Subconscious Mind

I think that our minds are acting subconsciously all the time while we are awake. You often hear the saying that "Maybe subconsciously you wanted that to happen." This is usually applied to a negative situation for either yourself or someone else. In general, people don't like bad things to happen, but say you did something that ended up being bad for someone you hate, well maybe you did mean it subconsciously.

I think that we do sometimes know what we want to do, but since it is not a good thing, we trick ourselves into believing we didn't mean it. But deep down, our true mind knows what we really want and is carrying it out.

Often it is said that your subconscious mind will betray your true feelings. For example, you may be listening to someone talk. What they are saying is extremely boring. To avoid being rude, you give all the classic signs of interest. You nod your head, you say "yes" and you keep eye contact. However, your subconscious brain will betray you by the way your body may act. Although you are pretending to listen, you may have unknowingly crossed your arms, are tapping your feet, or even have a quick glance to your watch. All these are very subtle clues that you have lost interest and you may not even realise that you did it. Something must be controlling these actions. Even though your conscious brain is telling you to pretend to listen, deep down you know that you don't want to listen and your subconscious brain is exhibiting all the classic signs of boredom.

Just today, I was driving home from a friends BBQ. I was going down the road that would take me to my new home. I was really listening to the music in the car and singing along so wasn't paying attention to where I was going. Without even thinking, I had turned into the street to go to my old house. Years of repetition had trained my mind to this task and even though I knew I was going home, I wasn't really thinking where. My subconscious mind must have taken over and instructed my hands and feet to take a path that it knew well. Only when I was nearly at my old house did I realise I had made a mistake. Once I was "awake" again, I knew which road to take to go to my new house.

Sometimes our brains can go into an auto-pilot type state, which I think is one of the tasks of our subconscious mind. It's like a back up system that helps you function while your active mind has dozed off. The other task of our subconscious mind is to display the true feelings we have towards things sometimes despite our conscious mind telling ourselves to lie otherwise.

Well thats my crazy thinking for the day. Have you ever had any experiences where your subconscious mind has betrayed you or helped you out while you were on auto-pilot mode? I am really interested to hear what other people have experienced in this matter.