We will now formally begin our discussion on the subconscious mind. You’ve probably heard a great deal of stories and, no doubt, apocryphal tales regarding what the subconscious mind is and what it is capable of. Very often the subconscious is described as an aspect of our mind that contains a sort of reservoir of our endless potential. It is often suggested that, if we could only tap into this potential at will, then we could truly accomplish anything. In fact, many self-help gurus are generally, in one way or another, attempting to teach you how to reach your full potential. They do this by offering positive suggestions for behavior as well as effective mental techniques, usually in the form of meditation, that we can use to improve ourselves on a deeper level of awareness. I believe that this deeper level of awareness which they seem to be appealing to is actually the subconscious mind. However, the particular thing that we’ve come to know as the “subconscious” is something of a mystery to most people and there’s probably no real consensus on what it actually is. For some, the term simply refers to certain automatic and involuntary regulatory functions in your brain. This can include your brain’s ability to regulate your body’s temperature, blood pressure or breathing for example.

          For others, especially in the psychology community, the subconscious is largely seen as a less aware section of your mind that is able to use past thoughts and experiences to affect your current behavior in a relatively automated way. A newer more recent interpretation of the subconscious, one which has made waves in both self-help and spiritual communities, is the aforementioned suggestion that the subconscious is a reservoir of endless potential and untapped power. But just what is the subconscious mind really? And just how powerful is it actually? Well, I will provide what I believe is the main answer to these questions, and many others like them, based on my own experiences and personal experiments. In this chapter, I’d like to present to you my perception of the mind overall but from a more structural theoretical perspective. This, I believe, is the most important step in understanding what the subconscious mind truly is and how to access its capabilities.

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MIND DUALITY

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In psychology, it has historically been commonplace and accepted mainstream practice to model the mind as a thing that exists with different specialized parts. The term subconscious was initially coined by Pierre Janet in the late 1800s and largely referred to a latent but more automated part of the mind that can affect your personality. It can also become more active at times and enable different mental abilities including increased creativity. Sigmund Freud however felt the term “subconscious” was largely a misnomer and felt uncomfortable using it. He instead coined the term “unconscious mind” in its place and modeled the mind overall as a kind of machine with 3 separate parts – the preconscious, the conscious, and the unconscious.

          The preconscious acts as a kind of mechanism that regulates what is accessible to the conscious mind while the conscious mind represents what we are fully aware of at any given moment. This includes our thoughts, observations and desires. The unconscious mind consists of our feelings, memories, and reactions and is not directly accessible to our conscious mind’s awareness although it can still have a strong effect on our behavior. There are other models of the mind which have been suggested by other psychologists as well. Now I’m certainly neither trained nor qualified as a psychologist. However, as something of an enthusiast on this topic, I’d like to take a stab at this mind-modeling practice as well. In this book, we will look at the model of mind that I’ve come to believe in based on my own observations and dealings with what I refer to as the subconscious. The structure of the mind which I will present and describe in detail in this chapter, and throughout the book, will have some similarities to previous structures of mind suggested by psychologists but, in many ways, will also be very different.

          In particular, I’ve come to view the mind as being made up of two main structures or parts. These structures are very diametrically opposed to each other and act like opposites in many ways. For this reason, I find it useful to think of these structures like charged particles with one being positive and the other being negative. I like to refer to one of these structures as the negative mind and the other structure as the positive mind. I find it very useful to both understand and analyze the operations of the mind by perceiving it through the lens of a positive and negative. I believe you will come to appreciate this formalism too as you continue to read through this book and especially when you start practicing some of the techniques we will discuss in later chapters. Eventually, we will outgrow this formalism somewhat as we learn more details about the subconscious. However, it is still very useful when first learning about the structure of mind that I’ve come to believe in. Let’s now begin discussing these two structures in detail and start off with the one that should be very familiar to you and easy to understand.

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CONSCIOUS MIND

 

The first of the two main mind structures I’d like to discuss is the one that is classically thought of simply as your conscious mind. I like to think of this structure as your negative mind. It should be noted that there isn’t anything that’s actually negative, as in bad, about your conscious mind of course. Just as there isn’t anything that’s actually bad about an electron that has a negative charge. “Negative” is simply a term that is used to acknowledge that it is somewhat opposite in nature to something else. Throughout this book, I will use the terms conscious mind and negative mind interchangeably to refer to the same aspect of the mind. Now you probably have a pretty good idea of just what your conscious mind is already but still, let us go through the motions and describe it in detail anyway just in case.

