Some people think they have nothing to say. Some people believe they cannot express themselves.

These are illusions.

Your “Helpful” Friend, the Unconscious Mind

These illusions, these thoughts, are caused by the unconscious mind’s automatic learning. It learns something, usually in childhood, and quite often these “solutions” are brilliant, given the resources you have at the time. Unfortunately, like how to tie your shoes, these solutions are re-generated automatically below consciousness ever after, and sometimes they fit, but oft-times these solutions suck!

These beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and automatic reactions are a part of you, operating below consciousness, but they are illusions. (In which we are sometimes as trapped, and blind, as fish are to the water.)

(If you want to learn more about how the unconscious mind both helps and sometimes harms you, in its effort to promote your survival, pick up my free book at http://beinghappytoday.com. You can one-click unsub the newsletter if you wish.)

How to Make Writing Flow Easily

Let’s talk about how to make writing, and self-expression … easy.

I learned this from a woman named Brandt, in a book she wrote about creative writing, 40 years ago. It’s still true. Here’s what you do …

In the morning, when you arise, go immediately to a typewriter or a computer where you can type things, and start typing.

Type any garbage that comes into your head.

Describe your dream if you wish. Type out the ideas flitting through your head. If you are thinking “I cannot express myself,” then type that.

Keep typing.

It will be a lot of hooey … but you’ll notice some good ideas in there. Keep typing for 20-30 minutes, every morning.

Do this for a couple of weeks, and your beliefs and considerations that you have nothing to say or that you cannot express yourself … will have vanished.

Why Does it Work?

It works for the same reason that you can dream. In your dream you automatically create scenes, words, ideas, pictures, and on and on and on. This is an inherent skill of a human being.

And when you first awake, your “censors” are not fully functional. That’s why you must go *IMMEDIATELY* to the keyboard. And start.

By starting while still sleepy, and while your usual blocking claptrap isn’t fully booted up, you can of course effortlessly spew your trains of thought. They are huge freight trains, and they’re running at high speed, all the time.

Perhaps you’ve got out of the habit of allowing your trains to run down the track toward the horizon. Your unconscious mind is programmable; that’s how it got programmed to block you, and it can be programmed differently, with this exercise.

This simple practice throws the switches on this particular railroad, and your freight trains start building speed, moving on down the line.

Hear the clacking of the rails?

Hear the whistle soaring into the air?

It’s easy. Prove it for yourself.

You’re the engineer.

Whoooo-wooooo!

::: WHO CAN USE IT?

If you’re already going to the gym every day and spending long hours on treadmills and pumping iron, then the Three Minute Gym would be a simple way to stay fit when on the road or away from your usual gymnasium.

If you’re not a gymnoholic, and can barely find time to wash your nose in the morning, then the Three Minute Gym is a way you can begin to get back into shape, so you can feel the way you did when you were a kid — active, playful, energetic, and alive!

::: WHERE IS IT?

The Three Minute Gym is not a real gym where you have to pack up special gym clothes and drive to get there.

It’s simply a virtual gym — a little time you set aside for yourself — to ensure your health, enhance your energy, and improve your looks. It requires no special clothes, though it’s easier in pants and flat shoes (or barefoot) than in a dress and high heels. (So you guys wearing dresses and high heels will have to change. Sorry.)

The Three Minute Gym is a short set of routines that will give much of the benefit of exercises such as “resistance-training” (weights), “aerobics” (running and jogging), and “flexibility exercises” (like yoga).

But it can be done in a very short amount of time.

::: HOW IT WORKS

As with all things that actually work, the Three Minute Gym is very simple.

The first and most important core fact of the Three Minute Gym is this:

Surely you can find Three Minutes for exercise.

(If you can’t find even three little minutes, nobody in the room believes you even a little bit, and everybody including you is becoming completely disgusted with your shameless behavior! Bad! Bad boy!)

And so, on the theory that each day you can find a measly three minutes for exercise, we can begin.

There are many things which our culture believes are automatic and unknowing processes — such as regulating our blood pressure, remembering to breathe, regulating the salinity of our blood and the acidity of our stomach acid — and that these processes are built into the body, are automatic, and cannot be controlled.

Yet we know by observation that there are yogis who have in fact taken control of many of these processes, and so we know it can be done. But why don’t you and me have awareness of these things?

Baby Know

I personally suspect that, as an infant, even as an infant or fetus in utero, we were dimly conscious of many of these things. Why not? Might not have we had some dim awareness of beating our heart? We had no language, we didn’t even have a completely grown brain. But why wouldn’t we have felt the beating of our heart?

What better a thing for a growing brain to choose as a beginning project than to beat your heart? Perhaps to begin to regulate blood pressure? Perhaps to begin to learn to regulate salinity of the blood?

