My head is toying around with a quote that I read in a book; “The Thinker Thinks and the Prover Proves”. This saying is used in reference to our Conscious and Sub-Conscious mind. In general, it refers to the Conscious mind as the Thinker and the Sub-Conscious mind as the Prover. Being one of those people who once in a while gets lost in the woods of the concept of Conscious Mind and Sub-Conscious Mind, any explanation that comes along I welcome.
I will try to explain what I understand about this saying by telling you a story of what happened on Friday evening. I got home early expecting to have a quiet evening when two of my friends called and said they were coming over. I was glad because we hadn’t met in a while even though we had been trying to set up a meeting for some time, in vain.
When they arrived, we were all excited to share the news of what had been going on in our lives. But eventually, the conversation turned to an incident that happened in one of my friend’s office. It involved some two young men who were talking about drugs; in the casual way that two girlfriends might discuss the merits and demerits of a particular facial cream. In the course of that conversation, it emerged that the effects of one of the drugs is to make a person hallucinate ‘a little green man’. So, one of the young man advised the other, “If you see a little green man, just ignore him.” I would imagine that the little green man is a party pooper.
My friend was so petrified at the prospect of seeing a little green man that the rest of us brought up all sorts of stories to make fun of her. Soon, we exhausted the story of the little green man, and it emerged that my friend was carrying a copy of a movie called, “What the Blip do we Know?” None of us had watched it and when I put it in the DVD player, we all found ourselves captivated by the promising beginning. And so we decided to settle down and watch the movie.
The movie generally explains how we can free ourselves from destructive tendencies that we all find ourselves acting out over and over again in our lives. It talked about taking charge of life through understanding how we get ‘hooked’ into destructive cycles and addictions that we just cannot seem to break out of. For example, there was an overweight man at a party who was gorging himself with food to the point of bursting, and yet he continued even though he wanted to stop; he was addicted to food. In the explanation to how the situation comes about, the movie talks about the emotional attachment that the man had on food, and the dependency that his body had on the chemicals secreted by the thoughts that trigger the eating binge. Those retrogressive thoughts were represented as little green men that talked to the overweight man and mercilessly prodded him to eat.
When we got to that point of the movie, my ‘little green man’ friend suddenly shot up in disbelief. She just couldn’t fathom the fact that she had ‘attracted’ little green men in her life! It was pretty amazing to watch her reaction. She was even concerned that the overeating man didn’t take the advice to ignore the little green man!
“The Thinker Thinks and the Prover Proves”: My friend consciously thought about little green men, and her sub-conscious mind – the Prover – materialized little green men.
How do we end up with a habit? When the Thinker thinks and the Prover proves for long enough, then the Prover will become so competent that he will prove even without the Thinker having to think. The Prover just needs a signal – for example an image that existed whenever the Thinker thought – to know that it is yet again time to prove. The habit will become as automatic as looking up and down the road before crossing, or opening the mouth when a spoon approaches with food. Do we think about such things? And yet at some point in life, we had to learn by consciously thinking about it.
How do we break a habit? By having a different thought each time we are confronted with the same old situation that we do not want to re-live. The Thinker will think a different thought and the Prover will prove a different reality. Which comes down to what we already know; to break a habit, replace it with another habit.
It has been proven that when you follow a sequence of events for 21 days in a row, or for 21 times, then you form a habit. Any subsequent time you follow the same sequence of events, you reinforce the habit: similar to how the wheels of a car make a deeper imprint onto a dirt road with each subsequent pass. To break a habit? Try having a different thought each time confronted with the same old situation that you do not want for 21 days in a row. Not necessarily easy to do, but possible.