Communicating With Our Subconscious? With Our Wiser Self **WHILE AWAKE?

I performed a very interesting exercise from a book I am reading (book came up as being related to self-awareness) and the exercise is viewable via Google Books here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=6-...ply%22&f=false

^^(*Load this webpage only once as the book appears to have a viewing limit blocking part of the exercise if you refresh or reload the book. If my search query above is creating this limitation via the encoding in the link then just do a google search (copy and paste the following with the quotation marks) for:

"Find a comfortable position to sit quietly. Allow your eyes to gently close. Breathe deeply"

and you will find a new version of the google books link that shouldn't have the limit applied).


*I suggest to read through the above exercise to get down the steps (easy to remember) and then do the exercise with closed eye visualization as the exercise suggest, unless you are very good at open eyed visualization. You can have the google book webpage open to cheat if your forget a step but it seems best if you can complete the visualization without opening your eyes.

I encourage you to do the exercise before reading my results below so that my results don't influence yours. You could always do it again after reading mine if you choose.

Spoiler for My result enclosed but I suggest to do your own exercise before reading this.:

I won't go into all of the details due to privacy but one thing I found interesting, and very subconscious-like and dream like, was the potential symbolism that tied into the verbal answer. One answer I got from my visualized wiser self regarding how to handle difficult situations was "to flow" and later when I visualized my wiser self giving me a gift connecting me to my wiser self it was a basic 2d flower shape and I only just now made the connection to the answer that I should "flow" and thus become a flow-er…a person who flows.

This seems to be a good exercise to use to ask the same kinds of questions that we sometimes seek to ask in our lucid dreams…those questions where we are looking for a subconscious answer, a higher answer or a creative solution without our normal blocks of waking biases and beliefs perhaps.

Please chime in with any thoughts or results. (You probably won't need to use spoilers, as long as others read the above and have already done the exercise if the choose to do so. If you choose to use a spoiler and aren't sure how: just click on "Go Advanced" under the reply box and you will see the square white picture frame symbol which you would click on after highlighting the text that you want to put in the spoiler.)

I think of my wiser self when AT or AP. I would ask a question like why are you here. The higher self answer would be like....you are here. I thought...hmmm true, I am here. Simple enough. Like my higher self was saying in as few words as possible.....just be since you already are.

Thanks Kadie! :)

This exercise can be done from the waking state with interesting results! If anyone is shy to post their specific results, you can still chime in with general feedback on whether or not you got anything interesting out of it.

Hey foldlbise, I just wrote out my goal for my next lucid dream. To ask my higher self for a gift, to open my hand behind me to receive it and then to examine it. I would show you were I wrote it in my journal if I could figure out how to post a pic on here. I then saw this post, went to the link to the book and saw it explain how to ask for a gift from your higher self. Second time this week I've had a weird coonicidence, I love it! We will see how the experiment goes.

Thanks for the share. I'll give it a try.

I've definitely communicated with my higher self through meditation exercises, to a certain degree. Although, most of my experiences of communicating with my higher self while awake have involved off topic methods that I don't want to discuss on here.

I know I'm being a bit of a downer here, but why exactly do you think the subconscious is an entity of its own or that it's necessarily wiser than the conscious you? I actually made a thread about this in a separate subforum, although I didn't bring up the point of the subconscious being wiser or not because my argument was more about it not existing in the way the popular thought posits.

The idea is that there isn't another you inside of you, it's all just you. Things that don't work out during attempts of dream control or trying to get lucid are attributed to the subconscious messing around with you or something, but it's merely misattribution and has to do with random chance and later on plays on your expectation of what will happen in that situation in the future, and your expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and in effect it is you who has messed with yourself, not some "other" consciousness more connected to your emotions. Dream content is more or less based on the unconscious thought processes you have and when you're lucid, your expectations and the unconscious associations you have with certain memories and feelings, but it's again all you, not some other you that exists in the background. The only reason you can get a response when you try speaking directly to the "subconscious" is because you expect an answer. In that way, you can essentially speak with something that isn't you in a strict sense, but it's not something that always exists in the background. What comes out as a response usually sounds cryptic or meaningless specifically because you either expecting it not to make sense or you weren't expecting anything in particular and something random just came out.