Some things it didn’t need to learn, perhaps. The mother’s body is regulating the blood pressure as her blood entered the umbilical tube.

The child in the womb didn’t need to learn how to operate lungs, or to digest food.

But at birth it learned how to operate those lungs, real quick.

And soon after, at the breast, it learned how to suckle, and then how to digest food.

Why would we think, just because the infant has no language, cannot speak or use a computer to write an email, that the infant isn’t learning these things? Why would we *assume* that it just knows them?

After all, it learns everything else. Why would these things be so different?

The learning would be stored in the mind, but it wouldn’t be stored in a form readily accessible to later memory. In a similar manner, you might learn how to do a triple-gainer off the high diving board, but when you access it in your memory, it’s probably a memory of sensation rather than some clear visual picture.

We Learn to Focus

In the earlier article, I discussed how we learn things, and these repeated things become what we now call habits, and what that means is that they’ve been relegated to the ‘Unconscious’ part of the mind.

But is that how it happens?

Let’s consider a different view …

I submit that at some point in our lives, starting in infancy, we learn to ‘focus’ the attention. In contrast to the dim and vague warbling of the baby in the crib, as arms and legs twitch aimlessly and the eyes wander, the child learns to focus attention. Perhaps onto being wet or hungry. Perhaps the child learns to stare at the plastic ducky hanging over the crib.

As the child focuses its attention on the yellow ducky, what happens to all the other awareness?

It goes away from consciousness. The child is not ‘attending’ to it. It’s still there: blood being pumped, lungs breathing air, food being digested. But it is not in ‘consciousness.’

I say that the other side of Focus is the creation of the Unconscious.

It’s still the one mind. A single unified mind.

But as we become skilled at focusing attention, more and more and more gets shoved below what we call consciousness. We pretty much have to do it this way in order to get along.

And along the way, we learn to do the same thing with traumatic events. We learn that our pain will subside if we turn the attention away, we place the focus elsewhere, and the traumatic memory now becomes a resident of the so-called Unconscious mind.

The practice of focusing attention is how we create unawareness of the vast majority of the thoughts and processes constantly undulating in the sea of the single, unified mind.

It’s the classical two-edged sword.

Focus is completely necessary to survival. And Focus is what creates ‘Unconsciousness.’

Conscious? Unconscious?

Now here’s something funny.

In many ways, the so-called Unconscious is way more conscious and cognizant of far more than our feeble ‘Conscious’ mind can handle.

Julian Jaynes, in “The Evolution of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind”, provided a brilliant analogy. Each of us is like a person in a completely dark, huge room. On our head we have a helmet with a miner’s lamp. Everywhere we look, we see.

Because we are constantly looking, we constantly see *something*. We think we are being ‘conscious’ of the things around us.

And yet, no matter where we happen to be looking, all around us — above, below, to the right and to the left, and behind us — we are completely unaware. We are blind to 98% of what’s there, because we’re focussing on the 2% that falls within our limited attention, the limited 2% illuminated by the dim wattage of our so-called conscious mind.

Seems to me that the Unconscious mind — attending to a thousand things at once — is actually more conscious than our so-called conscious mind.

Make a friend of your Unconscious mind. It’s probably the best friend you’ve got.

What is it about taking a shower that causes new ideas to pop into your head?

Is it the invigorating ions that are caused by splitting water droplets?

Or is it a simple as Murphy’s law triggered because you will never have pencil and paper in the shower?

I don’t know the answer to this time-proven rule, but as of this morning’s shower, I do know a super-simple way to look at mental health, a simple way to be happier and more productive.

It’s simply this –

As you go through life, and as you go through each day, stuff will be going on. Some of it’s yours, and some of it seems to just happen. And you’re going to be seeing this stuff happening and you’re going to react to it and think about it.

Now here’s the key –

If you allow yourself to *dwell* upon the bad in it, you’ll be using your mind in a way that, over time, conditions you (by repetition) to habitual thinking. And in this thinking, you’re dissatisfied with life, you’re the effect of stuff out there, perhaps a repeating victim of stuff out there. And this will never produce happiness in your life, and your thinking or perception will tend to become oblivious to the good things, the good possibilities, the good feelings, that could turn it all around for you.

But to have a happier life, if you will make an ongoing and intentional practice to consciously find what good is in whatever is happening, if you will consciously consider what’s happening and consider how it may be to your (now or later) benefit, then several good things will happen.

Over time, as you do this you will experience more happiness, because you’re going out of your way to find some happy thoughts. Thinking happy thoughts tends to go along with a happy life. Sounds a little too simple, because frankly it is simply too simple. It is so simple that hardly anyone thinks to try it.

