Understanding the Prime directives of the Unconscious Mind is crucial as you learn how the Unconscious mind goes about running your life. We care a lot about Conscious Unconscious integration and it’s important for your Conscious Mind to remember that all true change happens at the Unconscious level. It’s also important to understand consciously as much as you can about how and what the Unconscious Mind does.
Your Unconscious Mind works in an orderly manner in line with its prime directives:
1. Stores memories
Your Unconscious Mind stores all your memories in relationship to time (Temporal) and not in relationship to time (A-temporal).
- Temporal memories are stored in relationship to time, Temporal memories are stored in relationship to time, it chronologically saves these memories, using your Time Line.
- A-temporal memories are those not related to time, like acquisition of language for an example – the meaning of the words that we learn are not in relationship with time.
2. Is the domain of emotions.
You were perhaps led to believe that your heart is domain of the emotions? I agree that your heart will process your emotions, just like any other organ or a cell in your body. However, it all starts in your Unconscious Mind. As it links things and gives meanings to things your hypothalamus produces matching chemicals that impact all the cells in your body. Your Unconscious Mind is where it all starts – it’s the domain of the emotions.
3. Organizes all your memories.
Your Unconscious Mind organizes all your stored memories. It uses your Time Line as a filing system. Mechanics of it is gestalt, which simply means that it also organizes memories according to subjects or feelings. It will chain all memories related to happiness – it will link them together. I’ll speak about it in much greater detail later on. (In case you are familiar with the Gestalt Therapy, it has no relation to it – treat this newly!)
4. Represses memories with unresolved negative emotion
Your Unconscious mind can repress memories to protect you. Continuously facing your baggage will drive you crazy. It represses the unresolved negative emotions until it feels that you are ready to deal with or resolve it. It can also present you with unprocessed negative emotions because the memory was triggered by some event.
Both the Conscious and Unconscious Mind know that negative emotions are not good for the body, don’t they? If they were good for the body, I doubt that they would feel so destructive and damaging to our system. This is not to say that we should not process anger, sadness, fear, hurt or guilt. We have the ability to feel and experience them for a reason. I think they can be useful when used in the appropriate context. Later you will learn about warranted and unwarranted use of emotions. Back to negative emotions and storing of unresolved ones in your body.
The usual metaphor I use is that it puts them all in a small black bag and stores it in the body for processing later. Since EVERYTHING is made of energy, including our thoughts… that means that these unprocessed negative emotions are also made of energy, made of atoms, remember? Since it’s a physical thing your Unconscious Mind can’t store them in the fridge – it has to store them within the body. And then these unprocessed negative emotions, stored in our body cause stress to our organs, hurts the body, makes the flow of the communication of all your internal systems rather difficult. This impacts our health, and this is the stress doctors talk about when they say that 80% of all our diseases are caused by stress.
Think about it – information flowing from your brain to your elbow, say it’s healing a cut, creating new cells, replacing the old ones… and that information gets intercepted by this energetic blockage, this black bag stored somewhere on the way, say in your shoulder area. This is bound to change the quality of the information, making the communication and healing difficult or confusing, or even worse, it can change the direction of that information meant for your elbow and it may end up in the kidney?! Kidney receives some very confusing instructions and acts accordingly. This causes stress for kidney, which causes stress to all the other organs in the body. Usually, the weakest link in the chain will develop some sort of a dis-ease.
Knowing this, you may wonder WHY does the Unconscious Mind do this then and works against itself, hurting the body? Well, that ties up with the next directive…
5. Presents repressed memories for resolution
Have you ever experienced a significant emotional event where you were deeply touched or affected emotionally? Has it happened to you (I think it happens to everyone) that sometime later, time did the healing and you moved on. You thought that you were healed, and that life has carried on. Only to be surprised days, weeks, months or years later, when you were in a far better state, this issue presents itself again. Those thoughts start crawling back into your Conscious Mind and your thinking? Has this ever happened to you?
This is when you discover that you did bury it long ago. You buried it in your body. Now your Unconscious Mind is presenting it to you for resolution as it thinks you can handle it now. It’s opening that little black bag to your consciousness and inviting you to PLEASE deal with it now, process it and get some learnings, get some resolution, so that you can grow and move on, not repeating same mistakes in life, etc… It just wants to make these memories rational so that it can release the emotions.
