The conscious mind
The conscious mind is the little voice in our heads that we hear all the time. It chatters all day long, it takes care of us, it comments all the time, it can be critical and stern. With a conscious mind, we actively think. It is analytical and very useful. It tries to protect us from danger. That’s why the inner voice so often whispers to us not to venture into the unknown. Because that’s where danger can lurk. The conscious mind processes information by noticing differences. But it can only hold a limited number of thoughts at a time.
The subconscious mind
The subconscious mind contains our wisdom, memories, is the source of creativity, and governs most of our behavior. Everything that has ever happened to us or that we have ever imagined is stored as a multi-sensory record in the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind works associatively – it looks at something and sees similarities to a past event. In a sense, our lives are mainly controlled by the subconscious mind – we don’t perceive most of our autonomous processes. Every second our subconscious receives 2 million sensory perceptions. It would be impossible to process all of this information consciously, so the subconscious mind sorts it out and presents only a summary.
Hypnosis/trance allows communication with the subconscious. It can help reveal details of events that happened many years ago, or change ingrained patterns of behavior.
The difference between conscious and subconscious can be compared to a dark room full of scattered objects (subconscious) and a flashlight (conscious). The latter always illuminates only part of the room. Whatever the lamp illuminates is bright and visible, while the rest of the room is dark. However, the dark part of the room is still there, even though we cannot see it. In the same sense, what our attention is focused on is at the forefront of our consciousness, and the rest of our memories and wisdom are still stored in the subconscious.