There are only two primary ways we make sense of the world – consciously and unconsciously.
Your conscious mind is the mind you actively and deliberately think with all day long. You probably experience it as a fairly continual internal voice you think of as ‘me’. It is your conscious mind that we try to control with meditation techniques.
But while the conscious mind certainly has its uses, it is extremely limited in what it can accomplish on its own. Studies have shown that it can only hold a handful of ideas at any one time. That’s why the majority of your life is run automatically by your other mind.
Your Unconscious Mind
The unconscious mind is your larger mind. It can process millions of messages of sensory information every single second, and contains all of your wisdom, memories and intelligence. It is the source of your creativity, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes here, it stores and runs all the ‘programs’ of automatic behavior you use to live your life. Once you’ve learnt how to meditate on a deep level, you can start to impact your unconscious mind.
Tags: automatic behavior, conscious mind, handful, internal voice, meditation techniques, sense of the world, unconscious mind