“To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge”  Benjamin Disraeli

How important to your daily living is your subconscious mind?

But as for me, this secret has not been revealed to me because I have more wisdom than anyone living, but for our sakes who make known the interpretation to the king, and that you may know the thoughts of your heart.  (Dan. 2:30; NKJV)

Last week, I said that I was going to do an extended series of DGs on the human brain.  If you missed that introduction, I encourage you to take a couple of minutes and go back and read that introductory material.  (Access that DG by clicking here.)

Today, I’d like to introduce you to your Non-conscious mind (aka subconscious mind,  or unconscious mind).  I say introduce you, because I expect many of you are going to be pretty surprised how important and how powerful this part of your brain really is.  Last week I said that of your brain mass, 17% comprises the conscious mind and 83% is the non-conscious.  That should be your first clue.  How would you like to have the responsibility to process somewhere around 100,000 chemical reactions per second in every cell of the 70 to 100 trillion cells of your body?  Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?  Well, your non-conscious mind handles that without even thinking about it.

Allow me to quote a passage written by John Assaraf in a chapter of his book entitled Having It All.  This particular chapter is devoted to understanding our marvelous brains and is where I’m getting a lot of my information for this series.  He writes, “At any given time, your conscious mind is absorbing about 11 million pieces of information, but you’re only aware of about 40 to 2,000 pieces.  What happens to the other 10,998,000 pieces?  You’re dropping them from your consciousness because you either don’t need them or you’ve conditioned your brain to drop them.”

Your conscious mind “only controls two to four percent of your perceptions and behavior.  Your non-conscious mind…controls ninety-six to to ninety-eight percent of your perceptions and behavior.  This part of your brain averages four hundred billion actions per second by handling impulses that travel faster than a hundred thousand miles per hour…At any given moment, ten thousand trillion electrical and chemical actions and reactions are happening in your wonderful brain.  Yes, you are a genius.”

Your non-conscious mind is your personal operating system to use computer vernacular.  It is sustaining your life.  It causes your heart to beat, it kills off ten million blood cells every second and is responsible to create ten million new ones.  It digests your food and maintains your body’s temperature at that perfect level.  The list is virtually endless of all the things the subconscious brain does for us just to keep us alive, and I suspect that we’ve only begun to understand much of what is on that list.

So, the question of the day is, if 96-98% of our perception and behavior is controlled by the non-conscious mind, why do we invest so much time dealing with the conscious mind?  As I mentioned last week, we can’t accomplish the goals we set because goal setting happens in the conscious mind while the application of relevant information, the actions and perceptions necessary to accomplish that goal all take place in the non-conscious mind. 

Diets don’t work because we attempt to use the conscious mind to lose the weight, but the real control of our behavior is in the non-conscious mind.  How many times have we heard some weight loss guru talk about the mental side of losing weight and immediately dismissed it as a bunch of woo-woo mumbo-jumbo?  I know I have.  Even after I was beginning to understand some of this I was careful who I tried to explain it to for fear of being labeled “new-age.”  Brain research is now verifying that the subconscious mind is where all the action really is.  And we’ve been ignoring it! 

In addition to all the processing power devoted to just keeping us alive, the subconscious mind also stores all the memories, habits, and beliefs you’ve ever developed, most of which you can’t even remember using your conscious mind–but believe me, they’re still all there…every one of them.  But that’s another DG later this week.  Stay tuned.

Prayer Power
Lord, our minds and bodies are so amazing.  When we begin to get a glimpse of how powerful our minds really are, it truly causes us to humbly recall how fearfully and wonderfully we are made.  We are incredibly blessed.

Link of the Day
Having It All

Blessings on you as you begin to comprehend the amazing power of your subconscious mind.
 

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