The Unconscious Quotes

Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it. ~ Susan Hill

Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light. ~ Max Ernst

Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify. This altered shape (raptus, he would say) makes art of the shapes, while holding in counterpoise such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, complexity and simplicity. ~ Edmund Morris

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. ~ Carl Jung

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers. ~ Carl Jung

Through its influence upon the unconscious, music can have a specific healing effect. It can help in eliminating repressions and resistances, and it can bring into the field of waking consciousness many drives, emotions and complexes which were creating difficulties in the unconscious. ~ Roberto Assagioli

A quote has an even more powerful effect if we presume not just a particular author behind it, but God, nature, the unconscious, labor, or difference. These are strong fetishes, each conjuring the powerful submedial in a particular way. Yet all of them must nonetheless be exchanged in a certain rhythm according to the laws of the medial economy. In order to create such fetishes, one does not have to use brilliant quotes by famous authors but can use anonymous quotes that stem from the author- less realm of the everyday, lowly, foreign, vulgar, aggressive, or stupid. Precisely such quotes produce the effect of medial sincerity, that is, the revelation of a deeply submerged, hidden, medial plane on the familiar medial surface. It then appears as if this surface had been blasted open from the inside and that the respective quotes had sprung forth from the submedial interior - like aliens. All of this, of course, refers to the economy of the quote as a gift that can be offered, accepted, and reciprocated. ~ Boris Groys

The conscious mind determines the actions, the unconscious mind determines the reactions; and the reactions are just as important as the actions. ~ E. Stanley Jones

The universe consists primarily of dark matter. We can't see it, but it has an enormous gravitational force. The conscious mind - much like the visible aspect of the universe - is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable. ~ John Brockman

The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious. ~ Terence McKenna

A complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repitition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations. ~ Carl Jung

But it also happens at times that dreams genuinely tell us something about other people. In this way, the unconscious plays a role that is far from being fully understood. Like all the higher forms of life, man is in tune with the living beings around him to a remarkable degree. He perceives their sufferings and problems, their positive and negative attributes and values, instinctively-quite independently of his conscious thoughts about other people. ~ C. G. Jung

The only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival sex is, as a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a superiority which recognizes itself may sometimes please by suggesting possibilities of capture to the subordinated man. This ~ Thomas Hardy

The result of this one-sided patriarchal stance, demonstrable in all areas of life, is an un integrated man who is attacked by his repressed side and often enough overwhelmed by it. This transpires not only in the fate of the individual man as seduction by a "lower" anima, but equally through seduction by a compensatory ideology, for example materialism, to which "spirit" men are especially susceptible.
The man wants to remain exclusively masculine and out of fear rejects the transformative contact with a woman of equal status. Negativizing the Feminine in the patriarchate prevents the man from experiencing woman as a thou of equal but different status, and hence from coming to terms with her. The consequence of the patriarchal male's haughtiness toward women leads to the inability to make any genuine contact with the Feminine, i.e., not only in a real woman but also with the Feminine in himself, the unconscious. Whenever an integral relationship to the Feminine remains undeveloped, however, this means that, due to his fear, the male is unable to break through to his own wholeness that also embraces the Feminine. Thus the patriarchal culture's separation from the Feminine and from the unconscious becomes one of the essential causes for the crisis of fear in which the patriarchal world now finds itself. ~ Erich Neumann

Man's desire for God is bedded in his unconscious & seeks to satisfy itself in physical possession of another human. This necessarily is a passing, fading attachment in its sensuous aspects since it is a poor substitute for what the unconscious is after. ~ Flannery O'Connor

The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven - the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own "existence" and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger. ~ C. G. Jung

The unconscious in us warns us that in art we have to followoneparticular path. And if wefollow it, it isnotthe sign of anunconscious act.On the contrary, it showsthat there is in our ordinary consciousness a greater awareness of our unconsciousness. ~ Piet Mondrian

