Bruce Lipton – The Secret of the Conscious and Subconscious Mind

But the conscious mind says: “I could stop the program, I can create a new program and I can have wishes and desires”, that’s creativity. What is it that you don’t have that you want? You’re creating an image of something that doesn’t exist like, “I want to be healthy, I want to have a great relationship” and so on. That’s creative thinking. So the conscious mind is the seat of wishes and desires.

Different from the conscious mind, you get the programs in your subconscious mind mainly through experience. Our lives are controlled by our mind. Your conscious mind is creative and has the destination you wish to see and the subconscious mind just knows how to deal with life.

I like to demonstrate how this works with a child’s mind and let’s use the analogy of an iPod: On the front of the iPod is a click-wheel. With that wheel you can select the music and you can go fast-forward or reverse or push on pause for example. So we have the tendency to think that the click-wheel is the equivalent of the conscious mind. But when you go to the Apple Store and buy a brand new iPod, take it out of the box and push play, what happens? Nothing! But we know that we can’t play anything because we didn’t download any programs. When you put information on the hard drive (that’s the subconscious mind) the conscious mind can select and play and change and all that information, but if there’s no data in the subconscious mind, the conscious mind has nothing to work with.

Imagine a baby could speak the moment it’s born and it’s coming out of the birth canal and we say: “Hey welcome! Tell me something.” The little baby would look up at you and realize “I don’t know anything, I just got here”. That’s an iPod with no program.

So in other words, for a baby to use a process of consciousness, it has to have some kind of data to start with.