The Inner Power for Self-Help.. An Analytical Reading of the Notion of the Subconscious Mind

The Inner Power for Self-Help

An Analytical Reading of the Notion of the Subconscious Mind

Sayed Mahmoud Al-Mosawi

Psychologists, behavioral scientists and success experts always mention that the human being has two mental powers:

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The first: “the mind,” on the one hand, as a conscious power, alert, attentive and fully aware of what it does and what it chooses according to clear and evident foundations. The mind relies on the amount of sensed information stored in a person's memory; it draws conclusions through logical thinking and induction, by linking scientific premises with other premises and then obtaining rational conclusions.

The second: “the unconscious mind,” or the subconscious mind, which is the other side of the human mind, or is another kind of operation of the human mind itself, given that a person has one mind but with multiple functions. The subconscious mind is merely a store of information, feelings and memories accumulated since a person's childhood; it uses their given results and the commands with which it has been instilled, whether by the self or by another external party, or by the surroundings and the events that come upon it in succession.

Whoever follows the course of psychology sees that the idea of the subconscious mind has brought about a great transformation in the way the human being is understood and his courses are understood; indeed, specialists began using it in shaping a person's personality so as to bring him to success and accomplishment. This discovery came to fill a wide gap in the way of viewing and understanding the human being among those of materialist thinking, since ignorance of many occurrences, and ignorance of many achievements of results for which materialist thought had no explanation, led it to adopt the idea of the subconscious mind and to be convinced of its explanations. The truth is that the idea of the subconscious mind served to explain a small part of the effects and erred in explaining most of them; the aspects of the practical preliminaries in achieving some effects were effective to some extent, apart from the truth or otherwise of the explanation.

The discovery of the subconscious mind and belief in this notion led scholars to deal with human powers with a certain breadth, as they came to believe that there are effects of the spirit and the soul no less important than the effect of the mind and the body. (“William James,” the father of American psychology, believed that the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of adding the subconscious mind to faith)[1]. That is because psychologists noticed that there is much whose explanation they do not know, and through the notion of the subconscious mind many of these were addressed.

What Is the Subconscious Mind?

Psychologists have considered the subconscious mind to be the spirit, and they claimed that the human spirit, which arises with him from birth, carries a measure of awareness; but that awareness is not the awareness expressed by the mind; rather, it is something necessary that has no place and no delimitation, but is known by its effects. That is why the fetus grows, breathes and moves by virtue of that conscious measure. In an approximation with religious terminology, which is not free of objections, Dr. Ibrahim al-Fiqi mentions: (If we look at the mind from the perspective of psychology, we will find that it is divided into two parts: the conscious and the unconscious. In order to clarify the link between the religious and the concept specific to psychology, we will resort to terms: what psychology calls the conscious, its religious term is (the soul), while the unconscious is called (the spirit). The word spirit expresses for us that unknown power which appears in its simplest forms in electronic particles, and that name is synonymous with consciousness. Although the spirit is spread throughout all parts of the universe, in the human personality it concentrates on the aspect related to what is beyond consciousness, or the subconscious mind, and without our awareness of consciousness it claims all the functions of the body, such as the functions of the heart and the regulation of the flow of blood)[2].

The important thing that distinguishes the subconscious or unconscious mind from the conscious is that it responds to inputs without thinking; it is responsible for the movement of our bodies and all quick reactions; indeed, it may lead a person toward his goals without his being aware. This can be illustrated by someone driving his car toward a particular destination he is used to going to: he may become absorbed in thinking about something, or may become distracted, and then find himself in front of the place he was heading for. He has thereby driven the car without paying attention to everything his body does in turning the steering wheel, pressing the brakes and so on; he has also taken the right road and kept to the traffic rules without being conscious of the fine details.

Specialists have considered this evident characteristic an extremely important entry point to success, to accomplishment and to shaping the human self. In order to get good results, you need to feed the subconscious mind with everything that is good, for the work of the conscious mind is to supply the subconscious with positive information so as to obtain positive results; and the reverse is also so: feeding the subconscious mind with negative thoughts will lead it to negative results. Those premises that the subconscious mind receives may not be correct, for examining their soundness or corruption is not among its tasks. (If you put bad or destructive premises into the subconscious mind, the results will come with devastating effects. We must remember well that the spirit cannot think; thinking is considered the capacity specific to the conscious mind. Example:

My father had cancer – major premise

I am very much like my father – minor premise

I will die of cancer – conclusion

My mother says that I am a failure – major premise

My mother is always right – minor premise

I am a failure – the deduction

In this way negative concepts are programmed into the subconscious mind, as in the two examples, and the subconscious has no choice but to execute, however great the degree of harm)[3].

