It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it. [00:27.6]
Bob: All right, folks, welcome back to the Alive and Free Podcast. Today we are going to talk about something that's going to probably really stretch your mind a little bit; it's called ‘The Myth of The Subconscious.’ Now I want you to like consider this from a certain standpoint. How many of you have ever heard anybody tell you that, Oh, no it was a subconscious thought or it was you know, some of my subconscious has all these stuff and everybody, you have heard this, in fact, I've used this terminology a lot. If you go to a lot of these personal development people, they're going to say, well, your subconscious mind is like 95% of what's going on and only 5% of it is your conscious mind and so on and so forth. And they talk about the subconscious and the conscious mind as if they are things and use that in order to describe some of the things that are happening. [01:16.3]
Are we actually having unconscious thoughts? Are we not having unconscious thoughts? And so today, because this conversation ties into core beliefs or core ideas that people have, which drive their behavior, I think it would be really beneficial for us to take a moment or two or a few minutes and really look at it. So first order of business, I want you to like take stock of what the subconscious mind is. If you listen to a lot of the common talk out there, I mean, I went through so many personal development programs. I went to events. I watched people draw diagrams of what the conscious and the subconscious mind are. They would draw these stick figures and then a circle for the head. And then they would draw a line across and they talk about one part of it being conscious and these other parts being unconscious and so on and so forth. Some of them would get more sophisticated and have another line in there. And they would talk about thought loops and they would talk about beliefs and limiting core beliefs and where those sat and that all of that other stuff. [02:14.5]
And, and it made so much sense to me at the time because humans are the things that make sense. So a thing doesn't have to be true for it to make sense. If you look at it, all of the fiction books in the world that have been written, have an internal sense to them, they make sense. Harry Potter makes sense for the world that it is, but it isn't true. It isn't a world in reality, it isn't doesn't have anything to do with reality. It has enough internal consistency that it makes sense. So you can look at science fiction novels, like Ender's Game, where they're doing all of these war games with alien species, and they all make sense, which is why we continue reading the story, which is why we're willing to suspend our disbelief, which is the word Tolkien used in order to adopt this, right. And our worldview and the way we think about how the human mind and the human body and everything works is really that we've been given a series of stories about how the mind and how the body work. [03:12.5]
For some of us, we grew up in a religious culture, which taught us that the mind and the body are things that were created by God. And for some of us that God has a body like ours for others he doesn't have a body with parts and passion. And so to some degree, our understanding of the human body is that it's in the likeness of God, whatever that means for that person. And so we start seeing this body in those terms, and it makes sense to us because that's the story that's been given. And anything we find later on in life that starts to challenge that our first interaction, Our first attempt to understand it is to, to grab that thing and to stick it back into our worldview, Oh, the mind works like this. The unconscious mind works like this. See that's proof that God created it and we'll use our own bias in order to bring that back in so that we continue to make sense of the world. Human beings are the things that make sense. Now. Other people didn't grow up in a religious situation and so they learned that the human body was made up of cells and molecules and DNA strands and connective tissue and things like that. [04:17.2]
Or they learned that the body had guts and like really vague, simple childlike terms for anatomy. And when they're talking about sex, they talk about it in a particular storied kind of way, right. Or when they talk about digestion, they talk about it in a certain storied way. And there's a story of calories in digestion, which we talked about in, Oh gosh, a long time ago with Beldon, when he came on early on, this was last year, a good ways ago. I'm discussing where the idea of calories came from and how that has become a major factor in almost, almost all of the diets out there and all people talking about nutrition. When the reality is calories, as a thing do not exist, they don't exist in food. They don't exist in your body. You don't burn a calorie. A calorie is just a measurement. It's like an inch, right? You don't have, there's not inches lying around on the ground that you pay. Oh, look mom, today I found an inch. I found three inches at school. Check this out. An inch is just an idea, a way of measuring what happened and the same with the calorie. [05:17.9]
But it's a story a lot of people have been given about how digestion works and they say, well, if you want to lose weight calories in calories out when that's not the case at all, and there's so many different factors that go into why weight is lost, including time of year, including seasons of life, including psychological trauma, including the type of food that's being put in and so on and so forth. There's a lot of variables involved, but because we've got the story of calories, we believe the story of calories. And that was a story that was, was created in the eight mid 1800’s by a guy who was using steam engines as a measurement for how many, how much food a would need in order to continue to be able to work a full day's work. Because his job was to make sure that he could put the most efficient amount of food rations for the railroad workers, so that they would get the right amount of food and energy in order to be able to continue working a day's work. [06:13.8]
