Becoming More Conscious: How we Replace Reality with Illusions

Posted On March 30, 2015 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

 When we say that we tend to live a life of illusions that we mistaken for being real, many don’t know for sure what this means, or how it is that we do it, because we do it in a completely natural way. Because our perception is formed primarily out of our subconscious mind, we perceive the world around us in an automated fashion without any effort or direct awareness of what we’re doing or how we’re doing it. This general sense of confusion is compounded by the paradox that exists between the two aspects of our mind called the conscious and subconscious, where the subconscious operates almost completely out of memory in an automated fashion. While it functions out of memory, it doesn’t have the ability to create it’s own memories, and only forms memory out of actual experiences. Whereas the conscious mind, which is the self-aware aspect of our mind that directs our attention, is hardly ever present in the moment, and spends most of its time consumed with thoughts of the past that it imagines over and over as different scenarios that create a form of false reality in place of the real one. The conscious mind creates false realities in the imagination that form virtual experiences that the subconscious mistakes for being real, and uses to form an equivalent outer experience of the same feeling and emotion.

The subconscious mind isn’t creative like the conscious mind in the sense that it doesn’t have the ability to make stuff up, and doesn’t tell stories about things that make them mean something like the conscious mind does. The subconscious forms more of an objective memory as important information it gathers about the environment that it uses to regulate our behavior, which is necessary for our survival and our overall well-being. Our subconscious, which is always one with our environment while also running all the biological functions of our body, regulates all of the natural and automatic behaviors that we do without having to think about them, and as a result, we remain primarily unaware of them. This is a very basic form of evolution where our internal state (body) is constantly adjusting to match the energy being expressed in our immediate environment. The subconscious is the aspect of our mind that’s always connected to and exchanging information with everything around us through feelings and emotions that trigger automatic impulses. Emotions can be thought of as the physical equivalent of the qualities of consciousness we express through the visual images of our thoughts. Information exists as vibratory frequencies that are inherent in the atmosphere that act to stimulate our body, producing chemistry we experience as emotions. Emotions produce automatic behaviors that are a form of instinct. Because of this, the emotional states we consistently live out of are always producing our natural behaviors and determine what activities we naturally engage in, most of which happens in a completely natural manner without our direct awareness.

The self conscious aspect of our mind, which is also the creative component, has the ability to literally program our subconscious through deliberate use of the imagination, where we create internal realities that our subconscious perceives as an actual memory. The subconscious doesn’t know the difference between an actual experience and an imagined one, especially if the imagined one is imbued with detail and sensation that makes it seem real. When we play ideas out in our mind as possible scenarios formed out of past memories that have strong emotions associated with them, we’re literally programming our own subconscious on what to produce as an outer, physical equivalent. It’s not the idea formed as a picture that serves as the programming, but the feelings and emotions that the mental picture acts to naturally stimulate and call forth in an active state. All mental images are symbolic and serve as a metaphor for producing a particular type of experience. The experience created by the subconscious gives us more of the same type of feeling. Most people don’t realize they have the ability to literally program “themselves” on what to create as an experience, and as a result, use this innate ability in a very haphazard and counter-productive way by constantly dwelling in old memories that they replay over and over in their mind. As we play out ideas in our mind, they stimulate correlating emotions (that are the vibratory equivalent) in response to them, which combine to form a virtual reality that the subconscious interprets as being an actual reality or directive for creating an equivalent reality. Memories (virtual or actual) provide the subconscious mind with whole patterns for producing corresponding realities.

Whatever we think about and dwell in with intensity, we systematically develop a whole array of possible behaviors around that we perform without being aware of them. Anything offered up to the subconscious mind in its own language as an emotionally intense reality, becomes our natural way of being. We act on ourselves by using our imagination to form internal realities that are perceived as being real and actual experiences, and simultaneously tune ourselves to the emotional vibration of those thoughts, acting them out by how we behave, which subliminally connects us to the same type of reality as a pattern or type of experience in everything around us. The emotional component as a frequency, vibrates that same emotion in anyone who has programmed themselves to a similar type of story as a thematic reality. Emotions are part of whole patterns formed as an idea that systematically activates thoughts and visual imagery that match it. Emotional thoughts produce an inner experience as an imaginary reality that replaces the actual one, while also acting to stimulate the type of thoughts that go with the emotion, and thereby connect elements and people who are programmed with the same type of emotional dramas, where they act them out as a joint experience that tells the same type of story.

