Our conscious mind is only a small percentage of ourselves. Most of our physical functions, such as our heart beating, our breathing, not to mention the inner workings of our cells and other vital organs, is handled by the autonomic nervous system. Our minds, meanwhile, are also run mostly on “automatic pilot.” The words we use when we speak, our emotional reactions, and even the thoughts that run through are heads during the day, are not, for the most part, consciously chosen. They are, rather, in our subconscious. The conscious mind is really the proverbial tip of the iceberg, while our subconscious is the larger part of our minds. The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a definition-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings.
In everyday speech and popular writing, however, the term is very commonly encountered as a layperson's replacement for the unconscious mind, which in Freud's opinion is a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression. However, the contents do not necessarily have to be solely negative. In the psychoanalytic view, the unconscious is a force that can only be recognized by its effects—it expresses itself in the symptom. Unconscious thoughts are not directly accessible to ordinary introspection, but are supposed to be capable of being "tapped" and "interpreted" by special methods and techniques such as meditation, random association, dream analysis, and verbal slips (commonly known as a Freudian slip), examined and conducted during psychoanalysis. Carl Jung developed the concept further. He divided the unconscious into two parts: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is a reservoir of material that was once conscious but has been forgotten or suppressed. One of the more remarkable aspects of life is that there are always options and possibilities for us to explore as we search for answers. Sometimes an off-handed comment, a bumper sticker, or a line in a magazine or book will provide a spark of insight that helps us to move forward. With more and more people talking about collective consciousness, it seems natural to wonder, Is there any scientific research to back it up? The answer, increasingly, appears to be “yes.” In fact, a growing body of recent research suggests not only that a field of awareness and intelligence exists between human beings but also that through it we influence each other in powerful ways.
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