I find it very difficult to talk here now because I'm watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. I've spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If it's an image of anything, I think it's an image of our own unconscious, the unconscious of our own minds ... or you can put it the other way around, and that is that we have a sea in us. After all, we are sea creatures that learnt to walk on the land, are we not? And perhaps one way or another we go back to it. Every night when we dream we go back into that kind of depths, and that kind of beauty and monstrosity and mystery. So really the sea is not a single image, it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover. ~ William Golding

Art always has something of the unconscious about it. ~ D.T. Suzuki

I hold the view that the alchemist's hope of conjuring out of matter the philosophical gold, or the panacea, or the wonderful stone, was only in part an illusion, an effect of projection; for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious. As is shown by the texts and their symbolism, the alchemist projected what I have called the process of individuation into the phenomena of chemical change. ~ Carl Jung

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

This shift from automatic living to awakening parallels Carl Jung's Individuation, Dada Bhagwan's Self-realization, Dr. Abraham Mazlow's Self-Actualization, G.I. Gurdjieff's Self-Work and other related approaches to differentiating the innate being from the unconscious complexes we have mistaken for identity. ~ Antero Alli

In the end a person must lose that which is most precious, that to which one's whole life has been devoted. The treasure is consciousness; it is the ego's final sacrifice to the Self. This sacrifice must be offered before the ultimate moment when the individual merges with the unconscious and stands before God. ~ June Singer

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle. ~ Adrienne Rich

as an artist, i do not always enjoy the questions, 'what were you thinking when you wrote this. what was the inspiration behind this.' these questions imply that there is always thought involved in creation. for me it is the exact opposite. creativity is the act of experiencing the unconscious in the conscious. sometimes, i want to say, without sarcasm, 'i do not know what my soul was thinking when i wrote that poem, i was too busy listening. ~ Nayyirah Waheed

The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free. ~ David Mamet

God cannot catch us. Unless we stay in the unconscious room. Of our hearts. ~ Patrick Kavanagh

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied. ~ Sigmund Freud

Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconscious processing of the day's experience, from the brain's decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory... The American psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University has provided
anecdotal but reasonably persuasive evidence that people who are engaged in intellectual activities during the day, especially unfamiliar intellectual activities, require more sleep at night, while, by and large, those engaged in mainly repetitive and intellectually unchallenging tasks are able to do with much less sleep. ~ Carl Sagan

Education, fundamentally, is the increase of the percentage of the conscious in relation to the unconscious. It must be a developing idea. ~ Sylvia Ashton-Warner

By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities with which we had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien, and yet one that belonged more to me. Her psonality was not constantly escaping, as when we talked, by the outlets of her unacknowledged thoughts and of her eyes. She had called back into herself everything of her that lay outside, had withdrawn, enclosed, reabsorbed herself into her body. In keeping her in front of my eyes, in my hands, I had an impression of possessing her entirely which I never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath.

I listened to this murmuring, mysterious emanation, soft as a sea breeze, magical as a gleam of moonlight, that was her sleep. So long as it lasted, I was free to dream about her and yet at the same time to look at her, and when that sleep grew deeper, to touch, to kiss her. What I felt then was a love as pure, as immaterial, as mysterious, as if I had been in the presence of those inanimate creatures which are the beauties of nature. And indeed, as soon as her sleep became at all deep, she ceased to be merely the plant that she had been; her sleep,on the margin of which I remained musing, with a fresh delight of which I never tired, which I could have ~ Marcel Proust

No demon can withstand the power of Christ, said my father, repeating the words he had used long ago, and what he meant was that no dissociated mind can withstand the integrating power of the Living God whose spark lies deep in the core of the unconscious mind and who can not only heal the shattered ego but unify the entire personality. ~ Susan Howatch

The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent. ~ Carl Jung

It's a mistake to think that if we don't remember or don't acknowledge painful experiences they will just disappear. In fact, great damage is done to us by those phantoms and pieces of memories that swim around in the unconscious, the part of us that never forgets. Unpleasant experiences gain power over us by being denied or hidden, but they can be made to relinquish that power when they are brought out in the open. ~ Susan Forward

Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way. ~ Charles Eisenstein

It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness. Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with this special content of it, namely the archetype of the Self. ~ Carl Jung

Criticism of others. Criticism of 'self'.
Criticism is the lack of compassion, insecurity of 'self' there a self defense mechanism is to put others down to feel superior EVEN IF you disagree with their lifestyle. Let go of your 'Self'.
And if you have acted wrongly according to your own self-standard. Let go of your 'self'.