And so he made some assumptions based on steam engines and based on those assumptions, assigned a certain calorie amount to food. And based on that, he calculated how much food a person would need. And since the mid 1800’s, we've still been using that archaic form of considering what foods need to be in and out of the system and what's optimal nutrition, even though it was based on steam engines and not human bodies. So we've all been given certain stories about how our mind and our bodies work. And I'm going to have you consider the possibility that all those are, are fictions that make sense. They're just stories and the one that works best for you use it, right? But sometimes the fictions we've been given work for a little bit, but they also have a negative side effect. And one of those fictions might just be this whole notion of a subconscious mind. [07:06.7]
So I want you to look at this really clearly, the people talking about the subconscious mind are using it in terms of like the sleeping giant, like Joe Dispenza does when he's talking about a spontaneous remissions and healings, right. As if he could give this unconscious processes of his body, some kind of instruction, then they would do the healing for him and he would be able to get out of that. Now his story is a remarkable one and some of the work he's done, it's absolutely incredible. So this is when I'm bringing this up to let you know that the story of a subconscious mind is a story that has been used to great effect by a lot of people. Also people who use this, they use this a lot in the mental coaching sphere. So Psycho-Cybernetics was a book that came out a long time ago by a plastic surgeon who noticed that the patients that he had, if their view of who they are and their view of themselves didn't change before or along with the surgery, then it didn't matter what the surgery was or how effective the surgery was and making the person believe they were beautiful or handsome or worth something. [08:09.3]
It didn't matter if their view of themselves didn't change, then eventually they would, they would one never be able to accept it and two, sometimes the surgery didn't take very well. And whereas the ones that actually shifted their view of who they were, the surgery took massively and some of his clients, some of them didn't even need surgery, shifting the view of who they were actually changed their physical appearance. And so he put out this book a long time ago, and they've been a lot of coaches who have read it, who have talked about cybernetic kind of capacities inside the human mind and this idea that there are some lurking unconscious hidden beliefs about who we are, that are sitting in this place called the subconscious as if it is a literal place in the body. And that are two entities, your conscious and your subconscious, and they are both vying for control. Now that flies in the face of certain research as well. [09:04.5]
It is an effective story, meaning it's helped people. It's helped people get results, but it doesn't really describe what's going on any more than if you were to say, this is how electricity works my friend. There's a light switch over there in the corner. Electricity works this way. If you flip the light switch up, that creates electricity in the light. And when you flip it down, it turns the light off, right? It gets rid of the electricity. Electricity is created by turning that switch. And while that isn't true by any stretch of the imagination, because electricity is created currently by the burning of fossil fuels like coal and an oil or by the collection of wind energy and solar energy and whatnot stored in batteries in some cases, and spread throughout an entire grid, that is an at constant access point. And the light switch only connects the circuit and connects you to it. And so there's no electricity created, tt's only dispensed from one way of looking at it. [10:03.0]
But the story that me turning on the light creates electricity works, right? You can go through life with that story and in, most of the time will work until the day when the light burns out. And then you'll be asking yourself what's going on or until the day when there's a short in the wire behind the plug. And then it doesn't matter if it's a good light bulb or a bad light bulb, for whatever reason, there's no electricity created. And so we say, Oh no, it's a bad, it's a bad switch, or it's a bad plug, or that one's a dud. It doesn't create electricity, this one does. But really that's not how electricity works. And the more you understand how it works, the more capable you're able to be to wire a house and create possibilities for other people. But if you don't understand how it works, then your capacity to work with it is very, very limited, same with the human mind. So I want you to take a straw poll for yourself. [10:53.2]
If you were to take any human being who just recently died and given all permission to science, to use their body for scientific inquiry, and you cut open their skull, would you ever, what parts of the brain are the conscious parts and what parts of the subconscious parts, do you know? Oh, no, a couple of weeks ago, Bob, we talked about the three brains. We talked about the neocortex, and when we talked about the emotional brain, and then we talked about your perception brain, right? And that emotional brain is subconscious it's operating on its own. You know, the thinker, a conscious thought, that's the only thing that we're aware of. Really, you're not aware of your feelings? You're not aware of the sense data that's coming in? You're not aware of any of it? Ooh, that's a muddy topic cause you are aware of some sense data or you would have zero sense perception. Clearly you're aware of that to a certain extent, you are aware of your emotional states, which isn't the only thing that the reptilian brain does, but you know, it's, it's a useful thing to look at it for, right. For all purposes, it also focuses on survival and some things like that, but right. Okay, cool. [11:59.6]
