Intuition, The Sub-Conscious, and Truly KNOWING

Reader's Digest Version: The main message of this post may be summed up succintly as this: the subconscious mind has a compendium of knowledge that it only shares the smallest bits of with the concsious mind. Therefore, whenever you have an "aha!" experience, that's just a signal from your subconsious mind that it knows something, but your conscious mind still has to unpack that information into bite-sized, conscious mind edible bits in order to understand it. To do this, you must consciously think about your aha! thought. The rest of this post is more or less my personal journey towards finding this out. So, I've offered you the reader's digest version in case you don't feel like trudging through my verbosity. I think I might do this more often. :)

I had a minor breakthrough yesterday while doing some hardcore thinking. I was listening to Steve Pavlina's podcast on intuition, and wondering about what he was saying about the subconscious and conscious mind. First thing first, though. I don't have a degree in psychology, I don't really have all that much of a background in the conscious and subconscious mind, and to be honest, I don't really care all that much about the science behind what I'm going to write about. This all just intuitively makes sense to me, and it helps me to unpack many of the concepts that previously caused me trouble.

Back to the story. Steve talks about how the unconscious mind is the repository for just about everything that you ever learn or experience. Basically, the conscious mind can only take in a very small sliver of what you're currently aware of without totally overwhelming you. Everything else goes to the subconscious mind for storage and, possibly later, recall. Therefore, although your conscious mind runs the show, you're subconscious mind is really the giant library in your mind that has all the pertinent information.

As an example of the difference between your conscious and subconscious minds, try and think of as many memories as you can right now consciously. How many did you come up with? Ten? Twenty? Now think about how during the day, some random scent, or word, or image can bring up a memory from when you were seven or eight that you would have never thought of consciously. That memory is not in your conscious mind, it's in your subconscious. Cool stuff.

While listening to all this discussion of the difference between the conscious and subconscious mind, a thought popped into my head (that's been happening a lot lately. I think it has to do with all the clearing out of psychic junk I've been doing with GTD and meditation), a thought to the affect of "so that's why whenever I have a thought, I assume I know it's meaning." For that to make sense, I'm going to have to give you even more of a backstory. Here we go.

For the past month or so, I've been wrestling with the concept that after I have a thought, I don't really need to do anything about it because, after all, I've already had the thought. That must mean I understand it completely. I realized that this can't be true, because I've had plenty of good thoughts, and very rarely have they manifested into anything of value to me or others. I couldn't quite figure this paradox out. How do I have a thought, but yet that thought, though seemingly fully formed, isn't of any use to me?

And the thought from yesterday happened. So that is it! Basically, I figured out that all these "aha!" moments I've been having, all these great ideas that pop into my head, are fully formed, but only in my subconscious. Basically, to add intuition to the mix, I intuitively know the things that I'm thinking. Yet I still have to "unpack" the thought into my conscious mind if I'm going to understand and utilize the thought. For example, I had the thought yesterday after reading further in The Future and It's Enemies that it's always better to just jump in and do something and allow evolution (or basically trial and error) to come up with the "best" solution instead of trying to find it myself. The old me, from two days ago, would have chalked this thought up as done, moved on, and had more thoughts and assumed that this knowledge would be applicable to my life right away. However, I now realize that it's nothing of the sort. Rather, my subconscious (or intuition, whichever you prefer) has given my conscious mind a heads up that my subconscious has this really great idea it would like to share with me. It's only given me a nice little keyword, or keyphrase (that evolution is the best way to solve things), and it's up to me, the conscious mind to unpack this idea into a useful, applicable, manageable form.

I don't know how clear this idea is to anyone reading this, but the clarity it offers me is amazing. It's almost as if I've been running around with blinders on, and suddenly someone took them off and I can see in all directions. Well, maybe not quite that dramatic, but still pretty freakin' cool.

Now off to explore this coolness.

Namaste.