The Conscious vs Subconscious Mind
It is useful to understand what the subconscious and conscious parts of your mind are, what are the differences between the two, how they work, and how you can use them to your advantage. Firstly, it is important to understand that the mind is a processor of sensory information. Our five main senses gather around 11 million bits of information per second. This is an incredible amount of information that is received by the mind. The conscious mind is what you intentionally focus on at any point in time. The conscious mind can only concentrate on a very limited amount of information — up to around 50 bits per second. It only uses the information you absolutely need in order to do what you want to do in the present moment. Let’s say you are reading this blog — the conscious mind will only be processing the words that you are reading right now.
But where does the vast remaining information get sent to? Well, it is all processed through the subconscious mind. And when the conscious mind shifts its focus to something else, the information that was previously being processed by your conscious mind now slips into your subconscious. While the conscious mind has little memory function and only really focuses on the present moment, the subconscious mind is a huge memory bank that stores all the information that is ever processed by it. Think about all the sensory information that you have received in your life — it is all stored in your subconscious mind. But this information doesn’t just sit in your subconscious and not do anything. All this information contributes to the creation of your ego, which lies within your subconscious. All your beliefs about your self, the world, and reality itself are formed using the sensory information you received from your past experiences. These beliefs are what drive your thoughts, words and actions. Advertisers and marketers know all about this, and they use advertisements to try to influence you to buy their company’s products. Even if you don’t consciously focus on the advert, the information within the advert reaches your subconscious.
When one is associating with their ego, they live primarily through their subconscious mind. As we are brought up, we are conditioned to have very limiting and negative beliefs about ourselves, the world and reality. These beliefs create our thoughts which create our reality. As our external reality reflects our internal thoughts, our lives simply reaffirm the negative beliefs that we already have. The more our beliefs are reaffirmed, the harder it is to change those beliefs. So we end up gliding through life, unaware that our life is being controlled by our past. We are just conscious enough to be able to function and do our daily tasks, but for the great majority of our day, we are very much within our thoughts. When living life from the subconscious mind, our reactions to situations are automatic and impulsive. These reactions are based on how we have reacted to similar situations in the past, or how we have seen others react to similar situations in the past.
In 2005, the National Science Foundation published an article summarising research on human thoughts per day. They found that 95% of our thoughts in a day are exactly the same as the thoughts we had the day before. This makes sense because our subconscious thoughts are based on the past, and without reprogramming the past within our minds, the same chain of thoughts get replayed in our subconscious each day. Whenever we see, smell, taste, hear or touch something or someone that we have encountered before, past memories of that thing or person will be triggered in our minds, which sets off a chain of thoughts. This is why many of us view everything and everyone from the lens of the past, and don’t really see things and people for how they are in the present moment. When you are within that chain of repeating thoughts, you are not really conscious. This is why it is said that you are asleep (spiritually speaking). But at any time, you can bring yourself back to full consciousness by breaking out of that continuous loop of thoughts and bringing yourself back to the present moment. In doing this, you take back control of your life.
The spiritual awakening is all about getting yourself out of your subconscious thoughts and being more conscious. The more conscious you are, the more you are focused on the present moment. You may be thinking that the conscious mind does not process enough information for it to be viable to be conscious for greater parts of the day, but you do not actually need much mind power to be in the present moment. This is why I have always said that being in the present moment is all about being, not thinking. When you are totally in the present moment, you are only focusing on one thing. Spiritually awakening is all about realising that you are not your thoughts, your thoughts are not really yours at all, and that you do not need to keep having thoughts about everything. When you experience life through the conscious mind, instead of reacting impulsively to situations, you react rationally. Instead of constantly experiencing emotional ups and downs, you remain in a relaxed state. Instead of your thoughts controlling you, you become fully in control of your thoughts, and you only have thoughts if you deem them useful in the present moment. However, becoming more conscious does not happen overnight. Because you have been constantly repeating the same thoughts every day for your whole life, you will need to keep consciously breaking out of that solidified loop. You have to keep snapping yourself out of the trance your subconscious puts you in. Gradually, you will find yourself being less sucked in to subconscious thoughts, and being more conscious throughout your day.
