Subconscious

The subconscious is the part of consciousness that is not currently in focal awareness.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
-- Gaston Bachelard.

Quotes

• It is true that the subliminal in man is the largest part of his nature and has in it the secret of the unseeen dynamisms which explain his surface activities. But the lower vital subconscious which is all that this psycho-analysis of Freud seems to know, - and of that it knows only a few ill-lit corners, - is no more than a restricted and very inferior portion of the subliminal whole... to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble.
  • Sri Aurobindo in: Joseph Vrinte The Perennial Quest for a Psychology with a Soul: An Inquiry Into the Relevance of Sri Aurobindo's Metaphysical Yoga Psychology in the Context of Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology, Motilal Banarsidass Publ., 2002, p. 481

• The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
  • Gaston Bachelard in: Ride the Waves: How to Take Control of Your Life One Emotion at a Time, FriesenPress, 2 April 2013, p. 386

• How do you develop the subconscious of an organization?... There's no time to take decisions deep into the brain—no time to take it to the data warehouse. It has to become a reflex action. We're developing the gut.
  • Sumit Chowdhury In: Vivek Ranadive, ‎Kevin Maney (2011) The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future--Just Enough. p. 109

• Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes, and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives.
  • Robert Collier in: Tracy Friesen “Ride the Waves: How to Take Control of Your Life One Emotion at a Time”, p. 386

• Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted.
  • Robert Collier in: Diana Goffman The Guide Book to Happiness, Archway Publishing, 13 March 2014, p. 28

• By means of personal experimentation and observation, we can discover certain simple and universal truths. The mind moves the body, and the body follows the mind. Logically then, negative thought patterns harm not only the mind but also the body. What we actually do builds up to affect the subconscious mind and in turn affects the conscious mind and all reactions.
  • H.E. Davey in: Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation, Stone Bridge Press, Inc., 2001, p. 29

• The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
  • Sigmund Freud in: Del Thiessen Bittersweet Destiny: The Stormy Evolution of Human Behavior, Transaction Publishers, 31 December 2011, p. 258

• If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically – to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness – or qualitatively – to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious
  • Sigmund Freud in: Erik Du Plessis The Branded Mind: What Neuroscience Really Tells Us About the Puzzle of the Brain and the Brand, Kogan Page Publishers, 3 February 2011, p. 154

• I just kind of conjured them up out of my subconscious and put them in order of ascending peculiarity.
  • Edward Gorey in: Nicolas Pichay Psychedelia apocalypsis: at iba pang dula, UP Press, 2007, p. 15

• The subconscious is like a party in your head that you're not invited to. There's a black curtain in the way and velvet ropes and you hear cool music coming out of there sometimes.
  • Don Hertzfeldt, Evening with Don Hertzfeldt

• Acting is just a process of relaxation, actually. Knowing the text so well and trusting that the instinct and the subconscious mind, whatever you want to call it, is going to take over.
  • Anthony Hopkins in: Katey Rich Interview: Anthony Hopkins, cinemablend.com

• Ends and purposes, whether they exist as conscious or subconscious tendencies, form the wrap and woof of our conscious experience.
  • Muhammad Iqbal in: The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Stanford University Press, 22 May 2013, p. 42

• If the Holy Spirit can take over the subconscious with our consent and cooperation, then we have almighty Power working at the basis of our lives, then we can do anything we ought to do, go anywhere we ought to go, and be anything we ought to be.
  • E. Stanley Jones quoted by Pastor Chris Kam in:Weekend (John 16: 7-15), public.dum

• I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.
  • Jack Kerouac Letter to Ed White (5 July 1950) as quoted in Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster (1996) by Steve Turner, p. 117

• Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
  • Hilary Mantel in: Linda Newbery, Yvonne Coppard Writing Children's Fiction: A Writers' and Artists' Companion, A&C Black, 22 August 2013, p. 55

• It is psychological law that whatever we desire to accomplish we must impress upon the subjective or subconscious mind.
  • Orison Swett Marden in: Canaan Mashonganyika “It's Do-able!: Power to Unleash Your Dream”, p. 125

A leader or a man of action Mahatma Gandhi in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action. - Jawaharlal Nehru.

• A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958), p. 506 (1949), p. 310 (1961); On Mahatma Gandhi

• Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality.
  • Earl Nightingale in: Canaan Mashonganyika It's Do-able!: Power to Unleash Your Dream, AuthorHouse, 1 April 2013, p. 128

• Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture. Never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of the mental image.
  • Norman Vincent Peale in: Ranipoma Bernard Zoungrana Your Dream Is Still Possible, WestBow Press, 2012, p. 48

• When a man is ill it is not necessarily because he wants to be ill subconsciously. It is not necessarily because he is receiving some hidden psychological benefit, or because the illness fulfills some need. He is ill often - always in fact - because of a distortion that is occurring within the self, and materialized in physical form.
  • Jane Roberts, in The Early Sessions: Book 6, Session 297, Page 136

• Suggestibility varies as the amount of disaggregation, and inversely as the unification of consciousness.
  • Boris Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion: a Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society (1889), p. 90

• If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible.
  • Boris Sidis, The Source and Aim of Human Progress (1919)

• You affect your subconscious mind by verbal repetition.
  • Clement Stone in:Heal Yourself: Drug-Free Healing By the Power of New Science & Ancient Wisdom, Balboa Press, 16 January 2014, p. 53

• Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconsious mind, I'm left to interpret it much like anyone else.
  • Pete Townshend in: Pete Townshend: Who I Am, HarperCollins UK, 8 October 2012, p. 24

• Only one thing registers on the subconscious mind: repetitive application - practice. What you practice is what you manifest.
  • Fay Weldon in Canaan Mashonganyika “It's Do-able!: Power to Unleash Your Dream”, p. 125

• The left ego is the master of consciousness; the right is master of the unconscious. And the relation between the two is not unlike the relation between Laurel and Hardy in the old movies. Ollie is the left brain, the boss. Stan takes his cues from Ollie. When Ollie is in a good mood, Stan is delighted. When Ollie is depressed, Stan is plunged into the depths of gloom. Stan is inclined to over-react. When Ollie wakes up on a wet Monday morning, he thinks: 'Damn, it's raining, and I've got a particularly dreary day in front of me . . .' Stan overhears this and sinks into depression. And -- since he controls the energy supply -- Ollie has that 'sinking feeling', and he feels drained of energy. This makes him feel worse than ever. As he walks out of the gate he bumps into a man who tells him to look where he is going, then trips over a crack in the pavement, then misses a bus just as he arrives at the stop, and thinks: 'This is going to be one of those days . . .' And again, Stan overhears, and feels worse than ever. by the end of the day, he may be feeling suicidal -- not because things have really been that bad, but because of a continual 'negative feedback' of gloom between the right and the left.
  • Colin Wilson in Frankenstein's Castle, p. 28-29 (1980)

• A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.
  • P.G.Wodehouse, in Uneasy Money, Indo-European Publishing, 1 February 2012, p. 111

• Once you learn to do something consciously, you can move it into the subconscious and do it well. Everything you do well will be done subconsciously.
  • Zig Ziglar in: See You at the Top, Pelican Publishing, 19 October 2010, p. 248

See also

• Intuition
• Instinct