The Conscious and the Subconscious Mind

The Conscious and the Subconscious Mind

“Our thoughts are mainly controlled by our subconscious, which is largely formed before the age of 6, and you cannot change the subconscious mind by just thinking about it. That's why the power of positive thinking will not work for most people. The subconscious mind is like a tape player. Until you change the tape, it will not change.”  Bruce Lipton

We all have both a conscious and a subconscious mind. Simply put, your conscious mind does all the active thinking: selectively recording whatever data and information you want to remember and reserve them for future use, while discarding whatever you consciously think is irrelevant or inapplicable to you in the future. Your subconscious mind, on the other hand, absorbs everything indiscriminately that you are exposed to, and stores it at the back of your mind in the form of emotions, feelings, and memories.

Originally, your mind is like that of a baby, which is a blank sheet of paper. Your thinking begins with your five senses—how they perceive and interpret your own life experiences. Then all these emotional, mental, and physical sensations become your thoughts or memories stored at the back of your subconscious mind. So, whenever you experience a similar sensation, your conscious mind will automatically go back to your subconscious mind to look for more clues, relevant information, or guidelines, and send out different messages back to your conscious mind, instructing it to act or react accordingly. As an illustration, a baby, who previously experienced a pleasantly tickling sensation, will begin to giggle, feeling pleased, when being tickled again, as soon as the subconscious mind sends to the conscious mind the message of that pleasant sensation previously experienced. 

Essentially, while your conscious mind is just about to make all your everyday life choices and decisions, your subconscious mind is, in fact, controlling and directing your conscious mind from behind the scene without letting you know; that is why it is called a “subconscious“ mind.

Gradually and accumulatively, all your life experiences with their own respective messages—the pleasant as well as the unpleasant, the positive as well as the negative—are all stored at the back of your subconscious mind in the form of data and memories. Over the long haul, millions and billions of such experiences and messages have become the raw materials with which you subconsciously weave the fabrics of your life, making you who and what you have now become—or so you think. In other words, they have now become your so-called “realities.”

But they are not your realities. The truth of the matter is that they are no more than your own thinking, controlled and dominated by your own subconscious mind. To illustrate, say, your conscious mind tells you to eat a healthy meal, but your subconscious mind—loaded with the images and messages of many TV commercials of mouth-watering junk food, as well as your own past delectable experiences of some of them—may tell you something totally different, and you may end up eating a burger and French fries.

Stephen Lau        

Copyright© by Stephen Lau