The Sound of Thoughts

Decision making has always been extremely tough for me.

Growing up as a timid paranoid cynic, I was always fearful of making a decision, because I was sure it would be the wrong one. If it didn't put me into serious trouble, it would at least deprive me of the benefits of making the right choice.

Several years ago, I wanted to sign up for a Mind Development program. I had been reading the very popular books behind the workshop for years, and looked forward to experiencing the actual program. However, the decision was not an easy one to make.

As usual, I was caught in my extensive unending decision making loop.

“I have wanted to do this program for a long time”.  “But it is extremely expensive”.

“I am really intrigued by the Mind and I want to learn all about it”. “But you will waste 2 days of leave on this”.

“….”               “But …”

“….”               “But …”

“….”               “But …”

The process went on, seemingly endless.

Only this time, there was a slight difference to it, because by this time, I had become aware of the role of the subconscious in our thinking and decision making process. I had sufficient idea on how to extract insights from the subconscious. I had learnt quite a bit about how to make the subconscious an ally in our thinking and decision making process. So this time, after a bit of deliberation, when I was sure that my objective has been communicated to the subconscious, I let go of the whole dilemma, and got busy with my life.

After a couple of days, while at work, I had an impulse to call up the organizers to ask for the registration details. It was a peaceful nudge from within, which got me to pick up the phone and make the call, without any thought countering the action. One of those days, I went over and got myself registered for the program. I applied for the required leave, and attended the program. In the whole process, I never had any thought within me that questioned my action or told me not to go ahead with the same. I never wondered if I am doing the right thing. I just went ahead and did all of that with no resistance from any part of me.

At some instant while sitting through the program, I was suddenly reminded of those moments that night when I was withstanding that excruciating dilemma of making this decision, and now here I was – attending it without any ambiguity, doubt, hesitation, and ifs-and-buts.

This is how the subconscious answers us in a “YES”. You may not hear the sound of “YES”, but our whole being functions unanimously to make the “YES” happen.

In many other cases of decision-making, where the subconscious answer was a "NO", I didn’t hear a "NO" either. Similar to the "YES" case, in the "NO" case too, I just let go all about the dilemma, never felt any deadlock any more, got busy with other things, and spontaneously, I didn't do the thing at all. Several days later I would get reminded that I did once considered doing this, but not one whiff of regret passed through my being for having missed it.

This is how the subconscious answers us in “NO”. When the subconscious decides that something is not the right choice for us, you simply forget about it and go ahead with other things.

"If I didn’t hear it, you didn’t say it"

The universe of the subconscious is a completely different world of its own. As the very word implies, the subconscious is beyond the limits of the conscious. Hence, we - as conscious thinkers - may not be able to know accurately what lies there. However, we can learn to be aware of its existence, learn about its capabilities, know how to communicate with it, and make the most out of it. It is our biggest ally in generating brilliant insights.

The universe of the subconscious has its own mechanics, dynamics, kinematics, and laws of motion. It has its own language that it understands, and its own language in which it responds.

It is for the conscious thinker in us to catch hold of these and interpret it to our relevant contexts.

The subconscious never imposes its will on us. It doesn’t convince us with a loud YES or NO. If we are willing to give it the space to function, it would just go ahead and do what’s required to be done to make the YES or NO possible. If we do not, it remains in its status quo.

The responses from subconscious are "existential" in nature. It doesn’t tell us anything, it just goes ahead and makes it happen – if we let it be.

If, for example, you wanted to receive inspired thoughts from your subconscious on how to lose weight, you wouldn’t "hear" a list of action steps or things-to-do in your mind. Rather, you would, in a matter of a few days, simply find yourself inspired to take actions that are most suited for your physiology and psychology, and hence, most effective to your individuality for losing weight.

The conscious feels it knows something only when it hears it out explicitly, with sufficient justifications. Hence, the conscious doesn’t trust the functioning of the subconscious. Often it feels that it didn’t receive any useful response from the subconscious.

As a result, we lose millions of opportunities for receiving the right inspirations and insights.

"Tell me – Do you love me ?"

If the Conscious and the Subconscious minds were in love, they would be very miserable.

