Most people believe their reactions are about the present moment. Someone says something, does something, behaves a certain way — and they react.
They believe the reaction is caused by what just happened.
It is not.
The present moment is rarely the cause of your reaction. The present moment is the trigger. The cause lives somewhere else entirely. It lives in your subconscious mind, in experiences from your past that were never fully resolved, still sitting there, still vibrating at the frequency of the emotion that was attached to them when they first occurred.
Let me explain what I mean by this.
Imagine a man named Joe. When Joe was a boy, his father would lose his temper and hit him. Every time it happened, an experience was created in his mind, with emotion attached to it. Joe never talked about it. He never worked through it. He grew up, moved on, built a life. He is now forty-five years old.
One afternoon, Joe is in a grocery store, walking down the aisle looking for cereal. He sees a father a few feet away raise his hand and slap his child.
In that moment, Joe is gripped with rage. He feels his face get hot. His heart races. He wants to walk over and confront this man.
What just happened?
The image of the father slapping the child entered through his eyes, passed through his conscious mind, and hit his subconscious. There, it found something vibrating at the same frequency — his own unresolved experiences of being hit by his father. The two connected, and the stored emotion came rushing to the surface. That is the rage Joe felt. It was not about the man in the grocery store. It was about Joe.
This is happening to all of us, every single day, in smaller ways.
Someone interrupts you, and you feel a flash of irritation that does not match the size of what just happened. Someone forgets to thank you, and you feel a wave of hurt that lingers all day. Your partner says something in a certain tone, and suddenly you are arguing about something that has nothing to do with the original comment.
The intensity of your reaction is the giveaway. When the reaction is far bigger than the trigger, you are no longer responding to the present. You are being pulled into the past.
Most people spend their lives reacting to old wounds without realizing it. They blame the people in front of them — their partner, their colleague, their parent, their child — when in truth, those people are simply the trigger that activated something old.
This is why two people can experience the exact same event and have completely different reactions. The event is the same. But the subconscious is different. What is stored is different. What gets activated is different.
A small deviation: that is why two people can experience the Self within us and have completely different articulations of it. The event is the same. But the subconscious is different. As the experience is described, it is described from the memory of experiencing the Self that is now registered in the subconscious, which has been tainted with what is in the subconscious.
Here is the practical takeaway.
The next time you have a strong reaction to something — a reaction that feels disproportionate or familiar — pause. Do not analyze the other person. Look inward. Ask yourself: what does this remind me of? When have I felt this before? What is being touched right now that has been there for a long time?
Your reactions are not random. They are not character flaws. They are messengers. They are showing you, with great precision, exactly where the unresolved experiences live within you. And know that the subconscious is the layer between the conscious mind — where most live — and the superconscious. It is what prevents most from experiencing the superconscious.
If you are willing to look, they will tell you everything.
