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Written by Master Dao on Tuesday, October 22, 2024
| ARTICLE SERIES | |||
| The Principles of Chan-Dao Self Wisdom | |||
| PERCEPTIONS | EMOTIONS | SUBCONSCIOUS | EGO-SELF (coming in February 2025) |
The topic of 'Subconscious' is an important one, and is one of the 4 key components of Shaolin Chan-Dao wisdom. Before continuing, we recommend you first study the previous two key components: perceptions and emotions.
This article brings clarity to the existence of your life partner, the subconscious. You will discover that your Subconscious Partner does exist, that you can understand it, that you can communicate with it, and that you can even work with it. Everyone needs to take This powerful and necessary step to pursue wisdom because it will help bring clarity to your existence.
The Subconscious Partner is the intelligence that helps You interface with your body, mind, and the world.
In this article, we have avoided using only the word ‘subconscious’ because there are too many different and conflicting definitions (and understanding) of the subconscious. By creating a new perceptual layer called the ‘Subconscious Partner’, we hope that we can push through the stubborn layers of perceptions and benefit from the wisdom of this article.
Let’s explore our newfound term, the Subconscious Partner.
The first keyword we use is ‘intelligence’. That means the Subconscious Partner is smart and can rationalize, calculate, store, and retrieve information, communicate, command the physical body, and make decisions.
The second keyword is ‘You’. The You is your consciousness, your ability to rationalize, calculate, store, and retrieve information, communicate, command the physical body, and make decisions.
These sound the same except there are three key differences:
Firstly, You can make the final decision.
Secondly, You can only command your mind and body while your Subconscious Partner carries out the work. In other words, everything you do including thinking requires you to make a request to the Subconscious Partner.
Thirdly, The Subconscious Partner is designed to keep you alive and support You in your endeavours so that You do not have to worry about it.
These three differences highlight how You interface with the body, mind, and the world through your Subconscious Partner.
Let’s explore some examples to understand the nature of the Subconscious Partner in relation to You.
Let’s use a simple and common example to prove that our Subconscious Partner exists. We are going to see just how complicated a simple example can be!
In our first example, you are working or in school and are very busy.
You work or study for a few hours and have not finished, and a deadline is approaching. You also did not bring your lunch and getting a meal outside is time-consuming. You want to continue but your stomach is complaining and you feel hungrier every minute.
You start thinking of all the delicious options such as fast food. Perhaps you are thinking of eating your favourite burger, sandwich, or salad.
Someone comes over and asks you a question related to your field, and you snap back at the person, feeling annoyed or angry that they have disturbed your focus.
Finally, you decide you have no choice and you seek out your meal.
You find your meal and as you are eating you have this very satisfying feeling. You feel sated and with that, you resume your work or studies.
Let’s review this example and analyze how the Subconscious Partner plays an important role.
In our first example, you are working or in school and are very busy.
We start off at work or school, and we use our mental faculties to study or solve a problem. How are you actually doing this? From the interpretation of what you can see with your eyes, to reading and analyzing information, and the decision-making to memorize or act upon information, is already a complicated process.
In a sense, you have no idea how this is even possible! How did your body and mind allow you to perform all these mental functions?
This is your Subconscious Partner at work. When you see something such as words in a book or an email, your Subconscious Partner is making some complicated comparisons of visual information to deduce letters, words, and sentences. It determines the idea behind them and conveys it to your consciousness, that is You.
You trained your Subconscious Partner to do all this. You may recall that in school you spent a lot of time with a teacher to learn to read and write, and you have continued to do so throughout your life. What’s actually happened is that your Subconscious Partner was learning what you were trying to do and it assisted through its ability to analyze and manage memory.
You work or study for a few hours and have not finished, and a deadline is approaching. You also did not bring your lunch and getting a meal outside is time-consuming. You want to continue but your stomach is complaining and you feel hungrier every minute.
For whatever reason, your progress is a bit behind and it makes you feel anxious. Your logical deduction is that you can delay lunch in favour of getting more done now so that you don’t have to worry.
Your Subconscious Partner understands this, however, it also understands that you are lacking the energy needed to be alert and to do the work or studies properly. It also knows you plan to work or study all day, and so it triggers the emotion of hunger in an attempt to make you reconsider.
You start thinking of all the delicious options such as fast food. Perhaps you are thinking of eating your favourite burger, sandwich, or salad.
As you continue to work and ignore the hunger, your Subconscious Partner may entice you with imagery of tasty food, causing you to lose focus, salivate, and daydream. It might also start to get angry with you (and thus the expression ‘hangry’!).
