Excuses Begone! Part 2 of 12: Your Two Minds
September 24, 2009 by dr. lam
In Excuses Begone!, Wayne Dyer like Maxwell Maltz divides our brains into two parts: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind occupies only about 5% of our active brain, whereas the churning engine of the unconscious mind ensnares the remaining 95%. Like Maltz, whom we covered extensively in our 2-month blog series on Psycho-Cybernetics, Dyer sees our conscious element to be creative in nature that can drive our unconscious mind toward an intended goal.
As explained in Tor Norretranders’ book The User Illusion, while our conscious mind can process only a few dozen or so environmental stimuli at any given moment, our unconscious mind is responsible for millions of stimuli at that concurrent time. Dyer argues we tend to blame what lives in the unconscious as being uncontrollable since it lies external to our more limited conscious presence. However, he sees choice in our thoughts and actions that can drive our unconscious mind where we want it to be, very similar to Maltz.
As mentioned in our blog yesterday, The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton posits that the energy of our very cells can be influenced by our mind. An example that Dyer uses is his swimming in which he tends to kick forcefully with his right leg but lazily lets his left leg limply drift, making him look as if he had a stroke. People observed this unusual swimming style that he actually used throughout a period of competitive swimming but that had slowly begun to affect his yoga and engendered inexorable back discomfort. At 65 years of age after 60 years of this habit, he surprisingly easily changed so that he swam properly alleviating the pressure on his lower back.
Mark Twain said, “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” We all can coax our habits down a step at a time, as this blog series will hopefully help us to do. Perhaps we can do what we thought impossible because we no longer think it.
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I’m excited to learn more about this in this blog series! Very interesting and insightful! I really liked your comment on habits. I tend to try to change a habit overnight and that usually doesn’t work for me, and now I see why…lol Look forward to more on this topic!!! Can’t wait actually!
cool. glad you found it helpful!