The 5 States of Mind

Our mind — or brain if you prefer — is like a house with five levels, and understanding the 5 levels can help bring insight into your daily life, how and why you act the way you do and where you usually are in day-to-day consciousness. Those levels are as follows:

• sub-subconscious
• subconscious
• conscious
• sub-superconscious
• superconscious.

Conscious Mind

The mind is a powerful tool that, once harnessed, can be of great use to the individual. One of the main levels of our mind is the conscious, or the front door and main floor of a house that is our mind. The conscious mind’s greatest ability is to collect and categorize data. That data is just made up of our reality, the things we experience, so whatever we see and experience gets collected and logged, categorized with judgment and then neatly packed away into the subconscious…ideally. Unfortunately most data (experience) comes in too quickly for us to neatly package it. We are left with unresolved experiences and confusion permeates, just like having a sub-floor in a house, a basement, that is filled with debris that has never been put in a box and back on the shelf. Which leads to the next floor of the mind:

Subconscious and Sub-subconscious

The subconscious is like the basement of a house. All of the data collected from the conscious floor are now packed, put away and stored inside the subconscious to use at a later time. When we understand experiences in a nice and neat way, like when we live with mindfulness, those subconscious experiences can be recalled programs that contain knowledge as data and used as wisdom. Wisdom is simply the timely application of knowledge, and that knowledge is right there in the subconscious.

When data doesn’t get neatly packed and stored properly, it still goes into the subconscious basement but that data is scrambled and hard to access — and that data is hard to clean up after-the-fact. This scrambled data, or unresolved experiences, can now come up at random and cause emotional grief, or will wait until meditation training is begun and then all of a sudden that thing that happened to you ten years ago comes up.

This is where the sub-subconscious comes in. When multiple experiences overlap each other they create a new structure, or rule, of what you know to be your experience. For example: one day you spill coffee on yourself while in a rush to get to that work meeting, no big deal except the pain and hassle of getting a new shirt. Another time, also while in a rush to get to a meeting, you repeat the experience and spill coffee…not good but also fixable. Now, those two experiences create a third rule based off what has occurred in the past and gets logged into the sub-subconscious. This new rules reads: “Work meetings end with coffee on shirt, POSSIBLE DANGER.” Every time you hold coffee, go to a work related meeting or some combination of the two, you get nervous, anxiety ridden, and have no idea why.

The subconscious mind is like a phone with thousands of apps still open and no one has swiped any of them closed. It’s up to us to live in the moment enough to categorize data from the conscious to the subconscious, and also to go back and clean up each unresolved and left open app of experience. Swipe, swipe, swipe, all those old apps need to be resolved and closed for our mind to work sharply again and our lives to be fully present. When that happens we go right into the next floor of the house:

Superconscious and Sub-superconscious

We all want to be here. The superconscious mind is our intuition. When we are flowing through the week, all is good, music is jamming, our timing is just right, the universe is finally on our side: you are in the superconscious area of the mind. This is when the conscious is working good, the subconscious is working right and the sub-subconscious is all cleaned up thanks to our therapy and mindfulness coach. Doors open and for once you see them opening. You take opportunity, do the work, self-educate, feel positive and are ready to face a new day: that’s where we can all eventually be if we work hard enough to get the other rooms in the mind’s house in order.

Whenever we have duplicate experiences they get stored as new rules, remember? The same is true for both negative and positive experiences and reactions. When things are good and we are flowing through the superconscious area of the mind those duplicate reactions will create more good for you. More positive rules of self-reliance, self-worth and positive self-perception will go into the sub-superconscious and we become unstoppable forces of strength, courage and willpower. Your morals and paradigms in regards to life will turn positive more than negative, and we tend to give the benefit of the doubt to others instead of blaming, judging or ruling against someone.