Mind Dimensions
An important formulation to be discussed here has to do with the dimensions of mind that relate to learning and personal productivity and happiness, the elements of everyone’s good mental health. Let’s begin with an analysis of the clinically validated conceptualization of three interrelated dimensions of mind, the unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious.
Unconscious motivation reflects the residue of past experiences that have been formed into each person's uniquely held personal attitudes, beliefs, values, and orientations. The unconscious resembles computer programs that shape all the activities it allows to happen, conformed in humans with one’s unique response patterns composed of individually biased attitudes, beliefs, values, and personal orientations.
These unconsciously motivated patterns will remain repetitive unless and until self-understanding becomes a focus in learning. Unconscious motivation happens with little if any conscious awareness or understanding. However, it is reflected in language both verbal and non-verbal. But unless that language is analyzed it will not be understood as a reflection of the unconscious.
The unconscious is in control of the pre-conscious and the conscious dimensions. Consider the result of an unconscious response pattern that is composed of attitudes that are generally negative, beliefs that are seldom based in reality, values that are narrowly maintained, and orientations where new experiences are closed from processing, thus depriving its owner from learning new things. How would this effect the functional capacities of the pre-conscious and the conscious? Rigidity in the applications of values is the product.
The pre-conscious is the seat of creativity. It’s conceived as an automatic, inclusive, and intuitive subliminal capacity that automatically receives its input directly from the senses and processes that input and passes along some of its findings to consciousness where they are organized logically and chronologically and expressed with language that conveys their meanings.
Clearly, if a negative unconscious pattern of response such as outlined above were happening, the pre-conscious creative capacity and conscious language will reflect very limited insight, but its results likely will contain aggressive behaviors out of frustration. This is a condition that relates to one’s status of mental health.
This formulation may be best understood by examining the relationships between the computer and the dimensions of mind, the unconscious, pre-conscious and the conscious.
Both the brain and the computer are hard-wired to process data.
The unconscious is thought to function like the programs that govern the mental processes of the system.
The computer receives input from the keyboard, or voice or image recognition, or in the case of AI it receives directions from within computer systems that duplicate brain functions, and the mind receives input from the senses.
How we process those data in the mind and how the computer processes data are both governed by pre-conceived programs.
Nothing happens without permission by an existing program.
Changing the unconscious programs is a difficult process that requires personal commitment to change.
Schools do nothing to remedy this situation, in fact it compounds the problem.
If the unconscious limits the activity of the pre-conscious, it also limits thought and problem solving that happens consciously. These limitations have raised havoc with the wellbeing and mental health of every individual who has attended formal instruction in the conventional school that is often developmentally inappropriate. Its results are expressed in troublesome unconscious motivations among the citizenry that could be avoided through education focused on developing self-knowledge and self-understanding.
Noted Psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie MD stated that education has three essential missions, namely: to enable human nature itself to change; to enable each generation to transmit to the next whatever wisdom it has gained about living; and to free the enormous untapped creative potential which lies latent in varying degrees in the preconscious processes of everyone. It is my belief Kubie said, in all three respects, all of our cultural efforts have failed.
“….education will continue to perpetuate a fraud on culture until it accepts the full implications of the fact that the free creative velocity of our thinking apparatus is continually being braked and driven off course by the play of unconscious forces. Educational procedures which fail to recognize this end up by increasing the interference from latent and unrecognized neurotic (rigid) forces - emphasis added).
“It has long been known that in early years children have an extraordinarily inventive imagination, transposing experience freely among the various sensory modalities, using delightful and original figures of speech and allegory.”
“What happens to this poetic gift under the stultifying impact of that which we call our educational system?”
“What happens to the free play of pre-conscious functions in the course of conventional education?”
“My unhappy conviction is that much of the learning which has traditionally been looked upon as an essential attribute of the educated man (or woman – emphasis added) has no necessary relevance either to creativity or to maturity, and that instead many ingredients in the process by which [men and women] become learned tend actively to obstruct them both.”
“Our knowledge of the external world and our ability to represent the world as it is or as we would like it to be has grown enormously, but our ability to meet wisely the challenge of how to be human beings has not developed equally.”
“… education without self-knowledge can never mean wisdom or maturity; …self-knowledge in depth is a process which like education itself is never complete. It is a point on a continuous and never-ending journey. Without self-knowledge we can have no adults, but only aging children who are armed with words, and paint and clay and atomic [lethal]weapons, none of which they [fully] understand.”
“Self-knowledge is not all there is to wisdom and maturity; but it is an essential ingredient which makes maturity at least possible. Yet it is the one ingredient which is almost totally neglected. This lack is both an index and a cause of the immaturity of our culture.”
“The failure of education to make it possible for Man (or Woman) to change is due to a specific component in human nature: to wit, that psychological rigidity which is the most basic and most universal expression of the neurotic process…”
It must be kept in mind that Kubie’s formulation refers to adult processes. When youngsters are developing intellectually, their abilities to think and act logically are in a process of development. What might be the consequences regarding the functions of the unconscious, pre-conscious and the conscious during those evolutionary stages in the process?
Those processes must be open ended to allow the natural development to occur as guided by each unique genetic code. Spontaneous pre-conscious activity is primary in early childhood before reasoning occurs.
An unconscious archive is relatively undeveloped in youngsters due to limited opportunity for experiences that fit the zones of proximal development that exist for everyone. As more and more stimulating and developmentally inappropriate experiences are processed, more detailed controlling factors of the unconscious and limitations in conscious activities occur.
Personal freedom to develop according to the dictates of each genetic code and interference in natural processes of development, the more that happens, the more it will likely affect the development of a healthy mental process.
