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The Mind—
Conscious and Subconscious
We live in two worlds: the physical world of the body and spiritual world of the mind. And we have two minds: the conscious mind that rules our physical world and the subconscious mind that is in charge of our spiritual world.
The conscious mind can handle only a limited amount of information, only what is coming through our five physical senses at that moment. Therefore, it is very much the now of what is happening at this instant. This means that, like the small end of a funnel, only a small, fixed amount of information can go through it at one time.
Think of the conscious mind like Doppler radar. It might show your local weather; however, there is much more weather—perhaps, something very dramatic—out there beyond what is visible on the screen. People who are not aware of anything other than what is going on in their conscious, visible, objective, concrete worlds don’t have “the whole picture.” It is as if they are “asleep” to the world beyond what they can see.
The subconscious mind pertains to the invisible world beyond the immediate view on the radar screen. It is a storage mechanism for everything we have ever seen, heard, tasted, touched, smelled, or imagined. Everything that all our ancestors have experienced is stored there as our genetic memory.
The subconscious mind is like the large end of the funnel. It can handle millions of functions at one time. It is the part of the mind that controls all of our “automatic” physical body functions, and it manages all of the cellular and chemical functions within our bodies.
Because the subconscious part of our minds operates within the invisible spiritual dimension, we understand that in that world there is no time. We can think forward into the future and backward into the past. There is also no space. We can imagine something very large or very small in an instant. This part of our mind is not limited by the three dimensions of space: height, width, and depth or the fourth dimension: time.
Our link that connects the physical world of the body and the spiritual world of the mind is our awareness of being. This awareness of being exists in the invisible world of spirit where God exists. When we increase our conscious awareness, then that unlimited part of the mind is no longer subconscious, but rather it becomes inner conscious. We can begin to use this infinite store house of information to intentionally create an amazing life.
Sleep is the natural state of the subconscious mind. When we physically go to sleep, the subconscious part of us awakens and continues to function even though we are not aware of it. The subconscious mind is responsible for our dreams.
Similarly, intuition and “psychic” information comes into our conscious mind from the subconscious when our conscious mind is turned off—when we are sleeping, meditating, or performing those monotonous, automatic tasks that do not require focus, such as showering, driving, running, cycling, or daydreaming.
The word “psychic” bothers some people. Let me assure you that, in my experience with many, many patients, precognitive experiences are a normal phenomenon for the great majority. A great number of people have had the experience of knowing who is calling on the phone before answering it, thinking about someone who calls a few minutes later, or knowing or dreaming something will happen before it happens.
In fact, this mental/emotional activity is our nature, part of our survival system. But most of us have underdeveloped this trait or not developed it all, probably because we have been taught that either this trait is evil or not scientific. It is as though we have the ability to read but either do not have books or are afraid to open the books we do have.
Let me give you an example of a precognitive dream. Six times during my life, I have dreamt about someone driving a hearse. Each time, except once, within two weeks, the person in my dream who was driving the hearse died. When I dreamt about my father driving a hearse, I was able to get him into a doctor who discovered a brain tumor, which was treated, and my dad lived for eight more years.
If the conscious mind is limited and the subconscious mind is so infinite, it makes sense to me that we need to learn as much as possible about how to make the subconscious mind work for us.
Because there is so much evidence that these subconscious phenomena do occur often, should we not ask: “If we can use our mind to create an amazing life, why do most of us not have everything that we desire?”
The reality is that we do. Everything we currently have in our lives, we have created in some way, consciously or subconsciously.
We might not want to believe this, especially if our lives are a little messy, but the truth is that what we are experiencing now is what we have been thinking about or feeling in the past. Or to say it another way, “If you want to know what you’ve been thinking about, look at what you are experiencing right now.”