The Unconscious

* Detailed instructions for making comments are in “News Items.”

* Candlemas is right around the corner, on February 2. I always found that this was a hard Satanic holiday to remember, as it lives on only as Groundhog Day. I hope that all of you have remembered it is coming up and have made plans for safety and to minimize the amount of misery that flashbacks may bring.

You can read about the background of Candlemas at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/candlemas/ The history of Valentine’s Day is at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/valentines-day/

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The idea of an unconscious has always seemed peculiar to me. How can I know something, remember something, feel something physically and emotionally, and not know I know, remember or feel it? When I think about that, it is really spooky.

Where are all these things I don’t know located? It’s not like I have a giant filing cabinet in my brain stuffed full of things unknown to me. Or a library of microfiches, which would take up less room. Does it have its own little corner of the brain, or does it piggyback on a part that stores things that I am conscious of?

Apparently, the conscious and the unconscious mind are pretty much the same thing, so there is no separate place for information stored in the unconscious. When things happen, the same areas of the brain light up – and almost all the brain is active in processing sensory information and storing it, whether we later can access it or not. The main difference is that trauma memories are stored as blocks of sensory information, while non-trauma memories are stored as narrative.

We, can, however, direct our awareness only to certain things; what we are doing in the moment and what we can remember if we wish. The amount of things we can easily remember is quite small compared to all the things that we have lived through. I know what I ate for breakfast this morning and one marvelous breakfast in Italy comes to mind easily but that leaves about 29,000 unaccounted for.

We can stretch our minds and get access to some stuff that was previously inaccessible. For example, I studied calculus in high school. About the only memory I have of calculus is that I spent a year studying it and that I liked it. And the phrase “asymptotically approaching zero.” The rest is lost to me – it is in my unconscious.

Now if I start studying calculus again, chunks of what I learned in high school will come back to me and I will learn more quickly than I did back then. Part of my unconscious has become once more conscious.

But I still find it spooky. How do some things get forgotten and others remembered? How can we forget something even as it is happening? This has happened to me, in everyday life, when I lost control of my car on a snowy road. I remember the moment I lost control, then nothing until I found myself in a snow bank with no idea of how far I skidded or whether I had spun or not.

It gets more complicated when multiplicity is added to the mix.

Okay, I know the theory. Trauma causes the mind to split and, if the same trauma is repeated, that split continues to evolve until it appears to have a separate identity with its own history, memories, and its own unconscious. Alter A may not know a word of German and Alter B may speak German fluently. Alter C remembers going to college and Alter D has no memories of anything that happened after age six. And all these alters may have forgotten some of the same things and so, in a very real sense, they share the same unconscious as well as having their own unconsciousnesses.

Back to how one piece of information is selected for conscious recall and the myriad other memories are not.
I fondly recall knowing a young gay man named Bobby who called himself Sonny when he went out dancing.

No problem, very normal. He only began to consider that he might be multiple when Karen came on the scene to choose whether he went out clubbing and therefore was Sonny or whether he stayed home as Bobby.

So do I have a Karen that chooses what I can remember and what stays firmly in my unconscious? I doubt it. But even if I did, it wouldn’t explain how Karen chooses. Does Karen have access to everything that happened to me? Does she have no unconscious? And what would motivate her to choose one thing to share with me and not another?

And animals? Do they have an unconscious, or do they have access to everything that ever happened to them? How could we tell, anyway?

The more I brood over these things, the spookier it gets. Multiple or singleton, the mind is mysterious and will surely not give up its secrets in my lifetime. It’s best just to accept that some things are so without worrying about why or how it works.

Guess I am lucky to have a mind, lucky to be able to ask unanswerable questions, lucky to be able to live with uncertainty.

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Upcoming Holidays

February
2/2 S Candlemas/Imbolc/Satanic Revels
2/14 Valentine’s Day
2/18 President’s Day/Washington’s Birthday
2/19 Full moon
2/25 Walpurgis Day

March
3/1 St. Eichstadt’s Day
3/5 Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras
3/6 Ash Wednesday/Beginning of Lent
3/17 St. Patrick’s Day
3/20 Full moon
3/20 Spring Equinox
3/24 Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan

April
4/1 April Fool´s Day
4/8 Day of the Masters
4/14 Palm Sunday
4/19 Full moon
4/19 Good Friday
4/20 Holy Saturday
4/21 Easter Sunday
4/26 Grand Climax/De Meur
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
3/20 – 3/21 Purim (Deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman in Persia)
4/19 – 4/27 Passover/Pesach (Deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt)
4/20 Hitler´s actual birthday
4/21 Hitler’s alternative birthday ((Note: Hitler was born on Easter, so Nazis celebrate his actual birthday and half-birthday on 4/20 and 10/20. His alternate birthday is celebrated on Easter of the current year and his alternate half-birthday six months later.)
4/30 Anniversary of Hitler’s death

(NOTE: Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas, Halloween, the solstices and the equinoxes)