Someone comes over and asks you a question related to your field. You snap back at the person, feeling annoyed or angry that they have disturbed your focus.
As time goes on, your Subconscious Partner will increase the feeling of hunger and make you feel irritable. You might hear a gurgling noise in your belly further communicating the need to eat.
Finally, you decide you have no choice and you seek out your meal.
Your Subconscious Partner has finally gotten through to you and now all you can think about is the food you are about to eat. It might also punish you in a sense depending on how long you decided to wait before making this decision to eat. For example, it might express its dissatisfaction by making you feel even hungrier, hoping that you will pay attention next time and make an earlier decision.
You find your meal and as you are eating you have this very satisfying feeling. You feel sated and with that, you resume your work or studies.
Finally, your Subconscious Partner rewards you with that satisfying feeling of delicious taste as you eat, and also the feeling of being sated afterward. It’s like giving you a pat on the back for making the right choice to eat!
Before continuing, we need to acknowledge the need for logical and clear thought and its relation to science.
There is wisdom in science when it suggests that something is not real until proven. On the other hand, the Subconscious Partner is not something that can be proven at the moment, so it is a dead end for many, meaning some people cannot get past this and are unable to carry on to learn self-wisdom.
It is good to proceed with skepticism and rely on your logic and ability to compare with your past experiences and knowledge, to determine if any of these ideas are valid to you. In this way, you can take your time to digest the material, introspect, and gain self-wisdom.
Your Subconscious Partner has one major role and that is to keep you alive.
This starts sometime when your brain develops and while you are in your mother’s womb. Already your Subconscious Partner is learning about its environment including what is happening outside through sounds, light, and information being sent to you by your mother.
It is also in charge of running your vital organs such as your heart and digestive system.
Once you are out in the world, your Subconscious Partner knows that your physical body needs to be cared for, and it will make you emote by crying and other emotions to learn how to communicate your needs.
As you grow older, your parent or guardian, caregivers, and eventually school and friends will play a role in shaping your Subconscious Partner’s understanding of how you can stay alive in your social environment.
As you experience events and make choices in life, You and your Subconscious Partner will learn together what works and what doesn’t.
Keeping you alive means reminding you to eat, drink, defecate, rest, sleep, and more. It also teaches you to be fearful so that you do not get poisoned by a creature, eat the wrong foods, or make decisions that put your life in danger.
We are also social creatures and we are meant to have social relationships. Your Subconscious Partner understands this and will edge you on to be part of a societal group, make relationships, and contribute in some way.
Your Subconscious Partner has another role, and that is to interface between You and the body.
In the previous analysis example, we highlighted how You interfaced with your Subconscious Partner to study or solve a problem using your mental faculties. Seeing and interpreting words, retrieving memory, storing ideas, comparing and analyzing - these are just a few examples of many things that you can do without knowing how to do them.
We can extend this idea to the entire body. How do you move your head, write, type, and walk?
You do this by projecting an idea to your Subconscious Partner. This can include visual, auditory, or other senses.
For example, you can move your hand and arm upwards by sending a visual projection of your arm moving upwards, and your Subconscious Partner will interpret and process the idea.
In another example, you can sing a particular note (such as C#) by sending an auditory projection of that tune, and again, your Subconscious Partner will interpret and process the idea.
Because your Subconscious Partner is responsible for processing things you can sense (with your eyes, nose, ears, tongue, and skin), it can also interpret and add things to them before presenting the information to you. For example, you could see things that no one else can see, or hear things that no one else can hear.
It is important to recognize that the interfacing function of your Subconscious Partner is only secondary. This means that your Subconscious can shut you out and manipulate your body or thoughts if for some reason it needs to do so. For example, this could happen due to a traumatic event, abuse, self-abuse, extreme danger, etc.
We will not go into much detail here as we will have future workshops to explore common problems that people experience (and how to overcome them), but you can take the time to contemplate this statement and reflect upon your life and real-world events.
Communication with your Subconscious Partner is best understood by exploring both directions, that is from You to your Subconscious Partner, and from your Subconscious Partner to You.
We have discussed the role of your Subconscious Partner and suggested some ways in which it attempts to communicate with you. But how does it actually communicate?
Since your Subconscious Partner does everything for you, it can use any part of your body to communicate.
Here we clarify with some specific examples.
Your Subconscious Partner can initiate any Emotional State as a means to communicate.
Before continuing, we recommended studying or reviewing the past article on Emotions, and how they are composed of Emotional States and Emoting.