However, this does not mean the subconscious mind is bad. In fact, it is a very useful tool that we can use to our advantage. For instance, hypnosis has been used to help solve crimes by getting victims and witnesses in a relaxed state so they can recall information about the crime that is stored within their subconscious mind. As you spiritually awaken, you can gradually reprogram your subconscious mind in order to create a better reality for yourself. To do this, you must enter a meditative state where your brainwave frequency is within the Theta range (4–8 Hz). When you are in this state, your subconscious and conscious mind become one. You become conscious of your subconscious. Being in this state allows you to examine what is influencing your thoughts, actions and words. By shutting off all sensory input, you can really explore your subconscious. You also enter this Theta brainwave state when you are dreaming, and so your dreams are a very good indication of what is in your subconscious mind. It is important to be aware of what is in your subconscious so that you can work on changing anything that you feel does not serve you. When you experience negative emotions, whether you are dreaming or awake, it means there is something from your past in your subconscious that is negatively impacting your reaction to your experiences. Usually this is a negative belief that you have, based on past experiences. You can then identify what that negative belief is and work on changing that belief to a more positive one through affirmations.
By repeating affirmations while in a Theta brainwave meditative state, eventually the affirmations will become your new beliefs within your subconscious mind. These positive beliefs will then trigger more positive thoughts in your mind, which will lead to a more positive reality. When in this meditative state, you can also visualise experiencing a reality that you want, and your mind registers this as if you are actually physically experiencing this reality because it cannot tell the difference between imagination and real life. The more you visualise experiencing a reality you want, the more your mind believes that this is in fact your reality, and so it manifests that reality for you in the physical world. However, you must first clear any negative beliefs you have about manifesting this reality, otherwise your subconscious will not allow this reality to manifest.
All this information further highlights the importance of being conscious of the information you consume. Every time you watch something on the TV, or listen to the radio, or scroll through your phone, or read a book, you are absorbing information that will affect your thoughts, actions or words, whether you are consciously focusing on these things or not. It is therefore important to be very mindful that you are not consuming anything that will negatively impact you. Instead, you can use it to your advantage and only consume information that will further your spiritual development and help you raise your vibration. This includes watching comedies, listening to soothing music with no lyrics, and reading spiritual books.
It is extremely difficult in the modern times for a person to have a long attention span. We are constantly being bombarded with sensory information as our attention, our focus, our love, our energy is the only real commodity in this world, and everyone wants a piece of it. Whether it be social media companies, TV channels, radio channels, advertisements, every shop you walk past in a big city, salespeople, artists, our employers, our families, our friends, and so on and so forth. Everyone wants our attention and uses their own ways to try and get it by enticing our senses. Our conscious mind cannot deal with all this sensory input, and so this sensory overload forces us to live our lives through the subconscious mind, the part of the mind that can process all this information. This is why fully concentrating on one thing, or shutting out all sensory input and just being aware of awareness, for a long period of time is one of the best ways to bring yourself back to full consciousness. At first, you will find it extremely frustrating to do this as you are so used to remaining in the subconscious mind which will keep trying to distract you with its never-ending loop of thoughts. But I promise you, if you bear with it, and you increase the duration of the exercise every time you do it, you will find yourself becoming more and more conscious.
When there are thoughts or memories that you intentionally repress, perhaps thoughts that trigger unpleasant emotions, or desires you deem as wrong, these thoughts and memories do not just disappear. They also move from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind. The things you repress affect your thoughts, actions and emotions in more subtle ways. For instance, if you are generally a calm person, but there are instances where you find yourself reacting very emotionally to something, then it is likely to do with a past memory that you have repressed and is hiding in your subconscious mind.
All these things within our subconscious affect our vibration and outer reality. Normally, we would simply go through life unaware of how all these things from the past are affecting us. However, we are now in a time where humanity is graduating to fourth density. Consequently, we are being forced to raise our vibrations so that we can graduate to this Golden Age. To do this, many high frequency energies are being sent to us from higher dimensional beings, as well as from many planets and stars (including our own). These high frequency energies surround us and force everything within our subconscious to rise to the surface, our conscious mind, so that we can become aware of it all and release anything that does not match these higher frequencies. This means detaching from negative thoughts, changing our negative beliefs into positive ones, and working through suppressed emotions. There is no more hiding now; we must face our past and deal with the negative influences within our subconscious that are keeping us in a low vibration. All the different ways of repressing, masking, and avoiding will no longer work. But I promise you, all the work is totally worth it.
Thank you for reading. If you would like to book a free spiritual support or healing session with me, or if you would like to donate love or money to my channel, then please visit my website https://www.highvibelivin.co.uk/ .