This morning I was considering the relationship of the subconscious mind to the conscious mind, and the best way of describing it that I could come up with is saying it’s like the evil mastermind’s less intelligent henchman… essentially it’s your conscious mind’s Igor.

The subconscious actually has more involvement in our every day, every little action, life than the conscious mind. It’s where the conscious mind sends tasks that are beneath it or too commonplace to be interesting. The subconscious, on the other hand, if it comes across a situation that’s interesting enough, or, alternatively too new and unprecedented, will flag the attention of the conscious mind.

As we go through life, we form experiences, and from these experiences we form patterns. The more experience we have in a certain area, the more detail the related patterns have, making fitting new experiences in those same areas into that pattern easier, or even finding a more specific pattern for that experience possible (ie making a cherry pie vs making a dessert vs baking vs cooking). When we have a pattern with enough detail for a new experience to fit easily, the subconscious mind takes care of handling that experience. For instance, though you may be changing lanes in a place you never have before, it probably fits the pattern of changing lanes enough that it’s handled by your subconscious, with your conscious mind being involved only in telling your subconscious mind to do it. On the other hand, if there’s a car coming right at you in your lane, this most likely doesn’t fit any pattern that you have much previous experience with (If it does, I don’t want your life!), so your subconscious spikes it back up to your conscious mind (“Hey, what do I do, what do I do?”).

Some patterns become so detailed, with so much experience, that your conscious mind doesn’t even get involved to the point of giving your subconscious mind the orders, it just expects it to be done. This would include things like breathing, chewing, and swallowing. In other areas, if your conscious mind is busy, your subconscious mind will make guesses based on previous orders from the conscious mind in similar experiences. This is what we refer to as habits. Fortunately, it weighs the most recent decisions more heavily, so that changing habits is merely difficult, not impossible.

Part of the being aware (in the sense that I use the term, here and in previous posts) is that less of this last category of experience is handled by the subconscious. As should be fairly obvious, the more situations, experiences, and choices the conscious mind is involved in, the more the likely the outcome will be what you consciously want. Also, the subconscious mind listens to (and obeys) the physical self far more often than the conscious mind… and can even influence the conscious mind in the direction of doing the bidding of the physical self. The conscious mind, on the other hand, is far more likely to listen to the spiritual self, and do what it suggests (which is, in my opinion, superior). As a matter of fact, I think the subconscious does what the spiritual self wants only when the conscious mind has set that pattern by many previous decisions… the subconscious tendency to follow the physical self makes forming habits to do so easier than forming habits to follow the spiritual self (which explains why even long-established habits fitting that description need occasional reinforcement from the conscious mind).

So, knowing that the subconscious is your conscious mind’s henchman, make sure that you keep it obedient. Being more aware means making sure that it’s keeping in line more often. Check in on it regularly, and make sure that you don’t confuse it… if you want to handle certain situations in a certain way, be consistent about doing so, and the subconscious will learn that that is the way you want it, and in the future will default in that direction, if there is no conscious direction for that specific experience.