An Interview with Bruce Lipton, Part 2 – The Secret of the Conscious and Subconscious Mind

Interview by Dirk Terpstra, Founder Soul Love

For Part 1 of this fascinating interview with Dr Bruce Lipton, please visit: Bruce Lipton: The Secret of Life is Belief

The mind has two elements; the conscious and the subconscious, and they are interdependent. This is very critical information, because we tend to speak about one mind, but it’s always two minds that work together, but they are two separate entities. The critical part is that they learn in different ways and they have different functions. So blaming the mind or the subconscious without understanding this, is a very confusing issue.

The subconscious is the equivalent of the habit mind. It’s purely stimulus – response. You push a button and you create a behaviour, no thinking involved. You walk outside for example and it’s cold. The body will sense the temperature, the subconscious mind will adjust the temperature of the interior of the body, heating it up, to keep it on a working temperature. Or, if you step outside and it’s warm, the body will read the warm temperature and then start to cool the body down using perspiration to keep the same body temperature. You don’t have any thoughts about this, this all happens automatically. A change in temperature causes the biology to automatically adjust. 95% of our life, including our behaviour, is from that mind.

The subconscious mind is the habit mind. When I learn how to walk, the subconscious has a program. Do I need to learn how to walk every day? No, once you learn how to walk, you know how to walk.

The evolution that makes humans so different than lower animals, is the evolution of the piece of brain tissue right behind your forehead called the prefrontal cortex. That’s the seat of the conscious mind. The conscious mind is not a habit mind, the conscious mind is a creative mind. This is what makes us different from animals. Animals have the stimulus – response, stimulus – response. The turtles come on the beach and lay their eggs at a very certain time each year. Not because they’re thinking about it, but because it’s a habit.