But you are aware of your emotions, your fears and all that other stuff. They do come to the surface, you are very, very familiar with them, right? And you are aware of some of your thoughts. So you are aware of these things and if you're aware of them, are you not conscious of them? And if you're conscious of them, then clearly those parts of the brain are not unconscious. So what part of the brain is subconscious? What, what structures, is it the hypothalamus? Is that subconscious? Is that opinion gland? Is it the third ventricle? Is it the first and second ventricles? The two lateral ventricles in the in the brain? Or is it the fourth ventricle? Right? Are we in the aqueduct of Sylvius, is that it? Or what about, you know, the straight sinus, you know, what, which parts of the brain are, we're talking about? The tentorium, the, the membrane that goes around it is that subconscious, is it all the gray matter? Is it, is it the temporal lobe? Is it the occipital lobe? Is it the frontal lobe? Which, which parts of the brain are subconscious? And the answer would be, if you're dead on the table, all of them are subconscious because they aren't, you're not conscious of them. Sorry. That was a trick question. Okay. [12:58.5]
But the point is, there are no parts of the brain that are subconscious, just like the old myth some time ago that, Oh, your average human only uses about 10% of his brain. And so yeah, people would interpret that to mean like, Oh 10% of my brain, if I could use a 100% that would be great. But it's not that you only use 10% of your brain, it's the only 10, any given 10% of your brain might be in use more, or maybe less for some people who knows. Maybe I'm a 3% or maybe less of that brain is being in use at any given time. Because if your brain was a hundred percent on all the time, the amount of consumption of fuel that that would take from your system would overload it. But each part of the brain is able to be accessed and used. No different than a machine, a computer, like is your computer operating at a 100% capacity all the time? No, it's not. [13:46.7]
Sometimes it has to operate in a high mode when you tax it with a lot of things. But by and large, it's only operating with a small amount of its capacity, a small amount of its memory. But there's all kinds of different tasks. And you can get all over the computer interface and it's not a big deal. And any computer that you try to make operate at its level, it starts to have a meltdown, to a certain extent. You need massive fans and external supports to try and help this computer because of what is, what the amount of computation that takes and the amount of energy that it takes to compute all those things and the amount of heat that, that builds inside the computer. So you, you might be using at any given point 10% of your brain, and yet your entire brain is accessible. So once again, the myth that we have as a human society starts to fall apart upon deeper scrutiny. [14:35.2]
There is no such thing as a subconscious mind; there are simply activities in your mind to which you have varying degrees of consciousness. So if you were aware of all that your mind was doing, then your whole mind would be conscious and there would be no subconscious mind. If you're only aware of 1% of what your mind is doing, then your mind would only be, you would only be conscious of 1% of it, but that doesn't mean that you, there is a subconscious mind. It just means that you're not aware of it. Any more than there is like, is there a conscious or subconscious car driving behind you on the road if you didn't see it in the mirror. It's not that the car is conscious or subconscious it's there regardless. It's driving, regardless. The only thing you're speaking of is your awareness of it and different parts of your mind, you can become aware of it different times. So all of them are accessible to you. [15:31.7]
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or wants some help doing it. Head on over to thefreedomspecialist.com/feelbetternow and check out some of the things we've got in store for you or book a call so we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for. [15:59.4]
I have learned over the years to be able to tap into and be aware of, and feel certain parts of my brain, my mind, different areas of my body, because your entire body is also just an extension of your mind. What part of your body doesn't have a nerve cell in it? Nerve cells, AKA nor neurons are part of your mind. Your entire body is an extension of your brain to a certain extent. And I have learned to develop my awareness in such a way that I can move it around my body and feel into deep things. I can feel my liver. I can feel my gallbladder. I can feel membranes in the brain, the pineal gland, all these different areas. I can move my awareness around because I learned to do that. Does that make them subconscious when I'm not aware of them? No, it just means I'm moving my attention around. [16:53.8]
Now, why is it useful to say there's no such thing as a subconscious mind. On one hand, it's not going to be useful, if your belief about the subconscious mind is giving you results. So if you going, Oh, no, I've got to work on my subconscious. I really got to help myself out with this. Sorry, I don't mean to do that in a teasing way. But if you saying that is helping you in your life, don't worry about this. But if you've noticed that, like, it feels like there's another person inside you, when people say it, then I want to give you a way out. You see, cause you and I are individuals, individuals, which means we cannot be divided, which means that inside there's only one. There's no, Oh, part of me wants to do this and part of me wants to do that. That's not true. What's actually happening is sometimes I want to do this and sometimes I want to do that. It's just you and you waffle back and forth between them. That's all that's happening; there is no part of you. There's no like some extra brain somewhere else in your brain that's like, Oh no, for our greater, we want to do this, that or the other. [17:51.0]
