Helping Leaders Own Who They Are

This article is about you, it is about me, it is about all of us.

When I started exploring hypnosis nearly 3 years ago, I became familiar with the terms “unconscious” and “subconscious” mind. These were used to depict the same elusive concept: some kind of deeper level in our psychology. The traditionally labelled unconscious mind represents some inner capacity that lies outside of our awareness, and that extends from running our hormones, heartbeats and dreams to the automatic and emotional reactions, judgements and behaviours we evolve through daily.

Recently though, I have heard a different term which for me supersedes the traditional names for this deeper capacity. A well-known contemporary philosopher casually referred to our inner mind as a “superconscious” mind. He didn’t linger on the idea but when I heard it, something hit me probably much deeper than was intended. What a beautiful and logical word to describe what we cannot consciously grasp!

Think about it. We all know what our conscious mind is: it basically represents the thoughts and cognitive processes that we are aware of. Why would everything else, lying outside of our awareness, be described by something inferior (“sub-conscious”), negative or amputated (“un-conscious”)? Because the mammalian and reptilien brains are biologically located underneath the cerebral cortex? Even though they are indeed, I think it is very limiting to refer to those parts of our psychology as sub- or un-conscious.

On the contrary, anything that our brains are able to perform without us knowing about it, evidently belongs to a higher order, something that supersedes an already advanced human conscious awareness. Something that must be above consciousness, hence super-conscious!

Personal development, emotional intelligence, philosophy, all these approaches aim to help us build and grow our awareness, don’t they? And what happens when one becomes more aware? One then has access to more possibilities and more potential. The process of building awareness means that previously superconscious processes become more and more accessible to our conscious mind: one becomes more aware of his former automatic reactions, behaviours, etc. A person’s experience of life is elevating as a direct result of him or her stretching their awareness to higher levels. To the extreme, faqirs manage to become so aware that they can slow their heartbeat, directly accessing the source of life, lying in the superconscious realm.

When we work on building our awareness, our conscious mind elevates and we become more aware of the potential and untapped power that lies within our broader mind. The more conscious and aware we become, the more we have access to what is our birthright as human beings, and the more “enlightened” we become – note that enlightenment is not, in my terminology, a state, but a never-ending process.

Our mind is superconscious in essence; only a fraction of it is conscious. Deep inner work is the way to grow this conscious part of our psychology that we have control over, so that we can grow and rise beyond the status quo, into the realm of our super-conscious.

If we don’t work to grow and develop our conscious awareness, we engage on an alternative path which yields a narrow and constricted view of the world and ourselves as human beings. We don’t get to access our wonderful superconscious mind, and we end up going through life blindly, missing out on the extraordinary nature of the experience of being alive.

You, like me and everyone else, have a superconscious mind. USE IT!