The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [74]
Today, you get in the car, turn the ignition on, and consciously review your shopping list as the subconscious mind dutifully engages all the complex skills you need to successfully navigate through the city—without even once having to think about the mechanics of driving. I know I am not the only one out there who has experienced this. You are driving and having a delightful discussion with the passenger sitting next to you. In fact, your consciousness gets so caught up in the conversation, that somewhere down the road it dawns on you that you haven’t even paid attention to your driving for five minutes. After a momentary start, you realize that you are still on your side of the road and steadily moving along with the flow of traffic. A quick check of the rear view mirror reveals that you did not leave a wake of crumpled stop signs and smashed mailboxes. If you weren’t consciously driving the car during that time, then who was? The subconscious mind! And how well did it do? Although you didn’t observe its behavior, the subconscious mind apparently performed just as well as it was taught during your driver’s education experience.
In addition to facilitating subconscious habitual programs, the conscious mind also has the power to be spontaneously creative in its responses to environmental stimuli. In its self-reflective capacity, the conscious mind can observe behaviors as they’re being carried out. As a preprogrammed behavior is unfolding, the observing conscious mind can step in, stop the behavior, and create a new response. Thus the conscious mind offers us free will, meaning we are not just victims of our programming. To pull that off however, you have to be fully conscious lest the programming take over, a difficult task, as anyone who’s tried willpower can attest. Subconscious programming takes over the moment your conscious mind is not paying attention.
The conscious mind can also think forward and backward in time, while the subconscious mind is always operating in the present moment. When the conscious mind is busy daydreaming, creating future plans, or reviewing past life experiences, the subconscious mind is always on duty, efficiently managing the behaviors required at the moment, without the need of conscious supervision.
The two minds are truly a phenomenal mechanism, but here is how it can go awry. The conscious mind is the “self,” the voice of our own thoughts. It can have great visions and plans for a future filled with love, health, happiness, and prosperity. While we focus our consciousness on happy thoughts, who is running the show? The subconscious. How is the subconscious going to manage our affairs? Precisely the way it was programmed. The subconscious mind’s behaviors when we are not paying attention may not be of our own creation because most of our fundamental behaviors were downloaded without question from observing other people. Because subconscious-generated behaviors are not generally observed by the conscious mind, many people are stunned to hear that they are “just like their mom or their dad,” the people who programmed their subconscious minds.
The learned behaviors and beliefs acquired from other people, such as parents, peers, and teachers, may not support the goals of our conscious mind. The biggest impediments to realizing the successes of which we dream are the limitations programmed into the subconscious. These limitations not only influence our behavior, they can also play a major role in determining our physiology and health. As we’ve seen, the mind plays a powerful role in controlling the biological systems that keep us alive.
Nature did not intend the