Get Up. Make Your Bed. It's Not Just About Discipline.
Or don't. But focus the conscious mind. It allows the subconscious to get creative.
The group of twelve students have all bonded and formed a cohesive group, sitting together, moving together, studying together. They dress similar, white button down shirts, gray vests, and slacks or skirts, well groomed. There are six boys and six girls, blond, almost platinum hair. They stand together, attentive, attuned with a painful focus on their teacher.
The twelve are working together. Delving into the mind of their teacher. Attempting to reach into his conscious mind, his subconscious mind, even his unconscious mind.
The teacher is an elderly English doctor, all-tweed, all-Oxford and singularly focused. Brick wall. Brick wall. Brick wall.
He has planted a bomb in the school room. Set to go off very soon. It’s him and the children. It is his mission to blow himself up, to blow up the children, and the little school room at the back of his English manor. Time for them to go. Blown to bits. If he can remain focused. If he can keep his mind ordered.
Brick wall. Brick wall. Brick wall.
Conscious Mind
Putting brick walls aside for now (don’t worry, we’ll get back to the big bang of it), we all have three levels to our mind; the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, and the unconscious mind.
Thinking of a brick wall and imagining a brick wall is the work of your conscious mind.
The conscious mind refers to your current awareness. It engages with the world around us, processes information, and carries out voluntary actions.
If you are driving to work, listening to music, and thinking about the tasks required for the day, you are engaging your conscious mind on the three tasks. All of the thoughts that pass through your mind, the sensations and the emotions and perceptions of the outside world, and your current environment are thoughts from your conscious mind.
Ugh. That’s a confusing sentence. It rambles a little. Just like your conscious mind can ramble. Words and thoughts matter. They help organize your conscious mind. It’s difficult to explain. The conscious mind can only focus on three or four thoughts at a time. Anymore and confusion reigns or ideas get pushed off into the subconscious to be pulled up later.
Get up. Make your bed. Popular refrains from the military and productivity gurus. The small, simple tasks are meant to install discipline.
They help. Small successes each day lead to big successes.
But it’s not solely about discipline. It also organizes your mind. It’s one task. Complete. Checked off. Now on to the next task.
Business guru’s preach the same discipline. Develop a mission statement. Set little goals supporting big goals. Select and work a niche. A market.
These methods are used to discipline and focus actions. They order the mind. An ordered conscious-mind allows the subconscious mind to solve your problems.
A disciplined mind focuses the subconscious mind.
Subconscious Mind
Our subconscious is something like an unlimited hard drive. It’s vast.
Think Dr. Strange floating in the lotus position, using the Time Stone to zoom in-n-out, viewing millions of outcomes. That’s the subconscious. Hard at work.
It’s stored just below the level of your conscious mind. It houses every experience, emotion, and reaction to your experiences, either real or imagined, and any tendencies or reactions caused by these impressions.
Need to remember your third grade teacher’s name? It’s in your subconscious. Your father’s middle name, first pet’s name, when did the War of 1812 start (ok, kidding)? They’re all sitting in your subconscious waiting to be called up.
Our subconscious has a huge impact on our day-to-day actions, thoughts, and behaviors. The subconscious can work with incomplete facts and creatively fill in the gaps.
It’s generative AI with your entire known and unknown knowledge as a data set.
It gets questions and problems from the conscious mind, and answers immediately, or spins it around awhile and pops a solution into the conscious mind while you’re in the shower.
The subconscious is like a child. It believes you. It looks up to you. If your conscious mind tells it something, it will believe. Words are powerful tools because the subconscious will work to make them true.
The subconscious also creates our dreams but more importantly it creates our habits.
The subconscious is about efficiency. It’s why repeated tasks and actions become habits. Practice and work a task enough and it becomes ingrained. You do without thinking. You play the guitar without looking at the strings. You are in sync with your dance partner. It’s a dream-like state and it comes from work and focused practice.
It’s your subconscious that takes these conscious actions and turns them into habit, turns them into a ‘flow state’.
Unconscious mind
Now, our unconscious mind is deep down the rabbit hole. It houses thoughts and memories but also all of our instinctive needs and wants. They can be primitive. They may have kept your cave dwelling relatives alive but you are unaware of these deep seated emotions and the impact they have on your life. All apologies to Dr. Freud but it doesn’t mean they are all bad or mommy-daddy related. Doesn’t mean we are helpless to our baser motives.
We have our own personal unconscious that consists of our suppressed or forgotten memories and instincts but we also have a collective unconscious. The collective unconscious, as espoused by Carl Jung, is our inherited ancestral memories common to all of humankind. Still deep seated but coming from the collected emotions and instincts of all humankind. That’s a lot of data to pull from.
Always a deeper level.
When Three Becomes One
Time for a breakdown.
The conscious mind gathers and responds to data, dissects the problems, answers the questions. It performs efficiently with clear objectives.
Hence, step 1, step 2, step 3, and all that linear thinking that brings peace.
The subconscious mind is working the next cubicle over. But instead of working on a linear line of reasoning, it is spiraling off into millions upon millions of ideas. It will send back it’s insights, and it’s answers, likely while you are taking a walk around the block.
It’ll wander around connecting bits of disparate information, from your subconscious, until you have that ‘Eureka’ moment of insight. All cobbled together from your personal knowledge.
It works best when the conscious mind is coherent. It’s all hands on deck to solve the problem.
When all is aligned, the unconscious mind drives perseverance and dedication. It’s the source of the ‘gut feeling’ that guides you to pursue a particular path, to ‘follow your bliss’ even in the face of uncertainty. It can push you through pain and gives you a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Again and again.
The Explosion
Brick wall. Brick wall. Brick wall.
The children never got past the teacher’s conscious mind. He thought of a brick wall. He imagined a brick wall. He visualized a brick wall. He became a brick wall.
It’s the strength of an ordered, conscious mind.
The students got the explosion. Big boom. Children gone. Teacher gone. School room gone.
Spoiler alert. If you haven’t figured it out by now, this is from the 1960 movie, Village of the Damned. Please, forget about the 1990 remake.
The brick wall is a defense mechanism of the conscious mind. It’s the power of a single thought. A single thought for the subconscious. The subconscious can solve a single thought.
The language and words we speak and think matter. The thoughts and words, we let into our conscious mind — past our brick wall — matter.
Thoughts are tools for our subconscious. They create a powerful, ordered mind.
If you want to check out some great reading list and see which books have influenced, surprised, educated, and entertained me check out my book shop here. The lists grow monthly and I don’t recommend any books I haven’t personally read. Thanks for the read.