As we’ve seen, the mind is not physical, but spiritual. It is not an object but an activity which extends from the brain into every cell in the body and the energy field surrounding it. It contains all the imprints that form your personality, including your habits, interests, memories, ideas and beliefs. It is shaped by your learning and the environment, and ultimately fashions the way you live. The mind operates at many levels. We are generally aware of some and completely unaware of others.

The levels of awareness that exist include: Each level influences the others since information constantly flows between them. However, the deeper, subconscious levels of which we are relatively un aware are many times more powerful than that of which we are aware, i.e. the conscious.The deeper we go into the mind, the closer we get to our spiritual centre. It’s like peeling away the layers of an onion, discarding the accumulated mental and emotional baggage until we reveal the Creative Intelligence that lies at the centre.Understanding the mind and how its various levels interact with each other is important because it enables us to become more spiritually aware and more effective in our daily lives.

60 The Conscious Mind

The mind has often been compared to an iceberg, with a small portion floating above the water level and a bulky mass hidden beneath. The conscious mind is the ‘visible’ part. It is the small fraction of mental activity of which we are aware in any moment, and includes the facility of reasoning also known as the intellect.

Thinking at the conscious level is like talking to ourselves; indeed, we know the conscious mind as an ongoing conversation in our heads, one thought following another, and another. When we pay repeated attention to a thought it filters through to the subconscious and produces record-like grooves which play over and over again until the thought becomes a habit.

The conscious mind has only a fraction of the capacity of the subconscious, but it plays a major role in our lives. We can consciously feed new patterns into the subconscious, creating new habits, weakening old habits and replacing them with new. Similarly, we can weaken old habits by withdrawing our attention from them until. Eventually, they fade away.

61 Birds Flying Across A Cloudless Sky

Try this: Sit comfortably or lie back. Take a few deep breaths, close your eyes and relax.

Become aware of your thoughts. Without judging any thought good or bad, observe each thought. Where is it coming from? Where is it going? Why are you thinking that thought? Where is it taking you?

Picture your thoughts as birds flying across a cloudless sky, coming and going seemingly at random. Now take some control. Imagine them flying into your field of vision from one side and out of the other.

62 The Intellect

The intellect is the reasoning part of the conscious mind. It gathers, sorts and uses information, calculates, decides, analyses and makes judgements.

The intellect is a powerful resource, but it can mislead because it relies too heavily on the five senses. We know that our senses miss much of what is around us. Dogs hear and smell things we cannot; bats pick up vibrations and eagles in flight see tiny objects on the ground that would be out of our range. Moreover, there is a world of micro-organisms of which we knew nothing before the invention of the microscope, the optical telescope opened up a new understanding of the Solar System, and the radio telescope is still revealing galaxies millions of light years from our own.

The intellect is greatly influenced by childhood programming and cultural conditioning. Thinking habits we learned as children do not always serve us well in adulthood, so we must be careful: wisdom cannot always be deduced by logic and is more akin to intuition than reasoning.