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? ************* 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