What is the preconscious mind?
Your preconscious mind is a state of mind. It is also a place in your brain. It is a place where your body can live and breath and reveal its unique kind of sensory intelligence and knowledge. It is a place where your body feels at home and safe from the accusations and restrictions of your conscious mind. It is a place where your body can tell its story- a story that only it knows how to tell. It is a place where energy which flows both within your body and around your body can commingle and create a new flow of energy that is shaped into movement that tells your body’s story. This movement story can be sensed and comprehended by other people’s bodies at the same preconscious level. Our conscious minds do not function at the same level of awareness as our preconscious minds.
Your preconscious mind is also not your unconscious mind or your subconscious mind. This place is where your body lives and breathes; it is where your body collects and remembers all that it has seen, smelled, tasted, and touched long before any of your other states of mind can even begin to respond. And it is the place where your body is free to express what it knows about you. Your conscious mind cannot handle this because it is not designed to do so; it has other purposes. The result is that your conscious mind does not have a direct connection to an extremely intelligent and powerful part of you. However, your preconscious mind functions as the intermediary between your body and your conscious mind. It is also the place where your body interacts with the environment around you. It is the flow of energy from within your body and through it from your environment that creates and sustains these connections.
So let’s break this all down into digestible bites.
Your preconscious mind is a state of mind.
Your preconscious mind is definitely not your conscious mind. Your conscious mind wants to control, to restrict, to dominate, to make judgments, etc.. It is the default state of mind that we live in most of the time. Your preconscious mind is rarely up front showing off what it can do. It is more like a primitive, animal mind that is based in instinct. It is the part of the brain that reacts split seconds before your conscious mind to sensual input from the environment around you and causes nanosecond spontaneous electrochemical (that is, energy driven) responses in your body’s processes and movements. When you hear a loud sound or a bug suddenly hits your face, your body responds split seconds before your conscious mind can make sense of it. These responses are not conscious in the sense that they come from a thought process or any ideational intention. They are responses that the body’s own level of intelligence generates.
This is a level of consciousness that is free of the inhibitory restraints of the conscious mind. In a sense it is your body speaking before your conscious mind can capture the moment and stifle it with self-reflection, second guessing, or self-monitoring. It is this nanosecond period of time in which your preconscious mind functions completely. It exists in the constant interaction between sensory input and muscular response. It is possible to enter into that nanosecond stream of time and remain there for as long as you wish. It is similar to maintaining a state of being continually in the present moment.
Some people talk about it as an alternate state of mind. Musicians and free style rappers who improvise (make up musical and word phrases on the spot spontaneously without written music or words in front of them) often talk about being in the “zone” or “flow” when they are in this state of creativity. There is no judgment or calculation in this alternate state. It is all about letting whatever is in you flow out freely. What comes out is true; it has integrity; it is natural. It is not manipulated to fit some preconceived idea or intention that your conscious mind wants to impose on it. It just is. There are ways to get into this alternate state of mind.
What has just been described above also matches Abraham Maslow’s peak/flow experience. He is the founder of the self actualization movement in psychology. He and his followers discovered that people who have achieved this self actualized life have a unique set of experiences when they are in this flow state. Their experiences include such elements as: control in flow, effortlessness, altered perception of time, melting together of action and consciousness, and the autotelic quality of flow-experience. This is just one more window that allows us to view what happens in your preconscious mind.
Your preconscious mind is a place in your brain.
Dr. Charles Limb is a surgeon, neuroscientist, and musician at the University of California, San Francisco who has carried out research on the neural basis of musical creativity. He has spent years observing brain activity with an fMRI scanner. This scanner registers increased and decreased activity in areas of the brain. He has focused his attention on monitoring jazz musicians and freestyle rappers as they improvise (make music and assemble words spontaneously) inside of one of these scanners. Here is what he found.
The frontal lobe of the brain is considered the seat of consciousness. However, there are subdivisions, the medial prefrontal cortex and the lateral prefrontal cortex, which do very different things. The lateral prefrontal cortex is involved in self-reflection, introspection, and self-monitoring which would tend to inhibit an individual’s freedom because of a fear of mistakes, for example. Dr. Limb found that this part of the prefrontal cortex shuts down when the musicians and rappers start creating. At the same time he recorded that the medial prefrontal cortex suddenly lit up. This part of the brain is the center for self expression which sets you free to risk mistakes and not worry about what comes next.
This area of the brain is what I call the preconscious mind. It is that place where your body can both freely remember and freely express what it knows from a life time of interacting with the world around it. It speaks in its own movement language. Dr. Limb also found that “that when you’re doing a creative spontaneous task, the senses and motor (movement) regions of the brain are more active.” This part of the brain is wired especially well for telling your body story.
Your preconscious mind is created and fueled by a constant flow of energy.
The flow of energy throughout the body and the brain organizes all of the functional levels in them. Ultimately, this organizational activity culminates in what we call the conscious mind. But there are other levels of intelligent activity in the brain that precede the conscious level. There are levels such as the unconscious and subconscious mind which are not always easily available to the conscious mind. There are also levels that carry out a multitude of totally unconscious automatic electrochemical and motor functions millions of times every day in our bodies. All of these levels of consciousness occur as a result of ubiquitous forms of energy that constantly feed back on one another. (If you would like to see more details about this energy based theory of consciousness, click here,) Energy is the unifying factor in all of the brain’s and body’s life giving functions. Energy is the organizing source of intelligence. It is the universal language of the body and the brain.
Your preconscious mind is also a result of these endless self referential feedback loops of energy. These loops begin at the level of subatomic electrochemical interactions in your cells and move all the way up to the more complex layers of energy feed back that organize your whole human organism. It is this same energy flow that allows your body and preconscious mind to understand each other. This connection generates a new environment in which your body can tell the stories that it has been longing to tell. In fact, it is the desire of energy itself to find a voice through your body.
ShapeShifting is a reality based on energy flow. You carve out space for your body to tell its stories. It is a place in your brain and in time and space.