Interestingly, I was thinking today of exactly this point.
I heard a quote one or two days ago:
Vision without Action is just a Daydream.
Action without Vision is a Nightmare.
It led me to reflect on Conscious and Subconscious contributions to outcome. And on what precisely actually happens when a person uses a method that develops a subconscious orientation but without taking action.
To what extent is there a kind of accumulation of subconscious strength even if no action is taken? If this were the case, then when one did finally take action, might change then occur powerfully and quickly?
Then there’s the view that nothing at all useful happens unless subconscious orientation is paired and aligned with conscious effort and action.
I guess that connected to this also is a second question of ‘at what precise moment does action begin?’ It’s not always quite so obvious. Often the assumption is that action begins when ‘the body is in motion in support of a chosen outcome’.
But I’ve suggested elsewhere that we might approach Intentionality itself as occuring along a continuum from subtle to gross. With the subtlest section of the spectrum containing what are usually called ‘thoughts’, further along the continuum these condense into ‘desires’, further along into ‘plans’, past that into ‘goals’, and past that into ‘organized physical movement’.
Just as with other continua, where a given person perceives it to begin will depend on the thresholds of that person’s acuity, sensitivity, and degree of attention.
Anyway, it’s clear that there is such a thing as a ‘mental action’. One example of this would be taking a moral inventory; a very powerful mental exercise of remembering and scrutinizing one’s actions with emotional honesty. It results in clarifying one’s values and decisions.
All forms of planning are ‘mental actions’. On the other hand, you can’t eat your plans for dinner, not unless you’ve at least written them down somewhere.
So, I’m distinguishing ‘Action’ from ‘(Establishing) Physical Manifestation’. Even though there’s a tendency for people to use them interchangeably.
But this brings me back to the first question:
What, by themselves, are the subliminals doing?
or more broadly:
What, by itself, is the subconscious mind doing?
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