Figmentations

While I might not be prone to having blind faith in “an experienced pilot”, I am also not prone to “throwing the baby out with the bath-water.”  In other words, I’m finding that just because you don’t agree with everything when you first learn something, that doesn’t mean you have to disregard everything about it either.

I bring this up in the context of what I’ve been learning about the role the subconscious mind plays for us in combination with the functioning of our conscious (thinking) mind.   As is taught through SRI Coaching, it is important to develop rapport between the conscious and the subconscious mind since each serves a purpose.   

Clearly, the concept of a conscious mind is easier to grasp than that of a subconscious or unconscious mind.  The unconscious mind is said to be where memories, emotions, and perceptions exist, as well as where energy is stored and from where our bodily functions are run.

(Note: The words “subconscious” and “unconscious” are being used interchangeably here.  And, the ”unconscious mind” is not meant to imply being in an “unconscious state”, but rather refers to what exists outside of our conscious awareness.) 

In class with SRI Coaching, for some of us, the concept of trusting the power of the subconscious mind wasn’t such a easy concept to grasp since it can seem like such an abstract theory.  So, as I mentioned in a prior post, I thought I’d focus just on understanding the thinking part of our mind better to see if we really needed to focus on the subconscious part directly or even at all.

In a book on Critical Thinking by the Foundation for Critical Thinking, I am surprised to be finding that the existence of the subconscious mind isn’t being overlooked or denied there at all!  A quote from this book clearly expresses how the two minds work together: 

“When our thinking is of high quality, rational emotions follow.  When we develop rational emotions, we think reasonably.  ….(And, that) thought and emotion are inseparable functions of the mind.” 

While the study of Critical Thinking seems to aim at getting closer to the facts of the situation, i.e., to ”reality”, via the following:

“It is useful to practice making conscious what is subconscious in your thinking.  Then you can better understand what’s going on beneath the surface of your thoughts” (p 68), 

the practice of understanding the subsconscious mind better seems to broaden the scope in the opposite direction by encouraging us to trust that there is a lot that we process and internalize that the conscious mind can’t be conscious of all the time.  So, that can lead one to conclude that, in the subconscious mind, there might just exist an undeniable energy and resource that might be worth tapping into.

So, here it might come in handy to consider how our minds process the information we encounter. Let’s first look at the NLP Communication model which we’ll then compare to, what appears to me to be, the “Critical Thinking” version of it. 

According to the NLP Communicaton model there are statistics that describe how we are bombarded by 2-4 millions bits of information daily, yet our conscious mind can only process 134 bits per second at bites of 7±2. Basically that means that our internal re-presentation system has to filter this overload of information (by generalizing, deleting, and distorting it) based on our beliefs, values, attitudes, the language we use, our memories and decisions.

According to the book ”Critical Thinking”, 

“we rarely sort the ‘lived’ integrated experience into its component parts, raw data versus our inner processing of the data, or ask ourselves how the interest, goals, and desires we brought to those data shaped and structured that interpretation. Similarly, we rarely consider the possibility that our interpretations (and hence, our experience) might be selective, biased, or misleading.” (p132)

So, information is always being is processed both consciously and subconsciously.  If the existence of the subconcious mind can not be denied by those focused on improving our thinking processes, maybe we shouldn’t minimize its value either.

With that I’ll leave you with a Saint Augustine quote that Steve Linder of SRI Coaching often shares with his classes:

“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”
~Saint Augustine

If anyone has any thoughts or comments to add to this post, please feel free to share them below. Thanks!