Further, as you intentionally practice focussing your attention on discerning what good is in what’s happening, or how it may turn to your advantage, you are developing a creative problem-solving mentality, and you’ll discover yourself creating new ways to operate that are to your advantage. This too is horribly simple — if you look for ways to get good from a situation, you’re likely to find some.

Now let’s hear it from the nay-sayers!

The nay-sayer will have an automatic reaction against what’s just been said here. Now in fact, what we’re seeing with the naysayer is that something happened (some words appeared) in the naysayer’s life, but the naysayer is in the habit of finding the bad, so the automatic, trained, habit of the naysayer is to now find something that will ruin it for himself.

For example, the naysayer can object that “squelching down your negative feelings and suppressing them is an unhealthy mental practice.” And, truth be told, there is a germ of truth here. Because the ongoing practice of denying the feelings one experiences will lead to the automatic, trained, habit of becoming unconscious of one’s feelings. That doesn’t help survival nor lead to a happier life.

The difference is: if you’re *pushing against* a negative thought, you just keep it there. ‘Pushing against’ will tend to be reflected in the words you say inside your head. For example, “I’m not feeling like crying, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!” is a pretty good example of pushing against. Another one is “I’m not going to be mad at Johnny any more!”

Maybe you squelch it, but it’s not really going away. And for some folks, who have fears about their mind being out of control, this can be a real catch-22. A self-fulfilling problem.

But if you have fears about your mind being out of control, then you can simply learn to practice meditation, in the simplest sense of the word.

Meditation, at the simplest level, is nothing more than practicing holding your mind on one thing. That one thing could be your breath going in and out. That one thing could be the repetition of a word, like ‘Om’ or ‘Shanti’ or ‘peace’ or even ‘boogie shoes.’ That one thing could be holding a picture in mind: a mountain, the bright light of a candle, the face of someone you love.

Now your mind *will* wander away; that is the unruly nature of a mind. And when you notice it’s wandered away, you just put it back.

And if you do this every day for 20 minutes, then after a few weeks you will notice that you feel better, and you feel calmer, and your fear about your uncontrollable mind will have dwindled, because slowly by slowly you are actually learning to control your mind. Not in a harsh, military and suppressive way, but by a gentle persistent returning way.

And this is the same way that you would develop your practice of looking at what’s happening to find good in it, or how it can be turned to good.

If you have a real stubborn case of the nasty unhappies, maybe you’ll have to start by simply finding ways to *minimize* the bad that you see all around you. But if you persist, you will slowly by slowly begin to develop the habit of seeing the good going on all around you.

Look, here’s a kind of proof:

In your life, like any life, there have been unhappinesses. Let’s consider how many of your experienced unhappinesses have been ‘hard’ unhappinesses caused by something that happened in the physical universe, and how many of your experienced unhappinesses have been ’soft’ unhappinesses caused as you *thought* about things that had happened or might happen.

If you’re like most humans, and even if you’ve had a rough life, then less than 5% of the unhappinesses were ‘hard’ ones, like you tripped and fell down the stairs and broke an arm or sprained a muscle, or like you had a traffic accident, or your boyfriend left for another woman, or your dog died, or somebody stole something that belonged to you, or something you owned got ruined or spoiled. These are hard unhappinesses caused by an actual event in the physical universe.

Now you may have more control over these things than you realize, but we don’t even need to think about that. What we want to look at here is this –

Do these things happen every day? Do they happen multiple times every day?

For most people, no. They don’t.

These things happen, but only now and then.

For most of us, many days go by before we get another of these ‘hard’ unhappinesses.

But if that’s the case, what about those times when you’ve been continuously unhappy for days and days at a time? Where is that coming from?

Well, if nothing is happening in the physical universe to give you a ‘hard’ unhappiness, then you’re filling up your experience with *your thoughts*.

And you must have these thoughts on automatic unhappy mode, because it’s just one unhappy thought after another. Let’s say the boyfriend left. That happened once. But what about the hundreds or thousands of times you think unhappily about it? What about the hundreds or thousands of times you think about it even before it ever happens?

With these hundreds or thousands of unhappy thoughts, you are training your mind by simple repetition to automatically generate unhappy thoughts, and these will create the unhappy emotions in your body, and you are training yourself, unconsciously and automatically, to become and remain an unhappy person.

Is this mental health? To train yourself to become an unhappy person?

No, it is not good mental health.

So what is the opposite of this unconscious training program for unhappiness?

The opposite is a conscious training program for happiness.

Can it really be that simple?

Yes. Actually, it is exactly that simple.

You choose: Unconscioiusly keep running your unhappiness training, or consciously re-train to become a happy person.

Maybe not always easy. Maybe not immediate. Takes intention, practice, and time. And it works.

