How to Use the Imagination Cycle to Improve Your Happiness & Wellbeing
The 3 Levels of Consciousness
Previously, in The Power of Focus, we discussed how you create the conditions that you experience with your mind, specifically your thoughts, ideas, beliefs, how you speak to yourself, and how you’re feeling.
Which is why I’d like to go into more detail and show you how the creative process works, from your imagination to physical reality, and how you can utilise your own creative power to live the life you want, the way you want, how you want.
In everything you do, your imagination is first cause. Nothing can happen without you first thinking about it. Meaning your mind, your imagination.
Every action from scratching your cheek, to walking to the shops, to driving the car, to writing an email, anything that happens in your day-to-day life first begins with a thought.
Granted, some actions are unconscious, like breathing, your heart pumping, your kidneys filtering, your nails growing, and your other bodily functions, but that doesn’t mean your mind isn’t thinking about these processes. All it means is that you’re not aware of them.
This is because your mind works on 3 distinct, but overlapping, levels:
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- Sub-conscious
- Conscious
- Supra-conscious
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Your Sub-Conscious
To use a building analogy, your sub-conscious mind is the equivalent of basement-level thinking.
Sub-conscious thoughts run in the background without you being aware of them.
They control all your automated bodily functions like we’ve just mentioned, breathing, blood circulation, kidney function, and so forth so you don’t have to think consciously about them.
Imagine if you had to say to yourself 15 times a minute, “Breathe in, breathe out.” Or if you had to consciously tell your heart to beat 60 to 80 times a minute?
You wouldn’t be able to get much else done during the day. And you wouldn’t be able to sleep or you’d soon stop breathing and your heart would stop, waiting for the command to get to work.
But even though you’re not aware of your sub-conscious thought processes, they still activate your body’s organs to keep functioning.
It’s usually when things go wrong—pain, disease, dysfunction—that the basement level thoughts send alarm signals up to your consciousness to make you aware that something isn’t quite right and is in need of your attention.
Your Conscious
The next level of awareness is your normal, day-to-day consciousness.
Your conscious mind is the equivalent of street-level thinking. This is the level of awareness we are all familiar with, the level of consciousness we are aware of 99% of the time.
Thoughts, sensations, visual stimuli, dreams, pleasure and pain, reason, logic, creativity, all enter through the front door of our consciousness and make their presence known to our awareness.
Your Supra-Conscious
The third level of awareness is your highest level, your supra-conscious.
This is the equivalent of the top floor of the building, or the penthouse. It’s where the boss lives and works, your Higher Self, and communicates to your awareness on the street level through intuition and insight.
Your Higher Self can see further because it is above street level. It also knows more, is wiser and more patient.
Unfortunately, because the street level is so noisy and full of distractions and things that need your urgent attention, the wisdom, insight and intuition of your Higher Self gets drowned out and ignored.
So its communication often goes unnoticed and slips past your attention.
Only in the silence can it be heard and understood, which is best achieved through practices of mindfulness, such as meditation and prayer.
The Imagination Cycle
The 3 levels of your mind—sub-conscious, conscious, and supra-conscious—are 3 parts of your whole consciousness.
As such, all 3 can be accessed and utilised by your imagination superpower to increase your personal and professional effectiveness and improve your happiness and wellbeing.
“The Imagination Cycle” is what I call the process by which your imagination engages all 3 levels of your consciousness to propel you to higher levels of effectiveness and achievement.
This is how The Imagination Cycle works:
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- From your imagination, thoughts and ideas are born.
- From the birth of thoughts and ideas grow emotions and feelings.
- From emotions and feelings, words and actions are motivated.
- From words and actions, effective behaviour is moulded.
- From effective behaviour, success habits are set.
- From success habits, achievement is accomplished.
- From achievement, success is experienced.
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And from success, more ideas are born and the whole process begins again.
A word of caution is warranted here. The Imagination Cycle is a driver of success, but if your thoughts are not focussed and directed, this cycle also drives failure.
Here’s how:
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- limited or negative ideas lead to negative emotions and feelings;
- negative emotions and feelings lead to demotivation and inaction;
- inaction leads to limited or absent behaviour;
- limited behaviour leads to bad habits;
- bad habits lead to non-achievement, which leads to failure.
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So be mindful to focus on positive ideas and use the power of focus to supercharge your Imagination Cycle and manifest the life you really want.