We tend to place ourselves on a pedestal and create this non-realistic image of who we are and how we react to others and our position in life. The problem with that though, is once we have this false image of who we are, everything we do is based on that image. Our whole life is spent acting and reacting to who we think we are, which leads to problems.
We spend so much time judging, criticizing, and condemning other people and really not much time doing that to ourselves. So we consequently look around and judge other people and what they’re doing, while we walk around with this idealized self-image, this over inflated sense of self. And that’s a problem. It creates all kinds of tensions, frustrations, and suffering for humanity as well.
We all do have a portrait of who we think we are. For many people that portrait isn’t even close to the true reality of who we are. And we can see that with our friends and family and coworkers that think of themselves a certain way and we know that they’re not really accurate. They don’t see the problems they cause themselves in situations they get in with unrealistic views of themselves.
The Hidden Side of Our Psyche
Just like the moon has a “dark side”, a hidden side which is not seen, our psychology has a hidden or unknown side. When you look at the moon there’s only a small portion of the moon visible at any given time depending on the phase of the moon itself. But remember that because the moon basically rotates at the same rate as the Earth, we never get to see the back of the moon. The moon always shows the same face to us. We can’t see what’s going on the other side. The same is like our psychology. We’re only conscious of a very small part of ourselves.
We live in a very small part of ourselves. Our consciousness only illuminates a very small aspect of which we’re aware of. But that’s kind of like the tip of the iceberg. Within us there is a hidden part of our psychology – aspects of it that are never visible to us. When you think of your own personality, yes there are some aspects of your psyche that you’re aware of, but we carry much more that we’re not even aware of.
You can think of your subconscious as a really big room with no lights. The consciousness is like a small candle that sits in the corner. That candle illuminates a very small area that we can see, but leaves a lot of the room dark. Our own psychology is like that. There’s a small area around that consciousness that we can kind of perceive, but there’s a lot of stuff moving in the darkness that we’re not really aware of.
Part of this psychological work is to illuminate that dark area by developing that consciousness. It is turning that candle into a bigger and bigger flame until eventually it’s a giant spotlight, which lights up the entire room. This means becoming aware of our entire psychology leaving no place for the subconscious to hide.
Think of walking into a hotel. There’s the main lobby that you can see, but there’s all these other rooms in which you have no idea what’s going on in. The mind is like that as well. The main lobby that you walk into is the conscious part of your mind. All the different rooms that you can’t see make up the subconscious.
Just like walking into a hotel, you might see a few people standing around in the lobby. They would represent the aspects of our psychology that are visible to us. But inside the hotel you have no idea who’s in the rooms and what they’re doing or what they’re up to.
We’re only aware of a few people coming in and out of the front lobby. We can see them as them as they come in and out, but we don’t know where they’re coming from. We don’t know where they’re going. We don’t know which rooms they’re staying in. They’re just visible to us as they pass in and out of the front lobby.
Our consciousness is like that. We see aspects of our psychology that are coming and going from time to time, but we really don’t know where they came from, what they’re trying to do, and we don’t even know how many there actually are. What we want to do with the consciousness is to go from room to room basically clearing it out. We want to get rid of everybody in the hotel leaving just us inside of it.
We are only aware of a few of our most conspicuous aspects of our psychology. We must discover the hidden ones. Part of our goal in awakening consciousness is discovering the full aspects of our psychology. We want to discover all the hidden aspects of our subconscious, because these are responsible for most of the impulses and motives and desires that drive our life.
The hidden aspects of our psychology become the forces that direct the ship of our life. They become the wind and the waves that steer our ship: These are like the puppet masters to which we dance. And that’s why a big aspect of this work is to discover and work on aspects of our psyche that we carry in a hidden sense; The one’s that we’re not really aware of; The one’s that we’re always excusing, the one’s that we never really pay attention to that are still lurking in the background.
We have many things inside us that we neither know nor accept. There’s many aspects of our psychology that we’re just plain not aware of. They manifest in our behaviour, perhaps our loved ones or people close to us can see them manifesting, but we don’t.
Sometimes we have aspects of our psyche that manifest and we know they’re there, but we just don’t acknowledge them. We tend to rationalize their existence or justify them, saying “I did this because of that person, or because of the circumstances, etc.” That’s what we do. Most people inherently, aren’t bad people. They don’t want to do bad things, but they up hurting others with their actions and then rationalize it later. Like they had no choice or the circumstances deemed it or they just weren’t paying attention or even sensitive to their actions on other people.
So it’s not just that we have aspects of our psyche that we don’t know. Many times there’s certain aspects of our psyche we have good reason to suspect exist, but we chose not to acknowledge them. We chose to deny their existence and justify and rationalize all the various things that happen when they manifest.
Our mind is like a city. Just like a city has nice fancy upscale areas and bad degenerated areas where crime and poverty exist- so does our mind have “good and bad” areas. That’s the thing to remember. We all like think we’re perfect. “I know I’m alright. You all might have problems, but not me.” We tend to do that all the time. We don’t want to acknowledge our dark side.
Some of our actions will be for compassion and the benefit of other people, but then again sometimes they’ll be selfish and self-interest. So we have to acknowledge that we’re not perfect. All of humanity is not perfect. We’re usually under the assumption that “everybody else has got something wrong with them, but we’re okay,” and that’s the idealized self-image.