You will recreate yourself as a happier, and healthier person.

Presto. Mental health and happiness.

People in my parents generation used the word “beggers” to describe people who beg on the street. Or sometimes “moochers,” “panhandlers,” or “bums.” Of course, in tiny Henrietta, Texas, where I grew up, the town was too small to have an official panhandler, so the town drunk filled in part time.

Friends of mine as I grew up didn’t seem to like the word “Begger,” though it would seem to be accurate. And I guess the phrase, “Buddy, can you spare a dime?” from that older time had mutated into “Spare change?” by the hippie period in the 1960’s.

THE SPARE-CHANGER

The writer in “Evolving Times” was describing what we’ve all felt in that situation. You’re walking along and you are suddenly asked, “Spare change?” Which as we all know, means “Do you have any spare change, that you could give to me?” (I guess those beggers are either very lazy, or they are astonishingly efficient.)

And then what happened?

Well, as you know, the common reaction is that you say “No, sorry,” and you hurry a bit more to get past the place where you just told a lie.

The writer of that blog is someone who follows the “Law of Attraction,” which states that what you think and imagine in your mind tends to manifest in your life. And the key thing there is that it doesn’t matter whether you think about something you do want or something you don’t want. In either case, you’re picturing something, and you tend to attract more of what you are “picturizing,” and so more of that is likely to show up.

So if you’re following the Law of Attraction, it greatly behooves you to pay attention to what you’re thinking and picturing. And the writer suddenly realized that, telling that lie to the spare-changer, because the writer didn’t want to stop and give away money, was in fact a statement to the Universe that “No, I do not have any money at all that I could spare.”

Which, according to the Law of Attraction, would tend to bring you that very thing. A shortage of money so acute that you couldn’t possibly spare even a quarter!

Bummer.

And even if a person didn’t try to follow the Law of Attraction, even so, you’d be programming your own habitual thought that you don’t have any money whatsoever to spare. And this kind of thought, repeated and made habitual, would cause you to experience the emotions that would be reasonable for a person who had no money whatsoever beyond the strictly necessary. And those particular feelings aren’t much fun.

So whether you follow the teachings of the Law of Attraction, or whether you follow the Law of NFL Football, either way, letting yourself get in the habit of telling this particular lie to the spare-changers is a losing proposition for your own prosperity and enjoyment of life.

A RAY OF HOPE

Now, having shown you a veritable hell on the sidewalk, it’s only fair that I show you how beautifully we can escape these torments and have a delightful day, and it’s just warm enough.

Here’s how –

Realize that the spare-changer is, in his or her own special way, saying “Hello!” to you. Watch them and you’ll realize that they greet everyone with this same phrase. It’s their greeting to other humans. And that’s OK. They are free to greet the other humans any way they choose.

And you have the same right.

So when they greet you, saying “Spare change?” you can just smile broadly and greet them right back, saying “Hello!” or “How ya’ doin?” or “Nice to see you!”

And what you will discover is that quite often they’ll simply say, “Hello,” or “Fine, thanks.”

Other times they’ll repeat their greeting, “Spare change?” but you’re already past them now. And so if getting past them without stopping, and without giving away money was your goal, then you’ve succeeded.

And other times they’ll just stop, silent. Gave them pause, you did. Probably not many people greet them back.

Or, you could just stop and give them some money.

It’s your call, and you have a perfect right to do it any way you choose.

As you may recall from the movie, that young man started out hating the pirates, and yet, in the course of his adventures, he’s become bolder and he has dared great things, and by golly he has become a pirate. And that’s a good thing.

And so … why is it a good thing to be a pirate?

Here’s an idea to consider –

“Personal growth only takes place outside your comfort zone.”
– Tony Robbins

Think about it. Think about moments when you’ve attained major personal growth. Think about the moments just before you attained this personal growth. Would you say those moments were “comfortable?”

Probably not. We grow the most when we’re challenged. Funerals. Difficult contests. A breakthrough moment. When you go beyond what you know. That’s when it happens.

While it’s not always street-smart to “live on the edge,” it is usually exciting. And while the path of wisdom does not lead us to endanger our lives, our loved ones, or that which we hold dear, it is also a fact that living a life in which there is no challenge, no “danger,” no spice, nothing new, the same every day … well, I suppose it’s good for some folks, but I question whether it’s good for you.

Wouldn’t you rather be a pirate?

There. Didn’t that feel good, just thinking about being a pirate?

Why is that?

DILEMMA OF THE DAY

Mankind, and men (and women) have it in them to both (a) seek safety, and (b) seek novelty. I suppose evolution built that into us. I mean, some folks living way back when who didn’t seek safety left no descendants! And other folks who avoided anything new couldn’t adapt to the first change and they didn’t leave any descendants either!

