Article – by Hamid Soltani
Your true prosperity lies in the mastery of your subconscious mind
Introduction
Misconception about our conscious objectivity
Most of us innocently believe that we objectively and consciously control and make decisions about our daily life events. This general misconception primarily stems from the fact that most people lack a clear understanding of how concepts become established and processed in their minds.
Since we all like to be the masters of our destinies, it is somewhat convenient for us to assume that we are fully in charge of our lives. The truth is that very few people have any deep awareness of their true make-up, their sense of self, what drives them, where and how their beliefs come to be and how their subconscious” likes and dislikes” influence their perceptions, thoughts and actions both positively and negatively.
What we need to realise is that when we confront a life event, behind the scenes, our subconscious emotional reaction to the event autonomously and without our conscious awareness releases its matching chemicals (e.g., sadness, anger) into every cell in our body.
This activity takes place without our conscious involvement. We have no say in that. Once we become consciously aware of the feeling in our body, it will be almost too late for us to remain objective in such a situation, as the corresponding chemical emotions are directly influencing, biasing, and distorting our perceptions of reality.
The person undergoing such experiences (most people, most of the time) will feel an unfolding force of emotional changes in their entire being. One can almost instantly taste the emotion and feel the alterations in their energy field. Once these powerful chemicals are experienced in the body, the conscious self will find it extremely difficult to reason objectively and to examine the unfolding life events from a position of greater and unbiased understanding. There is no way that the conscious self can rationally disengage itself from “how its body deeply feels”, – which is the emotional substance presented by the subconscious (emotions at the cellular level in the body).
Shortfalls of logically structured therapies.
As mentioned earlier, human beings have an ongoing challenge in seeing reality as it is. This stems from how our inner mental processes are structured and operate, often in the background and totally unknown to us.
When our conscious self (the real ‘I’ within everyone) tries to search for answers, it only sees the world through its emotionally painted views and not the presented reality. Therefore, in most cases, our claim for conscious derivations of meanings in a given situation is merely another way of legitimising and endorsing our earlier emotional conclusions and nothing else. We do it under the disguise that we are rationally engaged, thinking straight and being objective.
Of course, we always need to use our rationality in life to help us make informed decisions and navigate life, but can rationality ALONE be effective when our body and brain are chemically tricked and acting irrationally?
This is why some practitioners with the best intentions often struggle to bring about desired changes in their clients if they narrowly resort to logical reasoning and dialogue as their ONLY means for healing the subconscious wounds.
No matter how many times you try to help stressed individuals through logical discussions, especially those incapacitated by their highly charged/raw emotional state, clients will find it challenging to embrace and adopt new ways of being.
Solutions
How to look for deeper solutions and meaningful transformation
The first prerequisite for people eager to overcome their mental and emotional challenges is to be open to solutions and strive to explore the holistic truth in their unfolding life encounters. The reason they should do this is that they have recognised the only thing that can enable, empower, and prosper them individually and their larger environment is when they are changed from within.
It is wrong to assume that others should change to help improve your current life challenges and circumstances. You have no right or control over how others are or how they behave. You cannot expect the world to change around you so you can feel better. This approach does not provide an intelligent solution for you.
The second requirement is to try diligently to recognise solutions when you see them. Often, our emotional biases stop us from seeing what is right in front of us; we miss the presented opportunities and novel solutions that can help and rescue us. Recognise that you need to apply personal courage to confront and change what does not holistically serve you.
Also, remember it is hard to operate rationally while you are emotionally charged. For this reason, address the root causes of your stress when you are mentally calmer. In stressful scenarios, try to relax and apply various somatic practices such as physical exercises, yoga or meditation, to establish some degree of physical regulation in your body and help rebalance your agitated, emotional state.
This suggests that to be truly liberated from the biases of the emotional mind and live a free, conscious and happy life, we must heal our subconscious mind from its short-sightedness and its emotional chemical influences. We must make it our business to turn those negative, unproductive beliefs about who we are and how we should live and act in this world into a wiser set of beliefs aligned with our state of happiness and well-being.
We need to consciously bring about change to our current beliefs that are no longer serving us and create a holistic understanding of the bigger context, a healthy and balanced approach to life.
