Explore theories of the workings of the unconscious mind

Reading about visions boards, thinking about vision boards, I have a plan.

My next project will be to photograph people for our website, at the treehouse and in spots around the island. These photographs will form an album on the website, giving people thinking of getting married here a better idea of what it will be like.

But there is another something going on with the pictures. They bring to life the fantasy of the treehouse and pavilion as parts of a beautiful, romantic, intimate celebration of love.

It will be like choreographing a dance.

My plan is to make a collage for my own use, to suggest to my unconscious and subconscious mind that this is now my life purpose – the celebration of life and love. And to relax and sink into being and living here.

If I could master this process, I would give lessons in the rainforest pavilion.

Now there is a Volcano-esque thought.

Perhaps weekly meetings in the pavilion to inform the subconscious would do amazing good. Here is why I think this: Like light and dark, the powers of negative thought and positive thought are in a dance inside each of us.

When we worry, when we verbalize negativity, we give play to negative thought. Play equals power. So the more worry, the more negative expression, the more likely the negative unhappy outcome.

When we express hope and stamp down fear, positive energy gets play. Even as I write this, the first sunlight of the day opened over my writing table.

When we express appreciation, positive energy flows like turning on a spigot.

All of this goes to inform the subconscious of our hopes and fears, and whatever balances more gets the juice.

If this seems like so much balderdash, you may need a bit more polish on the spiritual side of self. People have been practicing this for eons, often times thinking of it as prayer. I use the word prayer for it, as it is more accessible as the idea of prayer. But in practice, it is a constant struggle to keep the balance on the positive.

The treehouse and wedding pavilion are coming into being through some pretty intense practice along these lines, and dragging through it all is still a lot of negative energy I do battle with. Battle!

There is the idea of sacrifice practiced in many cultures. I think sacrifice is the giving up of something that was formerly yours to carry away the negativity, and must be done fairly regularly if there is that sort of energy informing your subconscious, or you will find yourself inadvertently giving up something you cannot and yet are forced to.

There has been huge sacrifice in our projects, and now I am sending this message to my subconscious: no more sacrifice. Enough. It is time to expand and complete, and move on to the utility aspects of the projects.

A few years back we were thinking of what we might do with the heavily wooded canvas of our rainforest lot, lovingly referred to even today as “the lot”.

R suggested that I go on the internet and find an image of a structure that appealed to me, and use it as my screensaver. I found an image of a redwood sided treehouse in the Daintree rainforest and put it up. For about three years, it was my screensaver until I switched computers.

I had forgotten all about it until this weekend, when I kept walking past the redwood siding on our treehouse here in the rainforest. The picture I chose was a more conventional symmetrical design, with all that warm wood, lit up from within like a jewel.

When the windows go in on our treehouse, it will be extraordinary, as in every room including the bathroom there are bevel edged stained glass panes.

So the look will be similar, a translation of the beautiful image that informed my subconscious all those years, while I rarely contemplated a treehouse and tucked my treehouse goal away as I had no way of accomplishing it for so many years.

One very weird thing I have noticed is that when we think along two different paths – anticipate two different results that are antithetical to one another – the universe of change tends to back up like a toilet and we have a mess to clean up.

Those old reoccurring dreams.

In the dream, I live in a large house with unused rooms. Often in the dream, I am discovering the rooms for the first time. In last night’s dream, I was on this balcony overlooking this vast, comfortable room. I was previously aware of the room, but thought, “I don’t come here often. My life would be better if I came here more often.”

Now to keep unlocking that unconscious mind.

What can be more unconscious than the sleeping mind?

It seems to me that my sleeping mind is more creative than my waking mind, that is always focused on getting down to business, sifting and sorting, seeking patterns. Awake, my creative mind is fogged by active thoughts jockeying for position like small children getting into a line. I am obsessed with making order out of them.

But while I am asleep, the creative aspect of mind is untethered. Whatever rules are being imposed leave, and whoosh, up into the mind-sky the creative aspect soars.

Here is an example.

For months now, we have been contemplating the tree house. I’ve searched images and mostly seen structures I don’t want – some look like trailers or mailboxes lifted into a tree, others look like houses that were meant for the ground somehow levitated up into the tree, maybe having jumped there in a fright.

Then a few evenings ago, searching for a book to read before sleep, I saw a coffee table book my sister had given me years ago. It being the sort of book it is, I had never “read” it. It is about house design, as in when you are building a house, by architects. Since I never thought I would ever be designing a house, I pretty much set that book aside after I leafed through it.

The book sets out ten principles of design. The most esoteric one for me was the roof. The authors insisted that the roof defines the living space – they call it “sheltering”, and explain that it needs to go up, as in their idea, be peaked.

Each night before sleep, I would study one or more of the principles, and in the morning, I would wake up with new design ideas for the treehouse.

And now, the idea for the treehouse is defined by the soaring wings of the roof, reaching out and up, like bird or butterfly wings, their eves slanted up instead of down, to bring the light that penetrates the canopy of the rainforest into the rooms. Instead of looking like a housey house, it will look at home up in the trees, clearly a thing of the sky more than the ground, something you ascend to reach.

The product of the unconscious imagination…

This is a money story.

Is the color of money green, or is it red? Gold, or silver? I ask these questions, as we tend to think we understand and know money, but to that, I say ha!

I am a person who has been known to worry about money, to wonder sometimes if the money that is needed for the time at hand will come to hand in time. This can keep me awake at night, foolishly.

Foolishly?

Yes, for here is the story about money.

