In the first part of this article, I exposed some flaws in the way spiritual leaders are teaching about the mind. Now, let’s explore Dr. Thurman Fleet’s famous stick-figure diagram of the mind (on the right). First, I will explain his diagram, then I will propose an alternative diagram, and from that new perspective, we’ll then look at how Thurman’s diagram is limiting our understanding of the mind and what are the implications of it.
What he says is very simple: we are a spiritual being, we are gifted with an intellect and we have a physical body. We have a subconscious mind that runs on auto-pilot and that cannot filter information, and we have a conscious mind that can filter information and make decisions. We also have a body, but it is the least important aspect although we do need to take actions. The actions won’t do much if they’re coming from the wrong state of mind, and the actions will flow effortlessly when coming from the proper state of mind. Many self-development and spiritual teachers use this model all the time to explain how the mind works in very simple terms.
Now, let me propose an alternative model. I first drafted this new diagram at Rion Freeberg’s Self-Awakening Immersion Party in Thailand last October. One of the reasons I am writing this is to clarify how what I’m learning based on the previous model fits with the rest of what I’m teaching, because confusion causes inaction and stagnation. I cannot fully integrate new knowledge until it fits with what I already teach. The possibilities this new diagram offers are really interesting.
If you look at the diagram on the left, it is divided in 4 parts. There are the Cyclical Thoughts Patterns and the Universal Mind, and each of them has a Conscious and an Unconscious part.
The Cyclical Thoughts Patterns (CTPs) are the rigid thoughts that are driving your life around, which include your past stories, beliefs system and ego. Most people try to change their lives by re-organizing their CTPs but that doesn’t lead anywhere. All CTPs are rooted in fears in some way or another. Also, the mind does not only reside in the brain. This part of the mind resides in the whole body. For example, someone with a broken heart will keep making decisions based on the same place that will keep manifesting the same kinds of painful experiences over and over again, sometimes on smaller scales and sometimes on larger scales. The cyclical thoughts coming from the broken heart are directly linked to a physical pain you can feel in the heart, and this disbalance can even cause diseases in that area.
Now, some of these cyclical thoughts patterns (CTPs) are conscious and some of them are unconscious. The only reason someone would consciously keep CTPs is because they get benefits from them in some way or another. Conscious CTPs are systems you use in your life that are not aligned with the universal mind. On the other hand, unconscious CTPs are beliefs and fears that are holding you back and sabotaging your life.
Then you have the Universal Mind (UM) which is the global intelligence of the whole universe. It is a plane of thoughts and emotions that re-arranges itself according to specific laws that seek to bring growth to all. All knowledge is at all places simultaneously because the whole universe is inter-connected and comes from the same spiritual source. We are a manifestation of that divine intelligence, and we align with it when we follow our intuition, desires and aspirations.
The conscious part of the Universal Mind (UM) is your intuitive abilities and internal powers. Psychics are simply aware of their subconscious universal mind. This includes your power to read people’s intentions as well as your power to create your life the way you truly want it. The unconscious part of the UM is a part of your internal powers that are working on auto-pilot without you being aware of them. These are dormant powers.
When you look at Thurman’s diagram, the goal seems to be to use your conscious mind to alter your emotions and subconscious mind in ways that will bring you what you want. It gives the illusion of a separation between the conscious and subconscious minds. And more importantly, it leads you to control your emotions with your rational mind which disconnects you from your authentic nature. With my diagram, however, the goal becomes obvious: to get out of cyclical thoughts patterns and become conscious of your subconscious mind. Once you become conscious of the subconscious, there is no separation between them.
Now, here’s where things get really interesting. With this more accurate model, we can now measure your brain to see how much of your life is directed by each of these 4 areas of the mind. This is not possible with Thurman’s model because it doesn’t represent reality closely enough to delimit what to measure. Many people asked me to teach them how to read energies, so here’s how I do it. I focus my mind on a specific idea and a number pops into my mind. The key is to clear the noise on the line and start trusting your perceptions. That’s all there is to it.
Here’s the way my own mind is operating, as well as Rion Freeberg and Eckhart Tolle.
I am operating 92% from the Universal Mind and 8% from Cyclical Thoughts Patterns. Being aware of that, I already made a reality check that will help transfer over to the side of the conscious Universal Mind. Now, here are a few interesting things to notice. For highly spiritual people, the Conscious CTPs are very low, because once we’re aware of something holding us back, it’s easy to overcome it; unless we’re getting real benefits from it. Also, Natural Grounding and Self-Awakening meditations make your mind transfer from Cyclical Thoughts Patterns over to the Universal Mind.
