Most people assume it is a part of your consciousness that’s not self-aware. But what if it’s really more a case if it not being very accessible to your awareness. What does that mean? How can a part of your consciousness be aware of itself and not be part of your awareness? You’re you after all. But, again, I ask you to explore what exactly that means. Are you familair with the cases of individuals who have had their corpus callosum severed as part of a treatment for some extreme forms of epiliepsy. In a sense, there are 2 separate consciousnesses accesible from opposite sides of the body.
When split-brain patients are shown an image only in the left half of each eye’s visual field, they cannot verbally name what they have seen. This is because the brain’s experiences of the senses is contralateral. Communication between the two hemispheres is inhibited, so the patient cannot say out loud the name of that which the right side of the brain is seeing. A similar effect occurs if a split-brain patient touches an object with only the left hand while receiving no visual cues in the right visual field; the patient will be unable to name the object, as each cerebral hemisphere of the primary somatosensory cortex only contains a tactile representation of the opposite side of the body. If the speech-control center is on the right side of the brain, the same effect can be achieved by presenting the image or object to only the right visual field or hand Split Brain
So, how is this so different from your subsconcious, a subsection of your consciousness that does not have direct access to any of the motor or language centers in your brain. Therefore, it is unable to communicate outwardly, and in many ways, it is not able to communicate with other sections of your brain. At least not in the way you’re familiar with.
I would put forth that your subsconscous is the part of your brain that is responsible for your intuition. Your gut feelings. It is the part of your brain that stays awake when you are under anesesthesia, and it’s the part of your brain that is screaming from the experience of having been operated on when you wake up. In my experience of having gone under to have my wisdom teeth removed. All four of them, I woke up crying and I couldn’t assign this emotion to anything in particular so it got assigned to something that had been weighing on my mind.
It’s seems my subconscious was likely acutely aware of what it was upset about. So much so that it’s emotional experience spilled over into my conscious awareness.
If only we could truly communicate with our subconscious. What does it know? What does it know about the true nature of existence? What is its experience? Does it remember our past lives? What might it be capable of doing if communication between it and our conscious awareness were more well established?
Why does it exist if it remains outside of our ability to interact? Or is our disconnection from this part of ourselves a cultural phenomenon? Like anything else, language, motor skills, we must learn how to do everything. If, at no point, we are told by our parents or peers how to interact with our subconscious mind, its entirely possible that this huge part of us could be neglected entirely.
My best guess for how to communicate with this part of us would be to follow the parts of it you are aware of. What is is that drives your gut feeling. Next time you feel this, pay attention. Stop what you’re doing and meditate on it. Journal these feelings, journal your dreams. Try to access memories of when you experienced strong intuition when you meditate or lie in bed at night or when you’re lost in the enjoyment of music, or anything. Try to experience your WHOLE consciousness.
There’s likely something powerful you can access there. If at some point in our history, there was a cultural shift to ignore this portion of our being. It’s highly likely the motivation behind it was social control by a smaller group over the majority in the pursuit of wealth or power.
These are the patterns of our history. We can untie ourselves and become free.