The closer you come to knowing that you alone create the world of your experience, the more vital it becomes for you to discover just who is doing the creating.
Eric Micha’el Leventhal
The mind has two parts—the subconscious and the conscious. The subconscious mind is the primordial mind and is shaped by evolution and the environment around us. It is designed to deal with millions of bits of information per second that we receive from our senses. Hence, it has evolved to process 40 million bits of data per second. That’s a mighty fast and powerful computer. However, the conscious mind that evolved a lot later (represented by the prefrontal cortex) is capable of processing only 40 bits of data per second.
Let me give you some time for the fact to sink in …
Our subconscious habitual mind is 1 million times more powerful than our conscious creative mind. I don’t know about you, but I surely wish for it to be otherwise 🙂 . The conscious mind that is the seat of our creativity, our willpower, and our happiness is significantly low-powered in comparison. Why is it designed this way?
The answer lies in how we evolved. We evolved to survive … to handle emergencies and combat stress while interacting with our environment. The subconscious mind had to deal with millions of bits of information per second, make sense of it, and provide a suitable response. There is simply no time to think and ponder when someone is attacked by a predator. However, the conscious mind does not deal with survival. It’s built like an add-on. It deals with the ability to create … to create art, to create music, to create stories, and most importantly to create one’s life the way one wants to live it. Unfortunately, many of us continue to treat the conscious mind as an add-on and use it minimally. Based on our individual capabilities we are conscious of 1-5% of our cognitive ability. 95-99% of the time we are dictated by our subconscious … by the programs in our subconscious mind! Most of the time we’re not living the life we want … but the life we are programmed to live!
What are these programs then? They are information encoded in our genes and they are what we learn from our environment … our parents, our teachers, our communities et al. Is there a way we can update these programs so that we can live the life of our dreams? Yes, most certainly.
The answer to it is meditation. Once you become aware of the breath that enters you and leaves you … once you become aware of every sensation in your body from head to toe and from toe to head … you become aware of the impermanence of the body made of flesh and bones. You become aware of yourself as a magnetic field … as a vibrating and pulsating field of energy. You stop thinking about the past and the future and you start thinking about the now. You become conscious and you stay conscious for the most parts of your life. At that point, you can stop playing your unconscious programmed mind. And you start playing your conscious creative mind! And once you start playing your conscious creative mind, you start creating the life you truly want to live … and not what you are programmed to live.
And this is not merely a theory! Almost everyday towards the end of my Vipassanā session I feel my body vibrating intensely. It’s a feeling available to all of us … available always within us! However, we mostly fail to recognize this as we live in a world driven by money. We spend a lot of money … we run to clinical hypnotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, life coaches, self-help gurus et al. We fail to recognize that the most beautiful things are available to us for free, e.g. air, water, sleep, and meditation.
Meditation not only helps you become more conscious, it also gradually changes your life for the better. How you are truly influences your happiness and the world around you. Consider for instance Magnetoencephalography (MEG). MEG is a functional neuroimaging technique for mapping brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by electrical currents occurring naturally in the brain, using very sensitive magnetometers. MEG does not even touch the head. You can read your brain activity outside of your head. It’s not magic! When a nerve carries an electrical signal it has a magnetic field around it (just like electricity carried by an electrical wire). The magnetic field passes through your skull. Your thoughts are not contained in your head.
Now consider a hypothesis. When you think positively about someone they make an effort to get in touch with you. If you have negative thoughts about someone they will create negative thoughts about you. Have you experienced this? If so, you already know that it’s important to be conscious of your thoughts and judgements. They are not only connected to you but connected to the people you think/talk about.
Embrace meditation. Reprogram the mind. Create the life you want. Be happy now!