Through the process of conscious self-healing, enabled by our solid desire for personal transformation and further reinforced by our disciplined daily practices, we can wondrously reshape our mindset and establish a healthy foundation for experiencing new possibilities and exploring opportunities to flourish in life.
However, despite our genuine and committed intention for change, we should recognise that the subconscious mind is always ready to pounce and exert itself as the ultimate ruler, and in every opportunity to derail the progress of our well-intentioned liberation. For this, the journey of conscious self-empowerment over the subconscious should be regarded as an ongoing activity akin to the daily remembrance and meditation.
Tips for maintaining your conscious objectivity
The following points can help you develop ways to empower your conscious thoughts and maintain better control over your subconscious mind and uncontrolled moods.
Stay conscious most of the time and resist completing the picture of what you are feeling.
When you’re listening to the internal voices, realise there are two aspects of your mind having a conversation with one another. The innocent mistake is when we wrongly assume that our consciousness (the “I”) is one of the active participants in the conversation.
You will know if you are in your conscious zone when you can separate yourself from the thinking mind and, unbiasedly, liberally and curiously observe the commotion of your judging mind having a conversation with itself.
When you are conscious, you can only experience your emotions as a fleeting encounter (a momentary phenomenon). If the inner voice expresses negative stories without any factual justification and consequently causes a sudden feeling of anticipation of an impending future disaster, realise you are not helpless and can exert control over how your body feels.
You can learn to consciously choose to ignore and stop listening to your mind-generated narratives (often the presented negative stories) that do not holistically serve you in any form or shape. You can also use your creative imagination to override such inner-generated emotional stories.
You can positively shift your attention and perceive your situation from a position of greater knowing, wisdom, and projection of exciting possibilities and potentials.
Remember, we all can innocently fall in and out of conscious awareness and become dominated by our emotional fluctuations. Some of us, through lack of exposure to learning opportunities and practice, can easily fall victim to our emotional upheavals and miss the chance to allow our consciousness objectivity to guide us forward.
Others with prior exposure and understanding of their inner mind processes can encounter their emotions from a conscious position of clarity and objectivity.
It is a sad fact that most of us seldom operate consciously in life, even though we genuinely think we are fully conscious. Of course, we all have consciousness, but it is usually an unquestioning and obedient servant to the subconscious emotional ruler. Very seldom does our consciousness take the initiative to stand up and declare its sovereign independence and exercise its majestic presence.
For those who wish to experience their conscious awareness directly, they should try various popular techniques for quieting their minds, such as meditation or self-hypnosis.
Can our intuition mislead us?
Do not try to automatically justify the legitimacy of what appears to you as “gut feelings” or any other feelings produced inside you. It is often hard to distinguish between the emotions manufactured by the biases of your subconscious mind and those mysterious divine sources of truth, which we like to label as our intuition. For this reason, we should always consider everything objectively, as it is difficult to identify our ego (our inner pseudo-self) pretending to be the Conscious “I”.
For example, you have just met your new boss, and he begins to explain his expectations of you in your new role. Even though the presented demands from your boss, at least on the surface, may be reasonable and within the tolerance of your current capabilities, you may unconsciously and suddenly feel a sense of insecurity/fears rising in your body.
This could be due to your subconscious-generated fears. You may internally exaggerate and complete the picture of inadequacy in your head without any external factual reasons. You may view the expected tasks from your new boss as hard challenges and imagine they could stretch you beyond your comfort zone.
If you could isolate your initial fears and objectively and emotionlessly view your expected mandates, you may complete the picture of your current reality very differently. Perhaps your inner-generated narrative could have become positive and self-empowering.
The reason for your negative emotions rising from your subconscious mind could be because of your new boss’s expression or tone of voice that you may have referenced against your subconscious view of your father, whom you could never please and were constantly scared of. Your new boss may have no real correlation to your dad, but you unconsciously felt a sense of fear in his presence.
This example highlights how distortion, misunderstandings and confusion can arise from what we innocently perceive as our reality and how easily we can become misguided by our mind-generated emotional fantasies.
Such a commonly occurring human misapprehension can often decrease our overall balance and sense of internal coherence and increase our daily stress levels. They can also vastly reduce our objectivity for intelligent decision-making and weaken the effectiveness of our actions.
Your thoughts should be conscious-driven – only think when you are required to do so.
