Subconscious Awareness.
The mind is a crazy beast—you just never know what’s going to enter into its subconscious. So, feed it wisely.
**To preface this article, I’d first like to say that I am not a sports fan. I don’t follow any major sports (outside of the UFC, which is questionable for even being a sport in the first place), so I really had no idea what was going on at the time.**
This morning, I woke up to a dream in which my friend, Wab*, had changed his license plate number to JLIN27 in support of Jeremy Lin who now plays on the Toronto Raptors as number 17 (I was close). Asking him “why would you do that?” he replied (being a long-time Raptors’ fan ever since I knew him since the age of 11), “because the Raptors are killing it this year!” Then… I woke up.
Scrolling through my Instagram, as I often do in the morning, I saw all of the highlights that the Raptors had just won Game 3 of the series. Shocked, I started to tell my roommate, Vish*, all about how there may be something to our “collective unconscious”—especially since I had just been watching Season 2 of the OA* the night before (if you’ve ever seen the OA or checked our Rupert Scheldrake’s talk on the JRE Podcast, you’ll know what I’m talking about, here).
To which he replied, “no, you did know.” “How?!” I protested, “my brother told us on the weekend at the movies.” He was right! Instantly, I took to Google to see if Jeremy Lin was, in fact, a Raptor—which he is—and a sudden flash came to my mind of how I had glanced over that fact a few weeks before, as it was on the front page of a newspaper that was sitting on the kitchen table at work.
Somehow, subconsciously, my mind had manifested and orchestrated an entire dream scenario with realistic and timely events without me consciously knowing about it or how it came to be. From which, I attached my own meaning and narrative behind it as being some untapped “collective unconscious”.
The story which I had attached toward the “collective unconscious”, real or imaginary (science is unsure at this point), helped propel my fantastical belief in something that was perhaps supernatural and etherial.
In sum, the simple takeaway is this (which ancient yogic texts have been championing for eons): beware that which you subject your mind to. You just never know how it will manifest or how it will drive your actions moving forward. Without proper reflection over the “why”, you can often be caught up (consciously or unconsciously) in the story that you tell yourself, versus the actuality of what is really going on.
So, take a moment; reflect; and always maintain to proceed with caution.
-perceive wisely.