Just like every city has a nice part and a bad part, our psychology is like that as well. We tend to play up the good parts and want to ignore and forget the bad parts. Just like any city does it through politics, we do it with our own psychology.
Just like if we’re driving through a city, we are usually aware of what area of the city we live, work, and travel in, we should be aware of what parts of our “psychological city” we are in at any given time.
If we have an action or thought or impulse, then where did it come from? Did it come from that nice upscale good area of the city, a.k.a. the consciousness, or did it come from that bad seedy part of the city, hidden aspects of our psychological depths. If it’s coming from the subconscious, then which aspects of it is it coming from? Is it coming from the aspects of our psyche we’re kind of aware of, or is it coming from deeper levels, a more hidden side of our psychology?
The hidden side of ourselves is important because this is where we find the origins of our errors. We find the origin of a lot of our psychological problems in the hidden side of ourselves. This is something psychologists know, if you go see a psychologist they will ask you questions about your childhood, dreams, thoughts etc. Because they know if they start poking around inside the subconscious mind they can often find the root of things like depression of insomnia or various anxieties.
People can have fears and phobias that can manifest as various physical ailments as well. If you’re in the wrong state of mind emotionally and mentally it can literally make you sick. We all know this. Just think of when you’re really nervous. That has profound changes in your body. Your heartbeat goes up. You start sweating. There are all kinds of chemicals dumped into your bloodstream, like adrenaline.
So everything from our physical health to our thoughts, emotions, can be affected by what’s happening in the hidden side of our psychology. The problem is we have no idea what’s going on in there. We have no idea what’s going on in those hidden hotel rooms that we can’t see. We really have no idea what the motives and impulses are.
Consequently the hidden side of ourselves becomes one of the reasons why we incorrectly relate not only to ourselves but also with our fellowman. We find a lot of conflict in the various relationships we have from society or humanity as a whole, but also personal relationships with family, friends, and coworkers. Some of the reasons why we incorrectly relate with people are found in that hidden aspect of our psychology.
If we don’t even correctly relate to ourselves and fully understand ourselves, how are we supposed to understand other people? If we don’t understand what’s going on in our own psychology, how are we supposed to understand other people’s psychology? If we have a totally distorted perspective of who we are, how are we supposed to know who anybody else is? The problem is we don’t do that. We just make all these assumptions, and go through life acting-reacting to the various situations that we find ourselves in.
Discovering Hidden Impulses
The subconscious can be controlled and changed through rigorous comprehension, which is why self-observation is so important. You can only learn about yourself by observing yourself. Remember that our whole lives we have been building patterns of behavior. We’re mechanical, creatures of habit. We have patterns in the chairs we like to sit in rooms, but we also have patterns in our emotions and our thoughts and various aspects of our psychology.
We have to question those patterns and ask why. “Why do I always get angry when someone insults me? Why do I get embarrassed when people are laughing at me?” We all have our own reactions, but why do we have them? They’ve been there for a long time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean because we’ve always done that, it’s right or correct.
To comprehend the subconscious we must analyze all our subconscious motives, the actions and reactions of the subconscious both externally and internally. We have to find the hidden impulses and determine their root causes.
The mind is like an onion with skins you could peel off. If you find that you react a certain way to a certain circumstance, ask yourself “Why?” You peel off one layer. You just keep peeling off the layers until you get to the root cause of some of your behaviors. You do this for whatever particular challenges you have in your life. You have to keep peeling everything back until you get to the root. That’s when you’re going to see changes in your psychology.
Examples of Hidden Impulses:
- Envy=source of fuel which drives our materialistic society.
- Self-importance=source of anger, impatience, pride, frustration etc.
- Low self-esteem=source of social anxiety, embarrassment, depression.
So these are examples of hidden impulses that aren’t visible straight away. When our neighbor pulls in with a nice new car, we feel that jealousy or frustration or displeasure. Why? Where does that come from? These are impulses that we keep coming back to. This is what is meant by self-observation and comprehension.
Life is an extraordinary psychological gymnasium. Everything that happens to us, every obstacle in our life is there for us to learn something about ourselves. In relationships with our fellowman the hidden aspects of our psychology in the subconscious depths flourish spontaneously.
The concept of Projecting Our Errors is where we use other people as a mirror to reflect aspects of our own psychology. There are always things that we would never really see unless there was something to bring it out. Rather than standing there condemning, criticizing, judging, reacting to other people, we can use the manifestations of other people like a mirror to search within ourselves for that behavior.
Studying our dreams can tell us a lot about the hidden side of ourselves. Self-observation and being aware of ourselves is something we want to extend into the process of dreaming as well. We can learn a lot about our psychology from our dreams. Many aspects of our subconscious that we don’t see manifesting in our everyday lives, we can catch manifesting in our dreams.
As we progress in psychological self-observation we become more and more conscious of ourselves. Remember the time we spend questioning, asking and studying ourselves is a workout for the consciousness. The brighter that light shines, the more aspects we see of our psychology. It’s like a mechanism that sustains itself, but it begins with such a simple thing, self-observation.
It’s the first step on the path, but once we get that ball rolling and once we start learning about ourselves, then we start drastically changing how we see ourselves and how we see the world around us.