At this point in our exploration of Faith over Fear, it may be helpful to spend a few minutes focusing on our subconscious mind and the role it plays in our everyday thoughts, beliefs, and actions.
A Bi-Level Mind
For more than a century, we’ve understood that our human minds operate on at least two levels. The level we are all most familiar with is the conscious mind, where we experience all our thoughts and beliefs. It is through our conscious mind that we can develop awareness, focus attention, cultivate affection, offer and receive acceptance, and initiate action. Anything we perceive, believe, or choose to pursue in life takes place in our conscious mind.
However, there is another, more powerful aspect of our minds that is mostly hidden to us, called the subconscious mind. I’m neither a research psychologist nor a computer engineer, but I think of the subconscious mind as a combination database and internal operating system.
The Subconscious as Database
First, our subconscious mind is a database. It keeps a record of everything that has ever passed through your conscious mind. As such, it is a vast storage space that organizes all of your thoughts, beliefs, and experiences. It remembers every bit of information you’ve ever known, every image you’ve ever seen, and every skill you’ve ever learned. It’s all there, even if you don’t have perfect recall or immediate access to it.
My first understanding of subconscious mind came from F. Leroy Forlines’ class on “Understanding and Helping People” at Welch College in 1991 or 1992. Forlines humorously described the subconscious mind as “little boys downstairs” or “little girls downstairs” who are always at work to achieve the tasks we give them, whether we are awake or asleep.
(In that class, he recommended a book called Psychocybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, and it was my first real introduction to the power of the subconscious mind.)
Keep in mind that the information our subconscious stores all comes from our unique perspective, not necessarily from a global or divine perspective. So, it’s not necessarily a repository of truth, so much as it is the keeper of our own experience and a way of understanding life as we know it from our perspective.
The Subconscious as Internal Operating System
Second, our subconscious mind serves as our internal operating system. Every day, there are hundreds if not thousands of activities that take place in our bodies that we have little or no conscious control over—breathing, circulation, temperature regulation, and so much more. It is our subconscious mind that controls all these internal activities. In addition, there are dozens if not hundreds of things we do with our bodies each day that we do without thinking. These can range from brushing our teeth to driving to work. When we are engaged in routine activities, our subconscious mind often takes over and directs those as well.
The functioning of our subconscious mind is shaped by the hundreds of thousands of data points it receives over the course of our lifetimes—including the decisions we’ve made, the beliefs we’ve adopted, and the attitudes we’ve assumed. The way we instinctively respond to a situation is based on piles of data sitting in our subconscious mind, plus how we—usually unknowingly—have taught it to respond.
The Role of Emotions
One of the ways our subconscious mind seeks to assist us is through our emotions. An emotion is a message from our subconscious mind alerting us to the need to pay attention to something. A feeling of joy is a message from our subconscious that we could use more of whatever is causing our joy. The emotion of fear is a message from our subconscious to watch out for the thing that is causing us fear. And so on.
Keep in mind that our subconscious mind is fallible. Like a computer, it responds in the way that it has been programmed to respond. If we were bit by a dog when we were two-years-old, our subconscious mind will continually warn us about dogs—through the emotion of fear—until our experiences convince our subconscious mind that dogs are generally safe to be around.
Changing Our Minds
Because of the intensity of the experience that led us to believe subconsciously that dogs are dangerous, it will take a significant amount of opposing data, as well as a certain intensity of emotion to convince our subconscious mind that dogs are actually fun to have in our lives.
Thankfully, it is possible to use our conscious mind to retrain and redirect our subconscious mind to think, believe, and respond in a different way. To address a spirit of fear, for example, we need to convince our subconscious mind—despite the information it finds in its database—that the thing we fear is not at all likely to harm us. Or even if it does harm us in some way, we will still be better off than we were before.
I’m not saying it’s quick or easy, but it is possible to change our core beliefs, and it is often worth the effort. It involves training our subconscious mind to let go of once deeply held beliefs and adopt new ones.
More on that next time.
Return to the beginning of the series.