Subconscious Mind

While we are aware of the powerful activities of our conscious minds, the relatively immense power of the subconscious mind functions silently in the background. It regulates a cornucopia of bodily functions while monitoring our sensory inputs, regulating our attitudes and behaviors and providing a bridge to the cosmos through universal mind. Our total sensory inputs alone account for roughly three million bits of data per second. In contrast, our conscious mind is capable of processing about sixteen bits per second.

Bruce Lipton (The Biology of Belief), using a computer analogy, refers to the subconscious mind as a hard drive that stores all of the programs that run our behaviors. He points out that most of these programs have been downloaded uncritically into our subconscious minds during a long window of impressionability in early childhood. This open window of malleability begins at conception and extends through early childhood until independent judgment arises in the young mind at about age ten. It accounts for the profound ability of young humans to master languages and learn an entire culture in a very short time. It also accounts for the internalization of the attitudes, behaviors and total world view of adults in the immediate vicinity of the child. These are swallowed whole and accepted as truths. These "truths" become the programs that control the attitudes, choices and behaviors exhibited throughout an entire human life. This is the basis of the Jesuit boast:"Give me a child to the age of seven and you may do whatever you wish with him afterward." The essential conditioning of the child's life has been laid down by that time.

Our ego consciousness resides in the conscious mind. We think that our identity lives there as well. We think that our choices are made there. We think that "we", as the ego self, are directing our lives. If we are relatively sophisticated about the role of thought in creating our world, we think that this conscious mind is the seat of that process of world making. We think that we can control our thoughts and therefore control our outcomes in life. This is a nice intellectual theory. It certainly feeds our ego. It is partially true but fatally incomplete.

Who is driving? The programs running in the subconscious mind, that's who. The ego-directed conscious mind is chattering away about "me, me, me" and my importance, my choices, my achievements, my control, blah, blah, blah, while the subconscious mind is silently, invisibly calling the shots from the background. So who are you anyway? You are the content of the various programs hardwired into your subconscious mind with a veneer of rationalizations overlaid by your conscious mind that smooth over the rough edges of your "self". Sorry.

This is pretty insulting to my big important "self". Beyond that, it leads to a feeling of hopelessness that sticks in my craw. Apparently, the realization of the control of human lives by subconscious programming has come to the attention of plenty of other people. This goes back into antiquity and extends to the operators of the self-improvement industry. It has become obvious to many that positive thinking doesn't work. It's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's purely a conscious mind activity that doesn't really touch the roots of behavior so it's partly delusional. So, what is to be done? We'll reprogram the subconscious, that's what.

This is an interesting task, this programing of the subconscious mind. There is very little actual contact between the conscious and subconscious compartments of the mind. The subconscious does not respond to ideas, that is, to talk. It responds to environmental inputs and to emotion. Environmental cues can directly trigger defensive action to protect the life and wellbeing of the individual. An observed pattern of movement might suggest the presence of a predator and cause the subconscious to trigger a fight or flight reaction. In addition to the train of physiological changes that are part of the fight or flight response, the conscious mind would register an emotion, fear, that corresponds to the perceived risk to the organism. The conscious mind in this case has shared in the biochemical arousal of the organism in response to a perceived threat. This demonstrates the existence of a functional link between the conscious and subconscious departments of mind.

This link between the departments of mind is a two way street. If the conscious mind perceives a threat in the environment and responds with fear, this fear is communicated to the subconscious mind which mobilizes the same fight or flight responses that are triggered by a direct environmental stimulus. This is an indirect, slower path to the same physiological changes. The subconscious mind, then, responds to signals from the conscious mind if they are emotional in nature or, at least, driven by emotion. Otherwise, it seems to pay no attention to the constant babblings of the conscious mind.

An interesting aspect of the subconscious is that it cannot seem to distinguish between its direct perceptions of the world and imagined perceptions of the world created by the creative conscious mind. It will respond to the imagined perceptions, that is the inventions of the conscious mind, as if they were actual perceptions as long as they are accompanied by emotion. In this way, it can be fooled. We can lie to it and it will do its best to make that lie a reality. This is a double edged sword. Worriers cause harm to themselves, both physiological (internal) and by the manifestation of negative outcomes (external) through this mechanism. At the same time, this is the key to changing the programming of the subconscious mind and, therefore, the manifested world of the individual. This is the path of breadcrumbs leading out of the forest.

Throughout history, people have devised a number of methods for reprogramming the subconscious mind. Some have been discovered unintentionally. Others have been the product of analytical, focused thought. Any number of variants of these schemes can be devised and practiced according to personal taste and inclinations. To the extent that they conform to the true nature of the conscious and subconscious departments of mind, they will all work. We are free to choose any that we are most comfortable with or to invent our own recipe based on our own intuitions. In any case, the proof of any method is in its outcomes. It must be personally tested. I suggest that we apply the test of Jesus:"By their fruits Ye shall know them".

I will return to this discussion in future posts. In the meantime, I invite you to help me to clarify my understanding. Talk back.