by Michael McKee
But you can remember that sometimes you see things and sometimes you miss them don’t you. And you can think of a time when you were looking for something in plain sight and looked and looked and when you came back later there it was all along. And isn’t it interesting to note that the unconscious mind can choose just what to notice and what not to notice.
There is a story of Milton Erickson who once went into a factory and noticed that the workers there could talk to each other and understand each other but that he couldn’t hear a word they were saying because of the loud background noise of the factory. He realized the unconscious mind can choose to not notice certain things.
And there is another story of the town of Niagra Falls which was right next to the famous waterfalls. One morning the residents of the town all ran to each other and asked what was that loud noise. It took an outsider to remind them what silence sounded like… they had acquired the ability to totally tune out the noise of the falls and when the river was diverted to the falls could be reinforced because they were collapsing they hadn’t made the transition to hearing without the background noise.
Now it is interesting that those people could go other places and find the lack of background noise quite natural but in their lives the unconscious mind had learned to simply tune out the noise of the falls.
And isn’t it interesting to speculate just how your unconscious mind can manage to undergo the experience of not noticing to notice things?
Take for example the color blue. It can be true blue but it can also be an emotional state.
And I don’t know just how exactly your unconscious mind can make the switch to thinking of blue as only the feeling. That’s right. There are many colors and for the next while your unconscious mind can forget to remember that feeling color and forget to even remember the name for that color that you don’t need to notice.
And you can notice many things. You can notice the color of the grass or the color of the tea you had back then for breakfast but isn’t it easy to forget to remember that you don’t need to even notice that particular color. You might even be surprised that others notice some things that you don’t but that is only natural.
You are trained to notice some things that others notice so it is very easy to let others notice some colorful things that you simply don’t notice. And you can not notice so easily….
For some things are here and some other things are over there and some other things are off color but we don’t need to make jokes just yet.
So letting the off color be off the other end of the spectrum of consciousness you can think of innuendo and maybe even make jokes of a different kind but some things are simply easier to not take notice of like the speck of mascara on the old lady’s face that belongs only around her eyes or the bad joke that are so easy to forget that you might as well have not noticed in the first place.