This statement may appear to you as an unintelligent remark; however, in close examination, you will understand how powerful this message is. What I am suggesting here is that you can intentionally discipline yourself to think at will and only when you know you have enough reason and certainty that such a thinking process can potentially serve you in life.
Only allow your thinking to progress if and only if you have already established the desired outcome from your thinking process, and you have reasonable confidence that you can get a helpful answer at the end of it. Even if you don’t end up with a tangible final solution, it is not all wasted, as you would have explored, exhausted and ruled out many possibilities and potential options that can form a solid platform for your subsequent explorations.
In general, there are three categories of thinking: 1) Solving organisational, professional, and scientific challenges, 2) Solving challenges relating to general life, including health and well-being, family and social decisions, and 3) Reviewing and solving emotional/mental wounds and perceived injustices.
The first two categories are essential for our daily survival, and we should do them as required. However, the 3rd category requires a different and more disciplined consideration.
When you are thinking about your emotional challenges and grievances, it is advisable before you commence with your topic of thinking, ask yourself, “If I am going to spend ‘X’ amount of time thinking about ‘Y’, am I going to have something of value at the end of my thinking process that can help me to achieve ‘Z’ “in my life?
If the answer is NO, immediately stop your thinking process. Ensure that you do not waste your precious time and energy on wasteful revivification, the unimportant/head-produced dramas, especially if you can predict that the process of thinking will not bring you any tangible resolution. Avoid thoughts that could exacerbate negative feelings and bitterness within you.
This is not to dismiss our genuine life grievances, which often feel very real to us; it is about recognising that we generally cannot avoid pain in life as it is a given fact, but we can control our level of subsequent suffering. We can consciously intervene with our ongoing mind-generated negative stories that have the potential to constantly and aimlessly loop in our heads to no avail.
If you recognise that what your mind wants, which is restoring a sense of justice, is unachievable, then by consciously disengaging from such thoughts, you can reduce your suffering. Learn not to unnecessarily stew over things that you cannot control or influence, as it is a wasteful pursuit.
To achieve the mastery of consciously directing your mind towards positive horizons will require knowledge of self-awareness, ongoing dedication to self-improvement, and appropriate supporting practices. Effective therapy sessions can further assist you in your journey. Also, remember, learning to forgive people and situations that may have contributed to your pain can bring a quick resolution to your ongoing grievances.
If I am thinking about what I should have for dinner tonight, even though it is a simple thought, it is a good thought, and I should allow it to progress, as it would eventually provide me with a clear final decision on what to eat tonight.
On the other hand, if my mind is gravitating towards a concept of bitterness about someone who may have upset me in some form or shape, it is highly advisable to first, acknowledge my grievances and sad feelings; also, it is just as important to recognise that this type of thinking may not help me or produce any real resolution to my current emotional state.
Again, this is NOT about ignoring your feelings; it is about not fuelling your emotional upheavals, even if your grieving subconscious mind is dying for you to go back and forth regurgitating the negativity for hours to no avail. The learning here is not to fuel your pain unnecessarily.
The discipline here reemphasises that we should ALWAYS look for solutions rather than waste our energy crying over the spilt milk that we cannot put back in the bottle.
Gravitate towards higher dimensions of possibilities for searching, thinking and acting
It is true that to some degree, we are all protective of our own individual beliefs, emotional state and behaviours. However, we could categorise people in society into two broad groups.
At one end of the spectrum, some people have no interest in the big picture of life (silo-focused) and are constantly engaged and preoccupied with the day-to-day dramas of life and worries about what confronts them. They may view their issues from a limited subjective perspective, feel highly stressed by their inability to change things for the better and mostly feel unfulfilled in life.
At the other end of the spectrum, some people are constantly searching for answers to the mysteries of life and the universe. Instead of embracing daily pain and suffering, they aspire to peace and harmony in life. They want to know why they are here in this world and question their purpose within the context of their larger systemic universe. Such individuals are often confronted with the same issues and challenges in life as their silo counterparts, and yet, they suffer less stress and are driven to be connected, remain conscious and live to learn.
Your general interest in learning and questioning the big picture of life and the universe will undoubtedly open opportunities for you to examine your life within a wider context of existence.
