Do you sometimes wonder why some people seem to achieve success effortlessly while others struggle at every turn? The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy explains how to tap into the hidden potential of your unconscious mind to achieve positive changes in any area of your life—from health to wealth, relationships, and personal growth.
In this free summary of The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, you’ll get an overview of how the mind works, and how you can start leveraging its infinite potential to achieve desired outcomes in various aspects of life.
Understanding the Subconscious Mind
How The Mind Works
We have 2 minds: a conscious mind and a subconscious mind.
Your conscious mind is rational and objective. It receives external inputs via your 5 senses, and makes deliberate decisions on what to focus on and what to do.
The subconscious mind is irrational and subjective, working beyond your conscious awareness.
• It is undiscerning and accepts inputs from the conscious mind without question. Whatever you think repeatedly gets accepted by the subconscious mind as “truth”.
• Once the subconscious accepts something as “true,” it will start to act upon it, manifesting that reality in your life.
Under normal circumstances, the conscious mind can accept or reject thoughts/suggestions based on logic, to filter or control what reaches your subconscious mind. For example, if you tell someone that he’s a cat, he will just laugh at you.
However, many psychological experiments have shown that people in a hypnotic (subconscious) state will accept and respond to virtually any suggestion:
• While under hypnosis, someone who is told “You’re a cat” or “You’re old and crippled” might start to behave accordingly.
• Others have exhibited symptoms of diseases or allergies based on suggestions alone.
The ideas can be a bit abstract, so we’ve conceptualized them into a visual summary:
Useful Analogies about the Subconscious Mind
To further understand the relationship between the conscious and subconscious mind, consider these 2 analogies.
Your mind is like a garden: Your subconscious mind is like the fertile soil in which the conscious mind plants its seeds (in the form of thoughts). The thoughts you plant and nurture most frequently will bloom.
Your mind is like a ship: The conscious mind is like the captain issuing directions, while the subconscious is like the ship that executes the orders without question.
A Key Idea in The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
This is core idea Murphy’s book: Whatever you consciously say or acknowledge gets “delivered” to the subconscious. Your habitual thinking shapes your outcomes.
If you constantly focus on negativity and limitations (e.g. “I can’t do this” or “I can’t afford that”), your subconscious will manifest those realities in your life.
If you habitually focus on positive, empowering thoughts (e.g. “I can learn and do anything I set my mind to”), your subconscious will also deliver those outcomes.
So, you should consciously flood your mind with positive thoughts to create favorable outcomes in your life. And, counter negative statements with positive ones. For example, if you catch yourself saying “I can’t afford this”, follow up with “I can buy this” or “I will own it…”
How to Tap into Your Subconscious Mind
Joseph Murphy goes on to explain in great detail how you can “talk to” or influence your subconscious mind through: Autosuggestions, heterosuggestions, feelings, visuals, affirmations, gratitude, and association. We explain these in more detail in our complete 14-page version of The Power of Your Subconscious Mind summary.
He also cautions us to be mindful of our thoughts, as the subconscious takes our words literally. In an extreme example, a father’s heart-felt but metaphorical wish (“I’d give my right arm if my daughter’s arthritis could be cured”) came true when he lost his arm in an accident and his daughter was miraculously cured.
However, not every thought gets translated to reality. Suggestions sink in when they’re repeated with feeling to reinforce your subconscious beliefs.
In short, the subconscious is governed by the Law of Belief, which says that whatever you believe most deeply will manifest in your life. Any idea that’s planted in the mind, and fertilized with positive expectancy, will grow.
Harnessing the Power of Your Subconscious Mind
In our full summary, we string together the key ideas above, along with specific examples, to explain how you can tap into your subconscious mind’s unlimited potential.
Here’s a simple visual overview:
Health and Healing
The subconscious mind works 24/7 to regulate your body’s vital functions—such as your heartbeat, breathing, blood circulation, and digestion—without your conscious awareness. You’re already healing daily, be it from a cut, a fall, or an illness. In fact, the cells in your bodies are regenerated so quickly that you have a new body in roughly 11 months!
