Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about the power and potential danger of the unconscious mind.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so the unconscious mind will start this episode with a quote.

It's a popular Carl Jung quote, and he writes,

until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Let that one sink in.

I think the power and the poignancy of this quote and one of the reasons it just like slices through us like a hot knife through butter is essentially saying that there is this guiding force that is pushing us in a certain direction moment to moment.

And if we're not paying attention to it, it will take us on a particular journey and we might say, well, this is just my plot in life where this is just my fate or there's some bigger force out of my control that is influencing the path.

I'll leave a door open for that possibility for sure.

But we can't deny how much power our mind has in influencing the thoughts we think, how we respond to situations, whether we feel safe or not in a situation and how that causes us to react.

The jobs we might take or decline based on subconscious beliefs or again feelings of safety, relationships we might stay in or move out of again based on subconscious feelings ideas, beliefs about why something is good for us or not good for us.

So much of this is happening beneath the surface of our awareness. In fact, I've heard statistics that say 95% of what is directing us moment to moment or subconscious thoughts.

I would do a double check Google search on that just to figure out if there's any update on it and what the exact sources.

But that aside, I don't think we need a statistic or even science to show us what we often wake up to once we start becoming more aware of our internal experience, which is that there is just so much moving through our mind moment by moment.

That most of the time we're just absolutely clueless to. And I think it's one of the frightening things about the frightening and exciting things about a meditation practice is we just see, oh my gosh, my mind is all over the place.

It feels like we're thinking more than we ever were. That is a common thing for meditation teachers with students early on.

If it's an eight week course or something, you'll usually hear in week two or week three students saying, man, I came here to try and calm my mind and now my mind is just thinking so much more than it was before.

It feels that way, but that's not the case. It's actually that you're just becoming aware of how much was happening beneath the surface.

And while that can be slightly terrifying at first, especially some of the things we have to see, it is the process of making the unconscious conscious.

...