Conscious vs Unconscious

The speaker discusses the idea of growing into one's authentic self and distinguishes between conscious and unconscious decisions and actions. They explain that being fully authentic goes beyond simply doing the right thing and involves uncovering and understanding unconscious behaviors and beliefs. The speaker emphasizes the importance of examining all aspects of life and questioning societal norms and conditioning. They also highlight the joy and fulfillment that comes from living authentically and exploring life fully. The journey towards authenticity involves battling the ego and continually learning about oneself. The distinction between doing what's right and living authentically is also emphasized, with the latter being a deeper and more personal process. When we look at the idea of growing into our authentic selves and the challenges we have with all our decisions and all our actions in life, I think it's important to distinguish between our conscious decisions, conscious actions and our unconscious decisions. Because being fully authentic is not just about doing the right thing, so if you think of a conscious thing we might do, you could think of an action like committing adultery or stealing. These are kind of your classic Christian sins where we consciously do something that we know is wrong. So of course as we become fully authentic and make decisions and actions and live lives that allow us to grow into our full authenticity, yes of course we want to not do those things because they serve the ego and they bring our energy levels down and move us away from what we truly are. But I think that only covers part of it and I think your average person who's probably not into spirituality and hasn't been enlightened, that's the depth of their understanding, those sort of conscious wrongs that we do. But so much of our life is about our unconscious. We might think it's, from something that's happened in our childhood, we might think it's okay to run away from conflict or to express our anger. We might think it's okay to kind of, to not give our love to others and to withdraw ourselves. And a big one is, we might think it's, we might let our ego dictate to us that we're not worth anything and it's not worth taking risks because we're not worthy, we're not good enough. And by not, and that stops us from taking risks and having confidence and growing into our full authenticity. So we have this whole unconscious world, these limitations we put on ourselves, these kind of false beliefs that we've picked up from childhood or from society of the day. And they're not who we are either and that's why life is so challenging, if all you had to do was make consciously right decisions where there was a clear right and wrong, that would be easy. But there's all this other stuff going on and that's what the real journey of life's about. It's about trying to understand what's, what are these unconscious decisions we make, even the decision to come home from work and just sit on the couch for three hours and watch TV. Is that the authentic you or is that just an unconscious behaviour that's sort of been conditioned into us? So everything needs to be examined like that. I look at the situation where my parents feed their grandchildren lollies and spoil them. I think that's just an unconscious behaviour or belief system they have that if you dig right into it, it's probably not aligned with who they really are. It's probably not the right thing to do and it's probably setting up a system of beliefs in the grandkids about how you use your body to derive pleasure. And look, I'm deliberately picking a very innocent example but that's how tricky life is and I suppose the idea is to move as much of our unconscious world where the ego kind of lurks and stops us from stepping outside of the box and taking risks and being different and being ourselves. Another one, classic one for men, the unconscious behaviour is not to show your feelings because that's what our society and our culture does and the female example of that is not to be feminine. Women have to become a bit like men in our society to survive. That's why women in Australia and South Africa and the UK are a lot more masculine than Asian women where they have a different culture. So, so much of who we are, these kind of unconscious behaviours and belief systems, the things our society has told us, institutions like the media and business and schooling, the things religions told us sometimes and misinterpretations of messages, the things our parents and friends told us. There's all these things built into who we are which actually aren't us if we dig really deep. You know, our society, for example, doesn't really advocate giving to charity, not as a whole. Is that authentically us? You know, there's so many different examples, you know, there's the rules society has outlined for us about, you know, having to buy a big house in a good neighbourhood, is that authentically us? Is that decision really, if we dig deep down, is that about ego or fitting in with society decision that we want to get into a whole heap of debt to have a nice house to live in. So, I think the thing about, you know, is we're very conscious of rights and wrongs that are important, but the unconscious uncovering of who we are. The other thing, so that's sort of the working out who we are, the other thing is that fully being authentic shouldn't be seen as a sacrifice or giving up things, like I'm giving up the joy of sex or something or chocolate or whatever it is because I want to do the right thing. It's not like that at all. The joy comes from being authentic, to be in the moment, you know, the ego wants us to be in the past or the future, the authentic us wants to be in the moment, the authentic you wants you to use all your creativity, all your love, all your humour, experience all the joy there is, have great relationships, be physically healthy, give love or receive love. It just wants us to explore life to the absolute full and that's the great gain that's there for us. But we need to make the decision, so I think the thing I wanted to point out is that to be fully authentic or to live, and this is where I think the Christianity message of sort of sin and there's a lot of focus on the right and wrong, the conscious right and wrong where we kind of know what we're doing is wrong, whereas really what we kind of know now is we would just, psychology of our childhood and the impacts of all the institutions is that a big part of the Western world is kind of undoing all this stuff, reframing all these ideas that you need to have money and power, all the concepts, all the goals that society has put out for us, all the judgements, sort of getting all these things out of our system and uncovering who we truly are and living a lifestyle aligned with us and that's a journey because we find out as we battle with the ego and we try to feel good and we try to be authentic and we test ourselves, we find out more and more about ourselves and grow more and more into ourselves along the way, but the difference between the conscious and unconscious is very important. And I think the other thing that I'm getting at there is the distinction between doing what's right, doing the right thing and authenticity. As I said, doing the right thing is all about the conscious level. It's about whether you're doing it right or wrong, stealing, committing adultery, saying a kind thing versus saying a nasty thing, whereas growing into our authenticity is much deeper than that. It's about uncovering who we are, what's really us. Is that just a learned behaviour? Is that something society told me or friends told me? Is that some damaging message or thought process? Whereas what you really want to ask is who am I? What lifestyle do I want to lead in all these areas? How do I become a fully authentic, integrated person? So it's much, much bigger than just this doing what's right.