Now on some level you could argue, okay, cool there are cells in the body and they want to do certain things. And cancer cells want to do certain things and bacteria want to do certain things. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about your experience of the mind and people who have for the longest time held the idea that there is an ego and that there is a superego and that there is ID and ID, the, the ego and the super ego and maybe there's another one. I don't remember all of the distinctions that they had there. And you know, they've held this for a long time too. They're just using stories to try and explain what's there. No different than the story of addiction, which doesn't exist in the world. It's not a real thing. Now people are experiencing something and they're using the word addiction to describe their experience. But the minute you start saying, it's a real thing is the minute that you now lost your control over it. Because now it's some other thing that's working on you and you're a victim to it. And too often, we go, Oh no, you know, it's just like, I'm having all these subconscious thoughts. Or my subconscious is working against me or my ego. Oh, that's just my ego doing this. [18:54.7]
And that's not a helpful way of doing it because what it means is inside of your own skin, inside of your own brain, there is some extra entity running around, running amuck with you. And that's, how is that different than believing you've been possessed by an evil spirit? How is that different than the language that says there are demons creating problems? And back in the old days, my guess is like in Jesus's time and stuff and even in the middle ages anybody having an addiction might be considered to have an evil spirit or a bad air inside of them, that there might be some demonic thing causing these problems when all of this is related to mental health and your capacity to be aware of and in control of it. And so instead of sitting here saying, Oh, my subconscious has these beliefs and I have to now beat down my subconscious and I have to train it to teach it how to do all these other things. What if there was no subconscious? What if, instead of saying, Oh no, I slipped and I fell, what if you could just simply own up to the fact that you did that now you always do the best that you can. You're not at fault, some weird way. Like you deliberately chose to do something bad. [19:56.7]
Every person on the planet is always doing their best. Even the times when they say, Oh, no, I'm not going to give it my best effort. If you really look at the context they're in, that is the best they can do at that moment. There is never anything that happens differently. And so if you're looking at it and you're like, Oh, my subconscious, this and that, what you've done is disempower yourself. What's really happened is a certain event happened or certain events keep happening. Oh, man, I went up to speak in public and my heart started racing and whatnot. And I started having these thoughts. Cool. Those are thoughts happening in that moment. It isn't your subconscious trying to kill you There isn't an extra subconscious running around trying to make your life miserable. You're not sitting here like on the back of something that you have to now control, it's just something that's happening. So instead of looking at it as the same subconscious mind, here's another potential way of looking at it for you. There is simply what you're aware of and what you're not aware of. [20:52.3]
Anything you're not aware of is, is below your consciousness, we could say sub conscious. Are you aware of China right now? Like aware of it? Like you can perceive it. Are you aware of what's happening inside of the blood vessels in your heel? Are you aware of what's happening one town over? Are you aware of the weather in Brazil? Right. All of the answers to them, most likely for most people is going to be, unless you're in China or Brazil, most for most people is going to be NO, I'm not aware of those things. So all of those things are outside of reality for you, outside of your real experience. And the only thing that you can work with is your real experience, that's all you have to work with. If you can't see it, all you're going to be doing is making up fantasies about it and that's going to create more problems for you. Even if there is literally some such thing as a subconscious mind, which we have yet to discover. You, if you, because you're not aware of it and you're not able to perceive it, it's not real for you. It's not real in your experience. And there's no point in making up another idea about it. [21:58.9]
What's happening in this moment is the only thing that's happening. And so instead of saying, Oh no, my subconscious mind this, and I have this belief in, Oh, it keeps coming back up. What is this it we're talking about? It's not keeping anything. In this moment something is happening. And all you have to deal with is this moment. You don't have to fight the subconscious mind. You don't have to go reprogram everything on the planet. Yes, we can help you. And we do this frequently help people process a lot of things that they've had on their mind, but we only help them process what's on their mind at the moment. We can't go in there and help them process anything that their subconscious mind is holding, that they're not aware of. We are always working with the conscious mind, always, always. And we're just helping them get clearer and clearer on how to work with that. Always, always! Everything that's going on and then the person's life changes because we're able to help them in the moment with the thing that's there in the moment. [22:52.0]
