01
A few minutes ago you remembered clearly what you were going to talk about, but when you first wanted to say it, you suddenly forgot.
When you were about to introduce your friend to someone, you suddenly forgot your friend's name.
Although you say that you have forgotten, in fact, this is not forgetting, but that the explicit mind has become subconscious, or at least temporarily separated from consciousness.
The same phenomenon is felt. For example, we're listening to a tune with a weak volume that sounds like it's intermittent. This phenomenon is actually caused by the periodic increase or decrease of people's attention, not any change in the tune.
But just as a car turns around the corner and disappears, the car is really just out of sight, it's still there, and we might see it later. When something disappears from our consciousness, it actually remains, and our consciousness still recalls what has been lost.
Thus, the subconscious mind contains many thoughts, impressions, or concepts that are temporarily hidden, and although they have temporarily disappeared from consciousness, they will continue to influence our conscious processes.
For example, there is a person who walks around the room in a "trance", intending to pick something up. But he stopped, looking dazed, forgetting what he was going to do, and he sleepwalked around the table with his hands.
He temporarily forgot his original purpose, but subconsciously he was still guided by the original. Finally he remembered what to take, and it was his subconscious that evoked his memory.
02
If you look at the behavior of a psychopath, you will find that many of the things he does seem to be conscious and purposeful. However, if you ask him what he is doing, you will find that his behavior is inconsistent with what his brain thinks. He was listening, but not a word; he was watching, but like the blind man he saw nothing; he knew something, but he didn't understand anything.
Examples such abound, and experts soon discover that the subconscious content of psychopaths appears to be conscious, and in these cases you can't determine which of their thoughts, words, or actions are conscious.
Many of their mental states are uncertain and changeable because their consciousness is disturbed by the subconscious.
Throughout the onset of symptoms, they were unconscious. But when the doctor hypnotizes such patients, he can clearly understand the process.
I remember a woman who was completely in a coma when she was taken to the hospital. The next day, when she regained consciousness, she didn't know where she was, how or why she was admitted to the hospital, not even the date, but she knew who she was.
However, after I hypnotized her, she told me the details of why she fell ill, how she came to the hospital, who approved her admission, etc. All details were confirmed. She even said the time of admission, because when she was taken to the hospital, she saw a clock at the entrance of the hall. Under hypnosis, her memories are as clear as those of conscious people.
We have found such phenomena from clinical observations [of psychopaths], and many people have hypothesized that the manifestations of the subconscious mind fall within the scope of psychiatry. They think that any manifestation of the subconscious mind is some sort of neurasthenia or psychosis that has nothing to do with a normal mental state.
However, neurasthenia is by no means a product of disease, they are only exaggerated manifestations of normal pathological phenomena. It is only because they are exaggerated that they are more pronounced than normal homologous phenomena.
For example, signs of hysteria can be seen in all normal people, but they are faint and often disappear before they are noticed.
Forgetting is also normal, because the person's attention is diverted, and the consciousness does not take care of these places. When attention shifts, it leaves the previously noticed thing in the shadows, just as a searchlight illuminates a place and leaves the previously illuminated place in the darkness.
This is inevitable because consciousness can only clearly retain a few complete images at a time, and even then its clarity fluctuates. But forgotten things don't disappear, they are placed in a latent state, outside the threshold of memory.
What I'm talking about above is what we consciously see or hear and then forget.
03
But we are also constantly looking, hearing, sniffing, or tasting many things without noticing them. Some are because our attention fluctuates, and some are because the stimulus we feel is too weak to leave a conscious impression.
However, the subconscious mind notices them, and this underlying sensory perception occupies an important place in our daily lives. Outside of our consciousness, they affect the way we treat people and objects.
For example, a professor and his students were walking along a country road talking, and the serious content of the conversation attracted almost all of their attention. Suddenly, the professor noticed that his train of thought had been interrupted by sudden childhood memories.
He didn't know what the reason was, and there wasn't anything in their conversation that had anything to do with the recollection. Then he found that it was while passing a farm that childhood memories came flooding in. So he turned back to the place where the memories had sprung up, where he smelled a smell of geese, and he realized that it was this smell that touched his memory switch.
He lived on a goose farm as a child, and he was impressed by the smell of geese, though that impression had long since been forgotten by consciousness. As he passed the farm, his subconscious mind noticed the smell and then evoked long-forgotten childhood memories.
His perception of smell was latent, because at that time his attention was focused on something else, and the taste stimulus was not too strong to make it directly to consciousness. However, this underlying perception awakens the "forgotten" memory.
This "clue" explains not only the signs of neurosis, but also the fact that sight, smell, or sound can evoke memories of the past.
Another example is a girl who is busy in the office and her emotional and physical state is good. After a while, she felt a headache and was in a very unhappy mood. It turned out that she had unconsciously heard the whistle of a distant ship, which reminded her of the moment of breaking up with her lover, an unpleasant memory that she wanted to forget.
04
In addition to normal forgetting, Freud described several cases associated with "forgetting," some of which people desperately wanted to forget, what psychologists call "repressed." There is an example that illustrates this.
One secretary was jealous of the boss's assistant, so she habitually forgot to invite the assistant to a meeting, even though the list clearly stated the assistant's name. When questioned, she simply said "forgot" or "forgot to be disturbed by other things." She never admits the real reason she forgot.
Many people overestimate the power of the will, thinking that if they don't do something, it won't happen. But we need to learn to distinguish between intentional and non-intentional content of the mind.
The former comes from the personality of the self; the latter comes from the source of the disunity with the self, which is its "opposite", (Note: It can be understood that because the secretary is jealous of the boss's assistant, although he does not deliberately forget to inform the assistant to attend the meeting, but the inner jealousy causes himself to unconsciously forget to invite the assistant to the meeting) that the secretary forgets to invite the boss's assistant every time.
05
The subconscious mind, which I spoke of earlier, is only a small part of the complex phenomena of the human spirit. Those materials exist in the form of the subconscious, because there is no longer a place for them in the conscious mind. They seem to become unimportant, or there is some reason why we are pushing them out of sight.
In fact, it is normal and necessary for us to "forget" in this way, and our conscious mind needs to have a place to accommodate new content. If this is not the case, everything will remain above the threshold of consciousness, and our minds will become very chaotic.
Today, this phenomenon is widely recognized, and anyone who knows a little bit about psychology will think that this statement is normal.
But the subconscious mind doesn't just store things from the past, new ideas and ideas can sprout from the subconscious. They grow like lotuses from the dark depths of the mind and form an important part of the underlying spirit.
Many artists, philosophers, and even scientists have their best ideas from the sudden emergence of inspiration in the subconscious.
Possessing these rich materials and effectively translating them into philosophical, literary, musical, or scientific discoveries is one of the hallmarks of "genius."
There are many such examples in the history of science. For example, the important scientific discoveries of the French mathematician Penghaler and the chemist Kepler, as they themselves admit, owe it to the sudden appearance of a graphical "revelation" of the subconscious.
The French philosopher Descartes was linked to a similar sudden revelation by the so-called "mysterious" experience, from which he saw in a flash of thought the "order of the whole science."
The British writer Robert Stevenson spent years searching for a story that would suit him for the "strong feeling of dual human existence", when the plot of "Doctor Incarnate" suddenly appeared to him in a dream.
And this creation, inspired by the content of the subconscious, is meaningful, especially when exposed to the symbols of dreams; I have found time and again in my clinical work that the images and ideas in dreams cannot be explained by memory alone, and that dreams show new ideas beyond the threshold of consciousness.
Source: Police Garden Heart Language