Applied Awareness

Subconscious Awareness

(Overview of the Subconscious Mind)

Subconscious Awareness is learning to be consciously aware of what’s happening subconsciously.

The only thing we really have control over are the choices we make.

It can seem like we make an endless number of choices, but we really only ever make the same two choices over and over again…and call it “thinking“.

  1.  We choose how to interpret a situation, and then
  2.  Decide how to react to our own interpretation.
Although it can seem that we react to others or external forces, we only ever react to ourselves.

We think by drawing on our three mental resources:

  1. Memories. What we remember and have learned through our past experiences.
  2. Emotions. Our mood, or how we feel emotionally, plays a key role in our interpretations and reactions.
  3. Our ability to Speculate. Some other words we use to describe this are our personal judgments, opinions, beliefs, guesswork, assumptions, etc., all of which we use in place of missing or unknown facts.

We form both conscious and subconscious habits for everything we do on a regular basis, including thinking.

Being able to recognize our mental habits is the first step towards being able to change them to become the people we want to be.

We can change our mental habits through repetition, which is how we form all of our mental habits.

We all make our choices of how to interpret situations and how to react to our own interpretations using the same mental resources. However, we all have subconscious habits of relying upon some mental resources more than others.

This causes some people to come across as being more emotional, more factual/logical, or more opinionated, with a variety of mixtures in between. 

We’re constantly forming subconscious mental associations.

A mental association is a group of connected thoughts and emotions around an experience in our lives, or a group of connected experiences.

It’s our mental associations that categorize and cross-reference our thoughts, memories and emotions.

Syncing

Our mind and body naturally try to keep in sync.

If we go from sitting to running our mind speeds up so we can maintain balance and avoid obstacles.

When we’re tired or depressed we tend to move more slowly.

Our Motivation

Every choice we make, everything we do, is a conscious or subconscious attempt to be happier.

Even performing unselfish acts of heroism or kindness are pursuits of happiness that can sometimes just be trying to choose the lesser of two evils for the happier outcome in our own minds.

Communicating

When trying to understand each other, all we have to draw from are the memories of what we’ve experienced at this point in our lives, our emotions, and our ability to speculate (to fill in the gaps of missing information)

Because we can have vastly different life experiences, different emotions concerning the same topic, and differing assumptions based upon them, the same sentiments, and sometimes even the same words, can mean something quite different to different people.

For a long time it’s been thought that our consciousness, soul, spirit was separate from the thinking mind, but newer theories are that it is also part of the functioning brain, which is in-line with my personal meditative observations. The only way to know for sure at the current time requires being brain dead, which we can’t come back from.