what is Conscious, Subconscious and Super-conscious Mind

Conscious, Subconscious mind and Super-conscious Mind are the 3 states or levels of our mind. They work together and form our personality. Few say it 3 levels of mind, 3 types of our consciousness or awareness. They all are similar concepts. 

On a broader level we can divide our mind into 2 major categories.One being the conscious mind and other being the Subconscious mind where superconscious is the extended state of subconscious.  

Our conscious mind understands language which is why it is able to interpret messages. But our subconscious does not understand any language. It is based on the vibrations and chemical releases in our body and brain through our thoughts, emotions and feelings.

Understanding our Brain and mind – 

Our Brain and Mind are not the same. 

Our Brain is 2% of our body. It consumes 25% of oxygen that we breathe, 70% of the body’s glucose supply and 25% of the nutrients we eat. It is a physical organ that can be touched or seen. Our brain contains one of the most complex neural networks which has around 86+ billion neurons which are dealing with messages every millisecond of time.

Our Mind is the way our brain works. Mind is our understanding of things, processing them, making decisions, memory, feelings and emotions etc. 

In this article we will understand what are the states of mind and what are the function of each state.

There were many psychologists and brain scientists who came up with ideas and techniques of how our mind works. Their few theories were debated and few were made the foundation of basic discipline in psychology.  

Following are our 3 states/ levels/ modes of mind

1. Conscious 
2. Subconscious / pre-conscious
3. Unconscious/ super-conscious mind

Our mind keeps on switching between the 3 modes in order to process meaningful messages. 

Conscious Mind:

It is the present state of mind where we are analysing what’s around us. We are observing. We are talking to people with our consciousness. Therefore this state of mind handles the following functions:

• Our conscious mind is the thinking and aware mind. 
• Understanding – It uses our sense organs to understand what’s happening- eyes to see, skin to feel, nose to smell, tongue to taste and ears to hear. 
• Decision making 
• Logical thinking/ Analysis and judging
• Right and wrong differentiation/ Rationality
• Will-Power
• Ambitions and Goal Setting
• It is working 10% of the time  or it actually governs our life to its 10%

Example – Consciously we think that we will not procrastinate from now onward. So here our conscious mind is analysing and judging and making a difference between right and wrong. Consequently it chooses what’s right and exercises it which is the decision making process. Furthermore it follows to stop procrastination repeated times despite a difficulty which is called Will power.

Subconscious/ Pre-conscious mind

It is the storage of our recent memories. For example if someone asks us what we were doing last week so we would need to fetch the information from our subconscious mind by remembering into our conscious and then speak. It is a very important part of us as it helps us to achieve our goals, have ambitions in life. It involves the following:

• Beliefs
• Feelings and Emotions
• Habits
• Personal security like Self protection 
• It is working 50 – 60% of the time  or it governs 50 – 60% of our life. 
• It cannot differentiate between what is real and what is just our imagination. Therefore it believes everything to be a fact or truth which it feels.
• Children from their womb till 7 years of age are in their subconscious mind most of the time as they believe everything to be true. That’s why we say a kid is pure. Kid is not able to judge or make a difference between right and wrong easily.

Unconscious mind/ Super-conscious Mind

We are not able to access the unconscious mind as there are so many functions of our mind which we don’t even know is happening. It can include long term memories or some past connected memories with people we don’t know today. It has all our feelings which generated in us from the time we were born. We don’t remember those feelings or thoughts but it can be accessed through professional help like hypnosis or deep meditation. 

Example – A very common phenomenon of speaking crazy things in sleep is observed in few people. They are the deep memory which disturbs them but when they wake up they forget what they were doing. Sometimes kids start running in their sleep out of fear. One of the reasons can be that the kid has seen something fearful happening in his home which impacted him this way but he was not conscious about it. He does not know why he feels the fear. These are the memories of the super-conscious mind that we cannot access. It includes:

• Deep memories
• Fear and happiness triggers
• Our personality 
• Basic emotions, feelings and nature
• It is working 30 – 40% of the time  or it actually governs our life to its 30 – 40%

When we sense a stimulus or a situation; we try to understand it. We interpret messages from it and do action if required. Here our conscious mind is working as we are aware of the things which are happening around us. 

We can access our subconscious mind by thinking, meditating, doing exercises which help us to remember our memories for a longer period of time. Subconscious helps us to achieve our ambitions by executing our plan as per the conscious mind.

The deeper one is the super-conscious mind. Here all deep memories are involved which we cannot access and which is the biggest part of our personality. We say that the basic human emotion does not change. This happens as we have all the memories from our womb till our life, stored in the super-conscious which cannot be accessed without professional help.