Ways of Influencing the Subconscious Mind

Since the effects of the subconscious mind are considered creative and astonishing effects, it is necessary to know how it is fed and how to deal with it, or in other words: how is the link made between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind? Specialists have laid down a set of steps for this answer. Before we mention those steps, we must stress an important fact in influencing the subconscious mind, namely the extent of the influence of the environment in which a person lives: the subconscious mind receives most of its information from the surroundings, whether the family or the social surroundings, including the situations a person faces in his life and the statements he receives from others; and it receives all of that without logical calculations, and consequently it responds to their results, and a person's personality is determined according to those results. In this way they explain why a person is a failure in his life, in his studies, in his work, or is fearful, miserly, generous, affectionate or irascible.

But with all that, a person is able to deal and communicate with his subconscious mind and change the course of his life and his feelings by changing the stored information and converting it into thoughts with positive results. Here we mention the most important things the specialists have mentioned, while presenting some observations on them:

1/ Relaxation and instillation: through practicing physical relaxation, another person can instill in the person a set of positive thoughts, so that the subconscious mind takes them as givens and proceeds on them.

2/ Visualization: imagination has great power in instructing the subconscious mind; therefore one must imagine good things and imagine that he has accomplished achievements and that he actually is what he wants.

3/ Self-meditation: it is absorption and concentration in thinking, and not everyone is able to do this, because it needs continuous practice and great experience, as they claim.

4/ Hypnotic suggestion: whereby the specialist performs hypnosis so that the mind is in a state of complete surrender, then works on instilling in it the thoughts he wants.

If we observe all the categories, we come out with the conclusion that they are based on the principle of instillation, but the positions of surrender of the subconscious mind differ, so that a person can make the inputs he wants. They also stressed other ways, which consist of pillars that can be used in the language of discourse directed to the subconscious mind, such as the process of repetition that a person must carry out, and such as positive phrases and the selection of words in a way that does not use the language of prohibition.

Basic Observations on the View of the Subconscious Mind

Given that the theory of the subconscious mind relies most of all on the theoretical and explanatory aspect of the course of things in human action, and that it is connected with the aspect of the unseen, and is also connected with a person's faith and with the realities to which that faith leads, we must record some quick observations about that, in addition to our need to treat the inner and unseen powers of the human being in other studies.

1/ The subconscious mind cannot be equated with the spirit; rather, it can be expressed as the soul (nafs), because, as we established in a previous study, the spirit is of the command of Allah, and what is affected by positive and negative qualities is the soul, which is given different names according to the kind of qualities that have formed it.

2/ In the explanations that the specialists have attempted to give for the working of the subconscious mind and some of its effects, there is a contradiction with faith in Allah the Exalted, in His messengers and His legatees, and in their teachings, such as expressing the power of the subconscious mind latent in a person from when he was a fetus until the end of his life as a “divine spirit,” as one of them said: (If the human being did not exist at that moment, the moment of the formation of the fetus, then what actually existed? There is a single logical answer, namely the existence of that unknown supreme power, or (the divine spirit), and the necessity of the existence of this kind of consciousness in that microscopic cell, which develops during the growth of the fetus with the beginning of the formation of the organs; and the existence of that spirit is necessary from the first moment)[4].

Others urge activating the power of the subconscious mind by abolishing divine decree and destiny and not understanding it correctly, and they count on relying on the subconscious mind without regard to any other powers[5]. And there are those who strive, drawing on some strange spiritual trends such as “Huna – Shamanism,” which calls first to activating latent powers by means of suggestion and hypnosis, for full capability of change through dealing with the unconscious, and ends with seeking the help of the spirits of the ancestors, as they claim, magic and the influences of the celestial spheres”[6].

The correct explanation calls for correct dealing, and calls for openness to a wide horizon of influence connected with true faith.

3/ Although the idea of the subconscious mind is an idea close to non-material spiritual influences, materialist explanations were present and evident. For example, in the idea of the answering of supplication (duʿāʾ): (“Murphy” says that the universe we live in is a universe governed by law and order, and therefore there should not be anything “secret” about the answering of our supplications. The answering of supplication has become a process as clear as the building of a house, since whoever knows the mechanisms of the subconscious mind's working knows how to supplicate “in a practical way”[7]. He thus confines the answering of supplication to a person's action and the manner in which he performs his supplication; and he does not only deny the role of the wisdom of Allah the Exalted in the answering of supplication, but denies even Allah's will and His help. Likewise, in explaining the process of repetition and the process of visualization, they are explained as mere vibrations that go out from a person to attract the vibrations similar to them in the universe.

4/ They said that the subconscious mind does not like the language of prohibition, and therefore we should never use the particles of prohibition in the process of conveying thoughts to ourselves. But as Muslims we find that Allah the Exalted brought Qurʾanic verses containing prohibition with its various particles, which means that the matter is connected with meaning more than it is connected with form.

5/ They have stressed that the secret of accomplishing an achievement, however great, is instilling what you want into the subconscious mind, and it in turn will realize it by attracting those goals; yet they come back and advise that those demands be rational and logical, which means that the criterion in accomplishing achievements is not confined to instilling positives; rather, there are other criteria and factors that have an influence as well.

These are some general basic observations on the theory of the subconscious mind, in the hope that we will strive to formulate an approach consistent with religious thought regarding the efficacy of the inner powers and the factors of the unseen in success and in shaping the self.