The Power of the Subconscious

The following is adapted from Reality Revolution by Brian Scott.

My first summer in college, I worked on a gigantic ranch in Wyoming. I had never ridden a horse before, and my coworkers joked that I should go ride the horse they were trying to tame. However, I didn’t know that it was a joke, so I got up on the horse only to be thrown off several times.

Once I understood what was happening and attuned myself with the horse, it calmed down. Eventually, I was even able to get on the saddle and ride the horse.

Something similar is constantly happening in our lives. Reality is a wild, untamed horse that’s bucking and kicking us around. If we ignore that truth, we’re just going to be bucked off.

But if we can tune into reality through our subconscious mind and come to grips with how it all works, we actually gain control and can ride the horse.

Whether we ignore it, downplay it, or work with it, we are all aware of the power of the subconscious. It is one of the most important forces affecting everything that we do.

The subconscious mind operates our automatic bodily processes like growth and repair — if you cut yourself it will provide blood cells and tissue to that cut until it is healed. It keeps our hearts beating, thousands of times every day, and manages hundreds of complex bodily processes, as well as our minds.

One of the best books about the Law of Attraction came from Joseph Murphy’s The Power of the Subconscious Mind, in which he outlines the incredible power of the subconscious mind.

The subconscious part of the brain is designed to avoid unnecessary energy consumption, since the brain itself requires almost 20 percent of the glucose and oxygen in the blood. In a conservation effort, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t use any energy to discover the genesis of new ideas.

Meanwhile, while we think that the decisions that we have made come from the “awake,” conscious part of the brain, often we are making a decision that has already been made by the subconscious. This has been observed on EEG patterns, when the brain began to answer questions before the person had answered them.

This quiet but active part of the brain can be broken down into two functions: there is the computer subconscious that operates without us having any access to it at all, and then there is the part that is somewhat self-aware.

It can be considered your higher self or your heart, but it has some level of personality compared with the automatic functions.

The automatic functions can then be broken down into physical actions such as riding a bike or driving a car, and mental actions like attitudes. The subconscious mind houses memory, including real and imagined life experiences.

While it can process unfathomable amounts of information at once — some studies suggest four hundred billion bits of information per second — it cannot edit that incoming information as true or false, helpful or harmful. It can, on the other hand, cure diseases and create and alleviate stress.

To put that into perspective, a movie has about twenty-four frames per second, while we’re living in about nine million frames per second, and the subconscious mind processes exponentially more than that.

The conscious mind is much slower, more deliberate, and less efficient — processing only two thousand bits of information, requiring them to be grouped, and moving its impulses at about 150 miles per hour compared with the subconscious mind’s 100,000 miles per hour. This makes the subconscious one of the most advanced forms of technology on the planet.

And this is the technology that we’re trying to hack.

For more advice on harnessing the power of your subconscious and shaping your reality, you can find Reality Revolution on Amazon.

Brian Scott wants to help transform the lives of as many people as possible in order to justify the improbable second chance he was given. Brian brings a unique blend of cutting-edge science, business savvy, and unbridled curiosity to his work. Where else can you find an NLP Master Practitioner, Certified Hypnotist, Meditation Trainer, and bookstore owner who’s also a comic book fan, Pearl Jam lifer, proud father, and motivational speaker who still thinks he’s an artist. Brian is the CEO of the Advanced Success Institute and host of The Reality Revolution Podcast. To learn more about Brian’s work, check out TheRealityRevolution.com.