So you and me, and all the rest of humankind, are the descendants of those humans who did both (a) seek safety, and (b) seek novelty.

So that means it’s a natural fact. We’re built that way. That’s just the way it is.

Go with the flow, and live well. Rebel and become like those way-back folks who left no descendants.

HOW DOES IT PLAY TODAY?

How does it play out? Look around you. One common scenario is a guy who works at a boring job, doing something he finds less than inspiring — it never occurred to him to create something inspiring, because his attention was fixed on renting an apartment and he needed some cash each month — and he’s seeking safety.

He’s a human, so he’s also seeking novelty.

How will he find it?

Television, I reckon.

Synthetic adventures. Stuff that happened to everybody else but him.

When he gets to the end of his life, lying on his deathbed, and maybe he’s thinking back, and he’s saying to himself, “Man, what a great life. I watched me some really good TV!”

So if that’s the obvious outcome of that behavior pattern, then why did he follow that pattern of behavior for 40 years? I can think of only one answer. He just didn’t know any better. He never looked. He never examined the path, and the outcome. He was too busy seeking safety, and finding his novelty cheap and easy.

Personal growth only occurs when you’re outside your comfort zone.

HOW TO HAVE PERSONAL GROWTH

It’s simple: Just operate regularly outside your comfort zone. Make it your habit to do so.

In other words, be a pirate.

You know you want to.

Perhaps you are now asking yourself, “But how?”

Well, you’re a grown person. Figure it out. That’s your first assignment.

There. You’re outside of your comfort zone right now.

Keep it up.

Think of the President. There’s your opinion … automatically.

Go out on a date. There’s your usual feeling … automatically.

Decide to tie your shoe. There go your hands … automatically tying your shoe.

But what if you’d like to do something … different … for a change?

MAKING A CHANGE

You might formulate a plan, like going on a diet, but your usual responses are going to be served up automatically. Just the *thought* of a meal will automatically trigger your usual response to have more pie. Your non-conscious mind trying to help you, just like you trained it to do, by repetition. That’s how it learns.

But let’s use going on a date as an example. Let’s say that it has been your habit to be up-tight, anxious, and worried. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter how this got started or whether your parents were good people or what your astrology sign is. Let’s just say that uptight, anxious, and worried has become your habit.

And maybe you think this isn’t the best way to enjoy your next date.

Now, just supposing you have that thought, thinking about going on your next date, most likely already your non-conscious mind starts serving up your usual feelings, so quite likely you may begin to feel uptight, anxious, and worried … and you haven’t even gone out on the date yet!

How then can you make a change?

CREATING SYNTHETIC EXPERIENCES

One way is to mentally “rehearse,” using your ability to chose which thoughts to think. You can mentally rehearse the date, and you can choose to imagine success, and all sorts of things going right. And the way your body will react to these thoughts and images of success is by giving you a bunch of good feelings.

If you are persistent, and will rehearse and rehearse, then you can build up an amount of positive “experience” which becomes a habitual way of thinking and feeling, just as your old pattern was a negative experience which became a habitual way of thinking and feeling. If you persist, eventually you’ll have more positive “experience” than negative experience, and you will discover your dates being more enjoyable.

Of course, doing it once, and saying, “Cool!” won’t do the job.

There are some other ways, such as using hypnotic or Neuro-Linguistic Programming methods, but simple mental rehearsal gives a clear model of what works.

COMMUNICATING DIRECTLY WITH YOUR NON-CONSCIOUS MIND

As you formulate your new plan for making a change, you can also “talk” with your Non-conscious Mind. By doing this, you can discover ahead of time how your non-conscious mind will automatically *help* you, and how your non-conscious mind will automatically *block* your new plan.

If you can know these things, then usually you can modify your new plan so as not to automatically invoke a lot of blockage, and in fact you can often modify your new plan so that automatic behaviors that will be served up by the non-conscious mind will assist your new plan.

So the question is: How do you talk with a Non-conscious Mind?

It doesn’t speak you know. It doesn’t even have self-consciousness as you and I know do. It’s not an actual entity as you and I seem to be. But it *acts* like an entity. It *acts* like a different, and autonomous, part of you. Because it is.

IT RESPONDS TO YOUR THOUGHTS

Here’s the answer: Although it cannot talk, it does have the habit of automatically generating the habitual thoughts and feelings you’ve entrained it to store, by your repeated thinking, feeling, or performing habitual actions.

So here’s what you do. Let’s say your new plan is to be more relaxed on your next date, and to have more fun.

So you sit down, and though you can do this just mentally, it will be easier to learn if you first try it with pencil and paper. So you start writing down your plan, with a lot of details. And as you write, pay careful attention, with every word that you write, what feelings and thoughts are popping into your awareness.