So my invitation to you is, even though it's a beautiful story, that seems to make sense of things for a lot of people, if you keep willfully suspending your disbelief, that story may start to make you believe that there is something in the background, working against you all the time. And if you're trying to change your life, that's not exactly a happy thing to be dealing with. Oh, okay. I just have to move this mountain. Don't mind me. I'll just go on it. And you're going to believe that change takes a long time. You're going to believe it's hard. You're going to believe that it'll never happen. But all of that thinking and all of the evidence that you've gathered for that has come from the idea that there is something unknown in you that's working against you and it's not true. Or come from the idea that there's something unknown outside of you like a devil or, or people tempting you and all that stuff that's working against you or karma or fate or something like that, working against you. And that also leaves you powerless. Even if those are such things, it is not helping you to change your life. But the moment you just say, Hey look, the only thing that exists is this moment, what there is right now is all there is. [23:56.2]
In that moment, there is clarity in that moment, nothing else, but what you can perceive, that's all you have to work with. And if you just simply learn to operate from right here and right now, which are the only things that exist, you will find that all of these “subconscious” limiting beliefs and things become a lot simpler to solve. And it's really simple because you don't have some memory. What you have is a current moment, reenactment that you're creating in your head. It's not a memory. It's not a thing somewhere in the moment; you are creating an experience in your mind. And that is easy to solve. If we have to go change your past, it doesn't exist anymore. How are we going to do it? We can't. But once you recognize that all that's there is what's happening right now in this moment that you are conscious of. And you are always conscious of when you feel bad, you're conscious of when you feel good, you're conscious of what you're conscious of. That's all you have to work with. You don't have to go looking for fancy fantastical things. You don't have to read neuroscience because in the end, all neuroscience is, is a really well fabricated story that may be entirely wrong, but somehow has been useful to humanity. [25:01.0]
And we have willfully suspended our disbelief, even though there has been plenty of evidence that our understanding of the world is not sufficient and it keeps changing and science is a discipline that keeps changing. So you don't have to believe or buy into any of that. You don't have to study neuroscience. All you have to be really good at is looking at what's here and what's now, to be honest with it, to not make up stories about it, to just what you can see and feel, that's it. And you start from there and there is the easiest, it's the easiest thing in the world to solve. Whether you're dealing with lifelong depression, anxiety, whether you're dealing with ADD, OCD, bipolar disorder or any kind of mental health stuff, whether you're dealing with addiction or compulsive behaviors and habits, or just, you know, sadness, stress overwhelmed, it doesn't matter what it is you're dealing with. All you will ever have to deal with is this moment right here and right now. [25:53.4]
And when you really can see that, and you can eliminate the myth of having a subconscious mind that you have to fight. Can you imagine that now I have to imagine a Phantom problem. And then I got to go solve the problem. You know, how, how many bullets is going to take to kill a cloud, right? How many arrows is it going to take before you finally dispel the fog? It's not going to happen. It'll go when it goes, because it's a Phantom. But if in the moment you can get really clear on what's really there. Oh, that's what it is. Okay, cool, that's all that it is. You eliminate so much of what seems to be the trouble, because in the end, all the troubles in your life, all the things that you think are happening. If you imagine a page with a bunch of dots, sprinkled all over it, and what you've done is you've looked at the dots and seen a few of them and been like, Holy cow, those look like they connect and you connect the dots and then you have a picture of a fish. And then you're like, Oh man, my life feels really fishy right now. Or you connect the dots and you have a picture of a monster. And you're like, Oh man, life is so ugly, right? Or you connect the dots and you have a picture of a dragon and a unicorn. And you're like, life is so magical. [27:01.0]
All you've done is connect the dots. And none of that connecting to the dots has anything to do with what's happened to you. It has to do with what you were making of it. And you don't have to make anything of what's going on in your life. You can simply look at the one dot that is here and now and choose what to do next. Some of that will require some skills. And if you need some skills, to be able to do that head on over to thefreedomspecialist.com/feelbetternow. And that will teach just the 20 day process of some amazing emotional skills and some mental skills to help you with certain things. But all you have to deal with is this moment, there is no subconscious for you to fight. You don't have to worry about external or internal influences. If you're dealing with something that inwardly feels heavy, all you have to deal with is that one moment, it isn't a disease. It's just that one moment in time. And if you get really good at handling that one moment at a time, every moment that comes as a piece of cake. [27:52.2]
And that's it for todays “Alive and Free Podcast.” If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from. And, while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice. [28:10.2]
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