In the previous example about work or study, your Subconscious Partner communicated the ‘need to eat’ and the validation of ‘eating is good’. This extends to any Emotional State that you have. We can imagine the Subconscious Partner saying, “We need energy - please eat something”, and “Good job getting nutrients into our body! Now I can support you in your work or studies.”
Here are some simple examples of your Subconscious Partner communicating with you. Can you imagine the Emotional States that you will experience?
Sometimes your subconscious does not have enough time to talk to you, and instead, it will make you physically react first and then tell you afterwards why it needed to do it.
Here are some examples:
Ever had a thought suddenly appear? It could happen while you are working, talking to someone, and when you are alone.
If an event occurred that made you worry, have anxiety or stress, or feel disturbed, you may ruminate about it with an endless cycle of reviewing the event and justifying your feelings and actions. Something you see, hear, or experience may trigger rumination and endless thoughts.
Thoughts that appear to randomly appear are actually coming from your Subconscious Partner. It’s trying to communicate with you.
If you take the time to listen, you may learn that it is concerned or is worrying about a particular thing, just like you are or would.
This extends to dreams.
Dreaming is a function that occurs while you are sleeping and is the time that your Subconscious is processing and optimizing your knowledge, thoughts, and worries.
During this time, your consciousness may be active so you may experience what your Subconscious Partner is reviewing or thinking. This could happen if you take drugs or eat certain foods that stimulate the brain.
On the other hand, your Subconscious Partner might be purposely presenting an idea to you, to get you motivated, to make you fearful, etc. In this case, it is trying to communicate with you, to tell you something.
Later on, we will explore how to interpret your thoughts and discuss them with your Subconscious Partner!
Have you experienced a time when you could not move or say something even though you wanted to? This could happen as a result of a fear emotion but it could also happen without an emotional state change in your body.
A Milder example of this could be hesitation. For example, you are thinking of picking up a pot but you are not able to immediately. Moments later you realize that the handle is very hot. Your subconscious is causing you to hesitate in hopes that you make this realization.
More extreme examples could be related to trauma (but not PTSD), and more specifically after you feel you have recovered from it. You might not feel fear, but your Subconscious Partner may still remember it strongly, and prevent you from taking an exception to repeat a traumatic incident.
Before continuing, we highly recommend that you review the article on Perceptual Layers.
Previously in the ‘The Secondary Role of Your Subconscious Partner’ section, we presented how you visually projected an idea to move your hand or arm or to sing. This is a basic way to send requests to your Subconscious Partner to carry out. We can extend it to mental functions such as mathematics, logical comparisons, retrieving memories, etc.
Your Subconscious Partner knows everything you do. Your thoughts, interpretations and judgements, are all perceptual layers and form your knowledge base.
In response to your environment, you will continue to learn skills and knowledge, compare and evaluate to determine what is good and bad, handle worry and stress, and learn wisdom when responding to events and your environment.
You will also continue to communicate with your Subconscious Partner without realizing it.
Here are some examples of how you are continuously communicating with your Subconscious Partner:
Note that your Subconscious Partner may not agree with you, and we will explore this idea later.
In order to effectively work and communicate with your Subconscious Partner, you have to give it recognition and respect.
Recognition is the realization of the existence of your Subconscious Partner. If you are not sold yet on this idea, you need to review the prior material and rationalize it until you can logically conclude that your Subconscious Partner must exist.
One of the exercises you could do, for example, is to pay attention to how your Subconscious Partner is trying to communicate with You and direct You throughout the day. You can use the ‘How Your Subconscious Partner Communicates with You’ section as an example of what to pay attention to.
Practicing meditation also helps to calm the mind, and will increase the likelihood of You paying attention to your Subconscious Partner (vs. dealing with day-to-day stresses in life).
The step of recognition is the most important if you want to work with your Subconscious Partner. If you do not have 100% recognition, your Subconscious Partner will know.
Respect is the realization of the importance of your Subconscious Partner. This also includes understanding its role and how it communicates with you.
When you develop respect, you will improve your rapport with your Subconscious Partner. That is to say, respect is a long-term development that builds mutual trust. It will not come right away and you must work hard at it.
Here is a general categorization of the levels of respect you can develop:
When you are at the 3rd level of respect, you can work together with your Subconscious Partner much more effectively and work towards mutual trust.
There are a few ways you will want to consider spending time working with your Subconscious Partner on a regular basis:
These ideas form part of the discussion and exploration of the ego-self, the final component of the Shaolin Chan-Dao Self-Wisdom. We will post a link here after we present it in our next meditation workshop.