Recognize when others are criticizing and 'choose' not to conform to the unconscious acts of others. Be aware, let go. ~ Matthew Donnelly

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious. ~ Adrienne Rich

Individuals blind to the sexual opposite within them, be they men or women, never realise that the partner they choose is chosen because he or she bears some resemblance to the anima or animus. The anger and hurt felt at the 'true discovery' of the partner's failings is really anger and hurt directed at oneself; and this would become apparent, were one to see the dark figure within one's own unconscious impelling one into a particular relationship. Like always attracts like; rather than railing at the partner, one should take a long, close look at one's own psychic makeup. But it is easier to complain bitterly --- to analysts, marriage counsellors, and also astrologers --- that yet another relationship has collapsed and yet another partner has proved to be a bad choice. It is also fashionable to blame this on the failures of the parent of the opposite sex; but the past continues to live within a person not only because in some way it is part of his own substance, but also because he permits it to do so.
When a disastrous relationship occurs once, we may fool ourselves into believing it is chance; when it occurs twice, it has become a pattern, and a pattern is an unmistakable indication that the anima or animus is at work in the unconscious, propelling the helpless ego into relationships or situations which are baffling, painful, and frighteningly repetitive. Again, it is much wiser to look within oneself for the source of the pattern, rather than at the inherent failure ~ Liz Greene

So much of a novelist's writing ... takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. ~ Graham Greene

If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her. If, instead, she concludes that it's ludicrous for her to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option. ~ David Eagleman

Gaia is a thin spherical shell of matter that surrounds the incandescent interior; it begins where the crustal rocks meet the magma of the Earth's hot interior, about 100 miles below the surface, and proceeds another 100 miles outwards through the ocean and air to the even hotter thermosphere at the edge of space. It includes the biosphere and is a dynamic physiological system that has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years. I call Gaia a physiological system because it appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life. Its goals are not set points but adjustable for whatever is the current environment and adaptable to whatever forms of life it carries. ~ James E. Lovelock

Henceforth the Cartesian surgical operation in which spirit and matter become totally separated dominated scientific and philosophic thought The domain of science was matter which was a pure "it" divorced completely from any ontological aspect other than pure quantity. Although there were protests here and there especially among English and German thinkers, this view became the very factor that determined the relationship between man and nature, scientifically and philosophically. Thus seventeenth-century rationalism is the unconscious background of all later scientific thought up to the present day. Whatever discoveries are made in the sciences and whatever changes are brought about in conceptions of time, space, matter and motion, the background of seventeenth-century rationalism remains. For this very reason, other interpretations of nature, especially the symbolic, have never been seriously considered and accepted. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Photography has a natural affinity for the strategies of surrealism - the exaltation of chance and eros, the exploration of obsession and the release of the unconscious. ~ Douglas McCulloh

At the core of One Spirit Medicine is the idea that how we perceive the world 'out there' is a projection of internal maps that shape our beliefs and guide how we think, feel and behave. These maps are the unconscious programs that drive our experience of life and the state of our health. The key to optimum health is to upgrade these unconscious maps and limiting beliefs that have been driving us to a toxic lifestyle and relationships. ~ Alberto Villoldo

The unconscious is so seductive because mortality is alien to it ~ Dean Cavanagh

We're all looking for a bit of recognition, even if it's the unconscious and hypocritical need for attention over the fact that we're not publically seeking out attention. ~ Abby Rosmarin

