unconscious

Everything with no exception is a choice. The choice can be either conscious or unconscious depending on the level of self-awareness. The more self-aware we become, the faster we can make our unconscious choices known to us.

Briefly summarising, we can express the proposed law thus: consciousness is bound up with learning in organic substance; organic competence is unconscious. Still more briefly, and put in a form which is admittedly rather obscure and open to misunderstanding: Becoming is conscious, being unconscious.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the __ther_ _ as that which like language is always anterior to us and will always escape us, that which brought us into being as subjects in the first place but which always outruns our grasp. We have seen that for Lacan our unconscious desire is directed towards this Other, in the shape of some ultimately gratifying reality which we can never have; but it is also true for Lacan that our desire is in some way always received from the Other too. We desire what others _ our parents, for instance _ unconsciously desire for us; and desire can only happen because we are caught up in linguistic, sexual and social relations _ the whole field of the __ther_ _ which generate it.

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the __maginary_ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being _ a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say __omorrow I will mow the lawn,_ the ___ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ___ which does the pronouncing. The former ___ is known to linguistic theory as the __ubject of the enunciation_, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ___, the one who speaks the sentence, is the __ubject of the enunciating_, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two _____ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The __ubject of the enunciating_, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ___ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot __ean_ and __e_ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes__ __ think, therefore I am_ as: __ am not where I think, and I think where I am not.

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.

We lie to reflect the aspirational goals that we unconsciously know we will not uphold.

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,One need not be a house;The brain has corridors surpassingMaterial place.Far safer, of a midnight meetingExternal ghost,Than an interior confrontingThat whiter host.Far safer through an Abbey gallop,The stones achase,Than, moonless, one's own self encounterIn lonesome place.Ourself, behind ourself concealed,Should startle most; Assassin, hid in our apartment,Be horror's least.The prudent carries a revolver,He bolts the door,O'erlooking a superior spectreMore near.

There are brains so smart in finance and unconsciously reject wealth.

Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others__s well as to ourselves__he sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.

Living in the past is a conscious or an unconscious choice made through a connection to the past.

Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage.

Life is beautiful. Suffering is due to unconscious following.

Cultivate the habit of making aware choice. Your choice makes your destiny. Do not be carried away by the unconscious choices.

Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.

The purpose of the false self is to defend against pain - not deal with reality

Most people do not erode their self-esteem over big issues but over small ones, little acts of betrayal and hypocrisy forgotten (repressed) very quickly. But the computer in your subconscious mind forgets nothing. It records your spiritual profit and loss. The balance sheet reflects your present level of self-esteem--and sends you the information via your emotions.