Source - http://witnit.blogspot.com/2005/03/3-how-mind- works.html The Reticular Activating System

The reticular activating system (RAS) is a network of cells in the brain associated with wake, sleep, attention, and focus. It physically filters irrelevant sensory input. It's the RAS that makes you forget that you have all those little tickly hairs on your body (until I mentioned it to you. Hey, what's that sound outside?)

The RAS allows you to focus. When you start reading a good book, or a fascinating post like this one, the rest of the world begins to fade away--the television, the traffic on the street, the sounds of rain on the roof, your sweetheart talking on the phone in the other room.

The RAS makes you blind to everything that you regard as unimportant in this moment. It opens your awareness to what you value, and closes your awareness to what you don't value.

Every day you walk through the world oblivious to everything you don't value. (Or to what others may have somehow convinced you is of no value. See how this might work?)

The RAS works like an executive secretary; it screens out the junk, clutter, the nonessential, working as a sophisticated filter, allowing you to focus. That't the good news.

Of course, it also screens out everything it thinks is junk. It's important that you realize that many valuable things get screened out because they are not valued. That's the bad news.

(Hey, suppose we want to prevent people from valuing certain things like, say, the founders of the first liberal democracy in the world, the Constitution, sophisticated language skills, what it means to be a citizen, etc. Maybe we should make sure everyone goes to the same kind of school and learn everything but those things and...but I get ahead of myself.)

The Conscious Mind

Let's do a quick review of what you pretty much already know. Your conscious mind constantly has you perform a basic series of actions as you go through the day. Each time you come upon an experience, you perceive, you associate, you evaluate, and you decide what to do. I perceive something slithering in the grass and I hear a rattle. I associate that with my experience and memory--a rattlesnake. I evaluate it. This is not good. A rattlesnake can bite and poison me. I decide to run away.

We think that is pretty much all there is to reality. But reality is more like an iceberg. A small percentage of the whole appears above the surface.

The Subconscious Mind

Your subconscious mind is a repository. It stores habits and attitudes, and it stores what it regards as "the Truth."

Your subconscious, especially as it relates to the reticular activating system, constantly strives to co-opt anything you do repeatedly and tries to make it automatic. That's its job.

Habits

When you start driving a car, you are conscious of every turn of the wheel and movement of your feet. You have to be because it's not yet habitual. Your subconscious notes the repetative activity, and soon, you're driving down the road for minutes at a time and you forget that you are driving.

How do you stay on the road? The subconscious takes over and keeps you doing what you have done so many times before. It makes your driving automatic to free your conscious mind to focus on other things.

The same is true with learning how to type. Most typing teachers will tell you that there is a 20-words-per-minute limit to conscious typing. There is a barrier that you cannot consciously pass. When you learn how to type, you have to learn to let go, allow it to become habitual (subconcious). Then you can reach 50, 60, 100 words per minute.

Piano players and other musicians know the same thing. At first, you have to practice, practice, practice. At a certain point, proficiency and speed pick up as you allow the activity to become more automatic, more a part of your subconscious.

Attitudes

On an airplane, the attitude controls determine how the plane turns toward or away from something. The right wing drops and you lean right. The left wing drops and you lean left. In life, we lean toward things we like and away from things we dislike. This behavor reflects our attitudes.

The subconscious begins to co-opt and make automatic our repeated likes and dislikes. Our cultivated attitudes become habitual. They become a part of us, and we soon believe that these attitudes are instinctual, determined, automatic, rather than remember that for the most part they are learned.

"The Truth"

So here is the kicker. Just like habits and attitudes, what you believe to be true also gets stored, whether it is really true or not.

Your subconscious is not interested in what is really true, only in what you believe to be true. Anything you strongly believe to be true gets stored as "the Truth." And it becomes part of your makeup, your personality, as integrated into you as your driving, your typing, your attitudes.

There is a third part of your mind. Let's call it The Censor. One of it's primary jobs is to keep you sane. The way the Censor keeps you sane is by making sure that "Reality" out there matches "the Truth" inside.

Think about that for a minute.

Link to You Tube – James Ray – Reticular Activating System http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5vyLyFo77M