Be Conscious About Your Subconscious

Because it decides a lot of what you do

This time let us consider matters of the subconscious. Your subconscious mind has been creating events for you throughout your life. Indeed, nothing can occur in your life without the activity of your subconscious mind causing it to happen. Your subconscious mind will do only what you consciously or unconsciously tell it to do.

You may have heard that your mind is like an iceberg, with 9/10ths of it below the level that we can see. An iceberg illustrates the differences between the conscious and subconscious aspects of our Mind. The tip of the iceberg represents the conscious mind - your awake, reasoning aspect of mind. That part of the iceberg, which is submerged beneath the water line, is symbolic of the subconscious aspect of mind - an incredible memory repository. More importantly, your subconscious mind is in direct contact with, what is referred to as Universal Consciousness, represented by the ocean surrounding and extending far beyond the iceberg. 

Our conscious awareness is like the tiny exposed part of the iceberg where our logical, rational, and sequential mind resides. We reason, doubt, and demand substantiating evidence. Our subconscious awareness is like the huge submerged part of the iceberg. We visit this part rarely, except through dreams, meditation, hypnosis and infrequent “aha!” experiences. This is where memories, dreams, imagination and creativity reside, a theoretical “place” full of powerful, mostly untapped and often unknown resources. Subconscious thought processes may play a crucial role in many of the mental facilities we prize as uniquely human, including creativity, memory, learning and language.

Roughly 10 per cent of our thought-processing occurs within the conscious part of our mind. The other 90 per cent or so of our thoughts and decisions take place in our subconscious mind. It permanently records absolutely every sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch that we experience -- every single one -- from birth to death. Beyond contention, it is the most sophisticated computer we shall ever see; at least in our lifetimes, and possibly ever. More than one hundred million separate neurons (brain cells) functioning up to a million times every quarter of a second. 

With each of life’s experiences, a mental tape is created. Each and every time we talk about, write about, or even just think about, a sight, smell, taste, touch, sound, or experience that we’ve encountered, a new and duplicative tape is recorded within our subconscious. This is what enables us to visualize things that are not actually in front of us.

If you see an object which has four legs, and a flat surface about three feet off the ground, you instantly recognise it as a ‘table’. You could walk into a room you’ve never been in before, see an object matching this description but of a design you’ve never come across and made of a material you’ve never seen, and yet you would put something onto this ‘table’ without a second thought.

Your subconscious mind is the real brains behind what you do. It does most of your thinking, and it decides a lot of what you do. When you’re awake, your conscious mind works to evaluate a lot of these thoughts, make decisions and put certain ideas into action. It also processes new information and relays it to the subconscious mind.

Surprisingly, it is the subconscious that can be in control of our behaviour most of the time. This is the reason people find it very difficult to stop smoking - they have consciously decided that smoking is bad for their health, costs a fortune, is ruining their breath, etc. However, they have not taken into account their subconscious reasons for wanting to carry on smoking. Go back to the iceberg analogy; if the little bit at the top wants to go one way and the huge bit at the bottom wants to go the other way, guess who’s going to win?

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Thought for the Week

“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”
Jean Cocteau
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First published in Gray Matter - The Hindustan Times