Hello everybody. I hope your final exams and preparations are going well. Throughout the semester, Eben emphasized the importance of self-reflection: thinking about if law school is really the right choice, etc. Although thinking about what you want to do and what you want to be may sound like a simple thought-process, I frankly had/have some difficulties in my journey to self-discovery.

What I had the most difficulties with was trying to distinguish my conscious will/choice from my unconscious beliefs/needs. We talked in class about how most of our judgments and choices are not a product of our rational thinking but a product of complex system of subconsciousness and conscious processing/justifications.

I think I was under the impression that when I am making a choice about my career path, I wanted to exercise my "rationality" which was based on my conscious choice rather than my subconscious thoughts that I was not in charge of. What fueled my thought between this consciousness-subconsciousness dichotomy was our discussion about the sewage system. We do not make conscious, rational choices in maintaining the sewage system, but mechanically sustain the system based on its preexisting establishments. I thought my decision making process could be analogized to that sewage system. I thought until now, I had been mechanically making decisions about what to do with my life, what actions to take without really thinking through the rationality behind the choices. Beginning from this thought, I had a misconception that I need to adhere only to my rational judgment rather than being guided by my subconscious. While reading some psycho-dynamic theories (more particularly by Jung) I think I have reached another stage in my thought process.

Contrary to my earlier beliefs that true reflection comes from being true to your "conscious" decisions, I think these convictions were totally false. I may change my mind again but I think true "reflection" comes from understanding that sometimes your thoughts are a product of your subconscious. You don't necessarily have to dismiss certain actions simply because you feel like they are guided by your subconscious. Rather, self-reflection comes from understanding why you make certain decisions accounting for both conscious and subconscious reasons. In this way, your understanding of your judgments and decisions become more holistic. I think from better understanding of how you make your decisions, you become one step closer to who you are.

I just wanted to share my thought process with you and possibly get responses on your road to self-reflection.

-- MinKyungLee - 04 May 2012

I would be very intrigued to know what methods you have found to peer into your own subconscious through basic personal self-reflection. I have long operated under the belief that a person isn't able to use her conscious mind to directly communicate with her own subconscious. Granted something like administration of a Rorschach Test or hypnosis might allow certain types of subconscious impressions or thoughts to be revealed, but I didn't think that one could simply think deeply and pierce the curtains of one's own mind. I hope this doesn't come off as challenging or doubtful. I am merely curious what type of self-reflection you're talking about and have been using. I wonder if there has been some confounding of the meaning of "subconscious" and "irrational." A conscious thought may be either rational or irrational without requiring any perception of the subconscious. (I operated under the assumption that you were using subconscious to mean the same thing that many Freudian psychoanalysts would call unconscious)