Newsletter #30
The Silent but Powerful Architect
Hi Subscriber First Name,
There is a version of you working right now that you know nothing about. While you read these words, it is regulating your heartbeat, filtering the background noise in the room, and quietly solving problems you haven't consciously posed yet. We call it the subconscious. And we totally underestimate its power.
Joel Goldsmith, the 20th century spiritual teacher, described what he called Infinite Intelligence as an ever-present creative intelligence that underlies all experience. A force field of infinite, creative possibility that we can draw upon, if we know how. The subconscious, in his framework, is that how. That’s becuase the subconscious mind is not simply the hidden basement of the psyche. It is the invisible connection between us, as individual human beings, and something far larger. The subconscious mind is a channel. A very important channel between us and infinite intelligence. And what we put through it matters enormously.
"Be impeccable with your word. Speak with integrity. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love."
— Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements
Don Miguel Ruiz placed "be impeccable with your word" as the first of his four agreements. Not as a polite request about honesty, but as a precise instruction about creative power. The word, in his teaching, is force. It is the conscious mind's primary act of creation. Every thought we speak into our inner subconscious world becomes instruction. The subconscious, as Ruiz understood it, does not argue. It does not distinguish between positive and negative. It simply receives and enacts. As Henry Ford famously said "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right." Your subconscious will act on the instructions you give it. Either you think you can. Or you think you can’t. And so it will be.
And this is where things become more practical. Because most of us, most of the time, are feeding our subconscious minds a fairly relentless diet of worry and negativity. We rehearse conversations that haven't happened, catastrophise outcomes that almost certainly won't, and construct elaborate stories about why things might go wrong. The conscious mind is, above all, a storyteller. The subconscious is the production company. It will make real whatever story you’re telling yourself. It will produce any story you commission.
Florence Scovel Shinn, writing in the 1920s, was perhaps the most direct of the New Thought writers on this point. In The Game of Life, she argued that the spoken word and the thoughts we hold are not merely reflections of our reality. They are its architects. This was considered radical back then. It probably still is. But in light of what we now know about neuroplasticity and the reticular activating system (the brain's mechanism for filtering reality according to what we are focused on and find familiar) it sounds less like mysticism and more like neuroscience.
What we focus on, we find. What we tell ourselves internally, we tend to build externally.
The question worth thinking about is not whether we believe these ideas to be true. Most of us have experienced moments in our lives where everything just magically falls in to place, effortlessly. They materialise just as we had hoped. There must be some truth to this way of thinking. The more practical question is: what are you consciously placing into the creative field of your subconscious most of the time? What story are you choosing to commission? Not the story you'd write if everything was fine. The story you're actually telling yourself on a Monday afternoon when you’re feeling a bit down because things aren’t working out the way you had hoped.
At times like this, you have more influence over what happens next than you may currently think because you have more influence over the story you tell yourself than you may currently be exercising. The work begins not with creating a big new masterplan, but with attention. With noticing the word — the inner word, the stories you’re telling yourself — and choosing, when possible, to align it with where you actually want to go.
That alignment is not magical thinking. It is, I'd argue, the most grounded way of moving yourself forward in life.
Until next time,
Simon