The conscious mind is limited by perception and experience. It works on a garbage in, garbage out principle. It’s only as good as its input. If you want to maximize the power of your conscious mind, you need something else; you need the help of your subconscious mind.
Using only your conscious mind means living in a psychic prison. When you focus only on using your reason and emotion rooted in your conscious mind, you are limited by space, time, and circumstances. There’s a whole other world out there. There are many layers to that
world. Unfortunately, you’re completely blind to it because you’re focused only on what you can see, touch, taste, hear, and smell. You’re bound by the limitations of your senses.
The conscious mind is very easy to enslave
It’s not unusual for great historical people to say and do things that we find repugnant today. How come? They are a product of their times. In other words, they were thinking consciously and rationally based on the world that they saw and interacted with during their historical period.
Yet their lives had the seeds of greatness, and we still benefit from their work and their achievements. Still, their limitations are glaring. You also are just as limited because you rely on your conscious mind.
We are very limited people because we are products of our specific circumstances. For example, we are products of our times. It really would be unfair for somebody from several hundred years from now to apply their standards of morality, culture, or whatever else to people living in our time. We are only responsible for what we know. Since we have a certain mindset and a shared set of ideas regarding how things should be in the here and now, we are limited by our times.
This is still a limitation. We’re also a product of our conditions. It really would be unfair for us to judge somebody who grew up in a certain environment to behave and have the values of somebody who did not grow up in that environment.
Of course, this has limitations as well. There are certain common values that we expect of human beings regardless of their or biography but, by and large, it is perfectly understandable for people to be judged based on the conditions they found themselves in. It would be great if all of us could overcome our conditions and live up to the highest standards but we’re only human.
Another limitation is that we are products of our culture. It’s very easy to define culture as involving a certain types of dress and a certain cuisine. Those are superficial cultural differences. Cultural differences actually run deep. They impact how you view life, your general attitude, how you get along with others, and how you define the good life. Your culture also plays a big role in what your personal priorities and values are.
We can debate all day long and then some on the issue of whether all cultures are equal or have the same value or lead to the same place. With that debate aside, it is indisputable that culture does play a big role in how people turn out.
Going even deeper, when you notice that most people have certain cultures, it’s easy to see where that cultural membership draws its power from. When you’re a member of a culture, you want to go along to get along. You want to be part of a crowd. You want to be accepted. There’s a tremendous value in a sense of belonging. This puts tremendous pressure on people who grow up in their own culture to behave and think a certain way.
The truth is given all these limitations, instead of taking our minds to the next level and expanding it, these limitations shrink our minds. It restricts our sense of possibility. They work to shape, warp, and constrain our ability to become whoever we want whenever we want and to otherwise live life on our own terms.
We are limited by our training
Your parents programmed you. A lot of your personal destiny has been set in stone by the people who raised you. It doesn’t matter whether you grew up in a traditional American nuclear family, or a variation of it. Whoever took care of you played a major role in setting the course of your life. This is a limitation on your conscious mind, because your conscious mind can process many other courses. It can process many other maps, but it’s stuck to the map that it first became aware of. Where’s the power there?
The conscious mind is bound by habit
It’s human nature to stick with what we know. We know that there are better things out there. There are better paths, but we are already familiar with our path. We are already comfortable with our programming, so we stick with it. We know we are capable of so much more, but because of the sheer force of habit, we stay on the course; we remain stuck.
The conscious mind is bound by reputation
Deep down inside, a lot of us live for other people’s validation. This is why we hang on to our programming. We know that it’s sub-optimal. We know that we could do better. We know that there are other forms of programming out there that may take us to a much higher level, but we stick to our programming because we want the people around us to approve. They stick to pretty much the same programming.
We’re going to stick out like a sore thumb if we choose another path. So because we want to go along, to get along, we stick with the tried and proven. Sadly, a lot of the time, the collective mindset that we seek to preserve, as far as our conscious mind goes, does us a big disservice. We could be soaring high.
We could be going so much better, but we stick to tradition, custom, and social expectations.
The conscious mind is easily overruled by emotion
It is no surprise that a lot of shoppers in the United States buy product after product when they don’t really need it. In fact, the vast majority of commercial decisions in the United States and elsewhere are actually impulsive by nature. The reason for this is our conscious mind is easily overridden by emotion.
We let our emotions get the better of us
Instead of us responding to situations based on our highest values or priorities, we let our emotions take over and we feel helpless against it. So despite the fact that we know that we are going to be spending more money than we have, and we are going to regret it later on, we still go through with it.