One Body Many Minds – Getting To Know Your Overlooked And Under-estimated Subconscious Mind

‘If the unconscious is the turbid bottom of the lake of the mind,
you have to be peering down into the lake to notice it.’  
Prof Guy Claxton – The Wayward Mind

Introduction

When you begin to feel dissatisfied with what you may have been doing for many years, and you find yourself driven to make a difference, what’s most important to understand is who you want to become in order for you to make the difference.   Understanding and connecting with your subconscious mind will help you with this.

The vast majority of people wake up every day with an unconscious assumption that they have no control over their lives.  They roll out of bed and face whatever life throws at them that day, remaining oblivious of the powerhouse that is their subconscious. 

The key here is choice.  You can choose to consciously connect with your subconscious mind and with practice, reap the rewards … or not.  This article will help you to make an informed choice by helping you understanding and appreciate your subconscious mind, and to notice and translate the nudges that you are receiving.

Once you engage with the phenomenon that is your subconscious, you’ll begin to see possibility in an entirely new way.

I wanted to share a series of articles with you, which are designed to help you move from the outdated, external way of doing, to understanding the relevance of developing who you are being and who you need to become day on day, to make your difference.

It helps you to define who you need to be to make the difference that is pulling you forwards, and then putting into practice.

Being gives you the lift and weightlessness that doing is entirely without.

So, I hope that you will find the articles not only informative, but transformative as well, should you begin to put what you learn into practice.  Obviously, the second bit won’t happen if you don’t!

This article is 2 of 3 that will give you a deep insight into the role your subconscious mind plays in your day-to-day life, and how you can tap into its infinite wisdom to support you in realising and delivering your vision into the world in a much more seamless way.

In this article you will learn to what extent the subconscious mind is in charge of your thoughts, choices and behaviour.  Once you have fully absorbed this, you will realise:

• how your perception of life changes and will never be the same again, and

• you will notice that adopting the new ways of thinking and being are the tools that put you in charge of who you want to become in order to make your difference, day after day.

Not Just One, But Three Minds

You may well have lived your life under the impression that what happens day to day, how you think, function and create, are all products of your conscious mind.  The stuff that you know is happening.   

In fact, you have access to 2 other minds, (arguably 3 if we take into the account the egoic mind).  As well as your Conscious Mind, there is also your Subconscious, or Unconscious Mind, and your Higher Self – your connection to universal intelligence.

What happens in your conscious mind may be impressive, but when you consciously connect the intelligence of your conscious mind with that of your subconscious and your higher self, you plug yourself into the field where everything has a beginning.

Like learning anything new, this will take practice to get good at, and when you do, you will notice that life begins to glide.  The friction falls away and what you have been creating in your mind’s eye slides into place.  You’ll lose the sensation of having to push things forward, or the urgency that you have to make things happen.  That formula is tired and broken, and it’s probably been making you feel tired and broken too.

When you consciously develop the relationship with your unconscious mind, you fall into alignment with what wants to emerge from you, in ways that defy the imagination and become beautiful ways of achieving your outcomes.   

Aligning The Three Minds

There is a free exchange between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind, and most of us are unaware of this most of the time.   However, there is no connection from your conscious mind to your higher self.  You can only access the wisdom of your higher self by consciously connecting to your subconscious.

When you freely access your subconscious, you will be pushing open the door to the depths of your purest potential.

The Conscious Mind

The conscious mind is the narrow area of your current focus.  It is only capable of processing between 5 and 9 pieces of information at any one time.  The conscious mind has to process information sequentially.

The limited capacity of the conscious mind to focus on information explains why we are easily overloaded and how it is impossible to ‘think’ of everything.  Trying to only creates stress and deepens any anxiety.

You can mitigate this by getting your thoughts, actions and inspired ideas out of your head and into a notebook or mind map.  This will free up your conscious mind so that it can move onto something else.  While this is a great organising, self-management tool it is superficial for our purposes here.

Important:  Information is only passed up to the conscious mind from the subconscious if the subconscious determines that it is necessary to do this.  The subconscious will have distorted, deleted or generalised the information it shares with your conscious self, according to your conditioning and beliefs.  Most of these beliefs will have been created unconsciously.

The Higher Self

This has many different descriptions depending on differing beliefs.  Other common terms used are Source, The Tao, Spirit, God, Universal Intelligence and Collective Consciousness. 

What term you use is unimportant.  For the purposes of this article, I will be using the terms higher self, universal intelligence and source interchangeably.

It is impossible to access your higher self through your conscious mind.  However, you have direct access to your higher self via your subconscious.

Scientifically speaking Source is the source of all that has ever been created and all that ever can be.  All that we know about, and more, has to originate from somewhere.   This place is also known as the Zero Point Field.

The Subconscious or Unconscious Mind

Where is the subconscious mind?

The subconscious mind operates from the oldest parts of the brain.  This is made up of 5 different regions of the reptilian brain, also known as the limbic system.  All the information received by the brain is gathered up in the first place by parts of the limbic system before being relayed to the conscious mind, after being filtered for relevance.

The unconscious mind stores and organises all of your memories.  It is also the domain of your emotions.  It controls and keeps your emotions repressed or suppressed until it is safe for you to become aware of them.

What Is The Subconscious Mind?

The subconscious mind makes up all the mental activity that is occurring below the point of conscious awareness.   It is capable of processing at least 2 million pieces of information at any one time.  Some say an infinite amount.  The subconscious is responsible for taking in an almost infinite amount of data and filtering it down for processing by the conscious mind.

“The human brain produces in 30 seconds as much information as the
Hubble Space Telescope has produced in its lifetime.” 
Neuroscientist Konrad Kording

The subconscious works tirelessly, ceaselessly and largely, thanklessly in order that we may function.  So many of us in a Western-style society are oblivious to the magnitude of what it does moment to moment which allows for this seamless functioning to take place.

One of the directives of the unconscious mind is that it is responsible for the health and well-being of our physical body.  As much as 99% of the processes that keep us alive are run by the subconscious outside of our conscious awareness. 

The subconscious mind is your intuition.

The unconscious mind is developed to the age of a child between 5 and 7 years old. 

In the next article, I will be revealing who’s really in charge.

Until next time

I hope that you have found value in this article.  I’ve enjoyed sharing it with you.  If you have any questions or would like help, please get in touch.

* We all have limiting beliefs, and mostly we just don’t know how to recognise them easily.  There are ways in which unconscious limiting beliefs can be brought into conscious awareness and busted and replaced with new life-enhancing beliefs.

Sources: 
Psycademy – NLP Spiritual Practitioner and Master Practitioner Training

‘The Biology of Beliefs’ – Dr Bruce Lipton

‘Moving Through Parallel Worlds’ – Kevin L Michel