These feelings and thoughts are the responses of your non-conscious mind to your plan, word by word, and bit by bit.

For example if you write (or say), “I’m going to go out,” you might have a vague feeling of questioning. (That’s your non-conscious mind’s automatic reaction to the idea of your going on an excursion.)

And you then continue, writing (or saying), “on a date,” and immediately you notice a gentle feeling of unease. So right there you could react, and try some different words, like “I mean, to go get some dinner,” now you get a feeling of relaxation and ease.

And you continue, “with Sally,” and you notice that there’s no feeling of uneasiness. You just saw that your thinking “go out” and especially thinking “go on a date” are triggering the unwanted, automatic responses entrained into your non-conscious mind, but that “going to get some dinner … with Sally,” doesn’t trigger any automatic unpleasant stuff at all.

HOW TO USE WHAT YOU DISCOVER

Well for one thing, pay attention to your thoughts. If you feel uneasy, did you just think thoughts about dating? If so, reframe them differently. In this way you are retraining the non-conscious mind as you go.

You might discover, for example, that your non-conscious mind is going to produce a lot of automatic negative stuff if you plan a trip to the bowling alley, but no automatic negative stuff if you go golfing, and that it will generate warm and pleasant feelings if you’ll take a picnic to the museum.

Then, for certain, take more picnics at the museum, and for those other places like the bowling alley, visit the bowling alley on your own and meditate there or listen to music that always puts you in a good mood, or do something in those places that create more confort for you in those places.

A SIMPLE EXAMPLE

Recently, I’ve been engaged in the process of buying a house, and I knew I had to go to the Title Company, because that’s part of the process. I’d never been to a Title Company before, and when I thought about the mysterious ‘Title Company,’ I felt a discomfort and an uneasy feeling. So, before the day that I had to go there with the seller of the house, I went to the Title Company on my own.

I walked in, and the first thing I did was to “locate” myself in the place. That is, I made a point to look at the space and the things in it. I looked at the carpet and its color, and the way the sunlight fell through the window on the floor. I looked at the desks, and the walls, and the chairs. And then I looked at the several people in the room.

I picked one of them, and was invited to sit down. I sat down and felt the chair, and examined the person across from me. And then I asked a half a dozen questions about the process, which both told me something about the process, and also told me something about the people who work there. I then thanked the lady and left, noticing the furniture and fixtures as I did so.

In short, I familiarized my senses with the place, the process, and the people.

Then, the next day when I returned there with the seller of the house, guess who was relaxed and comfortable in that place? That’s right. My disquiet (automatic reaction from the non-conscious mind) was gone, replaced with a feeling of calm familiarity.

In the same way, you can familiarize yourself with unknown places and situations, and you can de-sensitize yourself from upsets that occurred in the past in certain locations. It’s not a perfect system, but it does work.

HOW THE NON-CONSCIOUS MIND SPEAKS “NEW” IDEAS TO YOU

So far, we’ve discussed how you speak to your non-conscious mind, and how you can perceive its reactions to what you say. However, as you engage in this practice — and at many other times, once you tune in to this process — you will begin to discover that your non-conscious also initiates communications to you, and these can be new ideas. They are probably triggered by things you say and do, but these new communications, to you, represent new and additional thoughts.

This is the process we see anytime you are “brainstorming,” which is listening to all the (wild and wacky) ideas that spring up as you consider a problem. During our daily life, as humans we learn to “tune out” all these associations. We have to do so in order to concentrate on the task at hand. But when you “brainstorm,” you pay attention to all these ideas as they arise. Although many do seem irrelevant, often wondrous gems can be found. And sometimes, behind an idea which seems loco, will be found a useful idea that is completely “outside the box.”

KEEPING THE FLOW GOING

The key in brainstorming, to keep the useful flow a-flowing, is to write down every single idea, no matter how “useless” or “silly.” That is, you permit no criticalness to intrude. (If criticalness or judging ideas is permitted, then very quickly you go back into “daily tasks” mode where non-fitting ideas are squelched, and the flow dries up. Put another way, your non-conscious mind quickly gets the message that you aren’t interested, and stops bothering to send you this rich trove of ideas.)

When you are having your “conversation” with your non-conscious mind, and feeling its reactions to what you are saying, it will also offer up new ideas. These are ideas that just “pop” into consciousness. Hopefully you are listening, and being non-critical and non-judgmental during this process, because these “offered-up” communications seemingly originated by your non-conscious mind are often creative solutions to the project you are considering.

In our dating example, you might discover as you consider taking Suzie to miniature golf, that you suddenly get an image of some female relative from the past or an old girlfriend or a childhood friend. Where did that come from? You guessed it.

