This portrait was done in oil on Arches paper. The preliminary sketch below was done with markers. The image at the bottom was digitally enhanced.
Transliminality is a perceptual-personality construct developed by the late parapsychologist Michael Thalbourne. Wikipedia defines it as "hypersensitivity to psychological material (imagery, ideation, affect, and perception) originating in (a) the unconscious, and/or (b) the external environment." This sensitivity can be conceptualized as a thinness of the boundary between the conscious and unconscious components of the mind. Transliminality is correlated with intelligence, creativity, mystical experiences, and madness.
My own transliminality hasn't been clinically scored. And the medical usefulness of the concept is questionable at best. Nonetheless, I identify as highly transliminal. And when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 37, the idea of transliminality helped me make sense of the diagnosis.
My doctors said I had a chemical imbalance in my brain but showed me no chemical measurements to support this claim. They prescribed medication that disabled brain function in a useful way and told me it was correcting the unmeasured imbalance. I accepted the diagnosis and the meds, but questioned the epistemological soundness of the information I was given. Discarding the dubious science of unmeasured chemicals, I instead began considering the meds to be a device for thickening the thin boundaries of my transliminal mind.
Framing my mental illness in these terms explained the impact of the meds on my consciousness completely. I started sleeping every night and my dreams became less vivid. Little things bothered me less. The urgency of temporary obsessions was reduced. It was as if unconscious material that had always been nearby was being kept at a distance. I could still perceive the material from this distance, and interpreting it became somewhat easier.
Important Messages
Most unconscious material is completely useless in our manufactured ecologies. But the unconscious occasionally transmits messages of critical importance. Learning to identify and process these messages takes time. I've been at it for years and am always discovering new things.
The most reliable way of doing this that I've found involves a three part procedure. Step one is to act without thinking. Step two is to create a psychological space that interrogates the action without judgement. Step three is to note the action's motivations and implications. Performing this procedure continuously is like holding an ongoing dialog with the unconscious.
This dialog can be enriched by giving synchronicities special attention. Any coincidence that feels meaningful probably is meaningful. Interpreting this meaning takes practice. If the clock reads 12:34 a few days in a row, maybe it means something, but it probably isn't that big of a deal. Dreaming about an unusual animal and then seeing the animal, on the other hand, might warrant closer inspection.
I recently started joking about having a midlife crisis. And it's true that I've started making some changes to my appearance and elsewhere in my life. But it's also true that these changes are all part of a conscious effort to bring everyday life into better alignment with lessons from the unconscious. When my unconscious tells me to pay attention to something, I do it. This year, it's been highlighting how the world is transforming, drawing my focus to all the various forms of newness manifesting in this transformation.
Unconscious Choices
Religious perspectives that consider one or more deities to be responsible for what happens don't really do it for me. Some new age philosophy sets deities aside and holds that we are guided through our lives by 'higher selves' which are like little gods. Maybe there are people out there who are fully conscious of their higher selves, but I'm not among them. Consequently, I see no reason to differentiate between the higher self and the unconscious mind.
In my experience, the unconscious makes decisions and the conscious mind rationalizes these decisions. The conscious mind may choose what to pay attention to, but the rest seems mostly automated. If this is true on for individuals, then maybe it's also true on a social level. Groups of people, communicating material from their unconscious minds to each other unconsciously, do often seem imbued with a group mind beyond their summed individual intelligences. Perhaps I'll dedicate a whole post to this subject at some point in the future.