From the time we are born until we are about the age of seven, our subconscious mind is being
programmed to live in the world based on and influenced by factors such as our environment,
the people we are around such as our family, and the emotions these environmental factors
cause us to experience. Overtime, our subconscious mind becomes a storehouse for these experiences
or learned behaviors, like skills and beliefs, to form what we call our memory.
It is a knowledge base that is home to everything we know. But we have
to become of aware of this knowledge before we can store it in our memory,
and we do that with the conscious mind. All of these experiences we have are experienced
consciously with our conscious mind before being stored in the subconscious, and anytime we need
to access or reference that information we use the conscious mind. Here is another way to look at it:
Your subconscious mind is like a book of you. Everything you have ever experienced,
along with the thoughts and emotions that came with those experiences, have been written down
in this book. The book by itself is stagnant. Without the thinking aspects of who you are
to actively flip through the book and realize the information inside, the book has no use.
What’s a book without a reader? This is where the conscious mind comes into play.
Your conscious mind is the author and the reader of your book. It is the one who becomes aware of
experiences and stores the information learned from them inside of the book. It is also the
one who references the information that is already inside to respond to experiences.
It is the actively thinking part of your mind, while the subconscious is the storehouse for
the information that gives rise to thought. In other words, it’s like the conscious mind
is the thinker and the subconscious mind is the information that gives rise to thought. Without
the conscious mind there to think these thoughts, the information stored in our subconscious is
meaningless. And without the subconscious mind there to store the information, there are no
thoughts for the conscious mind to think. Without the subconscious there to store information,
there is only the conscious mind to be aware of the moment but not to take anything away from it.
When we are younger we are much more active with our conscious mind as we try to fill up the memory
space in our subconscious, but as we get older we tend to rely more heavily on our subconscious
program to operate in our daily lives. For example, when you learned to ride a
bicycle for the first time your conscious mind was extremely engaged in the activity
because you were just learning how to do this. But now when you go to hop on a bike, you do so
with very little thought required. This is because when you learned how to ride for the first time,
that information was stored in your subconscious so that you don’t have to re-learn to ride a bike
every time you get on one. Your conscious mind was responsible for learning that behavior or skill,
and your subconscious mind was responsible for storing that learned knowledge. You have been
subconsciously programmed to ride a bike and you now operate on that program when you ride one.
By operating on that program, you free up your conscious mind
to focus on things like the surrounding traffic to further ensure your safety.
The conscious mind and the subconscious mind are separate aspects of our mind
but they work together. These two powerful forces working together,
and specifically the amount of information that can be stored in our subconscious mind,
is what makes us humans such a powerful and advanced species.