Your open perspectives for understanding life events can directly reduce the exaggerated projections of your subjective experiences and their potential influences on your conscious awareness, resulting in you diminishing the potencies of your experiences by viewing your challenges as “a storm in a teacup”.
Try to appreciate the sense of oneness/coherence in everything. Also, value the contribution of all life constituents as an essential part of your existence. This can open a new dimension of wisdom within you and influence your daily perception of events and your corresponding behaviours.
The more holistically you look at life and understand it, the less you worry or become trapped in your circular thought silos. In wide and varied ways, learn and investigate different philosophies and question everything from your childhood adoptions of various rules and beliefs to your recent indoctrinations of any negative or rigid behaviours. Realise all pains and sorrows always begin in your mind, and manifest into your body (impact on the state of health and beauty) and subsequently impact all other external physical entities that are shaping and fuelling your subjective reality.
Understand how the mind works
In continuing your efforts to acquire a greater sense of understanding of forces around you, joyfully make it your business to become a high-level expert in how the human mind works. It is quite easy to learn. All you require is your passion for knowing the essence of who you are and how you think and behave.
Understanding of the inner self will provide the necessary basis for questioning your negative patterns of behaviour and enable you to consciously reshape your inner world. Such an inner transformation can manifest new life potentials, experiences and horizons for a balanced and quality existence.
Have you ever reflected on why so many people have a serious aversion and lack of desire to examine their essence of being, inner characteristics, what goes on in their minds and how and why their life unfolds the way it does?
Unfortunately, many of us innocently fall victim to our inner mental fixtures and established structures. This is primarily due to the hidden and dominant nature of the subconscious mind over the conscious self, especially when an individual does not distinguish between the sense of self (the “I”) and the mind-generated thoughts.
This lack of awareness can directly disempower the conscious self from having a say in our inner kingdom. It also makes it difficult for such individuals to sit still, relax, self-transform or meditate and escape from their inner emotional turmoil.
Notice any small internal movements within you
Become more sensitive to your internal voices and the interactions between different parts of your subconscious mind. Watch how the conscious aspect of you is witnessing such a dialogue (who is saying what to whom and why). Notice your emotions as they rise and learn about the type of pressures your subconscious places on the conscious self. Say to yourself, “I am noticing this internal dialogue”, and watch the interactions. Ensure you (the conscious self) DO NOT get caught up in your feelings and, as much as possible, remain as an independent observer of life events.
As an outsider, you could observe the dialogue in your head with the following focus:
- Who is talking to whom, and how should my conscious (“I”) view the situation?
- What are the mandates and driving forces for the two parts of the mind in this conversation?
- Are they part of the same system and serving the same master?
- If they have different masters, how come they belong to the same organisation/system (me)?
- What should they want from one another?
- Which one in the conversation should be trusted and why?
- Does my consciousness have any say in what has been discussed by the mind?
- With genuine intention and conscious practices, you learn to wake up from what differentiates your mind from what you regard as ‘my-real-self and enable the two aspects to work in unison and coherence.
Understanding our individual purpose, our personal evolution and ascension in life.
In my view, one of the main reasons we are born into life is to evolve as individuals by learning and resolving leftovers and unhealthy perspectives that are presently shaping our energy fields.
This individual energy field is responsible for attracting or repelling events and people into our existing experiences. Unless we intentionally change it for the better, our lives will continue on the same trajectory unabated. This is a significant realisation for you to consider.
We owe it to ourselves to expand our current knowledge and enable the emergence of new mind-liberating insights to organically flourish, revealing our true purpose of existence in our inner mental tapestry.
This soul-searching endeavour will fill in the missing link aspect of our place in the universe, change our perspectives and bring a sense of purpose into our lives. It helps us answer the question of who we are and what we are made up of, what we are to do and why.
Our combined hard and soft intelligence (what we are born with (inherent core) and what we can learn and change in life (epigenetic)) allows us to survive, learn and develop objects to sustain us individually and collectively as social entities.
The question you need to ask yourself is “why am I internally configured with my current set of understandings, aspirations, behaviours and experiences which are vastly different to anyone else around me”? What is it that uniquely defines me and compels me to do what I do? The more we question the mechanical fixtures of our mental foundation, the more we can change the underlying beliefs and drivers to bring about a more balanced life, aligned with our souls’ purpose.