Now, here’s something a bit more controversial, yet important to understand. You probably know Bob Proctor who was featured in the movie The Secret. He uses Thurman’s stick-figure diagram all the time to teach about the mind. Here’s the mind balance of Bob Proctor, one of his students who also teaches with Thurman’s model and a student of this student. This is 3 generations of mentors/students using Thurman’s model. See how things evolve from one generation to the next. The names are irrelevant, as it is the principle behind it that you must understand. Besides, I won’t say names if the information doesn’t look good. Keep in mind that this diagram is only one way of representing a person and doesn’t show the whole picture. Each person has strengths and weaknesses not represented in this diagram, and this mind diagram doesn’t include heart consciousness and sexual consciousness.
As you can see in these diagrams, there was high-level knowledge that was passed over from one generation to the next. However, the knowledge of the Universal Mind was rendered as a system and it is the system that was passed over, making a gradual shift from the Universal Mind to Cyclical Thoughts Patterns each time it is passed over. Here’s the thing. Developing your consciousness of the Universal Mind takes time. Using a system that is proven to work really is the fastest way to get results. However, it will also bring rigidity in your life and dis-alignment with spirit. You will still get cyclical results in your life, except that you’ll get results of a higher nature and probably you wouldn’t even notice you’re getting more of the same and how it’s limiting you from living an even richer life.
As we can clearly see by the results, studying the mind based on the Thurman’s model tends to shift your mind over to the Conscious Cyclical Thoughts Patterns. By not differentiating CTPs from UM, it hints at trying to control your unconscious CTPs with your conscious CTPs. It is also an oversimplification that doesn’t show how the Universal Mind works and doesn’t bring it into the picture.
In order to get the most results in your life, the ideal is to live in the conscious Universal Mind as much as possible. This paradigm shift, although highly controversial, now gives you a lot more clarity on the topic that will allow you to get there faster. An inaccurate model brings confusion, and confusion slows your progress. Since much of the highest-level knowledge we can find today is based on Thurman’s mind diagram, this will allow you to understand that knowledge from a higher place of awareness that will allow you to get even better results.
As I said before, everything you desire is already around you. All it takes to get it is the proper knowledge and the proper state of mind. Awareness is the key to having anything you want in life, and a proper map of reality is an essential foundation to awareness.
The average Canadian operates 73% in CTPs (12% conscious, 88% unconscious) and 27% in UM (3% conscious, 97% unconscious). This fits with the scientists saying that we are only using at most 3% of our brain potential.
This is extremely high-level knowledge and I’ve spent several days to clarify everything I shared here and to write this article. I’m realizing there has been some confusion in the message I’ve been sharing recently, and clarifying this is an important step to correcting what is out of alignment with my core message.
There are more important topics I absolutely have to clarify before moving forward, one of which is why are most spiritual people so broke. I feel there’s more to it than “spiritual people not valuing money”, yet nobody seems to have any answers to this. There’s a very profound reality check I will be sharing soon.
Etienne Charland, Soul Foundation Architect
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#1 by Dima on November 27, 2012 - 10:26 pm
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Thanks a lot mate . Great info indeed . <3
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#2 by m k parmar on October 12, 2013 - 10:11 am
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spiritual self transformation
self transformation and spiritual both cannot go together. spirituality is 100% related to belief. which are either it may with god or so call unscientific belief.
self transformation is related with total understanding of positive mind. WHICH LEADS TO PROFOUND COMPACTION WITH WISDOM.
if you are spiritual person you will strongly believe in your spiritual belief.
If you want to transform your self , one must detach ,from spiritual way of thinking. AND ONE MUST BE WITHIN , WITH THOUGHTLESS MIND.AND FOCUS ON RESPIRATION.
M K PARMAR
#3 by Patrick on June 28, 2015 - 4:26 pm
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Your study and findings here are intriguing, especially in relation to the idea of dissolving the border between conscious and subconscious – a highly worthy endeavor for each of us. What is challenging to follow is how the percentages in each quadrant are based solely on your perception of a person (granted intuition deserves trust) based on what would have to be a very limited perception unless you’re walking in their shoes and in their minds. More confusing perhaps though are the numbers expressed near the bodies, which appear to be the resulting outcome of the person’s mind numbers played out in the physical world. I can’t see where those numbers are derived – either I’m missing something or the math doesn’t seem to add up, or rather does not appear to involve any math. Are these purely based on your perception/intuition also?
While it’s very wise to nurture our intuition, I find it can be a very slippery slope in regard to ‘other people’ because Universal/One Mind intuition does not see ‘me’ and ‘other’, so it’s unclear why it would support and reinforce the idea of separation by supplying such data for ‘other minds’.
That said, the study into this and anything offered along the lines of helping to raise awareness and bring about a complete awakening is wonderful and a gift for all, so I thank you for your work here.