          Your conscious mind is essentially the part of your mind that has free will. It’s the part that enables you to freely choose to do and think whatever it is you want. If I want to move my body to get up and make a cheeseburger or if I want to add 2+2 or think about which pair of sneakers I want to buy, I can easily choose to do all of this by using my conscious mind. There is also an important property of the conscious mind which occurs as a necessary consequence of its freedom of will. Namely, your conscious mind generally has a great deal of clarity of thought which helps you to think in a very logical and clear-headed way. This is because in order for your thoughts to be truly free and manipulated purely according to your own will and wishes, it must not function under any kind of coercive force or influence that is able to force you to choose something. Such a condition would impede upon the very concept of “free” will. Thus in an ideal sense, your negative mind has complete freedom of thought which allows it to be very logical and clear-minded.

          There is a bit more to say about the negative mind, especially as it relates to the other ways in which it is opposite the positive mind. However, I’d like to take care and explain more about the negative mind slowly throughout the coming chapters. This is mainly because we will be exploring the negative mind in terms of how it is different from the positive mind. However, you should now have a pretty decent idea of just what your negative mind is and may even feel that this is the only mind you have. However, as you will see, there is a whole other side of your mind that functions very differently from the intuitive part of the mind that you know about.

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THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

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The second part of the two mind structures we’ll discuss is probably the much more interesting and far less intuitive one of the two. This second structure is what I believe has often been referred to as the subconscious mind in modern-day, new-age circles. While there may be some similarities to the more classical description of the subconscious mind, I believe the definition of the subconscious that I present here is much more compatible with the modern new age definition. And, as you may have guessed, I will also refer to the subconscious mind as your positive mind. Again, the term positive doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the good part of your mind. It is just a term to acknowledge that it operates in a somewhat opposite way to that of your negative mind. Going forward I will use the terms subconscious and positive mind interchangeably to refer to the same thing. That being said, just what is the subconscious mind? What functions of the mind are relegated to it which cannot be carried out by the conscious mind and in what ways is this mind opposite the conscious mind?

          Well, the topic of the subconscious mind is actually a very broad one and as such it would be very difficult to answer these questions in a quick fashion here and now. Instead, we’ll take our time and answer many of these questions slowly over the course of several chapters and really throughout the book. With each passing chapter, you will begin to get a better and more intuitive feel for just what the subconscious mind is and how it works. I believe this approach to be preferable because, despite using your subconscious your whole life, you likely have not been using it at a completely conscious level – hence the term “subconsciously aware”. Unlike the negative mind, the positive mind operates in a rather strange and kooky way that is not very intuitive and takes some getting used to. However, there is one main topic regarding the subconscious that I would like to discuss in this section. I’d like to acknowledge that, just as you can think with your conscious mind, you can also think with your subconscious mind as well. These two parts of the mind each have their own kinds of thoughts that can be distinguished from each other. The type of thought that we’re usually referring to when we discuss the act of “thinking” is generally the one expressed by your negative mind. These thoughts are usually very clear, distinct, and easy to control. Subconscious thoughts on the other hand are a whole other animal and will be discussed in pieces throughout this chapter and later ones.

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SUBCONSCIOUS QUANTIZATION

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          You may be curious to know what it means to think with your subconscious mind and why it’s something that seems to have a learning curve to it. After all no one needed to teach you how to control thoughts with your conscious mind. You’ve naturally been controlling these thoughts at will practically all day every day for your entire life. Well, recall earlier that it was mentioned that the subconscious and conscious minds are opposite each other in a lot of ways. From our discussion so far, we know that the conscious mind ideally has complete freedom and uninhibited control over its thoughts. But if that’s true and these two minds really are opposite each other in many ways, then this actually gives us a hint about what one of the properties of subconscious thought might be. As you might have guessed, your subconscious mind doesn’t have the same ability to freely express thoughts as your conscious mind can. In fact it really lacks this capability. Your subconscious is much more constrained in terms of what type of thoughts it’s allowed to think at any given moment.

          It is this characteristic of constrained thought that is probably one of the strangest and least intuitive aspects of the subconscious mind. I believe that most people are aware of this phenomenon to a degree but don’t necessarily think of it in terms of a constrained form of thought expression. When you hear people say things like “I subconsciously did this” or “I subconsciously believed that”, they’re actually referring to the constrained nature of subconscious thought expression. In these instances, they’re referring to an urge to think or do something that wasn’t entirely chosen by them on a conscious level. Usually, such occurrences are dismissed as a kind of automated response by their subconscious mind. However, that is not entirely accurate. Although subconscious thought can feel very automatic and computerized at times, it is important to remember that some part of your awareness is still doing the work expressing itself to think in a certain manner. It’s just that part of you is constrained in terms of what it’s allowed to think so, to the conscious mind which is used to complete freedom of thought, this constrained form of thinking looks automated.