Feelings aroused by the touch of someone's hand, the sound of music, the smell of a flower, a beautiful sunset, a work of art, love, laughter, hope and faith - all work on both the unconscious and the conscious aspects of the self, and they have physiological consequences as well. ~ Bernie Siegel

Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego's rapport with the Unconscious and its contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphosis of the psyche. ~ Carl Jung

The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious - from behind a locked door inside of our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I know that when I finish a drawing, my anxiety level decreases. The realistic drawings are a way of pinning down an idea. I don't want to loose it. With the abstract drawings, when I'm feeling loose, I can slip into the unconscious. ~ Louise Bourgeois

The language and the "people" of the unconscious are symbols, and the means of communications dreams.
Thus an examination of Man and his Symbols is in effect an examination of man's relation to his own unconscious. And since in Jung's view the unconscious is the great guide, friend, and adviser of the conscious, this book is related in the most direct terms to the study of human beings and their spiritual problems. ~ C. G. Jung

I was twenty-four when I read 'Zarathustra'. I could not understand it, but it made a profound impression upon me, and I felt an analogy between it and the girl in some peculiar way. Later, of course, I found that 'Zarathustra' was written from the unconscious and is a picture of what that man should be. If Zarathustra had come through as a reality for Nietzsche instead of remaining in his 'spirit world,' the intellectual Nietzsche would have had to go. But this feat of realization, Nietzsche could not accomplish. It was more than his brain could master. ~ C.G. Jung

...trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights. Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one's own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one's creative work. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The Imagination is the Manifestation of the Visible from the Invisible. It is the Engine of the Unconscious, and it is there that all desires, all dreams, all plans, and all achievements are born. ~ Martin Olson

[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity. ~ James Joyce

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not - which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. ~ Carl Jung

I became bored - that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

When Legion says, "for we are many," what are the many? Our modern interpretation would be that Legion has a completely fractured psyche. When the psyche fractures, it's like a pane of glass dropped on the ground; it shatters into many bits and pieces. Someone to whom this has happened is literally lost in the unconscious; that becomes their reality. ~ Adyashanti

Truth is often something we rewrite in our heads over time. We have a memory of a certain day, perhaps, or a particular event, but sometimes it is only that we've seen a photo of it. Our brain has constructed an entire narrative around a single image. It's quite remarkable. One snapshot can conjure up a whole sequence of events that may or may not have taken place. Smells can often trigger the same process in the unconscious mind. Sounds, too. ~ Samantha King

We find . . . in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations . . . from the unconscious. ~ C. G. Jung

In a sense, matters of the heart are mostly subjective and unconscious, and that's not bad. Soul connections should not always be made on a rational basis. What a boring life that would be! The unconscious part of ourselves has a wisdom of its own, and in some ways our heart knows what it wants and needs. That is valid. But God has made us with two sides of our being, the rational and the emotional; when they are in conflict, we are in trouble. ~ Henry Cloud

The "I" was not the self, but from there one could see the divine miracle. The small light resembled the great light. Henceforth, he stopped painting mandalas. The dream had expressed the unconscious developmental process, which was not linear, and he found it completely satisfying. He felt utterly alone at that time, preoccupied with something great that others didn't understand. In the dream, only he saw the tree. While they stood in the darkness, the tree appeared radiantly. Had he not had such a vision, his life would have lost meaning. ~ C. G. Jung

Music is an art that expresses the inexpressible. It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define. Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious. ~ Charles Munch

The key to the understanding of the character of the conscious lies in the region of the unconscious. ~ Carl Gustav Carus

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the night-time sides of the psyche, cease with progressive assimilation. ~ C. G. Jung

Until you allow the unconscious to become conscious, it will rise up to you as your life and you will call it your fate ~ C. G. Jung

