What You Don’t Know But Your Subconscious Does.
You have a “silent partner”. It is a part of you which is aware of things you have no clue about, and which pulls your strings and influences your behaviour in surprising ways. What on earth is going on in the 90% of your mind which is your “subconscious mind”?
Sexing newly-hatched baby chicks is an extremely difficult process. Their tiny bums look almost exactly the same to the average person. (You’re wondering what sexing chicks has to do with the subconscious. Keep reading!) Yet millions of dollars rest on accurately separating the one-day-old chicks into those who are headed for egg-laying and those whose future is the frying pan.
As reported in the latest issue of Discover magazine, the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan, beginning in the 1930s, devised a method to accurately tell the girls from the guys. A group of American chicken breeders went off to Japan to learn the method. To their surprise they realized that the Japanese experts had no specific objective technique. The wise Japanese chick sexers simply sat beside the students and told them to go ahead and start “choosing”. If they chose correctly, the teacher nodded. If they chose wrongly, they were corrected. It seemed to the students that all they were doing was “guessing”, and yet over thousands of choices, they became accurate, just like their Japanese teachers. It would appear that a part of the mind was making the choice, based on delicate sensory cues which the conscious mind could not discern. Smart subconscious!
What about your own subconscious?
How good are you at lucky “guessing” in your life?
During World War II, when the Luftwaffe began flying over to Britain to drop bombs, it was imperative that British spotters on the ground could differentiate the German planes from returning British aircraft. Gun crews did not want to target their own planes. At far distances and with the similarity of aircraft structure, plane differentiation was very difficult to do, and yet there were some spotters who were exceptionally accurate. They could not verbalize the mystery of how they knew, and so training their technique to others was difficult. Eventually, they hit upon a training method that acknowledged the subconscious: trainees were taught by making “guesses” and being given immediate feedback by the veteran spotters. The nuanced sensory data, which only the subconscious could perceive and process, were allowed to guide the conscious choices.
You are likely not spending your days checking out the rear ends of fluffy chicks or scanning the skies for enemies, so what does all this mean for you right now?
What nuanced, tiny, but significant sensory cues is your subconscious mind picking up from your environment, which then filter up to influence your thinking or actions in that moment? Are you the master of your thoughts and decisions, or is your subconscious mind taking a quiet role? Who is actually making the decisions?
What about your memories? Consciously, you place the past in the past. You don’t spend much time back in your dusty memory banks, unless called to do so for some reason.
However, your subconscious mind seems to be holistically and deeply in touch with your previous experiences. It all feels like now to your subconscious, and those “old” feelings still have a power and resonance to the subconscious self. When does this add richness and depth to your thinking and action? When does it get in your way, without you even knowing why you react the way you do?
A whiff of a certain after-shave, and your subconscious instantly accesses feelings about a certain boyfriend many years ago. While you, in your conscious awareness, are focused like a laser on a particular thought or external action, your subconscious picks up reams of broad peripheral sensory data: visual, auditory, even olfactory. Could this influence your feelings about the fragrant man to whom you are being introduced in this moment?
Has this ever happened to you: You are driving home, and your mental circuits are busily working on what to cook for dinner or what to do with that stubborn family member. Eventually you find yourself pulling into your own driveway, having paid no particular attention to the series of right turns and lefts which brought you home. Your subconscious looked after all that.
Notice that as you sit and read this, you can shift your position, and look up and around, without the need to send detailed instructions: “I will now move my eyeballs and look at the clock. I will now shift my rear end back in the seat, cheek by cheek”...
It is exciting and almost eerie how so much of your day-to-day actions are accomplished by the subconscious with a supple ease and without conscious calculation.
Who looks after your deep memories? The subconscious is your storage area, and the seat of your skills and knowledge, the source of your beliefs and attitudes, both constructive and negative, and the wellspring of your gut reactions, instinctive urges, and most profound motivations.
If you want more and better from life, the energy to do that springs from this level of your Self.
Might it be interesting to get to know this sometimes neglected part of your self?
Is it a good idea to encourage this aspect of your self to work on your side, and not against you? Are you curious? Would you like to learn how to do that?
That’s only one of the things you learn to do in the DynaMIND Course, (and you’ll have a great time too, sorry)
For more details see the “All Schedules” Button up to your left!