          This special property that your subconscious mind has that causes it to become constrained in its expression of thought is one I like to refer to as quantization. I use this term specifically because it reminds me of how particles at the quantum level are only allowed to gain or lose energy in discrete amounts and not in a continuous way. In other words, nature, in a sense, quantizes how particles are allowed to gain or lose energy. Similarly, thoughts with your positive mind are limited to only certain forms of expression at a time. In a certain sense, they are quantized in a similar manner to the way energy is quantized at the quantum level. In practice, this means that the subconscious will only be allowed to think certain thoughts whenever it has become quantized to and isn’t allowed to think any other kind of thoughts during that same period of quantization.

          For example, let’s say that I want to imagine a ball roll down the street. I can do that very easily and at any time I wish to with the conscious mind because I can control these thoughts with complete freedom. But doing this with the subconscious mind on the other hand is very different. If I want to imagine a ball rolling down the street with my subconscious mind, I have to get it to become quantized to do that first. Otherwise, I won’t be able to think this simple thought at the subconscious level. This phenomena of quantization is one of the most important properties to understand about the subconscious mind because unless I know how to properly quantize subconscious thought, I will never really be able to control it.

          In fact, this is the main reason most people simply stick to focusing on the thoughts of their negative mind because it’s so much easier to control. To nicely categorize things a bit further here, I find it useful to establish what I call control paradigms for both minds. Thoughts from your conscious mind can be controlled with complete freedom at will and follow what I like to call the free will paradigm of control. However, subconscious thought can only be controlled according to the way your subconscious has become quantized and therefore follows what I like to call the quantization paradigm of control. We will discuss this quantization paradigm and what it means in practice in great detail throughout the book.

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SUBCONSCIOUS ENERGY

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Another important property of the subconscious that separates it from the conscious mind is that it has the ability to think or express itself in a more or less energized way. In another sense, you could say that your subconscious thoughts actually have a component of energy to them. This is in contrast to the negative mind where thoughts all seem to occur at a relatively fixed level of “energy”. For example when you think normal everyday thoughts with your negative mind such as “I have to go to the store to buy groceries” or “What should I wear today” or when you move your body – you probably wouldn’t describe these acts of thinking as having a specific component of energy to them. You just sort of think of them with no particular feeling of them being more or less energized from one moment to the next. It's as if these thoughts function outside of the concept of “energy”. There are some exceptions to this however. For example, using your free will to move your body could, from a certain perspective, also be described as having a component of energy to it as well. One could describe moving your body in a very fast and explosive way as having more energy than moving your body in a slow and less explosive way. Similarly, it is also possible for your conscious mind to simply “will” something very strongly or weakly at any given moment. This too could be thought of as having an energy component to it. However, this kind of energy is not transient in nature and doesn’t need to “build up” in the way that subconscious energy has to. This will be elaborated on in more detail in the next chapter. However, it is mainly for this reason that I like to think of thoughts from your conscious mind as not really having a component of energy to them.

          As you might expect, the energy component of thoughts expressed by the positive mind cannot be controlled directly at will. Because of this and because it has to be built up in a transient way, the energy component of subconscious thought tends to remind me of the more classical concept of energy in physics. Because of this similarity, I like to think of the subconscious as having an ethereal-like substance associated with it that I simply refer to as subconscious energy. In many cases, I will simply use the terms subconscious and subconscious energy interchangeably to refer to the same thing.  Thus by learning how to control thoughts expressed by your positive mind, you will also be learning how to control your subconscious energy too. This is very important because you will begin to understand how your mental capabilities actually change when your subconscious thoughts gain more and more energy. In many cases, these changes can be quite dramatic as a result of these energy differences.

          We will discuss what specific mental abilities the positive mind is capable of and how they’re affected by your subconscious energy in more detail in chapter 3. However, for now, I’d like to mention that one of these abilities includes your ability to express emotion. You’ve probably wondered at least a few times in your life just what your emotions really are, where they come from, and how they work. You’ve probably asked yourself these questions and wondered why it is that you cannot simply control them at will like you can with your normal thoughts. Well, the answer has to do with the fact that emotions are actually a mental ability that comes from your positive mind and not your negative one. This in turn means that they follow a quantization paradigm and can only be expressed in the manner that your subconscious has become quantized to allow. In learning how to control your subconscious, you will learn what factors affect subconscious quantization and will be able to come "close" to controlling your emotions in a way that mimics the control you have with normal negative-minded thoughts. Although to be clear you can never really control your emotions with this same degree of freedom and instantaneity. But you can still achieve a great deal of control over them that goes beyond what most people will probably ever reach because they don’t actually know how to control their subconscious.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF INTENT

