“When the subconscious mind must chose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.” – T. Harv Eker. When people say their heart and mind are at war, its underlying meaning is that your mind is torn between the options of your Id and superego. The id is the impulsive part of your personality that is driven by pleasure and repulsed by pain, the superego is the judgmental and morally correct part of your personality, and the ego is the conscious part of your personality that mediates between the id and the superego and makes decisions.
This ego-based drive for success and happiness is of course ineffective. We keep wanting more, never feeling quite satisfied. Because our definition of happiness as something that can be obtained externally is fundamentally misguided. Our subconscious fears and desires drive our motivations and actions through emotions such as love, fear, and inspiration.
Be cognizant of your subconscious, of how it may both benefit and hurt you, and of how, by actively considering what emerges from it, sometimes with the assistance of others, you can become happier and more successful.
While sections of our subconscious minds are dangerously animalistic, other aspects of our minds are faster and wiser than our conscious ones. Our most creative ideas frequently “spring up” from our subconscious. These breakthroughs in creativity happen when we are calm and not attempting to access the area of the brain where they typically live, the neocortex. You may have seen your subconscious mind communicating with your conscious mind when you remark, “I just thought of something.” We live in a society that thinks the majority of our actions are deliberate. But the majority of what we do—and the greatest of what we do—is done subconsciously.
A knowledge of the interaction of your conscious and unconscious minds will enable you to transform your whole life. Because the greatest impediments to changes in our traditional roles seem to lie not in the visible world of conscious intent but in the murky realm of the unconscious mind (Augustus).