The Conscious would ask the Subconscious – “Tell me, do you love me ?”

Instead of giving a response in YES or NO, the Subconscious would go ahead, and pool all its infinite resources to create amazing experiences to make the Conscious feel loved.

Amidst all this – the Conscious would burst into tears – “You didn’t say YES. You do not love me”.

The Subconscious would try to soothe – “I am not good at words. But I always make you feel loved in the best possible way”.

The Conscious would weep even loader – “You have still not said YES !!!”

The Conscious most easily understands verbal thoughts – thoughts that we think as words. Thoughts that we hear in mind as soft whispers.

The Subconscious has a completely different language. There are a large number of parameters that decide what the subconscious is going to make of with the information it receives.

You can say the word “Fantastic” in 10 different tones to convey 10 different and quite contradictory emotions.

The Subconscious does not only take the “words” as its input, but many other factors which includes feelings and emotions. It also includes anything that indicates feelings and emotions directly or indirectly, e.g. color, texture, timbre of the sound, fonts, visuals, imageries, etc.

Words colored with intense feelings and emotions, visuals and imagery are received more effectively by the subconscious rather than plain, simple words.

Similarly, when the Subconscious responds, it doesn’t respond in words, but in impulses, feelings, emotions, visuals, imagery, intuitions. It is for the conscious to become aware of these responses and interpret them appropriate to the context of the problem that the conscious has been working on.

If you were in the process of choosing a dress to buy, and the Subconscious wanted to convey you that the red one is the prefect choice for you – you wouldn’t hear the words “take the red one. it is the best for you”. Instead, you would experience this response from the Subconscious in other ways - for example, you might feel extremely exhilarated when you look at the “red” dress and feel very excited imagining how you would look when you go out wearing it.

That is how Subconscious responds to us.

"I am all on my own"

After years of experience dealing with the Subconscious, the Conscious ends up realizing that whenever it needed help with an idea or a decision, the Subconscious was never there to respond to it. Any help that the Conscious ever received was by its own thinking, or the Conscious minds of others, and other verbal sources – books, lectures, journals, magazines.

On the other hand, the Subconscious mind maintains that it has been prompt and instant in giving the most amazing solutions that was every possible to provide. It was the Conscious that didn’t pay attention to most of them, and kept dropping them.

In due course of time, the Conscious is assured that it is all alone in its pursuit of answers. It is the one who has to solve all its problems on its own, or with the help of other Conscious minds. It is the one that has to think through the solutions. It is the one that has to generate all the ideas. It is the one that has to make all its decisions. It is the one that has to weigh all the pros and cons. It has to pore over hundreds of books and journals to find its answers.

In doing so, the Conscious loses the most powerful ally it had in creating amazing insights.

The Subconscious quietly sulks – “Whenever you have looked for an answer, I have given you countless brilliant insights – if only you paid attention … “

After a certain point, the Subconscious just stands in a corner, gleefully watching the antics of the Conscious continuing to break the sweat but barely accomplishing the task. The Subconscious knows that it could have accomplished it in a jiffy, and carries on enjoying the sight of the Conscious sweating it out and not reaching anywhere.

Why should the Conscious have all the fun ?

Downward is the only way Forward

We equate thoughts with words. This equivalence is very limiting and deprives us of millions of ideas that keep coming through our way all the time.

Surprisingly, the notion of wordless thought is not so alien to us either. We do it all the time. All our involuntary actions and reflexes are instances of wordless thoughts. We do act on impulses all the time.

A player playing a competitive sport may think something on the lines of – “the ball is moving in that direction, so I should move this way to be there in time for the shot, and since the opponent seems to be moving to the left, leaving a lot of gap on the other side, this is how I will position my body and finish off the shot on the right side” – and execute this entire thought in 0.2 seconds without verbalizing a word of it.

We are perfectly aware that non-verbal thinking is lightning fast. One faint non-verbal impulse or intuition could convey us something that would require hundreds of words to articulate, and may still not be expressed accurately.

The notion of thoughts arising at very deeper levels of psyche and bubbling upward as they evolve, becoming larger and more perceptible as they reach the surface, is deeply ingrained in the ancient Indian theories about the formation of sound (which is equivalent to formation of thoughts). This 4-level structure is a perfect framework for understanding ideas of all our cognition.

