I was going to write on an indie game we discussed during lunch, but during dinner with Lian we decided to do a book swap. I said I would read Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, and he would read the Creation of Consciousness. As you can tell we are both becoming more consciousness  – insert crazy face emoji here.

But as we were talking, we started talking about the unconscious. If we are trying to live as conscious a life as possible what is the point of the unconscious?

As I wrote the other day, it is about be intentional.  In this sense we can think about the unconscious as urges and motivations that the individual is unaware of in the conscious mind. But this is an impoverished explanation.

If I am intentional about every choice, then that means I options to choose from.  But where do these options come from? If this option space is small what does it mean to even have choice.  So, it is the unconscious that fills out the possible options from which I can choose how to live my life.   Through dreams, active imagination, analysis, prayer, or other means to facilitate communication with ‘that which is not the ego’ (ie the unconscious). This is what provides the options for the conscious to choose from.

As we become more conscious, perhaps we also cultivate our unconscious and the space of possible options from which to make our choices.

Earlier I was thinking of consciousness as different sorts of transcendental idealism grids. Like bats perhaps dont think in terms of space time, but magnetism or something. Building out the space of all possible consciousnesses in this sense is building out different matrices for processing and parsing perception.

With this notion of the unconscious as perhaps the source of categories or perhaps the source of reification, then what does building out all possible consciousnesses mean if it also involves building out the correlate – the unconscious (the source of the options available to consciousness).