That's my idea on the subconscious, anyway. Surely some things like expectation aren't fully conscious thoughts, but they aren't something lurking deeper having almost completely separate thoughts from you. Coming at it from a standpoint that assumes the subconscious does exist in the way you're describing, I wonder why we think it's any wiser than us though. What indication is there, really, that makes us believe this? I just always hear it, and I feel like it's just something you expect (and I used to expect back when I thought of the subconscious this way about 6 or so years ago) and so you believe it. But I mean, who is really to say the angry you or the happy you is the same "you" just because you consciously experience both and feel like you're the same? The difference between them is the perspective you're viewing things from and your priorities at the time. Either these are separate you's, or all thought processes, unconscious or otherwise, are just as much you as the angry you and happy you are, no matter how separate you feel.

I've come to believe this because of how getting a concussion has affected my ability to feel emotion. When I feel anxiety, anger, joy, etc., I don't actually feel the feeling associated with it. Half the time I'm confused to my emotional state because on some level I implicitly have an impression of feeling a way despite not actually "feeling" that way, and sometimes I don't get the impression at all. The way I've learned to tell if I'm feeling a certain way or not is to judge it by the actions I'm taking, the words I'm using, and what I'm thinking about. If they all indicate I'm feeling a certain way, whether I actually feel or believe I am feeling that way or not, I must be. It's like a part of me broke off somewhere, the part that actually connects me to my emotional state. I still feel the emotions, but I'm not consciously aware that I'm feeling them. Yet, I know from the fact that I used to actually feel these things before suffering brain damage that I was consciously connected to them. Are they no longer a part of me? Is it just my "subconscious" that's feeling them now? My answer to that has become no. Just because I am not aware of them on an emotional level doesn't mean I'm not aware of them at all, and it definitely is still me that's feeling them, because they guide my thoughts without me actually feeling them. If it's capable of influencing my thoughts and thought patterns, whether it feels like it's me or not, it's still a part of me. Hence, just because you can't "feel" expectations or things like that, even though they are unconscious thought processes, they are still equally a part of the conscious you and aren't something entirely separate that can operate on their own like a separate personality. I could be entirely wrong, but it explains more things for me to think of it this way than it doesn't. I'm simply trying to provide another way to look at the supposed "subconscious".

Well, I for one know for sure there isn't just one of me in there because I am very well aware of the different conflicting parts of my personality. Sometimes one part of me reprimands another while that one has a fit in return. Sometimes I have successfully overcome depression by identifying a wiser part of me and shifting my consciousness to her point of view. The more aware I become the more ridiculous the singular "I" appears to me. Anyway, when I am less consciously aware of my various parts of my personality, I do think a lucid dream consulting with my wiser part would be helpful because sometimes while awake I am in denial that there is a wiser part of me.

Hi Snoop, I'd say I agree with most of what you say. It may not have been clear what angle I was coming at this though. I definitely feel it is me and not some separate entity, thus the use of "self" in the term "wiser-self." I think that you would probably agree that very few people always understand why they truly react a certain way to certain stimuli without doing some digging. For example "why was I so angry when that simple thing happened?" Yes there is the simple answer of "they made me angry because they did such and such." However we come to realize, at some point hopefully, the truth that no one can make us feel a certain way in most circumstances…it is more about our reaction. So there are deeper answers that many times go back to very old experiences that aren't typically on the surface of our awareness/consciousness (the easy term to use is subconscious, though it is not a perfect term) and by digging down to the reasons behind the reasons, we tap into our "wiser-self." No, not a separate entity, but also not quickly accessible to most people without a little work at it.