This example, it seems to us, suffices to show in what way the nonreligious man of modern societies is still nourished and aided by the activity of his unconscious, yet without thereby attaining to a properly religious experience and vision of the world. The unconscious offers him solutions for the difficulties of his own life, and in this way plays the role of religion, for, before making an existence a creator of values, religion ensures its integrity, From one point of view it could almost be said that in the case of those moderns who proclaim that they are nonreligious, religion and mythology are "eclipsed" in the darkness of their unconscious - which means too that in such men the possibility of reintegrating a religious vision of life lies at a great depth. Or, from the Christian point of view, it could also be said that nonreligion is equivalent to a new "fall" of man - in other words, that nonreligious man has lost the capacity to live religion consciously, and hence to understand and assume it; but that, in his deepest being, he still retains a memory of it, as, after the first "fall," his ancestor, the primordial man, retained intelligence enough to enable him to rediscover the traces of God that are visible in the world. After the first "fall," the religious sense descended to the level of the ' 'divided" consciousness"; now, after the second, it has fallen even further, into the depths of the unconscious; it has been "forgotten," Here the considerations of the hi ~ Mircea Eliade

Every mental process, or every mental action, that takes place in our wide-awake consciousness will, if it has depth of feeling or intensity, enter the unconscious field, and after it has developed itself according to the line of its original nature, will return to the conscious side of the mind. ~ Christian D. Larson

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious. ~ Graham Greene

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them. ~ Carson McCullers

We live in a society where we don't want to commit to another person for life. We do at the moment that we marry, but less and less people marry. We marry later, we marry less. On some level of the unconscious, we know there is less of a chance that a marriage will be life-long. ~ Marilyn Yalom

A person can only see their shadow if they awaken their eclectic soul. Self-understanding commences by admitting to the shadowy presence of the primordial unconsciousness. The unconscious mind is a magical concoction of logical and irrational thoughts and feelings. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

That which you call the devil is part of you. The myth of the devil and of evil is imposed on us by our ignorance. The human mind is a great wonder and magician. It can assume the form of both a devil and a divine being any time it wishes. It can be a great enemy or a great friend, creating either hell or heaven for us. There are many tendencies hidden in the unconscious mind which must be uncovered, faced, and transcended before one intends to tread the path of enlightenment. ~ Swami Rama

Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity. ~ Eric Kandel

We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Of course our feelings matter. But emotional decisions are usually not the best ones. On the other hand, your emotions can affect your decisions whether you like it or not because the effects can occur on the unconscious level. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

When speaking of initiation, I mean engaging in practices that establish an exchange between conscious reflection and the unconscious material, and developing a form of analogical language: the acquisition of a poetic literacy. I believe this literacy of the imagination arises from a creative dialogue with the unconscious and involves recurring motifs or symbols that transform with time and seduce the initiate. And of course as conscious thought is not independent of the world, similarly the unconscious draws its ancient forms from all things around us in the this secret dialogue. New forms arise out of chaos. As the alchemists proclaimed, there can be no generation without decay. ~ Stephen J. Clark

The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded. ~ Carl Jung

Ava's father believed that myths and fairy tales - like dreams - opened a window into the unconscious. by listening to the language of dreams and old tales, he said, all humans could learn to understand themselves and the world, better. ~ Kate Forsyth

If we are to do justice to the essence of the thing we call spirit, we should really speak of a "higher" consciousness rather than of the unconscious. ~ C. G. Jung

I have the sudden thought that Monotheism etc. may not be 'Progress' after all, as I had been taught in school and life under the (unconscious) influence of Hegel. My Damascus: 'But then the Jews were wrong!?' The Chosen People not chosen for Beauty like the Greeks? Only for Morality, and what a Morality: the curses of J.C.! I have never recovered from my 'Damascus', and today at the age of 75, I hold it even with more fervour than 50 years ago. ~ Oscar Levy

Now, we used to think the brain was like a computer. But now, we realize that's not true. There's no programming of the brain. There's no Windows. And we think the brain is more like a large corporation. Because think of the unconscious mind. In a corporation, you have subdivisions which operate independently of the main office. ~ Michio Kaku

It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really raring to go.

I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed.

