’s say that on the surface you truly value your health and intellectually, you know how to achieve health and you have your own personal meaning of what health is (which can certainly be different for everyone). 

What if, beneath the surface, you believe that your meaning of health (and how to achieve it) is not worthy of your family or spouse’s support; that your way of being healthy is inconvenient, appalling, obsessive or flat out wrong and therefore your way of being healthy is just going to upset them, create conflict, and open you up to criticism which will just leave you feeling worthless, hurt and lonely? 

the conscious mind:

"health is being able to live pain-free with energy and strength to perform all required tasks necessary to enjoy a happy and fulfilling life, without the dependence of drugs, stimulants or depressants. I achieve optimal health by eating clean, whole foods, being hydrated and rested, and moving my body everyday in ways that supports strength, flexibility, endurance and a healthy posture."

the unconscious mind:

"I don't want to be lonely"

The conscious mind knows how to start the engine, but the unconscious mind knows how to puncture holes in the gas tank.

If you combine this function of the unconscious with the third and fourth principle, you may begin to understand how difficult it can be for some people to achieve health and fitness goals (or any goal). 

Familiarity is safe. Whether it’s positive or negative, the unconscious mind speaks the language of familiarity and then relates to the conscious mind through feeling. Therefore, the conscious mind must relate to the unconscious by doing and being what the unconscious wants to feel. This can be represented by the old saying “fake it until you make it”. 

As the old saying goes:

if you always carry a shield then everything looks like a sword.

Think of the unconscious mind as your shield. If the conscious mind never asks why its carrying it, then the conscious mind will continue to perpetuate you as someone who is defensive, and guarded by directing you to be suspicious, and reactive, and thus leading you to have many conflicts. Things such as another person expressing their feelings, someone requesting a boundary, or receiving constructive feedback will feel like an attack. 

The key to this principle is to consciously question the motives behind an impulsive thought and feeling (whichever you notice first). Engage with it. Feelings change for more fluidly than the foundations in which they are founded upon. Scan the foundation, then fill in any cracks… or… break it down and build a new one.