Our bottom-up mind

Our mind works from the bottom up. In other words the sub-conscious mind with all its emotions drives our conscious mind.

In a day we human beings have close to 12000 thoughts. A large part of these thoughts are driven by our inner desires, our hatreds, our likes and dislikes. The conscious mind more often than not, is just verbalizing what we feel inside our deepest core. The conscious mind tries to explain or put words to our feelings.

For e.g. let us say that you resent some person. What happens is that the conscious mind comes up with ideas about all the negative aspect of the person you dislike. You will find that there are so many reasons why the person you hate is so despicable. The conscious mind will explain the inner hatred that you have. In the end you will start believing that the hatred is a consequence of all your observations rather than the other way around i.e. you had resented this person to start with.

On the other hand when we are infatuated with some body then our mind finds so many reasons to make this person virtuous. We find qualities in the person that probably don’t even exist. In many ways the unconscious mind triggers thoughts in our conscious surface.

While we may think that we are reasoning the world we see around us, in most case we just try to explain to ourselves what our emotions are telling us.

In fact in “How to know yourself”, Alex Lickerman, M.D. says that if we explore our mind we will discover things that are counter to our expectations. He goes on to say “The conscious mind, however, is a great explainer. It’s irresistibly drawn into making sense of the world and everything in it, including itself.”

In most cases it is more important to address our biases, our resentments or our anger. If we are caught in trying to argue with ourselves,verbally, then we will end up frustrated. We have to attack the underlying cause which is behind all our verbal layers that our conscious mind makes to root out the problem.