The Doorway into Your Subconscious

Working with your brain

Your brain is the central control unit of your life. It weighs just over 3 pounds, but consumes 1/5th of the oxygen you breathe, 1/4th of your blood flow, and 1/3rd of your water intake. Those are not just meaningless trivia. Oxygen, blood flow and water fuel your brain, and you can actually improve brain function by increasing oxygen, blood flow and water. (See my Jan 10 post on "Feed Your Brain".)

Your Personal Super-Computer

Your brain contains about 100,000 miles of blood vessels and ten billion neurons. Each neuron is connected to other neurons through 10,000 synapses making the brain capable of multiple parallel computations. This is what gives the brain its great advantage over a computer with processors that must conduct each computation one at a time. The brain consumes 15 - 30 watts of energy, about the same as a personal computer but is capable of conducting quadrillions of computations each second.

With such a super computer inside of us, we should all be geniuses, but we only use a small portion of our brains for memory and cognitive thought. Most of your brain is devoted to subconscious functions such as keeping your heart beating. In fact, your conscious mind only controls a small fraction of your perception and behavior. Your subconscious mind controls the vast majority of the way you view your world and make your decisions.

You may meet a person and immediately distrust them. There is nothing you can put your finger on, but subtle clues can trigger a warning in your subconscious. Conversely, you may meet someone new and feel like you are old friends. Again, subtle clues trigger an emotional response. Your conscious mind is too busy making conversation to notice them, but your subconscious mind is sending you signals through what you might call intuition.

You have an intuition about yourself as well. This can work for you or against you. No wonder, if you see yourself as a failure, you will make one decision after another that leads from one failure to another. However, if your subconscious mind sees you as successful, you will make one decision after another that leads you from success to success.

Your conscious mind thinks verbally in logical patterns and divides time into past, present and future. However, you subconscious mind thinks in terms of images and emotions and sees all events as in the present. That is why when you think of a great event in your life like the birth of a child, you can feel that sense of elation and pride. Conversely, if you happen to remember a particularly embarrassing moment, even one that happened 20-30 years ago, your stomach starts to flip and your palms may even start to sweat.

The subconscious is incredibly powerful. Meditation is the doorway through which you can enter your subconscious and communicate with your it.

Be sure to follow the blog so you don't miss Meditation Part 4.