Can you laugh? Can you cry?

Try to laugh naturally. What do you do? First, if you’re like me, you’ll try to think of something funny, and then you run that funny thing through your mind trying to provoke yourself to laugh. Consciousness has ways of manipulating the subconscious responses that we have… but it’s a bit crude and doesn’t always work.

Some subconscious reactions are more difficult to control than conscious ones. For example, can you burp on command? How do you do it? Can you cry on command? Can you fall asleep on command? Each of these things is a subconscious response to a particular environment. We can’t activate these responses merely by willing them in the same way that we can move our arms and legs.

Understanding the link between the conscious and subconscious (the methods we have created for communicating back to our subconscious and receiving messages from our subconscious) is a subtle but important way of getting to know yourself better.