WHO’S MINING YOUR UNCONSCIOUS?

And Who’s Mining Your Children’s Unconscious?

Recently it was revealed that President Trump’s campaign data firm has been mining the unconscious of millions of people in the U.S. (and elsewhere) through data on Facebook (and perhaps other places, too) to impact election results. People at the top of this company, Cambridge Analytica, have been exposed on film in Great Britain as having the purposeful intention to find and exploit people’s inner demons, their deep fears and hopes – both the ones that are merely unspoken and the ones that are unconscious. The top people at the company actually talked about psychological profiling of people deeper into the unconscious than anyone else.  “There is no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion,” said one of the executives of the company. This company – or any other – can say that about elections, or about anything else that is truly based not on facts, but on emotions.

Mining people’s unconscious is not new in our world. Scam artists, snake oil salesmen, false prophets and more have existed since the beginning of time. Many years ago, ironically in 1984, there was a movie, “Dreamscape,” in which a government project tasked with training psychics to enter people’s dreams, purportedly to help them, ends up with a goal of assassination through dreams.

Although others mining our unconscious is frightening in any age and any form – and of course, it is frightening – more frightening still today is the part we ourselves have played in others mining our unconscious selves. Some may think our part is the outer participation in our use of the internet, and particularly Facebook.  But that isn’t the part that is of the greatest concern … for all of us.

The crucial part we have played is by our neglecting to mine our own unconscious selves. As time has gone on and we have been seduced into reaching for band-aids, trying to get rid of symptoms, looking outside ourselves, rising above ourselves, and ignoring the real deep roots of our problems, our pains, our unfulfilled hopes, our fears, our distress … we have become more and more disconnected from our own deep selves alive within our very own unconscious. As a result, we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of healing this disconnection.  And from the true help, the art, the skill, and the journey that exists to help us reconnect.

If we, the adults – the parents, the teachers, the leaders – don’t mine our own unconscious …
how are we going to teach our children to mine theirs?

If we, the adults don’t discover, face, and use for healing and growth our deepest demons, our deepest fears, and our deepest hopes …
how are we going to teach our children to do the same?

And what a setup it is for our children’s unconscious selves to be mined by others,
if we don’t help them learn to mine their own.

Mining our own unconscious needs to be part of the fabric of truth and love at the foundation of our work with ourselves and our work with our children.
Mining our own unconscious needs to be part of the fabric of truth and love at the foundation of our work in our families, our communities, our countries, our world.

This is core to what I help people do with themselves – for themselves, for the sake of their children, and for the sake of our world.

© 2018 Judith Barr