Or at least, it can be.

Let me explain.

For much of my magical and spiritual journey, I haven't made much of a distinction between the subconscious mind and the higher self, assuming that it was more a case of author's choice. No one that I have read at least, sits the reader down and spells out precisely what they mean when they use these terms. They are on occasion quick to state their rejection of the term 'unconscious mind' but that's about it. Regardless of the terminology used, I was always left with the impression that conscious mind = logical left side brain = bad, everything else = intuitive right side brain = good. If your spells don't work? Oh that's your conscious left side brain getting in the way. Can't meditate? That will be the conscious mind refusing to let go. I now know that in both cases, it is actually your subconscious mind that is sabotaging your efforts!

About 11 years ago I started working with the Anderson Feri system in which the mind is split into Talking Self, the Fetch (or Younger Self) and Deep Self (or God Self). Even within this system, I continued to clump the subconscious mind and higher self together in the Deep Self, seeing the Fetch as a go-between.

Then when I started doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to help with my anxiety and other disorders of thinking, I saw the target of this work as being my conscious mind.

Earlier this year I happened upon a BBC Horizon documentary that completely changed the way I view the subconscious mind. Without repeating the documentary word for word, I'd like to explain my thoughts here.

The documentary was called 'How you Really Make Decisions'. It goes into explicit detail about how what we might call our intuitive mind, governs far more of our daily decision making than we realise. In particular the documentary shares the Nobel Prize winning work of Professor Daniel Khaneman. Khaneman noticed that what we think of as our logical mind that he calls 'system 2 thinking', is slow, requires vast amounts of energy and we actually prefer not to use it. Instead, we have another mode of thinking that he calls system 1 thinking, which is fast, effortless and habitual. This intuitive thinking actually governs the majority of our daily thoughts and behaviours.

After the documentary I started to look into it a bit more and discovered that another scientist, Keith Stanovich, has taken this theory and run with it, changing the terminology from 'system' to 'type' because he feels that more than one cognitive process is involved in each system (and while I agree, I've decided to stick to 'system 1' and 'system 2' here). Stanovich is particularly interesting for me because he looks into the reflexive behaviour of language, particularly reading.

That our conversations are largely a string of automatic responses is something I became acutely aware of while learning Japanese. In the early days of study my head would physically hurt and I'd feel drained after even a short conversation. I was in system 2 thinking, analysing the sounds I was hearing for clues to the meaning and then desperately digging through my memory banks for words and grammar that could help me to form a coherent answer. As time goes by I am building more and more reflexive reactions. I can recognise familiar patterns of sound and know instantly what they mean, and I reply automatically with the same old sentences, just with different words slotted in to suit my needs. Little thought is required, except when the conversation drifts to unknown territory. I believe that thisis a higher self. There is of course in my belief system, the god energy flowing through me and accessible by turning inwards, but it isn't actually a part of me, it just occupies the same space.

This also got me interested in picking up where I left off with shadow work. The shadow too, is a part of this subconscious mind and is driving a lot of our system 1 reactions, from our instant disliking of certain people, to our avoidance behaviours. The Fetch can move information from the subconscious into the conscious mind, helping us to identify the errors in our thinking whether that be through dream analysis, meditation or shadow work. It can also move information from the conscious to the subconscious mind to assist us in reprogramming our automatic thoughts and feelings through CBT, EFT, hypnosis, affirmations or whatever your weapon of choice might be. The point is that these techniques are targeting the subconscious mind and not, as I used to believe, the conscious mind. Once you start to look at the mind in this way, our subconscious mind can actually become our greatest asset.

Resources;
How do we Really Make decisions?

More on the 'Fast Thinking' system 1

The Confirmation Bias

The Negativity Bias

If you have access to old episodes of QI, you can also check out Episode 13 from the M series 'Messing with Your Mind', that discusses some of these errors in thinking.