6. May keep the repressed emotions repressed for protection
On very rare occasions, it may keep the memories repressed for protection. Some people experience horrible events in life, so horrible and unimaginable, that the Unconscious Mind may repress them and not bring them out again. This can be displayed when we can’t recall the full content of such memory
7. Runs the body
Imagine if you had to consciously do everything that your Unconscious Mind is doing to run your body! Imagine if you were consciously responsible for all the breathing, heart function, healing, food processing etc. Imagine the number of processes that the Unconscious Mind does for you every single second of the day! And yet, some people dare tell me that they don’t trust their Unconscious Mind. I refuse to believe that, as I am sure they do! They certainly did last night when they trusted their Unconscious Mind to keep breathing while they were asleep, to run their heart and everything else! They may just need to be reminded how deeply they trust their Unconscious Mind with their precious life! Your Unconscious Mind has a blueprint of your body now and of your perfect health in conception. Based on this we ask the Unconscious Mind to heal the body. You see, your Unconscious Mind was programmed to build your body from a little tiny fetus to the baby size, making sure you had a head, two arms, legs, etc… It used a blueprint of perfect health that exists in the deepest parts of your Unconscious Mind
8. Preserves the body
Your Unconscious Mind maintains the integrity of the body. It preserves the body. This is the highest prime directive. It’s main and most important function. Preserving the integrity of the body is its No.1 priority. Your Unconscious Mind acts on your instruction and responds the world around it. This confuses and impacts its ability to always perform this function optimally. When this happens there is possibility for dis-eases to occur.
9. Is a highly moral being
Your Unconscious Mind is very moral — the morality you were taught and accepted. There is a saying “There is honour amongst thieves.” A thief steals for to earn his living. Yet he won’t steal from another thief. Which means that we can have unique and individual perception of what is moral and what is not.
10. Enjoys serving, needs clear orders to follow
Your Unconscious Mind loves you. It loves you more than anyone will ever be able to love you. It is you and it loves serving you. It just needs you to give it clear instructions to follow. The best advice I can give you here is to get clear on what you want and to send clear instructions to your Unconscious Mind consistently. People often send confusing instructions to their minds. They wake up one morning and they are happy with themselves, looking at the mirror acknowledging how beautiful or sexy they are. Next morning, they wake up and choose to feel sad, unsatisfied with their body and acknowledge how much fatter they are comparing to whomever… and this ties in with the next one…
11. Controls and maintains all perceptions
It’s in charge of your perceptions and whatever it receives through your 5 senses or telepathically, it processes it and reflects it on against your Unconscious mind. So it receives and transmits this information to the Conscious Mind.
12. Generates, stores, distributes and transmits “energy’
Your Unconscious Mind is in charge of all energy in your body. By directly communicating with it, we can achieve desired energy levels, direct it to needed places, etc. This can be very handy when you think of people who have a condition called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. We can encourage and give the opportunity to the Unconscious Mind to increase the energy levels and that would ease the symptoms of that condition if it does not completely disappear
13. Maintains instincts and generates habits
Instincts are naturally installed, almost hard-wired in our neurology. If your life is in danger, you will either choose to stay there and Fight or you will choose to Flight – to run away or safely take yourself out of that situation. Habits on the other hand are learnt over time, and it takes repetition for a habit to be installed. Using NLP techniques like the change of strategies or swish pattern would install a habit without much repetition needed
14. Is programmed to continually seek more and more
We are all programmed to seek more and more. Wanting more is great, it’s natural to us. In nature everything is designed for expansion and for growth. Your Unconscious Mind in no different to that. Needing more in order to be happy for an example, is where the problem occurs. Coming from a vibratory state of lack, when there is as much abundance as you dare to see in this world, limits you and your perception as your shaped reality attracts everything that resonates with it.
The good news is that there is always more to discover, new things to learn, new ways to grow. You see, the moment you close yourself to learning, there is nothing more for you to learn about, according to you. Knowing what you know, you agree that it would be silly to choose not to learn. The bottom line as that you are either dying or you are growing and expanding.
15. Functions best as a whole integrated unit
This is the subject of wholeness. Your Unconscious Mind does not need parts to function. The fewer parts there are the less chance for the incongruence. Being whole means being completely congruent, with no internal conflicts and zero chance for any incongruence or parts
16. Is symbolic
Your Unconscious Mind uses and responds to symbols. It likes symbols and uses symbols to establish meaning and make connections. There is no universal language of symbols for the Unconscious Mind. It gives symbols its own meaning. So everyone does that differently and has a unique way of doing it. That is why we say that every single book that was ever written on the subject of interpreting and understanding dreams is 100% correct! For the person that wrote it.
17. Takes everything personally
This is the basis of perception is projection explained earlier. Remember that as far as your Unconscious Mind is concerned, there is no one else but you.
18. Works on the principle of least effort
It always takes the path of least resistance.