The Mind’s Library – Part 1

Imagine I’ve constructed a home, and within it, I’ve designed a special room solely dedicated to being my personal library. As part of filling this space, I create a ritual of acquiring ten books a day and placing them in the library. In placing the books in the library, I don’t index, categorize or organize these books in any particular way; I simply add them to the collection.

After a year, I’ll have 3,650 books in my library. Will I be able to find the book I’m looking for? Probably with great difficulty. Where would I even begin? There is no structure, order, or system in my library. It’s utter chaos.

Libraries in the United States generally use either the Library of Congress Classification System (LC) or the Dewey Decimal Classification System to organize their books. That’s why it’s easy to find a book in a library with millions of books. Without a system it would be virtually impossible.

The subconscious, you could say in one of its many roles, is your mind’s library. Every day we place many books in it. These books are in the form of experiences and information that we consume, sometimes consciously and often unconsciously.

A TV playing the news in the background while you cook is one form of unconscious consumption of information. Then, many people consciously consume information all day long: scrolling through social media, reading articles and watching videos, surfing the internet, listening to podcasts and music, not to mention all the experiences we have each day.

All of this consumption of experiences and information is like placing not ten but hundreds of books in the library each day in a non-indexed and unorganized way, creating clutter and chaos in the subconscious. The poor subconscious is overwhelmed. It doesn’t even have the time and space to sort itself out as there is an incessant barrage of input constantly being fed to it.

A few years go by, and the library is now in complete shambles. You, the librarian, try to go in to retrieve some information, but you can’t. You don’t know where to look. You are overwhelmed by what you encounter. The result: confusion, anxiety, and stress—among a slew of other feelings.

If I were an organized store owner and a customer asked me for a product, I could reply and say, ‘It’s in aisle three, second shelf on the left, towards the right.’ I can give a clear response because my store is organized. The subconscious is no different. When the subconscious is organized, you have clarity—clarity of what you want, what you need, what you don’t want, and what you don’t need. Clarity of priorities in life. Clarity of purpose.

Our superconscious mind works through a clarified subconscious—an organized subconscious. Intuition, which finds its origins in the superconscious, cannot pass through a cluttered subconscious. When our subconscious is organized and free of clutter and unresolved emotional experiences, we can leverage one of our greatest assets—the superconscious mind. 

But when the subconscious is cluttered by constantly being fed experiences and information, it suffocates from indigestion, becomes crippled, and renders itself unhelpful in supporting us.

You see this often today in teenagers and young adults. Think about how much information the average young person consumes daily via their devices. It’s not just the volume of information but also the lack of a filter on what is being consumed and the timing of when it is consumed. That’s why so many young adults lack clarity about what they want in life.

The common response to that is, ‘You’re young, and you don’t have to have it all figured out. You’ll figure it out in time.’ Actually, most of you never will if you keep inundating your subconscious with information and experiences. Your mental library is only getting more cluttered as time goes on. This is no different for adults, most of whom are prolific and indiscriminate in having experiences and consuming information.

So, what do we do? Let’s address that in Part 2.