If evidence of problems in this respect are discovered, it is paramount that they be dealt with at their first appearance at the level of concrete operational behavior, and not left to fester and become a part of a troublesome unconscious response pattern, especially one that fosters aggressive behavior and diminished mental health.
Unconscious motivation reflects the residue of past experiences that have been formed into each person's uniquely held personal attitudes, beliefs, values, and orientations. The unconscious resembles computer programs that shape all the activities it allows to happen, conformed in humans with one’s unique response patterns composed of individually biased attitudes, beliefs, values, and personal orientations.
These unconsciously motivated patterns will remain repetitive unless and until self-understanding becomes a focus in learning. Unconscious motivation happens with little if any conscious awareness or understanding. However, it is reflected in language both verbal and non-verbal. But unless that language is analyzed it will not be understood as a reflection of the unconscious.
The unconscious is in control of the pre-conscious and the conscious dimensions. Consider the result of an unconscious response pattern that is composed of attitudes that are generally negative, beliefs that are seldom based in reality, values that are narrowly maintained, and orientations where new experiences are closed from processing, thus depriving its owner from learning new things. How would this effect the functional capacities of the pre-conscious and the conscious? Rigidity in the applications of values is the product.
The pre-conscious is the seat of creativity. It’s conceived as an automatic, inclusive, and intuitive subliminal capacity that automatically receives its input directly from the senses and processes that input and passes along some of its findings to consciousness where they are organized logically and chronologically and expressed with language that conveys their meanings.
Clearly, if a negative unconscious pattern of response such as outlined above were happening, the pre-conscious creative capacity and conscious language will reflect very limited insight, but its results likely will contain aggressive behaviors out of frustration. This is a condition that relates to one’s status of mental health.
This formulation may be best understood by examining the relationships between the computer and the dimensions of mind, the unconscious, pre-conscious and the conscious.
Both the brain and the computer are hard-wired to process data.
The unconscious is thought to function like the programs that govern the mental processes of the system.
The computer receives input from the keyboard, or voice or image recognition, or in the case of AI it receives directions from within computer systems that duplicate brain functions, and the mind receives input from the senses.
How we process those data in the mind and how the computer processes data are both governed by pre-conceived programs.
Nothing happens without permission by an existing program.
Changing the unconscious programs is a difficult process that requires personal commitment to change.
Schools do nothing to remedy this situation, in fact it compounds the problem.
If the unconscious limits the activity of the pre-conscious, it also limits thought and problem solving that happens consciously. These limitations have raised havoc with the wellbeing and mental health of every individual who has attended formal instruction in the conventional school that is often developmentally inappropriate. Its results are expressed in troublesome unconscious motivations among the citizenry that could be avoided through education focused on developing self-knowledge and self-understanding.
Noted Psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie MD stated that education has three essential missions, namely: to enable human nature itself to change; to enable each generation to transmit to the next whatever wisdom it has gained about living; and to free the enormous untapped creative potential which lies latent in varying degrees in the preconscious processes of everyone. It is my belief Kubie said, in all three respects, all of our cultural efforts have failed.
“….education will continue to perpetuate a fraud on culture until it accepts the full implications of the fact that the free creative velocity of our thinking apparatus is continually being braked and driven off course by the play of unconscious forces. Educational procedures which fail to recognize this end up by increasing the interference from latent and unrecognized neurotic (rigid) forces - emphasis added).
“It has long been known that in early years children have an extraordinarily inventive imagination, transposing experience freely among the various sensory modalities, using delightful and original figures of speech and allegory.”
“What happens to this poetic gift under the stultifying impact of that which we call our educational system?”
“What happens to the free play of pre-conscious functions in the course of conventional education?”
“My unhappy conviction is that much of the learning which has traditionally been looked upon as an essential attribute of the educated man (or woman – emphasis added) has no necessary relevance either to creativity or to maturity, and that instead many ingredients in the process by which [men and women] become learned tend actively to obstruct them both.”
“Our knowledge of the external world and our ability to represent the world as it is or as we would like it to be has grown enormously, but our ability to meet wisely the challenge of how to be human beings has not developed equally.”
“… education without self-knowledge can never mean wisdom or maturity; …self-knowledge in depth is a process which like education itself is never complete. It is a point on a continuous and never-ending journey. Without self-knowledge we can have no adults, but only aging children who are armed with words, and paint and clay and atomic [lethal]weapons, none of which they [fully] understand.”
“Self-knowledge is not all there is to wisdom and maturity; but it is an essential ingredient which makes maturity at least possible. Yet it is the one ingredient which is almost totally neglected. This lack is both an index and a cause of the immaturity of our culture.”
“The failure of education to make it possible for Man (or Woman) to change is due to a specific component in human nature: to wit, that psychological rigidity which is the most basic and most universal expression of the neurotic process…”
It must be kept in mind that Kubie’s formulation refers to adult processes. When youngsters are developing intellectually, their abilities to think and act logically are in a process of development. What might be the consequences regarding the functions of the unconscious, pre-conscious and the conscious during those evolutionary stages in the process?
Those processes must be open ended to allow the natural development to occur as guided by each unique genetic code. Spontaneous pre-conscious activity is primary in early childhood before reasoning occurs.
An unconscious archive is relatively undeveloped in youngsters due to limited opportunity for experiences that fit the zones of proximal development that exist for everyone. As more and more stimulating and developmentally inappropriate experiences are processed, more detailed controlling factors of the unconscious and limitations in conscious activities occur.
Personal freedom to develop according to the dictates of each genetic code and interference in natural processes of development, the more that happens, the more it will likely affect the development of a healthy mental process.
If evidence of problems in this respect are discovered, it is paramount that they be dealt with at their first appearance at the level of concrete operational behavior, and not left to fester and become a part of a troublesome unconscious response pattern, especially one that fosters aggressive behavior and diminished mental health.