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Here’s my take on it …

Like many questions, and most swords, it has two edges.

On the one hand, most thoughts first come from the subconscious mind. And the subconscious mind is *associative* in nature. It can be triggered by images, or by words, or by feelings. And whatever it is that’s triggered, it’s something that in this moment is associated by the triggering sight, word, or feeling.

So, right there, a huge lens has been imposed, a vast lens, but a biased lens. Because it can, apparently, only come up with things that are associated. (The subconscious mind regulates your blood pressure and such body changes as well, and those beneath-awareness kinesthetic triggers are also working.) So you’re often unaware of what the association is.

And that’s also why saying “don’t think of purple elephant” produces a thought of purple elephant. The subconscious cannot process a *not*. It can only process the association.

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The formation of the unconscious/subconscious mind, in my estimation, is actually caused as a byproduct of our learning how to focus. Because in order to focus, we must *withdraw* our awareness/consciousness from the background in order to place the awareness on the thing we’ve chosen to focus upon. As a consequence, over time we withdraw our awareness from regulation of blood pressure, speed of heartbeat, and remembering to take a breath and more and more we place our moment-to-moment awareness on thoughts, feelings, and sights. It was good survival; our ancestors did it; and we creatures sprang from their pattern in the reproductive process. So we do it, too. It works.

But we are, along the way, “enslaved” by the prior “decisions,” though we do not have an awareness of having made a decision. A 3-month-old has no such awareness, though the learning–and the associations–have already begun. The 2-year-old continues in the same way. The 5-year-old, the 8-year-old, the 12-year-old, and the teenager.

By the time we begin to reach some autonomous functionality, hundreds of thousands of decisions have been made, but we don’t know we decided. We feel them as “perceptions.” The people with blue eyes are not trustworthy. People with black skin are shiftless. Republicans are trustworthy. Texans are smart. Yankees talk too fast.

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We are now far down stream, paddling our canoes with paddles made of old views we’ve taken on with no particular care, steering by stars that our culture showed us.

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We think we’re navigating the world, but we’re only navigating *a* world. One that our “growing up” and the people and things and experiences painted for us to see.