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In the previous section, it was mentioned that the subconscious follows a quantization paradigm where it is only allowed to express certain types of thoughts at a time. You’ve probably wondered what exactly determines the state of subconscious quantization. For example, if I want to imagine a ball rolling down the street using my positive mind instead of my negative one, how I do get my subconscious to become properly quantized to express this thought? Well, this is actually a rather complicated answer and is one which we will discuss in more detail throughout the coming chapters. For now, it is enough to say that your intent – which actually comes from the conscious or negative mind – quantizes your positive mind. I like to think of your conscious mind’s intention as a sort of command that is obeyed by the subconscious mind. Yet it is still true that you cannot necessarily control the subconscious mind using intent alone. Intention only quantizes your subconscious mind. You still have to actually think with your subconscious mind to control it properly too. This will make more sense later on but this connection between both the positive and negative mind is very important because some mental functions are relegated to your conscious mind, like intention, while others are regulated to your positive mind, like emotion. This means that these two minds must work together to do what the other mind cannot. Only when these two minds are fluidly working together in tandem is the full power of your mind unleashed and can the full potential of your mind be realized.

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COMPULSION

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The last topic I’d like to discuss in this chapter has to do with a kind of back force-like effect that your positive mind has on your negative one. In the previous section, it was stated that your negative mind essentially commands the positive mind using intention. However, what wasn’t mentioned was that this influence doesn’t just work in one direction. In the same way that your conscious mind is able to influence your subconscious mind, your subconscious also has the ability to influence your conscious mind as well. I often to like compare this phenomenon to Newton’s third law of motion which is most commonly expressed as “for every action, there is an opposite but equal reaction”. In the case of your mind, every intention expressed by the conscious mind quantizes the subconscious mind and in turn the subconscious mind also exerts a kind of ethereal back force on your conscious mind. But what does this force do and how is it experienced by the awareness of the conscious mind?

          Well, this back force exerted by the subconscious mind can be best described as affecting the ease at which the conscious mind can choose. Earlier it was mentioned that the conscious mind ideally has completely uninhibited freedom in its ability to choose and is therefore is quite logical and unbiased in its nature of thinking. Well, this description of its ideal nature is just that, an ideal. In reality, the negative mind doesn’t actually experience this pure kind of freedom as a result of the back force that gets exerted on it by the subconscious mind. This back force makes it a lot easier for the conscious mind to make one kind of choice and a lot to harder for it to make another kind of choice. Thus you’re probably much more likely to make a choice that is easy to make as a result of your subconscious and are probably less likely to make a choice that is hard to make due to the influence of your subconscious. This ethereal back force that comes from your subconscious is something that I like to refer as compulsion.

          As an example of this, let’s say that you’ve decided to go on a diet and have chosen not to eat ice cream for a month. You then unexpectedly find yourself at an ice cream shop with a group of friends and are tempted to order some ice cream for yourself. You might say that it is hard to make the choice to not eat this ice cream and that it is very easy to make the choice to eat the ice cream. Thus your ability to choose isn’t entirely free in the ideal sense and the reason it is not is because of subconscious compulsion. When you focus on the ice cream and think about how nice it would be to eat it, your subconscious responds to this thought by compelling you to eat the ice cream. This compulsion also has a component of energy to it as well. A weak compulsion will little energy is rather easy to resist but a strong compulsion with a lot of energy is much harder to resist. With that being said, however, it should be noted that you do still always have the ability to resist your subconscious mind’s compulsions. The nice thing about the conscious mind is that it will still always have free will and the ability to choose, no matter how strong a compulsion is. A compulsion can never become so strong for example that it overrides your free will and you no longer have the ability to choose.

          In some cases your subconscious may compel you not to do something that you know, on a conscious level, you should. For example, if you want to ask a girl out on a date and feel a strong compulsion not to, perhaps from fear of rejection, you can still choose against this compulsion and ask her out anyway. Thus you will always have the ability to choose in the face of a strong compulsion. It should be noted that, due to the nature of the subconscious, you will generally feel some emotion during the same times that you feel a compulsion. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the compulsion usually. We’ll talk more about the connection between the conscious and subconscious minds through these bidirectional phenomena involving quantization, from the negative mind to the positive mind, and compulsion, from the positive mind back to the negative one, throughout the remainder of this book.

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Footnotes

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1. Although the subconscious mind and its corresponding energy are technically different things, there’s rarely ever going to be a reason to distinguish between the two. So it's generally fine to treat the two as one in the same in discussion.