Our current thoughts, which often have nothing to do with the present, and prevent us from being present in our lives, creates a false reality in place of the true, objective reality. The imagined scenarios we run through our mind over and over that cause us to feel the way we do, are self-made illusions that we mistake for being real while forming an emotional attachment to them as a kind of love for our own creation. We shape our identity out of our own stories formed out of our memories of the past, and don’t know who we are without them. It’s our attachment to our own story about ourselves and our life that make them hard to see as being self-made delusions. We are always making our reality and creating how we experience the outer world by how we exist in relationship with it and by how we act on ourselves to program ourselves to the reality of our imagining, usually based on past memories that had a strong emotional impact, that we continue to live out of and use to create more and more of the same type of experiences long after they’re gone. They no longer exist except in our imagination, and we keep them alive by giving them our constant attention and building our identity by way of the story we tell ourselves about of them, usually, without ever realizing that that’s what we’re actually doing.

Daily Practices to Increase Awareness

To bring this idea into practice in your daily life, simply start by examining the thought processes that run through your mind in an habitual and redundant manner without intentionally thinking about them (paradox intended). Notice what filters you use as a form of judgment that reforms everything according to a certain type of story that you use to explain and describe things that make them mean something specific. Notice how you use memories formed from past experiences to recreate the same type of experiences in the present, which give you more of the same type of feelings and keep you in the same emotional state as the past. Allow yourself to notice what type of story you’re always in the process of telling yourself about things, and realize how often this story runs in terms of how you normally think about things. Notice that thoughts simply run on autopilot sometimes, where you just start thinking about something for no apparent reason, or because they’re similar to something else you’re thinking about. Allow yourself to notice that you’re thinking about the same type of things you thought about yesterday, last week, last month, and maybe even several years ago. Most of which are offspring’s or variations of the same type of story.

Once you become aware of your own tendencies, simply learn to relax your mind, pull your attention away from your habitual thought patterns, and focus on your breathing, becoming present in your body. Then release all automatic thoughts and become aware of your actual environment. Pay attention to what’s around you while continuing to refrain from thinking about them. Instead, simply notice things in terms of how they feel. Notice how you feel in relationship with your environment. And simply experience things as they exist in their own right within the present moment. Don’t allow your judgmental mind to kick in and begin telling a story about them, or go off into an imaginary tangent, simply observe them from a neutral position, and allow impressions to rise in your body in response to them. Interact with them as they are in the present through what they are actually stimulating in you in response to them. Allow new feelings to rise without restricting them, and be willing to interact in new ways creating a new type of experience that will allow you to sense yourself in new ways. As you do this, allow yourself to realize that you can easily begin to learn how to tell a different type of story, and become a different type of person through that story. By simply letting go of the past and the story you formed about life from the experiences of the past, you can learn to be present in your life, accept it as it is, and interacting with it based on what its bringing alive in you relationship with it.

We can all learn how to tell a new kind of story by simply realizing the one we’re currently always in the process of telling ourselves and what kind of person it has developed us to be through how we tell that story, while forming an idea about how we’d like to be instead. Our original story, which is shaped more as an attitude, emotional state, and life theme, was formed through our formative conditioning as a child and adolescent, before our conscious mind was fully developed. As an adult with a fully developed higher mind, we can step outside of our past, and decide what type of person we want to be, and then start forming a new story around being that way. We can begin utilizing our creative abilities to form new and more desirable internal experiences that we infuse with sensory details and strong positive feelings, that will serve to begin reprogramming our own subconscious on what to connect with and create in the outer world that will provide us with more and more of the same type of feelings. As we begin creating new types of experiences of ourselves, we literally begin transforming our memory base to a new level of self-expression and begin creating ourselves with a strong sense of direction and purpose. In order to develop ourselves, we must decide what qualities we want to develop, then intentionally embody those qualities as a state of mind, see life through the perceptual lens of that state, where we see that same quality in everything around us and begin interacting with it in others. As we create new types of experiences, we shape them into new types of memory, which become the basis for directing our own subconscious on what to connect with and create as an equivalent outer experience.

Dr. Linda Gadbois

Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher