The mind is its own place

It is quite surprising how we internalise knowledge such that we do not consciously know what we know. For example, I stop myself from ‘thinking’ when I have to use my password on any screen because my fingers seem to know what to type. If I ask myself what the password is, my mind gets jumbled all of a sudden and I can’t seem to remember it. At this point even my fingers which obey the mind don’t know what to type and seem to wait for a command. This usually leads me to resetting my password.

A funny thing happened today. I usually use the shortcut Windows+E to open file explorer. The fact is that I did not know the shortcut was Windows+E in a conscious sense nor did I know the view where we see the whole folder structure was called ‘File Explorer’. But today just before a class that I was supposed to teach, when I tried to open my presentation, I suddenly made conscious the question of what shortcut to use. I have been using this shortcut for a million years, a million times a day, never stopping to ask this question. I am not sure why I decided to ask myself this question at this precise moment today. It’s a good thing that I usually turn up early for a class and another good thing that I store my presentations in multiple places because for the life of me I had no clue how to reach the USB drive without using this shortcut! (yes, I am sort of technologically challenged)

Once I was back from the class and tried doing it on my PC, I still couldn’t seem to remember what I used to do to conjure up the file explorer. I then did some Google searching and finally found the answer. The answer which was buried deep in my consciousness and if only I hadn’t asked it of myself, would have happily gone on making use of the knowledge.

This makes me think about the piles and piles of tacit knowledge that must be buried deep within our subconscious mind having been accumulated almost from childhood. When we say we have a gut feeling or intuition or hunch about something, it might be this underlying knowledge that comes into play. We can’t quite put our finger on what we are basing our decision or judgement on, but there is something that tells us that this is what we must do (or not do). And this something has been built up over a vast expanse of experience. I have this trick that I use when I have to come up with some complex ideas or crack a knotty problem or make a difficult decision. I simply sleep on it! No, seriously. That’s what I do. I don’t mean literally ‘sleep’ but basically don’t think about it and do other relaxing things like shopping, cooking or anything else. The following day or a day or two later I magically have an idea or solution. I have a feeling that putting the problem aside doesn’t make it go away but sort of makes it drop into my subconscious mind. I don’t have a clear sense of working on it when am shopping or cooking but something definitely happens in the background where this problem is evaluated against all of the data. My conscious mind does not have access to this data but the subconscious does and that’s where my answer comes from. If I thought and thought about it consciously, like I did when I had the shortcut issue, I would only be wasting my time (or pressing the wrong keys). Maybe the subconscious mind is as powerful as Google (or more)… only we don’t know how to effectively search or tap into its power yet!