The mind of man is a dark and murky place. Its mysteries have been under development for over ten million years; one layer of complexity piled on another, from the most basic and animalistic to the most human and altruistic. As humanity struggled to overcome its animal nature shaped by the wilderness from which we have sprung to the exalted pinnacles of civilization where we aspire to be.
But in that long march of time over the endless eons, none of the old mechanisms of mind have ever been replaced; they have only supplanted by evolution with the more modern machinery of thinking. The bottom line, we cannot fight our human nature; we can only learn to live with it. A strategy for problem solving that is not consistent with our nature is destined to be ineffective as a tool in meeting its ultimate goals. In the quest to understand ourselves, just how do our minds work: the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious? And what is the difference between them? The concept of three levels of mind has been around for some time now. Sigmund Freud, the famous Austrian psychologist was probably the first to study the dichotomy of mind and popularized that study into mainstream society as we know it today. Freud has bequeathed to us a useful model of the mind, which he separated into three tiers or sections – the conscious mind or ego, the preconscious, and the unconscious mind. One way to illustrate the concept of the three minds is by using a triangle. If you imagine at the very tip of the triangle is your conscious mind. It occupies only a small portion of space at the top, a bit like an iceberg where only a fraction of it is showing above the water. It probably represents about 10% of your brain capacity. This mental capability is newly developed and untried in the march of our evolution where communication of our thoughts requires some organization and logic to be transferred onward to others. Below this is a slightly larger section that Freud called the preconscious, or what some refer to as the subconscious. It is much larger than the conscious mind and accounts for around 50-60% of our brain capabilities. This mental process keeps our ancestors alive in their fight to struggle out of the wilds of our first habitats and is usually devoid of logic and science but the preserve of intuition and feeling. The section below this is the unconscious mind. It occupies the whole width of the base of the triangle and fills out the other 30-40% of the triangle. It is vast and deep and largely inaccessible to conscious thought, a bit like the dark depths of the ocean were the basest emotions live. Your conscious mind is what most people associate with who you are, because that is where most people live day to day. It is the thin veneer of our being. It is the outer edifice of our existence that we expose to the world. But it’s by no means where all the action takes place. Your conscious mind is a bit like the captain of a ship standing on the bridge giving out orders. In reality it’s the crew in the engine room below deck (the subconscious and the deeper unconscious) that carry out the orders. The captain may be in charge of the ship and give the orders but it’s the crew that actually guides the ship that does the dirty work, all according to what training they had been given over the years to best do so. Our conscious mind communicates to the outside world and the inner self through speech, pictures, writing, physical movement, and thought. The subconscious mind, on the other hand, is in charge of our recent memories, and is in continuous contact with the resources of the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is the storehouse of all memories and past experiences, both those that have been repressed through trauma and those that have simply been consciously forgotten and are no longer important to us. It’s from these memories and experiences that our beliefs, habits, and behaviors are formed. The unconscious constantly communicates with the conscious mind via our subconscious, and is what provides us with the meaning to all our interactions with the world, as filtered through our beliefs and habits. It communicates through feelings, emotions, imagination, sensations, and dreams. It is where optimism is born and the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks that face us or the road blocks that stand in our path. I’m not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. It is the unreason of stubbornness, the thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep on thinking, to keep on hoping, to keep on reaching, to keep on working, and to keep on fighting. It is the drive rooted in the instinct for survival that got us to where we are now over the countless generations in an endless cycle of birth and death. It is where these mystic chords of our passion lie that swell when touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our natures. It will not allow us to shrink from this great mission of life and the emotions that life engenders. It is the part of us that says unto the latest generation that when we are tested we refused to let this journey of survival end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter to pass the gift of life forward; and with unreasoned eyes fixed on the horizon, we are compelled ever onward to carry forth, restore and maintain that great gift that cannot be squandered and deliver it safely to future generations. Our subconscious is the work desk of our mind. Controlling and directing it is the key to personal change. Our subconscious is a bit like the RAM in your