WE CAN TRULY HELP OURSELVES by our own personal initiatives and in conjunction with assistance through external holistic practitioners to address all underlying beliefs that are not in line with our greater good and harmony in life.
However, try to enjoy the journey, stop your panic rush to obtain a quick solution or be obsessively driven towards your healing objectives. Remember, our true wisdom can only be achieved through its own organic time span and natural evolution of our maturity.
Realise you can choose to be serene/peaceful
You could honestly ask yourself: if I had a real choice in my life, would I rather be peaceful or miserable/sad? Remember, at any moment or situation, there are only two options open to us (peaceful or miserable).
Despite what happens in front of you, you could choose to feel OK about it. We intelligently know there are absolutely no gains in being miserable. If you disagree, can you think of a benefit or justification for living a life of misery?
You can imagine two people who similarly lost their jobs exhibiting their emotional experiences very differently from one another.
For example, even though they both went through the same ordeal, one is more at peace, accepting of the new situation and eager to look for new opportunities. The other one is angry, resentful, and sad, or even manic. The point here is not about being happy when you lose your job; it is about the concept of real happiness that is not dependent on the fact that everything has to go the way you want it to go or else.
Applying a bit of wisdom can reveal to us that life generally takes us down different paths, and it frequently changes our world unexpectedly. Despite the encountered challenges, we can choose to appreciate the journey and smile as we go through them. The reason we feel miserable is that our emotional mind (the subconscious) generates sad emotional responses in accordance with its false expectations of a rules-based life that expects a predictable existence. It often seeks justice and compensation for its imagined expectations.
Ask yourself, “Do I REALLY want to be happy”? If the answer is “YES” then, the next time your subconscious whispers in your ears to be sad or miserable, you consciously allow yourself to intervene as if a sudden vigilant slap brings you to your senses and say to yourself “my state of being is not dependent on the whims of my subconscious emotional ups and downs caused by the external world, and for this reason, I choose to be peaceful, relaxed and follow my passion for new adventures”.
Every time you challenge and correct your subconscious mind, you regain more conscious power and freedom over your dominant mind, which is often preoccupied and lost in its own unproductive projection of fears, sudden anticipations, dramas and negativities.
Conclusion
Our deep personal cravings for living a contented peaceful life and experiencing a quality of existence on a sustainable basis (in terms of mental and physical wellbeing ) can only be achieved when our conscious vigilance rises to a level that we can: 1) consciously recognise and override our emotional biases; 2) easily change our redundant beliefs at will and; 3) appreciate the larger context of the systemic nature that surround us, become aware of its ongoing dynamic influences that integrally govern every aspect of our beings, and finally the sheer joy and privilege of just being conscious and present to experience the whole magic of life.
Remember, we can’t directly control life events around us, and no matter how hard we try to make our lives rules-based, predictable and regulated, life surprises us every single time with its own plans and often derails our set expectations.
So, instead of controlling life, we can learn to become a partner with it and stop resisting its initiated daily changes by simply accepting, embracing, and cooperatively flowing with what comes our way. Intelligence means that we fully accept things exactly as they are at present, not how we have wished them to be.
This means that we set our well-intentioned personal goals and actively strive towards them, knowing that achieving those outcomes is not always directly in our control, and life can suddenly interrupt or derail our desired outcomes. If that happens, without resistance, we should accept the outcomes and recognise that perhaps life has other plans for us in line with our required personal growth and development.
What I have learnt in life is that when things stop going my way, the more I try to regain control, especially if I do it at any cost, it is not generally in my long-term advantage and will often backfire on me. The reason things may not go my way is generally because I may not be fully aligned internally with what I am trying to achieve. This is incoherence and imbalance between my four inner centres (spirit (my larger self), soul (my consciousness), ego (my personality & subjective beliefs) and body). Once these centres are balanced and work in harmony with one another, our individual goals become aligned with how life events unfold.
Always take the first step and don’t expect others to be responsible for your well-being or come to rescue and shape your life. You must take the initiative, and you are fully responsible for your own mental health and overall well-being. Also, know that you possess more inner resources than you can ever imagine.
However, once you actively commence your journey of self-healing, the heavenly conscious existence, often in its great wisdom and vast intelligence, will magically rearrange life around you and bring unimaginable external help and opportunities to assist you in your quest.