Be Careful What You Think! (4 of 5)
Your thoughts determine your reality. This is one of the central
tenets of most goal setting programs - but just WHY are your
thoughts so important?
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A thought - any thought - is more than just a passing flurry of
activity in your brain. It is a building block that helps
determine the reality you exprience in your life.
In earlier articles* in this series we have seen that it is our
subconscious 'instruction sets' that determine the limits on our
lives - limits on financial prosperity, limits on health, limits
on social ability - limits on practically every aspect of our
lives. But how are these limits set? What exactly is it that
determines the 'set-points' that so precisely control our life
experience?
((( *see note at end of article )))
The answer is surprisingly simple. The subconscious mind tries
to decide what is important and what is not simply by 'listening
in' on the conscious mind at all times, and giving priority to
the things that it decides the conscious mind regards as
important.
Unfortunately, the way in which the subconscious decides what is
important to us is not necessarily the way we would want it to
be. This is probably because the conscious 'chattering' mind
generates volumes of totally inconsequential thoughts during any
given day, and so the subconscious needs a way of filtering out
all the ephemeral rubbish to get at what is genuinely important.
The ways in which the subconscious mind filters output from the
conscious mind in order to estimate the 'importance' of
conscious thoughts and desires are quite straightforward:
Emotional loading
Thoughts that are charged with emotion are taken to be
important. The subconscious mind itself is essentially neutral -
it simply 'observes' the stream of data coming from the senses
and bodily feedback without applying value judgements. But at
the same time it notes the reactions of the conscious mind to
these inputs together with the emotional reactions they have
given rise to, and takes these emotional 'tags' as cues that
indicate what is to be considered important and what is not.
A simple example would be pain. The subconscious mind feels no
pain, but it observes what circumstances give rise to the
negative sensation of pain as registered by the conscious mind.
Once the association is made, the conscious mind will be
automatically steered away from similar sets of circumstances in
order to avoid repeating the pain-producing event. This process
is common to virtually all animals of course, but in humans the
subconscious system is much more complex and predictive, and
includes social and emotional 'pain'. (Interestingly it has
recently been discovered that emotional pain such as that
arising from