“Switching from Unconscious to Conscious Mind”

New studies with Functional MRI show that when a person is about to make a decision that part of the brain which is our unconscious takes over about 3 or 4 seconds before we make any decision.

The reality is that we have so much more going on in our unconscious mind, it’s the reason why we pick the color shirt we are wearing today, the type of car we drive, who we have as a spouse and so much more. Yet most people poo poo the whole thing that the unconscious is really in control. Yet most people don’t even know themselves deeply enough to understand their unconscious mind.

It is said in all spiritual texts — Know Thy Self

When we have some kind of challenge in our life the unconscious mind takes over and decides what will happen. It’s all automatic but those who meditate for long periods of time don’t have that happen. In fact, Functional MRI’s were done of Buddhists Monks who have meditated for years— logging in hundreds of thousands of hours of meditation. First, they did a normal response to stimuli using the Functional MRI and then they subjected these monks to photos of terrible things happening and the results showed no changes at all in their brain. Nothing happened at all, a slight blip here or there but nothing much.

But for an average person shown these photos, their mind starts going crazy and the unconscious took over and their animal instincts kick in. Having the animal reptilian mind take over is not good if we want to overcome all animal like tendencies in this day and age— and use our cognitive abilities to create a peaceful world.

So if we want to calm down our animal-like tendencies, if we want our prefrontal cortex or thinking mind to take over, then it’s vital that we do meditation for long periods of time. It seems that the thicker and larger the prefrontal cortex becomes through meditation— we can then skip the reptilian responses and see everything in a whole new light.

And just the opposite happens for those who use only use their unconscious mind to respond to the world. They have a bigger response in that area of the brain and thus connect to the fight or flight response more and more. Thus getting angry, upset, and lashing out at the world become a habit— and we see the world through a very different set of glasses with a different perspective.

It says in all spiritual texts— Be in the world but not of it.

Many Blessings My Friend

Dr. Paul Haider