"Freedom is an illusion," Bennett would have said and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability . . . I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut ~ Erica Jong

We are navigating through the unconscious, and this brings us to the occult, something hidden, secret and "difficult to understand." When things bog down, it is time for something else. Therapists need to have a variety of methods and perspectives ready. For example, dysfunctional families create a lot of confusion, havoc and pain. Interlopers, straw men and false gods have usurped the soul's central position - and oftentimes therapists have a chess game on their hands. ~ Stephen Poplin

He looked from the phone to the unconscious figure of the Salesman. "What did you do to him?" he asked.
"He got the wrong number," Alex said. ~ Anthony Horowitz

The unconscious is the true accumulation of your history.
It can be accepted or rejected but it can't fundamentally be altered. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Many a person cannot bear the thought of being completely controlled by the unconscious. ~ Edmund Bergler

When a person tries to obey the unconscious, he will often, as we have seen, be unable to do just as he pleases. But equally he will often be unable to do what other people want him to do. It often happens, for instance, that he must separate from his group-from his family, his partner, or other personal connections-in order to find himself. That is why it is sometimes said that attending to the unconscious makes people antisocial and egocentric. As a rule this is not true, for there is a little-known factor that enters into this attitude: the collective (or, we could even say, social) aspect of the Self. ~ C. G. Jung

Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas. ~ Dan Harmon

Since our philosophy has given us no better way to express that intemporal, that indestructible element in us which, says Freud, is the unconscious itself, perhaps we
should continue calling it the unconscious - so long as we do not forget that the word is the index of an enigma - because the term retains, like the algae or the stone that one drags up, something of the sea from which it was taken.

The accord of phenomenology and of psychoanalysis should not be understood to consist in phenomenology's saying clearly what psychoanalysis had said obscurely. On the contrary, it is by what phenomenology
implies or unveils as its limits - by its latent content or its unconscious - that it is in consonance with psychoanalysis. Thus the cross validation between the two doctrines is not exactly on the subject man; their agreements, rather, precisely in describing man as a timber yard, in order to discover, beyond the truth of immanence, that of the Ego and its acts, that of consciousness and its objects, of relations which a consciousness cannot sustain: man's relations to his origins and his relations to his models. Freud points his finger at the Id and the Superego. Husserl, in his last writings, speaks of historical life as of a Tiefenleben. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are both aiming toward the same latency. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I found sometimes, that it is of great help in handling such a case, to encourage them, to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their mythology. ~ C. G. Jung

Human being's possess the cognitive ability to survey and study the biological and cultural constraints that influence us in order to gain an enhanced understanding of who each of us are. Comprehension of what comprises a self allows human beings to monitor and regulate their thoughts and actions and therefore revise and modify their sense of self. How much conscious control we assert over our minds as well as what decisions through default we leave essentially unregulated and in the sole providence of the unconscious mind determines our self-identity. Self-identity in turns affects personal decision-making, which alters our external world. The combined impact of millions of people making conscious choices exerts a profound impact upon reality, the physical world that is constantly in flux. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious. ~ Donna Tartt

Thus the interpretation of dreams, whether by the analyst or by the dreamer himself, is for the Jungian psychologist an entirely personal and individual business (and sometimes an experimental and very lengthy one as well) that can by no means be undertaken by rule of thumb.
The converse of this is that the communications of the unconscious are of the highest importance to the dreamer-naturally so, since the unconscious is at least half of his total being-and frequently offer him advice or guidance that could be obtained from no other source. ~ C. G. Jung

All psychological research is completely barred by the interpretations of the psychoanalysts. Everything happens in the unconscious, and I don't know what this unconscious is. ~ Nathalie Sarraute

Intuition matters but, pay more attention to the unconscious bias. ~ Pearl Zhu

The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is "secret," i.e., known only through vague hints but essentially unknown. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background -into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence. ~ C. G. Jung

Affective reactions resulting from fascination are dangerous; they amount to an invasion by the unconscious. ~ Erich Neumann