A Journey Toward Self-Congruence
- Elmen Lamprecht
- Aug 12
- 6 min read
For millennia, humans have believed that parts of our being are composed of unknown, mystical elements. This belief propagates from our intuition that life is much more than its physical manifestations. Our felt experience testifies to something within us and around us, something we cannot directly see, feel and touch, but we know it is there. Just like we cannot see the movement of the wind around us, but can only experience it effects: Trees moving, dust carried around, a chill on our skin. In the same way, we experience the effects of the ethereal without being able to touch it directly.
This belief found its scientific counterpart in the early 20th century with the birth of the discipline of psychology, which began to explore the intricacies of the human mind. This exploration revealed that our cognition encompasses mechanisms not fully accessible to our conscious awareness at all times. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, introduced a groundbreaking theory that divided the mind into three distinct parts:
The Conscious Mind: This represents everything we are aware of at any given moment, including thoughts, perceptions, and feelings.
The Preconscious Mind: This contains thoughts and feelings that are not currently in our awareness but can easily be brought to consciousness. It serves as a buffer between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind.
The Unconscious Mind: This is a repository of feelings, thoughts, memories, and urges that are repressed because they are unacceptable or unpleasant. Despite being out of our conscious awareness, they exert a significant influence on our experiences, personality, and actions.
Carl Jung, a contemporary of Freud, developed a distinct theory of the unconscious that both built upon and diverged from Freud’s concepts. Jung's theory also divides the psyche into three parts:
The Conscious Mind: Similar to Freud’s concept, it includes everything we are aware of at any given moment.
The Personal Unconscious: This is akin to Freud's unconscious, but Jung believed that the contents of the unconscious are not solely negative but encompass a broader range of experiences.
The Collective Unconscious: This represents Jung’s most original and controversial contribution. He proposed that beyond the personal unconscious lies a deeper level shared among all human beings, containing archetypes and universal experiences.
Modern Understandings of the Unconscious Mind
Modern psychology has expanded our understanding of the hidden dimensions of the human mind through findings in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience. Neuroimaging techniques, such as Functional MRI (fMRI), have identified that the amygdala is associated with unconscious emotional responses, and the basal ganglia are involved in procedural memory and habits. Additionally, cognitive psychology has revealed the presence of unconscious implicit memory processes, which include skills and conditioned responses, alongside conscious explicit memory processes, which involve the deliberate recall of facts and events. Studies in social psychology have highlighted the role of unconscious bias in social interactions and decision-making. All these studies confirm what humans have believed for millennia: that we possess an inherent ability to connect with ourselves and the world around us that transcends our conscious perception.
Intent and Unconscious Awareness
While social sciences have definitely expanded our understanding of human behaviour, we are still confronted with phenomena that cannot be explained by scientific investigation. These phenomena and our inexplicable awareness of it relates back to an energy that predates human existence. This energy. This mystical energy, which spans space and time and flows all around and within us, grants us a supernatural ability to gain awareness of elements that escape the grasp of perception. Consequently, science may never fully understand this energy and the way our unconscious mind connects with it because its related elements fall outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Science simply does not have the tools to engage with this energy. These aspects of our existence can only be accessed through awareness, and the tools we must use to grasp its mechanisms are the same ones we have been using over millennia to engage with the mystic, the spiritual. In my book, the Daily Life of Resolute Beings, I dedicate an entire section around how we can connect with this transcendent energy, which I call ‘Intent’.
Connecting with Intent is a profound journey that involves both inner exploration and a heightened awareness of the surrounding world. Therefore, to understand life holistically, we must embrace both scientific and mystical dimensions. Science helps us analyse the perceptible aspects of our existence, while awareness helps us grasp the undetectable elements of life.
The Impact of our Past and Present
Whether detectable by science or only via human intuition, matters of the unconscious always have a practical, real-life impact on the human experience. Ignorance of our unconscious workings leads to disruption of life's energy flow, and this blockage negatively impacts each of our dimensions. These impacts could manifest as psychological disorders, dysfunctional relationships and an existence marked by discontent and disappointment. The blockage in energy can be amplified by past trauma, causing our worlds to drift apart even further. The more intense the trauma, the more divergent these aspects of our being become. In this way, the avoidance of dealing with our past keeps painful thoughts and feeling in our unconscious, allowing it is involuntarily controlling our future.
In addition, when we fail to gain self-awareness by understanding how things like our personality, religion and culture impacts our daily behaviour and decisions, we keep everything incongruent with the illusion of ourselves in our unconscious. In this way, our ignorance of who we really are keeps our conscious and unconscious separate. The greater the divergence, the more tension between the different parts of ourselves. Tension that often bubbles to the surface as feelings, thoughts and behaviour that we cannot consciously explain.
Promoting Congruence in the Resolute Life
The Resolute Life emphasizes the importance of accepting all aspects of our existence and promoting congruence between the various elements of the self, including the conscious and the unconscious. Jung calls this process Individuation, the journey toward self-actualization and integration of the unconscious into the conscious mind. The Resolute Life calls this Living with Intent, when our self-congruence matures due to our expanded awareness of Intent. It calls for the congruence of awareness and perception, the congruence of our past, present, and future, and the congruence of our different selves.
The Role of the Unconscious in Self-congruence
According to the Resolute Life, the unconscious does not represent our "true self," as some traditional psychoanalysts suggest. It is not an entity waiting to slip through the defences of our conscious mind. Instead, it is only part of who we are, but as an adult it requires significant attention because it has often been neglected due to our reliance on perception. To Live with Intent requires us to listen to the messages our unconscious send to us every day. Dreams are a prime example of messages from our unconscious. They attempt to bring important matters to our attention, whether they are unknown or suppressed issues that need resolution. Many people believe dreams are prophetic, and in a way they could be, because they provide clues about the unknown links between our past and present, indicating where we may be heading in the future.
Contradictory behaviour is another way our unconscious communicates with us. These episodes represent incongruencies between our conscious and unconscious that can give us clues around where these incongruencies still exist. Take notes of moments where what you say diverge from what you do, like when you verbally maintain you value friendships, but you continuously arrive late for meetings with your friends.
Freudian slips, or verbal mistakes linked to the unconscious mind, also offer insight. These slips may reveal repressed memories or thoughts that require congruence with our conscious mind through resolution.
Last words
Embracing the unconscious involves recognizing its role in our overall well-being and integrating its messages into our conscious awareness. By doing so, we can achieve self-congruence, leading to a more harmonious and fulfilling existence. The journey toward self-congruence is ongoing, requiring continuous effort and self-awareness. The rewards of a congruent self, characterized by inner peace, healthy relationships, and a balanced life, are well worth the endeavour.
The Resolute Life calls us to embrace all dimensions of our existence, both scientific and mystical, to gain a holistic understanding of life. By fostering congruence between our conscious and unconscious minds, we can navigate life's complexities with greater clarity, purpose, and resilience.
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