Consciousness and Connection

by Ashman Roonz

At every moment, your experience is shaped by connection. Some of those connections are conscious: they arise from deliberate attention, focused intention, and the active participation of your will. Others are subconscious: formed beneath awareness, guided by memory, emotion, habit, and the autonomic rhythms of the body. Together, they weave the fabric of your reality.

Conscious vs. Subconscious Connections

Conscious connection is your free will in action. It is your capacity to choose what you attend to, what you engage with, what you bring into convergence. It is the focal point of your awareness; what you deliberately connect.

Subconscious connections, by contrast, are always at work beneath the surface. These include your habitual thoughts, emotional patterns, sensory filtering, body regulation, and the unseen networks of belief and expectation that shape how you feel, act, and perceive.

Neuroscience supports this distinction: The vast majority of the brain’s processing happens subconsciously. Only a small portion of activity makes it into the narrow spotlight of conscious awareness. Yet both streams, conscious and subconscious, are constantly converging to create your experience. What connections are being made is what I experience.

The Active Nature of Perception

When I close my eyes and focus on my body, what I feel is not just my body. It is my body plus what I’m adding through memory, emotion, belief, and focus. Perception is not passive. It is shaped by:

Prior experiences: Past sensations, memories, and emotional associations.

Beliefs and expectations: What you expect to feel can alter what you do feel.

Emotional state: Calmness or anxiety changes how the body is interpreted.

Interpretive mindset: Are you judging your sensations? Or receiving them openly?

This view aligns with phenomenology; the philosophical study of experience. It reminds us that we do not simply perceive reality; we construct it through layered acts of interpretation.

Biofeedback: The Bridge Between Conscious and Subconscious

Biofeedback provides a living example of this dynamic. It trains you to observe and subtly guide subconscious physiological processes such as breathing, heart rate, and muscle tension… without force.

In biofeedback, the goal isn’t to control these systems directly, but to bring a minimal conscious connection, such as the intention to relax. Then, through gentle guidance (like breath awareness or visualization), you allow the subconscious systems to respond. You are not controlling the heartbeat; you are creating conditions for it to regulate itself.

The conscious role here is light, but powerful. You become a participant in your own process, letting awareness become the interface between will and biology.

In Summary:

Conscious Connection = Free will, focus, choice.

You decide what to align with.

Subconscious Connection = Automatic, habitual, embodied.

It shapes the background of every moment.

Your Experience = The emergent result of both.

A convergence of conscious intention and subconscious patterning.

Perception is Constructed, not received.

You are always adding something, even if that something is just your attention.

This view blends philosophy, psychology, and somatic awareness into a unified insight:

You are the convergence of all your connections. And by becoming conscious of that convergence, you gain the power to participate in your own emergence.