For now, let’s explore how powerful it can be to work together and manage perceptual layers and emotions.
Before continuing, we highly recommend that you also review the article on Emotional States (in addition to the article on Perceptual Layers).
Your Subconscious Partner knows everything you do. It is responsible for managing, storing, and retrieving your perceptual layers after all.
The interesting thing is that your Subconscious Partner doesn’t have to agree with you!
You will recall in the ‘The Power of Clarity: Developing Awareness of Our Perceptual Layers’ workshop that there are ‘evaluative perceptual layers’, and that these can be attached to other perceptual layers that define objects and complex ideas.
Some complex ideas include your current priorities, your future goals and dreams, things that are important to you, things that are dangerous, etc. Here is a simple example of how your Subconscious Partner may disagree with you:
When you were a child, you were playing in the backyard and you spot a cat walking into the cover of a bushy tree. The cat looks cute and harmless, so you approached it as it hissed. Not knowing any better, you reach out and try to pet the cat. Shockingly, it bites you in the hand, makes you bleed, and experience pain. You feel scared because you had heard of rabies and hoped that you would not get it.
Years later, you visit friends as an adult and they have a pet cat. You want to believe that it is safe to pet this cat. You fail at your first attempt to pet the cat but finally, you are able to pet the cat albeit feeling very cautious and nervous.
In the example above, You and Your Subconscious Partner developed a strong Evaluative Perceptual Layer that effectively says, “All cats are dangerous”, and there are strong emotions of fear and pain associated with it. Every time you see a cat, whether it’s a stray or a friend’s pet, you will feel cautious.
Logically you will come to realize that a friend’s pet is very unlikely to bite you and you may want to really believe it’s safe. However, you cannot help but feel the emotional state of anxiety.
In this simple example, You believe it’s safe to pet the cat but your Subconscious Partner does not.
So how do we work with our Subconscious Partner to remove the anxiety associated with being around cats?
The answer is to reflect upon how you would help someone with a similar problem. You would need to put quite a bit of effort into convincing that person how to read a cat to determine if it is dangerous. For instance, if it’s not hissing at you or it wants to cuddle up to you, then it will be safe. If it is hissing at you (as it happened in the past), then avoid petting that cat until you’ve earned its trust.
If we apply this to our Subconscious Partner, we can get it to accept it in time. You can do this by talking to your Subconscious Partner in your mind and with your thoughts. If you’ve passed the stage of ‘Recognition’ then addressing your Subconscious Partner will be easy. If you’ve passed onto stage 3 or 4 of ‘Respect’, then it will take less time to convince. Either way, likely you will need to present examples of your idea of when it is safe and not, but repeatedly petting cats as you talk to your Subconscious Partner.
To further clarify this example, here is an example dialogue that could work:
You: “Hi partner!” <- This is you addressing your Subconscious Partner so it knows that you are talking to it.
Subconscious Partner: Silent for a few seconds and no visual thoughts. <- This is a good sign that it is paying attention!
You: “I want to affirm that petting a cat is safe if it shows signs of affection.” <- You are pitching the idea to change your Evaluative Perceptual Layer about cats.
Subconscious Partner: Sends a signal to make you feel uncomfortable, anxious, or fearful. You may feel tension in your chest or head. It also makes you recall the time you got bitten. <- It is saying, “I don’t believe you!”
You: “It’s okay if you don’t believe me, and thank you! It is your job after all to second guess my decisions of what is safe and not safe. Can you let me try petting the cat? Look, it’s even rubbing up on my legs. It’s not hissing at us.” <- You are respecting your Subconscious Partner and giving it the power to make a decision (i.e. not giving it pressure).
Subconscious Partner: The uncomfortable feelings lessen but do not disappear completely. <- It is saying, “Okay go ahead and be ready to pull your hand back,”
You: “Thank you! Let’s try this!” <- You are thanking your Subconscious Partner for trusting you.
You reach out your hand to pet the cat cautiously and everything is fine. The cat purrs and brushes up against your leg as it walks around and in between your legs.
You: “It’s safe isn’t it?” <- You are confirming by asking your Subconscious Partner to evaluate the situation.
Subconscious Partner: The uncomfortable feelings begin to subside and you feel almost completely relaxed. <- Your Subconscious Partner is saying that it agrees this time, but is not 100% sold on the idea yet.
By repeating this with the same cat and with other cats, you will be able to gradually overcome the Evaluative Perceptual Layer that all cats are dangerous.
Instead, it may evolve into several layers of perceptions:
Your levels of anxiety will also be reduced depending on the situation.
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