Power of the Subconscious Mind

I just want to give one example of the amazing and often unappreciated power of the subconscious mind.

By the age of eight, children can play catch. They toss a ball or a bean bag from one to the other without a moment's thought. Even though they do it without thinking, the bean bag doesn't make it from one pair of hands to the other by accident. Something has to measure the distance to be travelled, calculate the mass of the object, adjust for aerodynamic resistance, gravity, wind counterforce, in order to assess the right number of calories to be burned in order to put just enough juice into the child's appropriate muscles so that they can contract and relax just the right amount so that the arm moves at just the right velocity and the fingers relax at just the right time to the object describes just the right geometric arc as it flies through the air and comes to land, plop, in the friend's hands.

All those calculations are made, in about 10 milliseconds, and they are made by the child without thinking. They are made subconsciously. They are made despite the fact the child knows (consciously) squat about geometry, gravity, aerodynamics and metabolism.

In fact, if adults ever tried to play catch consciously, with all the reference books necessary to inform the various calculations, the ball would never get thrown, ever. Why? Because you cannot tell your body, consciously, how much energy to release.

When Nike say "Just do it," or when Obi Wan Kenobi says "May the force be with you," they are both extolling you to stop relying on your puny conscious mind and trust, instead, the vast power of your subconscious. I say, "Catch!"