Cheers,
Patrick
#4 by Etienne Charland on June 28, 2015 - 4:28 pm
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The Universe is like a large library and fundamentally is only data. All the data, and also all the wisdom, is available to anyone who knows how to access it.
#5 by Moses Chishala on September 2, 2015 - 5:55 pm
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For your thorough understanding of the one true God and his son, our Lord Jesus Christ, kindly tap into my free download ebook I have placed at website http://navicy.wix.com/understanding The same ebook will serve has your spiritual guide to connect you with your infinite creator and father,Yahweh.
#6 by bharat on July 27, 2017 - 4:27 am
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Interesting theory
But how do you arrive at your final figures as the figures presented in the four quadrants do not bear any relation to the final figures you quote.
Great article sabotaged by your maths or is there another way you have worked these figures out?
#7 by Etienne Charland on July 27, 2017 - 11:34 am
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Not sure what you’re talking about, but these numbers don’t come through math but through measurement. I described the methodology in exact steps here
https://satrimono.com/how-to-measure-hawkins-scale
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#9 by Lisa on February 8, 2020 - 7:25 am
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Your theory is interesting but I was wondering your more updated thoughts as pain you site as out of the brain has since been shown to actually always be a multimodal, multi dimensional and cognitive interpretation of threat levels and memory playing with physiological triggers.
In addition, why would reverberating thoughts not be the subconscious pushing an imprint from body to a conditioning of the conscious level and false truth ( from the subconscious inprinted mind) being reconfirmed there
#10 by Mageburger on September 24, 2020 - 5:51 am
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I initially couldn’t use the new model, mostly because it brought more confusion as I used it. But I’ve been studying Born Rich for about a month now, using the ideas, and suddenly everything about your model makes more sense.
For instance, dormant powers in the unconscious UM have been expressed by Proctor as “Deep reservoirs of talent and ability”.
Also, your point about the conscious and subconscious being inseparable was interesting, but I only recently understood that if the subconscious is the emotional mind, that when I get emotionally involved in an idea in the moment, I’m really just using my conscious mind to accept the idea.
Proctor also defines the conscious mind as “Reason, INTUITION, perception, will, memory, IMAGINATION” so it isn’t solely defined as ‘in the moment rational thinking’ by him, but one could be mistaken for thinking so which is where the benefit of your model comes in.
What I’m saying is, the original Thurman Fleet model is fine, but only for those who actually know what the conscious and subconscious really are, rather than ‘spur moment thinking’ and ‘controls what you think and feel a little’. I switch to both yours and Fleet’s model when I try to understand a new mind concept because they actually both say different ideas, even though all you’ve done is add to the original model.
#11 by Mageburger on September 25, 2020 - 7:25 pm
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I’m reading through this more and more over and over again and I’m starting to develop a higher awareness of the different quadrants that I overlooked before, such as conscious CTPs just being misaligned thoughts, unconscious CTPs being our old conditioning and UM really being the mind that follows the Universal Laws, and that we get to choose which ones we follow.
Awareness of these natural laws, getting a picturette sense of spirit and thought energy etc. really is what Bob teaches in Born Rich.
Your model really is quite fascinating, I feel though that the original Fleet model is useful for learning the basics of thought theory first. But it is quite a difficult model to go back to with an understanding of natural law and omnipresent knowledge accessed ‘only by right of consciousness’ (what we are able to understand).
I am quite new to this game of the mind model, but I’m glad you gave me something to consider very early on in my journey that I’ve only recently come back to with a fresh, proper perspective.
This stuff does still require a lot of study in of itself, but it’s always great to have a starting point to organise all of it later on.
#12 by MageBurger on November 7, 2020 - 10:23 am
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I’m back again. I realize now a model alone cannot ever tell the full story about ourselves. The model can demonstrate ideas, but my developed understanding of how we function at this point tells me I should not limit my understanding of thought to just that model. It demonstrates ideas, but learning ourselves is not a linear process. The belief and understanding of the truth of energy, universal mind and intelligence and natural law in relation to everything around, as well as the emotional connection to said truths and the capacity for ourselves to do anything all collate to knowing what it truly means to learn and achieve anything we desire for our best spiritual development.
As someone who is religious, my understanding of universal intelligence is specific to a God who is above all things and does demand growth to all if only people would be open to the truth, such God would have a full understanding of their understanding and motives and such which invokes their responsibility to a belief in him and his truth. I’ve come to learn that belief requires admitting to our lack of self-sufficiency which requires belief first and understanding of everything that is dependent on God to exist properly (of which the study on the subject is infinite, but should be explored to properly build the picture of our dependence).
I genuinely find it fascinating how deep this stuff goes and how there is no quick answer to understanding it, not even in a simple picture like the mind model. The model is just a medium for which information is past through, it is our job to recognize it as a medium and not just an answer. The answer comes in many forms, not all which that takes the model into account.