Many years ago, when I was a practical person trying to make a life with a man who saw himself as now an actor, now a Bodhisattva, now a professor, and always an outcast, it came to me that it would be nice to have money. We had a new baby, and the man of many faces was going to school to get another degree. Please forgive my characterization of him – earlier today I remembered something about him that was all about his darker self, and I am still shaking off the memory. Actually, at heart he is a good man, and quite the intellectual.

Anyway, the story.

I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to get money from somewhere unexpected, without paying the price. No strings attached. Nothing happens that is horrible to which money is attached.

So what happens? We get a notice in the mail that my husband is an heir, an heir via someone he has never even heard of. We are sent tickets in the mail, and invited to go through her house and pick out anything we might like to have, and then, the house will go on the market, and my husband will receive half the proceeds of the sale. Now this was 25 years ago, so the house was not worth the 800K or so it would be worth today, but nevertheless, it was worth enough that this was a great big deal. And in that time, houses sold easily.

So who was the woman? Someone who had been a client of his father’s. His father had died sometime before, and when her will was read, the portion of her estate she left him went to his heirs – my then husband and his brother.

And so what does this have to do with the workings of the unconscious mind?

My theory is this. The unconscious mind attracts what is expected, one way or another. Fear creates expectation. Desire alone does not, but day dreaming does. Imagining the possibilities does. Over the years, I have found out that my theories on this subject are not mine alone. The theories of the so called laws of attraction are pretty close to this.

To exercise your ability to connect with financial stability, what is needed is to think of yourself as having the means to do what you feel is important in your life. To have what it takes to follow your dreams and give life to your visions. To keep your good health and radiant persona.

It was about 33 years ago, I think, that in a mire, a pit of despair over some chasm that opened in my love life, I began to explore these ideas. When I set them aside, eventually the currents of life sent me in unwanted directions, and things became more difficult. Ever since I made it my main project in life to connect with someone who was right for me, someone who inspired me – and that indeed worked out, I have taken this whole idea of the unconscious/subconscious mind work very seriously.

That’s the story.

The last couple of days we have been having some truly interesting discussions about the play and work of the unconscious mind. Some theories and questions and feelings are flying about, and to me, the whole subject is utterly fascinating and deserves a spot all its own for discussion.

Some of the questions we were touching upon are whether in some fashion the unconscious mind/persona of someone who dies lingers on in somewhat bizarre and interactive ways with those who loved them, and our experiences in that area. Are our ongoing experiences artifacts of memory, or is there something stretching through time and space on an unconscious level that continues to inform us subconsciously that originates outside ourselves?

That may or may not make sense.

Apart from this but related, there is one other theory I want to toss into the mix for comment:

Just as we have verbal conversations among ourselves, our unconscious minds converse and make plans and deals

Here are examples of what I am talking about. Person A and Person B were each married to other people, and the marriages ended badly, acrimoniously, hurtfully. Person A and Person B meet up and fall into an intimate relationship, but both are frightened of where intimacy can lead. Deeply frightened. So right away their unconscious minds have a meeting and make a deal: This relationship is not really intimate at all and is going to end abruptly whenever one of us decides it’s over This meeting happens in such a clandestine way that the conscious minds are not a party to it, and having not verbalized the agreement, Person A keeps wondering why the relationship isn’t going anywhere, while Person B recognizes Person A is just a place holder until … you fill in the blank. But Person B is not actively searching for the “right person”, because not being a conscious party to the deal, Person B is actually quite fond of Person A.

Here’s another example.

We all know families make us crazy. It’s that time of year, yeah? When we were young, and our families made us crazy, we all vowed we would not repeat those mistakes in our own families – we would be more forgiving, perhaps. Less judgmental, maybe. Certainly, less insistent, less controlling. But aha! The unconscious mind wants to leave nothing to chance – wants to install walls, windows, and doors in the family structure to allow for easy exits, ways out, you get the picture. The unconscious mind is looking after the well being of the individual, protecting him or her from future disappointments and misadventures.

And one unconscious mind communicates, again, with other unconscious minds. Long term plans are made. So here’s Annie. Annie (someone near and dear to me) had some really scary family experiences, and needed to get away and sort things out and see who she really was. But her conflict was, she loved her family and didn’t want to get away, so lived in a quandary where the transparent short term solution of a short hiatus did not present itself. Her unconscious was superseded by an intractable conscious mind that kept her in place. Her unconscious mind went to work, and conferred with the rest of the family, and devised a life plan that gave her an out she could use over and over again.

This is the sort of weird elaborate plan that I believe only a meeting of the unconscious minds can construct.

Take my word for it – holidays were hell in my family, growing up. You would not want to have been there. And I do not want to go into it.

So Annie, bless her, dives into a relationship with one of the cousins of one of the in-laws. The cousin is beyond weird – ungainly, unsociable, alcoholic, heroin using – have I said enough?

Here is my imagined version of the conversation between the unconscious minds that promoted the relationship and carried out the consequences:

Annie’s UM: I am going to have this lengthy fling, and in return, I get to use it to buy my way out of every family get together I wish from the time the fling is over until I die.

The other side of the deal: We will cooperate and invite this weird person we otherwise have nothing whatsoever to do with to every holiday get together you would rather not attend, and we will do this until the end.

I am not kidding. The only time this completely bizarre cousin shows up is at certain holiday gatherings, by invitation, and he participates only insofar as showing up, occupying a spot at the table, hovering near a wall otherwise, and vanishing when the wine has been put away. Were he not to be invited, Annie would have a dilemma. But a deal is a deal when the unconscious minds are involved.

This is just my wild hair theory, but I’ve been carrying it around for decades. Not just as to my family.

Anyway, I am hoping others here have curiosity and theories and stories to share, and we can have an opportunity to delve into this fascinating realm.