An Unlikely Descent Into Intuitive Feeling: how I use social media to experience my unconscious mind

I’m warning you now. This is going to be a weird one.

This morning it hit me, and I feel I have to share it. With such a bizarre realization, it’s almost as if my unconscious is screaming to make itself known.

The primordial scream.

Those of you who have kept up with my writings know that I always seem to revolve around one topic: the unconscious mind. But to talk about the unconscious is met with often cryptic writing, so I’ll reduce it to intellectualizing vs intuitive feeling, but will use the terms interchangeably.

And weirdly enough, I’ve been finding Instagram to create that intuitive feeling more than my attempt to think my way into feeling ever has.

Worth stating— I’m not associated with Instagram in any way other than using it. In fact, I generally can’t stand social media.

Insanity

I have 4 different Instagram accounts. They started out with a specific purpose. To monetize my online redbubble store.

Something had other plans.

Before I knew it, my 4 different accounts became entirely different concepts altogether. What’s more is that my using AI-generated art, perhaps imo one of the least creative ways to make art, brought up a myriad of ways for me to understand the inner workings of my unconscious.

Problem

Have you ever tried to intuitively feel something instead of intellectualizing it? In order to do that, I believe it is best to remove your conscious self from the equation. The conscious self just muddies the waters, pushing its own agenda onto what exists underneath the surface.

If this already seems strange, think of it this way. You have a dream. Did you purposely come up with the images in your dream? The Same situation applies here — we want to be an observer of what comes up from our unconscious, without the ability to interfere with it so that it may speak clearly.

Side note — do you know what Salvador Dali did to create his art? He did something that I’ve always found fascinating. He used what is referred to as the “hypnagogic state” to draw inspiration from his self to create images. This is the state where you are falling asleep and starting to dream, more or less.

Solution

Social media. Something I swore I’d never go back to. I know the exact moment that I’d sworn off of it too, but that’s for another time. With my solution, of course, this isn’t a way for everyone to do it. But it worked for me, unexpectedly. And I’ll continue to share every experience I have at uncovering my truest self.

As I found myself on Instagram doing a post a day, I used images that I created through AI software. The AI images, purposely made visceral and abstract, started as being limited to just one account. Before I knew it, these images would be across many accounts.

No one wants to see the same image repeated though, but I couldn’t help but feel each image was relevant in its own unique way to the subject I was presenting on in each account (each account had a specific aim).

So here’s an image I used.

The image shows what looks like a geometric outline of a human inside a human. What can one obtain from this image? If it were a matter of interpreting art, which I do believe is valuable to hearing from the unconscious, we could simply ask ourselves what we make of it and leave it at that.

Instead, I have these 4 Instagram accounts with the following purposes:

1. Carl Jung-based interpretations of his teachings
2. Attempts at summarizing Medium articles through high level captions
3. Bitcoin-based
4. Ongoing story with each image

If I’m to use this image in each of these focused accounts, here is what I may come up with.

1. Inside yourself is your self. The unconscious within your conscious. This concept is incredibly hard to intellectualize, but to see abstract imagery helps people to further the idea into a deeper understanding. On its own, though? Probably not enough to have any lasting impact beyond, “huh, that’s a cool concept.”
2. The inner self is the unconscious. The outer self is you. The background is how you present your unconscious, via social media. We’re referring to this article here. Sorry, this is getting a little meta, but the idea is simple. I’m putting a visual to the process of what I’m explaining via writing. This visual allows for myself to understand my own concept through a more thorough lens. Sort of like how movies will have different filters to display colors in certain ways, to evoke certain moods or feelings.
3. If I understood bitcoin is the center of a new technology, everything that extends from it would be the resulting financial system and behavioral effects. You don’t have to feel one way or the other here, just illustrating an example.
4. The ongoing story involves me creating a story each day depending on my mood. When involving this image, I’m forced to adapt its image to what I’m currently experiencing.

How to make sense of this leap

Think of it this way. We are taking an image that we have not created (AI), and I am pushing myself to understand this image through a very specific set of lenses.

It’s effectively like analyzing dreams for clues to unconscious desires. We of course understand the pitfall of using our conscious self to interpret said imagery, but by analyzing an image through a different lens, we are forcing the conscious self to understand something in ways that it wouldn’t normally understand. It’s a challenge, one that may push to awaken an intuitive understanding.

If I am to understand what it is to feel love, how do I do it?

Am I better off creating my own definition through what I’ve observed in someone’s relationship, or am I better off having an intuitive understanding through observation of relationships, movies, and various other instances of love visualized?

It’s by observing a concept, or an object like a tree, from all different angles that we can allow for us to have a more intuitive understanding of it, rather than a lens that we are always operating under.

My lens is me, my conscious self. The conscious self consisting of core beliefs and fears that push it to operate and think it a certain way.

To experience an intuitive understanding, and potentially alter these beliefs, I must approach them in a way that doesn’t let the conscious self interfere.

We are having to trick our intellectualizing into stepping step aside.

You try it, and then we’ll go over it together

Here’s an image

Interpret it in the following framework:

1. In the lens of happiness
2. Summarizing high-level
3. In the lens of money
4. In the lens of sadness

Think hard about each, and then we’ll go over it together below.

1. Happiness — Her eyes appear fixed on something that is so powerful that everything about her melts away. The object in front of her is powerful and she wants to see it.
2. Summarizing her experience in a high-level way— Happiness happens when using only her eyes.
3. She can only see money, and loses her sense of self as it melts away.
4. Sadness — She feels herself melt away and is stuck, not knowing what to do but having a deer in a headlight look.

What have we instilled in intuitive feeling from the interpretation of this image? You tell me. But, if you’re unsure, I’d venture to guess that you may be feeling an intuitive understanding of the power of a deep appreciation for something, through how she gazes in this image, and how we’ve interpreted this gaze in many different lens.

Through ways that we wouldn’t normally think, we challenge ourselves to use different parts of our brain. While this concept isn’t going to help you achieve enlightenment, I did like it for the idea that I was able to feel an image rather than try to intellectually understand it, which I often find myself doing. I think there are certainly many other parallels that could be made to this attempt, beyond social media.