Unconscious Mind - The Donkey

The Donkey

We have discussed about a monkey then why can’t we discuss about a donkey too! We can use the term ‘silent donkey’ also to represent the mind, but the one which is not conscious. The conscious mind will work only when a person is conscious and we use the term unconscious to represent the mind while the person is not conscious. The psychologists and mind researchers divide the mind into conscious, subconscious, super-conscious, unconscious etc to demark its nature and functions. However the demarcation between the conscious and unconscious is widely acceptable. Don’t forget that there is no physical form for the mind and the mind is an abstract function of the central nerve system including the brain!

When the person is alive and not asleep he is in consciousness and aware of his surroundings. Whereas when the person is alive but sleeping he is not conscious and not aware of his surroundings. Since his senses are not working at this stage he is unable to perceive or know anything. But it doesn’t mean that his mind is not working. It is working silently. The major part of our mind, almost ninety percent, is always silent however vigilant and intelligent. This major part of the mind is not conscious means only about ten percent of our mind is conscious!

Figure 1 explains briefly the concept of conscious and unconscious mind. Yes, the monkey and the donkey! While studying Neuro Linguistic Programming we discuss only about conscious mind and unconscious mind and hence you just forget about the subconscious, superconscious etc for the moment, which means the unconscious mind in NLP represents every part of mind other than conscious mind. Still we haven’t discussed the functions of unconscious and conscious minds and their roles in the life.

You have been reading this topic for the last couple of minutes and I don’t know up to what extent you understand what you have read. You were using your conscious mind to perceive what is written. You have used your visual sense (eyes) to read the matter and the sensory input (whatever you have seen) is transferred in to the unconscious where each bit of input is compared with your experience already recorded in the brain.

I hope that you understand what I mean, say for example, you see a word ‘donkey’. If you don’t know anything about a donkey and if you have never seen even a picture of it, you never understand what I mean by a donkey here. So your conscious mind passes the sensory input of ‘donkey’ to the unconscious and a verification process will take place. If the donkey is already recorded there you will understand ‘what I mean by a donkey’ otherwise your unconscious will revert it to the conscious with a ‘?!’ mark. At this point you will open the ‘WordWeb’ or some other dictionaries for the meaning. This is the procedure for each and every bit of information you perceive, the speed of reading and understanding depends on your sensory experience and concentration (monkey!).  

Now you understand that the unconscious does the functions of a dictionary. Not only that it is a container of all experiences, knowledge, believes, values, habits, talents, skills and capabilities but also of thoughts, emotions, feelings etc. When you want to express a feeling, whether love, anger, sorrow, happiness, the emotion will automatically come to the conscious mind from the unconscious without making any conscious effort.  So your unconscious is very smart too!

What is behaviour? We usually consider it as the manner of acting or controlling ourselves. Not only that, in NLP every actions we do in our life is considered to be part of our behaviour which constitutes our personality. It is the action or reaction to a particular situation in life for the existence biologically, physically and socially. Who generates and controls our behaviour, the unconscious mind. Note that most of our behaviour is unconscious with the exception of what we do specifically through our conscious effort. Say for example the children prepare for elocution. Mothers practice new recipe.

Then, what about habits? It is the frequent repetition of an action you have executed many times, say for example twenty times. The action is getting recorded in the brain and while repeating it many times the unconscious mind channelizes it as a habit to repeat in a similar way. Life is almost impossible without behaviours and habits. Hope you understand the concept of conscious mind and unconscious mind to some extent. We will discuss it in detail later.