The nature of the unconscious

Tad James once said that "all learning was unconscious". Those familiar with NLP will know that the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson was legendary for mobilising a patient's unconscious resources.

For me this raises an interesting question - 'what is the unconscious?'

Einstein once said that we use only 10% of our available mental abilities, modern estimates put that figure down to as low as 1% or even lower. This suggests to me an idea of the power of the unconscious.

Imagine having a team of a hundred experts working for you. These people are all highly skilled and very talented. Imagine these people working ceaselessly for you. Every time you ask or are asked a question these advisors get to work on the answer, without you having to think about it. Every time you think "I wish I could juggle or play the piano" these experts begin sorting through your memories analysing how your body moves and working out what you would need to do to juggle or play the piano.

This is how I imagine the unconscious mind to be. Far more than just a store of memories, but a vast collection of highly active and intelligent parts which are always working - whether we are conscious of the results of their efforts or not.

The existence of skill

Assuming the existence of the unconscious, and assuming that it is so creative, Symbolic Learning starts with the idea - 'imagine what it would be like if every skill you ever wanted to learn was already fully developed within you, simply waiting in your unconscious mind to be discovered and externalised'!

Imagine if learning was no longer a process of taking in information from the outside, but discovering what is already there.

All that would be required would be an abundance of examples of the skill for the unconscious to model (unconsciously), a way of connecting with the unconscious skills and externalising them, and plenty of opportunity to practise - or to give it it's technical term, "play".

The only one of these three that most people seem not to enjoy to the fullest is a way of communicating with the unconsciously developed skills. In order to communicate with the unconscious we must first be able to speak its language, and the language of the unconscious is the language of symbols and metaphors - the best process is Clean Language.

Symbolic Learning

Symbolic Learning is a process whereby a facilitator uses Clean Language enable the learner to model their perceptions of their existing skill and to then integrate into that appropriate resource experiences from their past or from their imagination.

The process then uses Clean Language to facilitate the learner exploring their perceptions of excellence. Using Clean Language, skills and abilities quickly enter into conscious awareness and start to develop.

Symbolic Learning enhances the richness of the learning experience, practise becomes play, changing from an activity for which people have to work up the motivation and into something where people don't want to stop.

It seems that this approach can be used to develop almost any skill or ability, such as juggling, playing an instrument, academic and intellectual abilities and spiritual development.

The future

This description hasn't included the process, I'll include that in another article - basically I need to use the feedback from the session in the step-by-step description, and I haven't got around to doing that yet. Watch this space.

I was surprised and encouraged by the benefit people gained from using this approach when I first shared it with people at the Middlesbrough Grovian practise group. I've learned a lot about using this approach, but most of it has been on my own development. I'd love to share this with more people and see how far we can take it.

Simon Stanton

March 1998