computer; the short term memory in a computer and its job is to hold the programs and data that are currently in use so they can be reached quickly and easily by the computer processor. It’s a lot faster than the other types of memory, such as the hard disk or CD-ROM. Your subconscious works in a similar way to computer RAM. It holds short term memory and current daily used programs. Apart from short term memory, the subconscious also plays an important role in our day to day functioning. It works hard at ensuring you have everything you need for quick recall and access to when you need it. Things like – Memories – such as what your telephone number is, how to drive a car without having to consciously think about it, what you need to get from the shop on the way home etc. Current programs you run daily, such as behaviors, habits, mood Filters (such as beliefs and values) to run information through to test their validity according to your perception of the world Sensations taken in via your 5 senses and what it means to you If it doesn’t happen to have a filter or reference point in its RAM for some bits of information that come in, then it has a direct line to the storage place of the mind – the unconscious. It will ask the unconscious to pull out the programs that it best associates with the incoming data to help make sense of it all. The subconscious is also constantly at work, staying a lot more aware of your surroundings than you realize. In fact, according to the NLP communication model we are assaulted with over 2 million bits of data every second. If our conscious mind had to deal with all that you would very quickly become overwhelmed and not be able to get anything done. Instead, our subconscious filters out all the unnecessary information and delivers only that which is needed at the time, around 7 chunks of information. It does all this behind the scenes so you can perform our daily work uninhibited. And it does this as logically as it can; based on the programs it has access to in your unconscious. The subconscious is where most problems are solved. These solutions flash into the conscious mind in a flash of inspiration, logic of the conscious follows the intuition of the subconscious. It then communicates all the results into consciousness via emotions, feelings, sensations and reflexes, images and dreams. It doesn’t communicate in words, it flashes insights that we feel come out of nowhere to help us solve problems. One of the truly great things about the subconscious (and one which we need to take advantage of to affect change) is … it obeys orders! People often erroneously think that the subconscious is in charge and you are merely at its mercy. In fact it’s the complete opposite. Your conscious mind gives it the direction, the environment if you like, for which it operates in. The subconscious will only deliver the emotions and feelings of what you continuously think about. Now I’m not saying it’s as easy as changing what you think of in one moment and your entire life will be changed. In most cases your default programs have too much energy attached to them to change instantaneously. It can be done though – such as after a massive life altering event or if enough pain is associated with the old behavior – but without a major shift like that it is likely the old programs will reemerge. As an example of how the subconscious mind works, let us look at on of the greatest minds to have ever lived to see what formed it and what made it tick. Leonardo DaVinci was a great painter, designer, scientist, futurist and thinker. He also had the gift of dyslexia. One remarkable indication that Leonardo was dyslexic is in his handwriting. Leonardo was constantly sketching out his ideas for inventions. Most of the time, he wrote his notes backwards. Why did Leonardo write from right-to-left, in mirror image? Although unusual, this is a trait shared by many left-handed dyslexic people. Most of the time, dyslexic writers are not even consciously aware that they are writing this way. Leonardo's spelling is also considered erratic and quite strange. He also started many more projects then he ever finished - a characteristic now often considered to be 'A.D.D.' The way the world entered DaVinci’s mind forced his subconscious programs to compensate. How this process worked is not known but his genius was not developed on the conscious level. It was a miracle of adaptation. Everyone has their own talents and abilities that have been formed by their nature and nurture. We must identify who can do the job needed to be done and let them do it. The shaping the subconscious mind is a lifetime of effort. Let Einstein understand the universe, Michelangelo build St. Peters cathedral, and William Shakespeare write the plays. In this struggle of life our dies are cast; we must learn how to match the job with the right person. On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 9:02 AM, Peter Gluck <peter.gl...@gmail.com> wrote: > Mt dear Friends: > > I have just published: > > http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2013/04/not-lesson-but-discussion-with-young.html > > It is about logic and synthesis applied to LENR, informatiom aimed > for the many future LENR researchers and an exercise for a future > paper about LENR Meta-theory. > You will easily discover that it is a long article, perhaps much too long. > I hope some of the readers will discover other dimensions of this paper > too. > Please do not forget, it was written in order to initiate discussions. > Peter > > -- > Dr. Peter Gluck > Cluj, Romania > http://egooutpeters.blogspot.com >