In our full summary, we explore how to tap into the infinite intelligence that governs the growth and survival of all living organisms in the cosmos, so as to enjoy a whole and healthy body. We also share miraculous stories of healing–be it through prayer, visits to shrines, or purposeful visualizations–and Murphy’s explanation of why/how it works.
Professional and Personal Success
True success is about living a peaceful, joyous life, doing what you love, and expressing yourself fully. In our complete 14-page summary of The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, we’ll cover 3 keys to success, examples of scientists and inventors successfully tapped into their subconscious mind, and how you too can use the methods to find the answers or solutions to any problem. We also explain how to avoid “mental coercion” by pushing too hard and unintentionally blocking your creative processes.
Wealth and Prosperity
Often, we reject riches unknowingly through our own beliefs and actions, such as condemning money as “evil”, worrying about not having enough, or holding beliefs that success must come from hard work. True wealth doesn’t come from physical assets. It comes from a mindset of abundance, and we explain how to nurture that in our full summary.
Marriage and Relationships
A real marriage is built upon love, spiritual connection, and mutual contribution. Here, we look at how to tap on the power of your subconscious mind to attract the right partner, and stay together as a couple.
Enjoy harmonious, fulfilling relationships by following this Golden Rule: Think, feel, and act toward others in the way you’d like them to think, feel, and act toward you.
Mental-Emotional Well-Being
Finally, we look at the importance of sleep—not just for physical, mental, and emotional health—but as an ideal time to seek guidance. Learn how to work with your subconscious to enjoy true happiness, release emotional congestion, overcome any fear in life, and maintain youth and vitality.
Getting the Most from The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
Your subconscious mind is immensely powerful. Just like how a magnetized iron rod can lift objects many times its own weight, a “magnetized man” tapping into his subconscious can attract success, health, and prosperity effortlessly.
Ready to start applying these insights to transform your life? Zoom in on the ideas above and get more detailed insights, examples and actionable tips in our our full book summary bundle. This includes an infographic, 14-page text summary, and a 29-minute audio summary.
This book is written in 20 chapters, with other details such as: stories, personal anecdotes, quotes, biblical references, and samples of prayers/affirmations to help the reader understand the workings and applications of the subconscious mind.
You can purchase the book here. Or, check out these summaries of other books to understand and program your subconscious mind, such as: Psycho-Cybernetics, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, The Science of Getting Rich, and What to Say When You Talk to Yourself.
About the Author of The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind was written by Joseph Denis Murphy—an author and New Thought minister, ordained in Divine Science and Religious Science. He was born in Ireland and was initially raised in a Roman Catholic household. Murphy trained for the priesthood and joined the Jesuits. Later, his interest shifted towards the principles of New Thought, which greatly influenced his writings and teachings focusing on how the subconscious mind can significantly influence personal development and success.
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind Quotes
“There is a huge treasure hidden inside you, you just have to open your eyes and see it.”
“Change your thoughts and you change your destiny.”
“Every thought is a cause and every condition is an effect.”
“A mental picture is worth a thousand words…A mental picture held in the mind, backed by faith, will come to pass.”
“As in heaven (your own mind), so on earth (in your body and environment). This is the great law of life.”
“When you are peaceful, happy, joyous and doing what you love to do, you are successful.”
“Your subconscious has no problem, it knows only the answer.”
“If you are fearful and worried, you are not really thinking. True thinking is free from fear.”
“Imagination is your most powerful faculty…You are what you imagine yourself to be.”
“When your blood is circulating freely in your body, you are healthy. When money is circulating freely in your life, you are economically healthy.”
“The feeling of wealth produces wealth. Keep that in mind at all times.”
“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Click here to download The Power of Your Subconscious Mind infographic & summary