An in-depth understanding of these 4 levels - Vaikhari, Madhyama, Pashyanti and Para - can be used to spike up the process of learning, problem-solving, creativity, innovation, communication and every other mental activity.

When Is An Idea born ?

An idea doesn’t take time to form. The subconscious creates ideas instantly. It is the conscious which delays the action of picking them up.

A “flash of insight” indicates that the impulse from the subconscious has found its way to the conscious.

An idea is formed at a very deep level of consciousness. Travelling up from the deeper levels towards the surface, the idea may get lost in the turbulence it encounters in the form of louder thoughts that pervade our minds all the time. An impulse passes through a large number of filters of biases, prejudices, beliefs, and may just not make the cut, and get rejected outright. It gets colored with a lot of noise of feelings, emotions, sensations and memories, and may reach us in a totally different form than it was formed with.

The best ideas come to us when we are not actively guarding the entry of impulses to our conscious and the impulses sneak their way into the conscious sidelining the turbulence, the filters and the noises.

Inspiring Insights

It is beyond doubt that all inspirations and insights come from the subconscious.

A very rudimentary approach to insightful thinking is to realize that there are basically 3 steps for receiving inspired thoughts :

a)     Stimulate the subconscious.

b)     Receive the thought streams triggered.

c)     Interpret, understand and correlate with the context.

The ReInvent Thinking Tookit provides a large repertoire of techniques that allows one to understand the subconscious intricately, amplifying the ability to trigger insightful thoughts.

In “The Einstein Factor”, Win Wenger describes an innovative brainstorming technique used by The Gillette Co. in 1980s to create their new shampoo product-line. The executives had to imagine they were shafts of hair. Acting out their “hair” identities, they would describe what would please them most in a shampoo. Some hair shafts preferred action and they wanted powerful cleansers to completely root out the dirt from the scalp. Some hair-shafts realized that they were split ends and requested for milder action.

Since no hair-shaft wanted to relent and let go of what they needed, the hair-shafts brainstorming over the new shampoo converged on a new shampoo, Silkience, that would automatically adjust to every hair need. Silkience has been one of the top-selling shampoos for 3 decades.

It should be noted that in this brainstorming, they didn't start brainstorming "ideas", a pitfall that most of us fall into all the time. Their first task was to present all the problems that they wanted addressed. They figured out a unique way of stimulating their subconscious to pour out the deep-rooted problems in the most playful way. This is a perfect example of many parameters involved in the working of the subconscious.

How can we effectively learn to stimulate and trigger the subconscious effectively ?

How can we effectively learn to identify the impulses and let them evolve into insights ?

How can we effectively learn to interpret these insights in the context of our problems ?

Many readers of our articles often express their desire to know a few techniques of how to accomplish these. However, a blind perusal of any technique is what we discourage the most.

We would rather invite you to embark on this fascinating journey with us, learning how to get intimately aware of our subconscious, and allow this understanding to evolve into spontaneous techniques that would be best suited for you.

From being passive readers, we invite you to be active travelers of this journey of self-exploration. Rather than we overloading you with a new baggage of information, we would love it if you gain all the insights yourselves. That's how a transformation can be achieved.

Starting to share your insights, learnings and thoughts on these discussions would help you a lot in gaining the maximum out of these articles. If treated as a little more than leisurely reading, these articles carry the power to completely transform the way you navigate your universe of thoughts.

Expression is a very powerful tool to get to the subconscious, and most of our techniques use free-flow of expression as the primary skill.

Let us make it a fascinating journey of self-exploration of the fantastic universe of the subconscious mind.

Become a part of this journey by expressing your insights in the comments section.

"Only Fools Rush In ..."

It is very likely that with these new insights, the Conscious goes and tells the Subconscious – “Okay, I am sorry I didn’t understand you before. Now that I know these things, I will make an attempt to do that, I will communicate to you in the way you want, but I have to send out this presentation by morning, just give me the ideas I need NOW”.

It doesn't work that way ...

Insightful Thinking is a romance between the conscious and subconscious.

It needs to give it the time it takes to create a beautiful story.

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