The Flea and the Elephant: Tapping the Power of the Subconscious Mind 

We’d like to believe that we can get want we want through the power of our conscious mind. But new information from the fields of affective neuroscience and energy psychology demonstrates that it is our subconscious mind that is often in control. Clinical psychologists George Pratt and Peter Lambrou, offer this insightful story in their book Code to Joy:  The Four-Step Solution to Unlocking Your Natural State of Happiness:

Once upon a time there was a flea who believed that he was king of the world.

One day he decided he wanted to go to the beach for a swim. But the western shore was many miles away, and on this own, the flea could travel only inches at a time. If he was going to reach the shore during his lifetime, he would need transportation.

So he called out to his elephant. “Ho, there Elephant, let’s go out!”

The flea’s elephant came to his side and kneeled down. The flea hopped up and, pointing to the west, saying, “That way—to the beach!”

But the elephant did not go west. He rather felt like taking a stroll in the forest to the east, and that is what he did. The flea, much to his dismay, could do nothing but go along for the ride, and spent the day being smacked in the face by leaves and branches.

The next day, the flea tried to get the elephant to take him to the store to buy salve for his face. Instead, the elephant took a long romp in the northern mountains, terrifying the poor flea so badly that he could not sleep that night. The flea stayed in his bed for days, beset by nightmares of thundering along mountain roads, certain he would fall to his death, and awoke each morning in a cold sweat.

After a week, finally feeling well enough to rise from his bed, the flea beckoned the elephant to his side, clambered up, and said, “I’m not well. Please, take me to the doctor.”

But the elephant merrily trundled off to the western shore, where he spent the day swimming. The flea nearly drowned.

That night, sitting by the fireplace and trying to warm himself, the flea had a thought. He turned to the elephant and said, “About tomorrow…um, what are your plans?”

What’s the moral of the story? If you are a flea riding an elephant, before you make any plans, you might want to check out what your elephant has in mind.

“This point is more important to your life than it might seem,” say Pratt and Lambrou. “The flea of the story represents your conscious mind which includes your intellect and power of reason, your ambitions and aspirations, your ideas, thoughts, hopes, and plans. In short, everything you think of as you. And the elephant? That’s your subconscious mind.”

Many of us have had the experience of consciously making plans to meet the man or woman of our dreams only to become attracted to someone who breaks our heart and causes us great pain. Why did it happen? To understand, we have to tap into our subconscious mind to see why we pick the partners we do. We’ve had the experience of consciously picking a job which we were sure was going to work for us, only to have it turn out to be a disaster. Again, our subconscious mind is at work.

Everyone wants to live a joyful life, have deeply loving relationships, and join with others to make the world a better place for all. Yet too many of us become depressed, irritable, angry, and discouraged. We read all the right books about health and wellness, but suffer from migraines, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s. We vow to take more time for ourselves and learn to relax, but we continue to act in ways that stress us out. Why? Once again we have to better understand our subconscious mind.

The Power of the Subconscious

When I was in graduate school I learned a lot about various psychological theories and therapy practices. I learned about Freud and the ways he understood the subconscious. But his theories didn’t resonate with me and I become more interested in humanistic psychology, reality therapy, and evolutionary biology. But more recent focus on unconscious and subconscious brain function has re-stimulated my interest.

Leonard Mlodinow, PhD., is a theoretical physicist and author of Subliminal:  How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. He says, “Though the unconscious aspects of human behavior were actively speculated about by Jung, Freud, and many others over the past century, the methods they employed—introspection, observations of overt behavior, the study of people with brain deficits—provided only fuzzy and indirect knowledge.”

But things have changed in the last decade. “Sophisticated new technologies have revolutionized our understanding of the part of the brain that operates below our conscious mind,” says Mlodinow. “These technologies have made it possible, for the first time in human history, for there to be an actual science of the unconscious.”

George Miller, Ph.D., one of the founding fathers of modern cognitive psychology, says that the conscious mind puts out an average of between 20 and 40 neuron firings per second while the unconscious mind puts out between 20 and 40 million firings per second. So, when we’re talking about the activity of the subconscious mind vs. the conscious mind, we’re looking at a difference of 1,000,000 to 1, which is roughly the difference in weight between an elephant and a flea.

New research from the field of energy psychology has highlighted the importance of healing early life trauma, often held in the subconscious energy fields of our bodymind. Only by healing the way these traumatic memories are held in our subconscious mind can we learn to be more joyful and productive in our lives. Drs. Pratt and Lambrou offer this thought experiment to help us understand how it works:

Imagine you are standing just outside your home, surrounded by a dense fog, so thick you can’t see the other side of the street in front of you.  You look to the left, to the right, but can’t see more than fifty feet in any direction.  You are surrounded.

How much water does it take to create the blanket of fog that has completely isolated you from your world?

A few ounces.  The total volume of water in a blanket of fog one acre around and one meter deep would not quite fill an ordinary drinking glass.  The fog actually contains 400 billion tiny droplets suspended in the air creating an impenetrable cloak that shuts out light and makes you shiver.

This is what happens when we have painful and traumatic experiences in our lives that we just can’t shake.   Pratt and Lambrou call it “the fog of distress” and we’ve all experienced it. What is it made of?  It is partly feelings, partly beliefs, and partly bioelectrical memory traces locked into our bodies. Most importantly, it operates below the level of our conscious minds.

Humans are adaptable and generally we handle the ups and downs of life without any lasting negative effect.  After one of those “bad days” the experience simply vanishes from our minds without a trace and we end up a little older and wiser as a result.  “But not always,” say Pratt and Lambrou.  “Sometimes, especially when we are very young, we have experiences that we cannot shake.  Even if they seem insignificant, no more substantial than a glass of water, when these upsetting experiences evaporate, they then condense into billions of droplets of anger, fear, self-doubt, guilt, and other negative feelings, surrounding us with a suffocating blanket that suffuses every aspect of our lives for years to come.”

But once we understand the impact the subconscious fog of distress can have on our lives, we can heal. In their book, Code to Joy:  The Four-Step Solution to Unlocking Your Natural State of Happiness, Pratt and Lambrou offer a simple, yet powerful, process for healing from a variety of life’s traumas. It’s never too late to have a happy and healthy childhood.