Why? That’s the interesting question. When you look, you may suddenly have an “Aha!” when you realize that Suzie is triggering this old similar situation and maybe that’s where some of the worry or anxiety is coming from. Sometimes, when you spot old connections like this, just the process of spotting it is enough to disconnect or weaken the automatic response. Much of conventional therapy is in hopes of attaining enough of these new awarenesses so as to improve your usual operation.

Or, it might be that you get that image of some female relative from the past or an old girlfriend, and you ponder it, and then you think, “Aha!” because you just remembered that Aunt Bessie or old girlfriend Lucy used to really enjoy baking gingerbread cookies, and you wonder if your new date might — radical thought, outside the box — you wonder if your new date might enjoy (as a “date”) the two of you baking some gingerbread cookies, and then you carry them in a picnic basket with a thermos of milk to this really secluded place in the park for a romantic date of cookies and milk? Here, your non-conscious mind had handed you a creative and different idea for a date, that might be lots of fun.

IT WILL FIND THINGS FOR YOU

We’ve all had the experience of searching for a word and can’t immediately grasp it. You’ve probably also had the experience that you are suddenly reminded of something, but you can’t quite remember what. Or you want to recall the past, and you know it’s in there but not floating to the surface.

Your non-conscious mind is already in contact with that information. That’s why you have the “feeling” that you know that word, or why you have the “feeling” of being reminded, or you have the “feeling” that you know it’s there.

If you just ask your non-conscious mind to fetch it for you, then at some later time — maybe two minutes and maybe two hours — as you are doing something else, suddenly the missing word, or the missing memory, or the missing information will “pop” into your mind. Your non-conscious mind, having been given the task, has been working on it, and has found a route to present it to you.

This is also related to the process of handing a task to your non-conscious mind, such thinking of a problem as you go to sleep, and awakening with the solution. But that’s another whole thing. And, the better you and your non-conscious mind can get along, and the better the two of you are communicating, the better it can serve you. Remember, it’s looking out for you in every way that it can, as best it knows how. And when you operate in conformity with its activities, you become more integrated and more effective. And, generally, happier.

CHANGING YOUR MIND

The Non-conscious Mind cannot speak, but it can automatically issue feelings and thoughts. That’s what it does. So if you’ll speak (or write), paying close attention to the feelings and thought automatically arising as you do so, you’ll be carrying on a dialogue with your own non-conscious mind.

You can discover where it will automatically help you, and where it will automatically block you. And so knowing, you can choose your path so that it will help you, and you can also find ways to change some of those ‘automatic blocks’ into more useful habitual reactions.

And, so doing, you are changing your mind.

For the better.

Now right there is a poser, because you might think, “Well, if it’s unconscious, then how can it be a mind?”

And if you read up on this, and if you watch dramatic movies about people who have disturbed the ‘Subconscious’ mind, you could easily get the idea that the Subconscious mind is a kind of lunatic stalker which lives inside of us, and given the right situation, it might burst out and *make* you do something … bad.

Scary, huh.

Well, it’s not like that. It’s something far simpler and less mysterious, and you’ve seen it all your life, but you didn’t think about it. Here’s what it is …

HOW TO TIE A SHOE

When you’re a child, you learn to tie your shoe. The first day you really have to concentrate. Finally, you get it tied.

The next few days, it still requires a lot of thought and focus, but in a week, you know the moves. It’s a kind of sequence. You’ve ‘learned’ the sequence. And now, in your normal, conscious mind, the idea of “tie shoes” leads to “certain sequence of actions,” which we might now label as “how to tie shoes.”

Except that we don’t think much about it. We just do it. And over time we do it more and more. And now, think a moment. If you’re wearing shoes with laces today, how much did you think about how to tie them this morning?

ACTIONS BECOME UNCONSCOUS

Probably you didn’t think about it at all. You certainly didn’t think of the steps involved. And yet your shoes got tied this morning. Because the habitual action, repeated, has become “built” into your brain and into your mind. (If you’re interested in the biochemistry of the neurons and how they change structure over time to accommodate learned, repeated activities, then read “Evolve Your Brain,” by Joe Dispenza.)

We see this our entire life, and we just think, “it’s become a habit.”

And it’s a darned good thing, because do you realize how slowly your day would go if you had to stop and really concentrate in order to get out of bed (learned as a toddler), how to shave or fix our hair (learned as teens), how to dress (learned as children), how to drive a car or take a bus (learned long ago), how to operate a time-clock or turn on a computer (learned as young adults), how to use a telephone, how to read the clock (“the big hand is …”), how to read the news, how to operate a vending machine or order from a menu, how to write a check, how to wash clothes, how to make a pot of coffee, how to …

You see, it would be impossible to have the life you have if these things required attention, or consciousness. But they don’t. By repetition, they’ve become “automated circuits” or stored body memory, and can be engaged just by calling them. Your conscious mind decides, “tie shoes,” and another part of your mind handles it for you.

THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

In fact, you were just looking at the “Unconscious Mind,” or the “Subconscious Mind,” and we don’t even realize it because we’ve seen it in action our whole lives long.

Now, bear in mind that a lot more than tying your shoes becomes automatic, repeated, habitual response as we store it away. For example, your habitual feelings and moods (happy-go-lucky, depressed, anxious, angry, dull, chipper, amused, terrified, worried, elated). And for example, your opinions, prejudices, and beliefs (Chinese people cannot drive, your mother is stupid, cops are pigs, your new sweetheart is just dreamy, your old sweetheart was just awful).

Just the conscious thought, or even half-conscious thought as when day-dreaming, will automatically trigger your stored “programs/routines/habits,” and they will play out. Some are useful (driving to work), and some are not (worrying what people will think).

And, sure enough, all that stuff is not conscious. It is not part of your conscious mind, now that it’s been stored as a habit. And for most of us, there doesn’t seem to be some other conscious entity in your head other than yourself. And it operates like a “mind” in that it offers up thoughts, automatically, all day long. Automatic thoughts. Sometimes useful. Sometimes not.

That, and nothing else, is the “Unconscious Mind,” or the “Subconscious Mind.”

THE ‘NON-CONSCIOUS’ MIND IS LOOKING OUT FOR YOU

I like to call it the “Non-conscious” mind because it operates much like a mind, but it’s somewhat more automatic. It follows certain habitual rules rather than thinking things out step by step like you do when you’re consciously puzzling out something new. This non-conscious mind is also directly related to thousands of habitual things that the body has to do, most of which has *never* been in your conscious mind at all, such as regulating your blood pressure, sending chemical messengers here and there, remembering to breath harder when working out, keeping the heart beating while you sleep, and thousands of other bodily processes, none of which are (normally) conscious. It *is* an unconscious mind for it has no self-aware consciousness like *you* do, and it operates in a way that generally you are unconscious of that mind, which I’ll call the non-conscious mind.

It’s not hiding. It’s not stalking. It’s not dangerous, but rather it has been preserving your life as best it can for your entire life long. However, it *does* operate automatically, and sometimes that doesn’t fit.

Automatically driving in the right-side lane will fail to work well when you visit England.

Automatically winking at the pretty girl will fail to work well when she’s your new boss.

Automatically picking your nose when it bothers you will fail to work well when you’re having tea with the Bishop of Boston.

DRIVING IN TWO DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS

Now, let’s get to something *useful* with this information.

Have you ever gone on a diet? Most likely you have. And quite often on diets, it’s not such an easy thing to do. And the reason is quite simple.

You’re thinking two different thoughts. One is “I want to go on a diet.” And the other thought is “I want to eat that big piece of pie.”

You’re thinking both thoughts!

If a car had two drivers, and they were fighting over the steering wheel, and first one was stronger and then the other, can you imagine how the car would be careening all over the road, on and off the sidewalks, into porches and houses and attracting the police while pedestrians leap into the bushes to escape?

What wonder then that most diets fail to follow a straight path to success?

Now, when you consciously decided to go on a diet, where do you suppose that other thought came from?

It came from your automatically-operating non-conscious mind, offering up to you the habitual responses you have entrained all these years. It doesn’t stop working just because you had a different thought today. It’s been remembering that you like a second helping of potatoes and gravy for your whole damn life, and a few minutes of new thoughts don’t neutralize that automatic program. Your non-conscious mind is looking after you, regulating your blood and digestion and helping you drive the car and take another serving of pie by golly.

HOW CAN A HUMAN CHANGE?

Thus comes what we call “will power.” If you can persist long enough with a new course of action then the new course of action becomes ingrained, made automatic and unconscious, and then the new course will be offered up to you next time.

That’s why when you are actively exercising every day, it’s fairly easy to continue exercising the next day. But when you’re in the habit of *not* exercising every day, then tomorrow it’s not so easy to exercise.

The non-conscious mind is looking out for you, the best way it knows how.

And, there are some other ways to make progress. For example, if you could just “talk” with your non-conscious mind, perhaps the two of you could get along. (“Can’t we all just get along?”)

And the fact it, although the non-conscious mind can’t talk, if you know how, you can easily carry on a conversation with your non-conscious mind. And if you can just know what things it’s going to automatically *help* you with, and where it’s going to automatically *block* your new plan, this helps tremendously for your formulation of workable plans.

And over time, the two of you will, in fact, get along better and better.

More to follow.